The conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has intensified to the very edge of open warfare. The Israelis have put on a defensive propaganda show that relies to a great extent on some reasonable assumptions about American admiration and European guilt. 

Israel claims a right of armed response, in effect, as a legitimate authority dealing with recalcitrant criminal elements (this is now the implication of the catch-all term ‘terrorist’). The truth is far more basic and biblical – it is an eye for an eye multifold.

One Israeli hit by a rocket (and two soldiers in the course of action) is deemed sufficient to slaughter (no other word is applicable) 100, many of them women and children. How it can be right to respond so disproportionately that toddlers and children are killed or maimed so indiscriminately beats simpletons like us - but Christian charity is not a relevant factor in this particular conflict.

A disturbing element is that the Israeli Deputy Defence Minister has warned the Palestinians that they face a shoah – the word is widely used to reference the Nazi holocaust. Of course, he was responding to the Palestinian use of the word naqba - both terms denote disaster of a general nature but both connote something darker and more vicious.

Whatever was intended (and we believe it was intended), a senior member of the Israeli Government implicitly crossed a moral line and threatened 'annihilation' to a people if they did not change course. The counter-lobby already refers to the containment of Gaza as a 'genocide', although a closer analogy might be with the early stage of the Warsaw Ghetto.

When did Israel become a pale but recognisable imitation of its own worst oppressor? Is this a state-level repetition of what happens when an abused child becomes a child abuser? This is a nation that needs to take a long hard look at its moral core. It needs therapy or social services assistance.

The political own goal internationally was that President Abbas was forced into the position of withdrawing all further co-operation with Israel, although his weakness merely means that he will come back to be slapped in the face again at a later stage.

As we write, international condemnation of Israel's disproportionate action was widespread, if muted and qualified the further West one moves.

But to understand the action, we have to understand that the political pressure on Israel's Olmert for a full-scale ground invasion was becoming difficult to resist. The emergence of the USS Cole and the Nassau battle unit on the coasts of Lebanon may be regarded as a fairly explicit warning to Hezbollah not to pile in with rocket attacks in support of Hamas.

In other words, the biblical savagery of the last few days was, to Olmert and his Western backers, the lesser of two evils, an attempt to pre-empt internal domestic demand for something, a full-scale invasion, that would set back the Peace Process by a decade if not forever.

The little Palestinian children were blood-sacrifices to the doctrine of the lesser evil. Be in no doubt, there are hardline Zionist and Islamists who want a confrontation not only in Gaza but in Lebanon and even between the US and Iran direct. 

We must also be aware that Jewish children can be the victims of indiscriminate Hamas and Hezbollah rockets, that the suicide bomb is the indiscriminate weapon par excellence and that Israelis have a legitimate fear that extremist rhetoric of annihilation means just that.  Both sides are degenerating to the slaughter of each other's innocents.

Whoever is 'right', many more children will die, screaming for their dead daddies with burns on hospital beds. Don't shy away from that thought - this is happening now and will happen again soon if some basic moral sense does not return to those with power to unleash fire.

Hezbollah may yet call the US bluff. A US landing in a Lebanon already primed for civil war might not bring in Syria and Iran (both of whom have nothing to gain by direct conflict), but the net effect might be a change in direction for the Mahdi Army in Iraq and a re-direction of Muslim Brotherhood and other radical elements into further confrontation.

It seems no coincidence that President Ahmedinejad not merely visits Baghdad at this time but gets a welcome that should (in the eyes of the West) have been accorded to the ‘liberator’ and not to the troublesome neighbor.

There is an evil stalking these lands and it is not in one place. It lies in a beast created out of history and ideology that is slouching heavily, crushing the innocent in its path, towards Megiddo and the moral fault, a lack of self-criticism as to causes and consequences, lies as much in the West as it does in the East.

The two sides in this conflict seem fairly easily defined. On the one side is the West - really, the US, old post-imperial states offering soft power support for the US and conservative elites seeking to preserve order but not at the cost of conflagration.

On the other are Syria, Iran and Arab and Muslim radicalism of many sorts. Neither side is wholly united. Both sides can have elements that may be detached into cautious neutrality. Reformist Muslim Turkey, close to Israel, and the small GCC States, dependent yet distrustful of the West, play their own ambiguous roles.

