Caricatures of angry, swarthy men with towels round their heads, blowing themselves up in anger and hatred have long been used by the western press to push this message further home. Scant attention is paid to the real causes of the turmoil in the Middle East, to the kind of desperation that would cause someone to see life as not worth living, or that would cause anyone to dare attack what by even the most conservative guesses is the fourth most powerful military force on earth.

Fully a third of all Americans who support Israel, one in eight support Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, do so out of their religious convictions. Two out of every five Americans believe that Israel was given to the Jews by God, and as such should be held by Israel at all costs, but perhaps most pernicious of all, is the belief that Israel’s conquest of Eretz Israel and her vanquishing of her enemies is a vital step towards the Second Coming.

Europeans and even many Israelis are no doubt less given to paying too much heed to religious mythology, almost four times as many Spaniards side with the Palestinians as do the Israelis. Even eminent persons like Tony Blair’s wife Cherie Booth- who declared that given the situation of the Palestinians she understands the desperation that would lead them to suicide bombing- and Ehud Barak former Israeli Prime Minister who said in an interview that if he had been born Palestinian and not Israeli he would have been a member of one of the terrorist organisations, see the conflict in its real light, as a struggle by the Palestinians against what they feel is an oppressive system that has deprived them of their land, and humiliated them as a people.

Turn all of that into the present continuous. Israel’s ‘apartheid wall’, her extra-judicial killings of Palestinian leaders, jailing of masses of Palestinians and Lebanese, blockades of Palestinian territory and her depiction of them as insane mad men keen to form a fascist republic where women would be eternally in purdah, serve only to anger and humiliate her neighbours, further exacerbating an already bad situation.

True, Israel had pulled out of Gaza and out of the Lebanon, but she continues to expand elsewhere ,in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Palestinian women and children continue to be held in Israeli prisons and Israel’s courts continue to show Arab Israelis that they are second class citizens. The crude atavistic portrayals in the Press are useful in dehumanising the Palestinians and Arabs and making the international society less sympathetic to their plight. Moreover, they have served to prescind permanently from the real issues for the dispute. Most people I have asked about the recent trouble in the Middle East believe either that it is a religious war, or that it is part of the ‘War on Terror’.

You don’t have to be stupid to think that, the British Prime Minister earnestly believes it. In the end however, the truth stands as David Ben Gurion, one of the Zionist State’s founding fathers said, "Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.” Reiterated by Ariel Sharon the same message went, "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonisation, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."