In his poem September 1, 1939, WH Auden wrote two fateful lines: "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return".
He was thinking of the humiliation of the Germans after the first World War and how this had assisted the rise of Nazi power. Were he alive now, he might sadly repeat his mantra, as Lebanese civilians become the latest victims of Hitler's own victims.
The Israelis - with massive infusions of US cash and "smart weapons" - have become the smiters of history, after centuries of being the smitten. In that inexorable process, Arab peoples of the Middle East have been cast as the New Jews - pariahs, outcasts, homeless wanderers.
To express solidarity with these victims is in no way to be guilty of anti-Semitism. The real anti-Semites today are those right-wing cartoonists in certain papers who portray the Arab in the traditional role of a Semite, complete with hooked nose, swarthy face and evil "plotting" grin. The transference was made back in the 1960s, after the Six-Day War, but the underlying figure is essentially the same as the Jewish bogeyman who terrified medieval children.
Like the Jews of old, Arabs are most often portrayed as a threat, even though they are far more often the ones threatened. The Palestinians were deprived of a homeland and robbed of their passports after the second World War. Ever since, they have been feared, because people always demonise those whom they have robbed. So deep did those fears run that, in 1982, an invading Israeli army stood nearby while a supporting Falange militia slaughtered 3,500 Palestinian refugees at a camp in Lebanon.
After that awful event, some American Jews withdrew support for the state of Israel. Woody Allen called those killings "state-sponsored brutality".
The real Israel, he said, was intended to be a haven not so much for Jews as for Jewish values. How could those values be reconciled with policies which so exactly mimicked the evil done to Jewish people through history?
It is hard to understand why the United States tolerated the recent weeks of civilian murder in Lebanon. Ever since 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld and others have propounded the doctrine of the defensive attack, i.e. that democracies under possible threat from "tyrants" should strike before the enemy grows strong. Having tested that policy to disastrous effect in Iraq, Bush's advisers may have wished to see how well or badly it worked in taking out Hizbullah in Lebanon. Now they know.
What ordinary Americans made of all this is still anyone's guess. Did they hear much about it at all? On the Sunday after the massacre at Qana, American PBS radio, Public Broadcasting Service - by far the most objective electronic outlet - carried only the scantiest coverage.
In the last presidential election, neither Bush nor Kerry had much to say about the Middle East. Many Jewish Americans still vote Democrat and probably share the views of Woody Allen. The current Lebanese adventure, orchestrated by a US regime led by right-wing Christians, suggests two things. One: that there are powerful pro-Israeli backers of the Bushites who will bankroll the Republicans in the next election. Two: that there may well be an anti-Semitic element in that Christian right, which sees its leader embarked on a new "crusade" against "Islamic fascism".
Americans, as a people, are far better than this foreign policy, for which they never voted. They welcome strangers, love their families and believe that everyone deserves a second chance. So how have their leaders and soldiers come to this pass?
It may all come down to the founding myth of their nation. Americans see their ancestors as having built a democratic "city on a hill", a clearing of civilisation in an ungoverned wilderness.
For some of them, Israel represents an enlightened democracy planted in a desert filled with inscrutable tyrants and shifty nomads. The Arab, in this equation, is doomed to a role rather like that of the Native American - deprived of normal civil rights by virtue of his nomad status.
Now, the United Nations, after years of uncertainty, has found a possible role. Its leaders must be smiling grimly at the bitter irony of seeing that same Israeli army which so recently killed UN operatives now withdraw to make way for other members of that force. And at the double irony of a United States whose leaders have done so much to weaken the UN now call upon it for help.
There is a threat to world peace from zealots of various backgrounds, just as there is a threat to the state of Israel from the Iranian leadership. The UN is the one supra-national force that can embody the ideals of love and brotherhood at the core of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Israel's survival will depend not on its ability to provoke the zealots but on its willingness to share space and a sense of history with its Arab neighbours.