But this is a seriously dangerous situation precisely because it so disordered. It is not a case of Washington and Moscow carving up territory to avoid global annihilation but of multiple players, none of whom can act on the chess board without triggering a counter move.

It is a situation that is being underestimated as serious by a Western media that seems unable to connect up the dots. But look at the oil and gold markets. They are aware of the implications.

Israeli-US confrontation with non-state actors results in informal support for resistance by the ‘other side’. The US may be dragged into more direct confrontation because at some stage its nose (as in 9/11) will be tweaked directly instead of indirectly by someone who miscalculates, makes a wrong move in the chess game.

Since Obama is unlikely to let the US nose be tweaked any more than Clinton, McCain or Bush, 'change' in 2009 may not be all that is being cracked up to be. So what is going on here that may trigger the opening of the gates of hell?

A tragedy is unfolding that is far greater in complexity than just the conflict between the shoah and naqba narratives of two peoples. Both are twins, victims of radical imperialism, whether vicious and anarchic like the Nazi or slow and relatively ordered like the British.

The issue in the Levant has now become bound up with the fears and ambitions of inter-state alliances. So many strands mean that each player is becoming caught up in positions that are increasingly morally untenable because big picture morality (or so they see things) requires certain stances and actions that cause violence and suffering.

Hamas may want a war out of 'self respect' and because they think they can improve their position through international condemnation of Israeli brutality and even martyrdom. Israel wants to survive without recognizing that its survival is the continued degradation of a whole people.

The Sunni conservative elites have done little other than give charitable aid and now want the problem off their desks. They think they can do this by pressing the West to sponsor a sufficient state and sufficient aid to promote a two-state solution that, in effect, is an admission of Arab defeat. Abbas represents an exhausted Palestinian middle class and diaspora that just wants an end to it all on whatever decent terms are available.

Complicating matters further is that not all states agree with the conservative Sunni elites and the West. Syria and Iran are not only maintaining an intransigent but perfectly moral belief in Palestinian rights but are prepared to assert this belief in terms that sometimes awkwardly remind Europeans of their central role in the creation of the problem in the first place.

Two imperialisms, British and German, clashed over fifty years of warfare, Both shoah and naqba were the twin progeny. The rhetoric of Iran is a slap in the face of European guilt. Europeans once thought like Ahmedinejad only more so.

The British foreign policy establishment is also a factor, possibly an irritant. It still has an institutional memory that guides its policy-making – there is no other explanation for some of the odder aspects of British policies in Southern Africa, China and South Asia.

British engagement, possibly unnecessary, with the Levant is almost the living-out of an out-moded habit of imperial responsibility, incompetently administered admittedly but definitely derived from duty rather than malice. And yet the road to Hell always was paved with good intentions ...

The British and the Sunni elites are trying to conserve or restore a settlement that they made as the Empire withdrew. A number of safe pair of hands were left behind to buttress informal empire. This means that Israel and Palestine must now be ordered into line to restore stability (which does have important national interest implications for the UK in terms of trade and energy).

The moral problem comes when the combined forces of the peace camp, determined not to lock the US and Israel into an intransigent opposition (and knowing that the ‘professionals’ at the heart of Israeli governance also know that there is no alternative to the Peace Process but have no mandate yet from their people), adopts the shoah narrative in full and neglects the naqba narrative entirely.

In contemporary terms, this means adopting the self-serving rhetoric of ‘terrorist threat’ and ignoring the inconvenient truths of desperation and a demand for respect implicit in Hamas’ hold on Gaza and on many other Arabs.

An EU Envoy is on his way to the region but, based on his negative comments about Hamas on UK radio on Sunday, he can hardly be called an honest and objective broker. The Western policy establishment is now united in following a route that removes any serious dialogue with the elected representatives of the people in one Palestinian zone.

Ironically, Israeli public opinion seems to be increasingly prepared to talk to Hamas. We know that senior Israeli politicians have been halted by their Western allies from developing such an approach. As the Beast slouches towards its opening of the Gates to Hell, it is Western manipulation and ideology that history may come to judge as having handed it one of the keys.

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