PETER HITCHENS: Who can seriously call on Israel – a nation the size of Wales – to weaken its defences further by agreeing to the clamour for a two-state solution?

Have you noticed that Israel is the only country in the world that gets blamed for being attacked? 

And that there are people who loathe it so much that they are actually prepared to defend or excuse the deliberate mass murder of civilians, including old women and tiny children?

There is something deeply wrong with the Western world’s view of Israel, and this is not confined to absurd, marginal figures such as Jeremy Corbyn, wandering in the dense jungles of Trotskyism. It is far deeper and broader.

The Western prejudice against Israel is most easily detected in the BBC. The Corporation long ago abandoned its impartiality over many issues, most notably man-made global warming. 

But it excuses its refusal to call the child-murderers of Hamas ‘terrorists’, on the grounds that its impartiality is so important.

I have a suggestion for the BBC. I would be quite happy if they called Hamas ‘murderers’ rather than terrorists. 

This is a factual description which does not breach impartiality. But we all know they will not do it.

It is now 19 years since the BBC commissioned the Balen Report into claims that its coverage was biased against Israel. 

This document has never been published, and the BBC has spent more than £300,000 of your money on court cases ensuring that it stays secret. So it is not hard to guess what it says, is it?

But this media and political bias is not confined to the BBC.

I will not name (for I have no recording of the event) the prominent TV reporter who I once heard using the expression ‘bashing the Shloms’ to sum up his basic mission of running anti-Israel stories, as the Western media corps relaxed over drinks in the lovely courtyard of Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel.

But you will find it in most of the British Establishment (the same is true of many European countries, less true in the USA). 

It is especially strong here because Britain in 1917 agreed to set up a ‘National Home for the Jews’ in what is now Israel. And almost immediately we wished we had not done so.

In 1939, we tried to wriggle out of our promise just when it mattered most. That year, when the homicidal Nazi hatred for Jews was already obvious to all, this country’s government stopped almost all Jewish migration to Palestine.

This cowardly backtracking closed the only true escape route for those who would soon afterwards be slaughtered in Hitler’s pogroms and death camps. 

One of the few to oppose this weak, shameful and wrong action at the time was Winston Churchill, then out of power.

Israel’s critics have many good points as well as bad ones. The anti-Israel propagandists say truthfully that Israel’s foundation in 1948 was based on the cruel expulsion of Arabs from their homes, under cover of war. 

Defenders of Israel long tried to deny this. But Israeli historians, especially Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris, have shown beyond doubt that it is true.

So what shall we do about this? Shall we make it a rule that nations which have displaced their original inhabitants should be dissolved, or forced to hand the land back? 

In that case what shall we do about the USA and Australia, both of which mercilessly cleansed their indigenous peoples, sometimes with actual massacres? Well, you might say that was long ago, though it wasn’t really.

But as it happens, the 1940s – when Israel came into being – saw several horrible events of this kind, in places other than Israel.

In what are now India and Pakistan, uncounted numbers were slaughtered or forced from their homes when the country was partitioned in the last weeks of the British Empire.

In Europe, a frightful, savage and often fatal campaign drove millions of Germans from their ancestral lands in Poland and Czechoslovakia. 

Most of these were women, children and the old, who could not be blamed for the deeds of Hitler.

And the cleansing was authorised by the Great Powers under the Potsdam Agreement of 1945. 

If Israel had conceded an Arab state on the West Bank of the Jordan, as everyone tells it to do, what guarantee would there be that such a state would not, like Gaza, fall under the control of murderers? Pictured: Palestinians wave their national flag and celebrate by a destroyed Israeli tank last Saturday

They said it should be ‘orderly and humane’ but it was anything but. It was so shamefully cruel that it is little discussed, but it happened.

Nearly 15 million were uprooted. More than two million probably died. Records were not kept amid the bloody chaos. 

And let us not forget that hundreds of thousands of Jews were ruthlessly ejected from all parts of the Arab and Muslim world. They were mostly forced to leave behind everything they owned. This cruelty was a response to the creation of Israel.

In all of these cases, the nations to which the refugees fled took them in and integrated them.

They may have bitter memories, but the world does not encourage them to ferment those memories into a permanent politicised fury.

But Israel is different. Why is it such a special case? These events took place about 75 years ago, in another age. In no case except in that of Israel does a special agency of the United Nations keep the children and grandchildren of those 1948 refugees in misnamed camps, under the supervision of UNWRA, founded in 1949 and now employing 30,000 people.

