Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of “Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity, and the Challenges of Today” (Gefen Books, $14.95). He is a frequent contributor to the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East Faculty Forum. His books, as well as other books, electronics, computer material, videos,dvds and gifts, can be purchased through the Amazon.com logo at spme.org/spmemart.html with proceeds from the book going to help Scholars for Peace in the Middle East spme.org

“Traditionally, I had counted myself as a staunch pro-Israel supporter,” a recent e-mail writer pronounced, but after delving “deeper into the history and nature of Zionism I find myself no longer able to articulate why a modern State of Israel should exist.”

Here is the latest post-modernist trend, delivered to my home computer. Four blood-soaked years ago, I would have deleted the letter. The very question offends, scrutinizing only Israel s origins and legitimacy. Unfortunately, today, many intellectuals are assailing Israel s legitimacy, making deletion no longer a viable option. Sticking to principles and refusing to engage the new breed of Israel-bashers risks losing the PR battle, especially when too many younger Jews don t feel motivated to defend the Jewish state and too many of their parents can only evoke Leon Uris romantic, warm, and glowy “Exodus” feelings.

Over the last three decades, while the Jewish people slept, an unholy alliance of Islamicists and anti-colonialist intellectuals, supposedly devoted to upholding human rights, systematically libeled the Jewish national project.

As a result, when we celebrate Zionism as an expression of Jewish nationalism, they yell “racism,” as if the world is not divided into 180 tribalist enclaves. When we hail the waves of chalutzim (pioneers), the immigrant heroes delivering individual and national redemption, they yell “colonialism,” as if the Jews lack a 3,000-year relationship with Israel. When we sing about making the desert bloom they yell “ethnic cleansing,” as if Palestinians occupy every square inch of that once-desolate land and neither the populations nor the boundaries ever shifted. When we endorse a specifically Jewish state that synthesizes modern liberal democratic values with traditional Jewish ideals, they yell “apartheid,” as if the Israeli Declaration of Independence does not consciously balance ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism, the yearning for a return to a Jewish homeland with the promise of rights for “all its inhabitants.”

Israel s critics ignore Arab racism, sexism, homophobia, totalitarianism, medievalism, and barbarianism that is an old story.Meanwhile, they posit an idealized model of European nationalism. Post-modern anti-Zionists and many Israeli post-Zionists worship Europe as a multicultural paradise, a multilingual America with manners. They ignore how particularly French the French are, how German the Germans are, and how impermeable those nationalisms are to outsiders.

Many Europeans disdain “multiculturalism” as a Yankee absurdity. A recent International Herald Tribune article noted that “many jobs in Europe are simply off-limits to foreigners.” The xenophobic French republic bars non-European Union citizens from 50 professions, including “pharmacists, midwives, architects, airline pilots, funeral home directors, and anyone who wants to obtain a license to sell tobacco or alcohol. Similar laws exist in other EU countries, especially when it comes to government jobs,” according to the story.

“People don’t really like foreigners here,” one student in Germany told the Tribune.

With these considerations in mind, replying to the anti-Zionist e-mailer was easy. “I resent the question,” I wrote, “unless we are willing to open the question to challenge the nature of nationalism itself and to explore other national myths and scars. Israel and the Jewish people are unfairly singled out. Israel is perpetually on probation and must behave nicely to be accepted. Shall we also examine Pakistan, that enlightened center of patriarchal oppression and nuclear proliferation? Shall we consider America’s two original sins regarding African-Americans and Native Americans, and question our own country’s right to exist? Shall we talk about the artifi-cial nature of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan all shaped by Ottoman, British, or French imperial cartographers?

And finally, shall we question the artificial, PLO-created nature of Palestinian nationalism? If so, given the Palestinians consistent refusal to compromise, and given the cult of death they have spawned, perhaps they should not exist. “

I prefer the high road, swatting off inquiries secure in the knowledge that from the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan through the Oslo years, Israel has compromised and pursued peace, albeit imperfectly, amid relentless Arab calls for its destruction. We have to rise to the new challenges and chide our critics for inconsistency, hypocrisy, and selectivity so intense and so obsessive that it undermines their credibility, integrity, and commitment to peace.