Has the high priestess of planetary doom finally tired of her own apocalypse? That clip of Greta Thunberg guffawing upon being told that kids are still bunking off school every Friday to bewail Man’s burning of Earth suggests she might have. She was being interviewed for a documentary about 21st-century activism. There’s a ‘Fridays for Future’ gathering in Berlin today, the host tells her. ‘Really? They still do that?’, she says, before cackling wildly in her dumb Richard III haircut. ‘Cut!’, she then cries.

I’m not usually one for feeling sorry for pious rich kids whose idea of radicalism is to down their geometry text books to sit in the rain and sob about the sins of industrialism. But you can’t help wondering how those German schoolkids must feel when they see the founder of their idiot movement ripping the piss out of it. It was in 2018, when she was 15, that Thunberg became the most famous brat on Earth by skipping school on a Friday to sit stony-faced outside the parliament of her native Sweden in protest at the climate apocalypse (sic). Millions of children followed her out of their classrooms into the hell of eco-neurosis. And now she laughs at them.

Those silly kids. Don’t they know that blubbing over polar bears is so 2019? The Current Thing is hating Israel. The ‘evil’ that now keeps pampered eco-saints like Greta awake at night is not global warming – it’s the Jewish State. The diminutive doom-mongerer long ago switched her narcissistic dread from CO2 to Zionism, trading her yellow rain mac for a designer keffiyeh, and her caterwauling about climate for the headier thrill of screaming blue murder about Israel. Get with the programme, children: the Jewish nation is now the demon that stalks the fever dreams of the young and self-righteous.

Thunberg hasn’t entirely ditched the eco-apocalypse nonsense. She still warbles about rising seas and stolen childhoods every now and then. She might no longer have spasms of infantile fury, howling ‘How dare you!’ at politicians who loved being told off by a smug teen, but she still does the green schtik. She’s currently at COP 31 in Turkey, wanging on about how the planet is being ‘killed’. How interesting that she boycotts Israel but is happy to hang out in a state that mercilessly persecutes the Kurds.

Yet the striking thing about St Greta’s pontificating at COP is how tired and even pantomime it sounds. It feels like she’s going through the motions, singing the old songs for the titillation of fiftysomething Guardianistas. The end of the world just isn’t where it’s at anymore. The end of Israel, on the other hand, the scrubbing from the map of that most demonic entity – now that will get the luxury-belief mob frothing with righteous ecstasy. Over the past three years, virtually all of them, in creepy sync, shifted from weeping over End Times to fuming over the Jewish nation.

Thunberg is now far more likely to be spotted on a boat of seafaring narcissists heading for Gaza than she is outside a parliamentary building yapping about eco-doom. She used to yelp ‘Stop oil’ – now she cries ‘Crush Zionism’. These people once wanted to keep fossil fuels buried – now they want to bury Jewish nationhood, which is all that Zionism means. She isn’t alone. If you’ve ever wondered why the ponces of Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain (remember them?!) are no longer making life miserable for working-class motorists, it’s because they, too, have switched their privileged ire to Israel. They, too, have converted from the bourgeois cult of climate rapture to the bourgeois cult of Israelophobia.

Look at Palestine Action (RIP). Many of those time-rich bozos who cut the fences of Israeli-owned business while shrieking about Zionism in cut-glass accents came from the privileged green movement. Like Greta, the Moan of Arc of greenism, they aren’t actually wedded to a particular cause – they’re just addicted to apocalypse. They crave the cheap thrill of standing up to some monstrous, planet-consuming bogeyman. Last week it was industry, this week it’s Israel. Their mercenary opportunism would be funny if it wasn’t for the fact that their new religion of Ziophobia – ‘Crush Zionism!’ – has created huge hardship for world Jewry.

We really do need a reckoning with the eco-hysteria of the past 10 years. These people told us humanity was doomed. They said billions would die. In 2018 Greta said ‘all of humanity’ will be wiped out if we don’t ‘stop using fossil fuels’ within five years. Five years later, she casually deleted that Nostradamus-lite bollocks. So intense was the doom and dread pumped into public life that kids started to suffer from eco-anxiety. Yet now they’ve all moved on. Now they’re all in the Med saying ‘Israel is evil’. Now it’s mainly Gaza these white saviours want to rescue from the monstrous forces of capitalism, imperialism, Zionism, yada yada. To stoke global fear and then shrug it off is irresponsible in the extreme. What’s more, given their End Times blather was clearly bullshit, why should we believe a word they say about Israel?