These places long ago ceased to be actual camps and are now often grim, cramped housing in which discontent and hatred are cultivated like evil plants by the fanatics of Hamas or of some other death cult.

You may well ask why the Arab world, so rich through oil, has made so little effort to integrate the refugees of 1948 and their descendants into their often-prosperous societies, as has been done in all the other cases of 1940s ethnic cleansing.

Is it possible that they prefer them to languish in these places of despair? There are shining exceptions to this stupid policy.

When I visited Gaza a few years ago I was shown excellent new homes which had been built there by the United Arab Emirates, to their immense credit.

It helped me to realise that Gaza, without its malice-filled zealots, could easily be a very pleasant and prosperous place. 

But I expect the flats have since been reduced to dust and rubble by Israeli high explosive, or soon will be.

And here I should say that I think Israel’s attack on Gaza is a mistake, mainly because it will probably not work, and because it will allow millions of people to start loathing Israel again. They cannot do this at the moment.

As long as the memory of Hamas killers striding into peaceful villages and slaughtering unarmed civilians and even babies still lingers in the public mind, Israel will have the support of millions and most of its opponents will keep their voices down.

And by the way, I do not support those friends of Israel now calling for the arrest and prosecution of those who defend Hamas. 

I am very glad that these people have come out into the open and said the disgraceful things they have said.

By doing so, they have warned all civilised citizens that such opinions are truly held by an alarming number of people. 

As long as they stop short of actual incitement, then the rules of free speech apply to them, and the rest of us, likewise, are free to tell them what we think of them.

So what can we do about it? Well, we can all ask ourselves what the real reason for Israel’s special pariah status is. 

Of course, Israel as a country has done and still does bad things. I have written about them often. But so, in truth, do most countries, especially when they are frequently at war.

But take some examples. This is a world which claims to despise appeasement, the giving away of actual territory in return for paper promises of peace. 

Yet in the case of Israel, the USA, the EU and most Western public opinion ceaselessly urge appeasement. They call it ‘Land for Peace’.

Israel gave up its major conquest in Sinai almost 50 years ago, under US pressure. It has little land left to spare. 

At slightly more than 8,000 square miles it is the size of Wales – but not its shape.

At its narrowest point it is nine miles wide – a tank could drive across it in 18 minutes. At its widest point it is 70 miles broad. Everything is very close.

That is why the ‘two-state solution’, which every Western statesman says he is in favour of, is so absurd. 

If Israel had conceded an Arab state on the West Bank of the Jordan, as everyone tells it to do, what guarantee would there be that such a state would not, like Gaza, fall under the control of murderers?

In which case nothing but a wire fence would protect Israel’s cities, towns, villages and farms from the sort of blood-soaked, screaming incursion we saw a week ago.

Who, after these massacres and kidnaps, can now really think that a ‘two-state solution’ is a wise idea? Yet it will not go away, I promise you. Pictured: Protestors pictured in London on Saturday

Who, after these massacres and kidnaps, can now really think that a ‘two-state solution’ is a wise idea? Yet it will not go away, I promise you.

Behind all this folly – the failure to resettle the 1948 refugees and recognise the reality of Israel, the endless pressure on Israel to weaken its defence – lies a guilty secret. 

The ancient disdain for Jews is still among us, often masquerading as ‘anti-Zionism’. 

In my own sad experience, drivelling anti-Jewish phobia can be found among too many Arabs in the region itself. You often find it in people who are otherwise charming, hospitable and educated.

That is why, deep down, Israel is the only nation in the world which gets blamed for being attacked, and is ceaselessly pressured to make itself safer by actually making itself more vulnerable.

Last week, Lord (Daniel) Finkelstein wrote movingly and wisely in The Times about how a Jewish state in the Middle East had become inevitable after the Nazi mass murders. 

Most people, including many European Jews, had always opposed such a state.

But when the death camps were opened they reluctantly accepted that if the bad times came again, there had to be somewhere for Jews to go.

There is no real counter to this. It is unavoidably true. And he said this: ‘If the world wants peace in the Middle East, it must ensure that what Hamas has done is not rewarded, or compromised with, in any way. 

‘Only once the failure of such violence is obvious to them and to the Palestinian people will it ever stop.’ This is absolutely true.

Whatever happens in Gaza in the next few weeks, the only real hope of peace and harmony, and of better lives for the displaced everyone claims to care about, is Western resolve to stand by Israel. 

Weakness and compromise will bring more horror.