Of course, in the case of Israel (the state being comparatively new) the most extreme suggestions for how to remedy this situation can seem more plausible. Whereas few people seriously call for everyone of European descent to be expelled from the Americas, it is not unusual (indeed it is policy in many Middle Eastern countries) for there to be calls for the descendants of Europeans to be expelled from Israel and for the land to be ‘returned’ to the sole ownership of the Arab tribes who originally lived there (and in many cases live there still). And although Middle Eastern history is perhaps even more than most a history of tribes and people usurping and replacing each other without recourse to any court of historical inquiry to make amends, when it comes to the Palestinian ‘indigenous people’ there is alleged to be an answer. And that is because the cause of the victimhood can be traced back to the Europeans. As anybody who has travelled in the region will know, the most benevolent view in the region of how the State of Israel came about is that the Europeans did something wrong in the Holocaust and now the Arabs are having to pay for it.

Australia, America and Israel are three very different countries on three wholly different continents all united by Europe. The settlers in America came from Europe. The settlers in Australia came from Europe. And although half the population of Israel are Jews who had to flee Arab lands, the Jews of Israel are widely believed to come solely from Europe. So it is not persecution-mania but simple observation for Europeans to fear that the uniting ‘evil’ in all of these cases, among many others, is not just people in history who did bad things, but Europeans who did bad things. And who – considering a people who did so many bad things and on such a scale – could not suspect that they were in fact simply bad people?

It is understandable if modern Europeans feel themselves to have a certain toxicity. Almost alone among all the peoples of the world, Europeans seem capable not only of doing terrible things in their own continent, but of spreading their evils around the world. And as the evil metastasizes it is also generalised. There are few worse intellectual crimes in Europe than ‘generalising’ or ‘essentialising’ another group of people in the world. Yet generalising and essentialising are allowed to become rife when the world speaks about Europeans. A European would be scolded for blaming every African for the crimes of every other African, or any Asian for the crimes of any Asian. But generalisations and a spreading around of historic European faults and crimes onto Europeans as a whole is normal and acceptable.