A week ago, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees endorsed, by 40 votes to five, with seven abstentions, a resolution that accused Israel of a long list of human rights violations, but failed to mention the targeting of civilians by Palestinian suicide bombings.

Germany, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic and Guatemala were the nations that voted against the resolution. Neither Israel nor the United States is a member of the UNHCR.

During the meeting, the German ambassador to the Commission complained that the text of the resolution was capable of being read as an endorsement of violence, and that it contained no condemnation whatever of terrorism.

A former American ambassador to the Commission, speaking after the vote had been taken, was rather more blunt: “A vote in favour of this resolution,” he said, “is a vote for Palestinian terrorism. An abstention suggests ambivalence towards terror. Any country that condones, or is indifferent to, the murder of Israeli civilians in markets, on buses and in cafés has lost any moral standing to criticise Israel’s human rights record.”

Certainly, in terms of international law and treaty, the Commission has taken the wrong side. The Geneva Convention quite explicitly bans attacks on civilians, such as the Palestinian suicide bombings. The restriction refers only to direct attacks on civilians. It does not exclude “proportional, incidental damage caused by attacking military objectives” — often called collateral damage.

This ‘principle of proportionality’ is at the very root of the law of armed conflict, and is accepted by courts in most countries as the basis for legal custom in any case that involves violence. It is a principle very familiar to lawyers, policemen and soldiers — an individual (and, by extension, a country) may use only as much force as is necessary to achieve a lawful end.

If the Israeli army were to be charged in a court with unlawfully killing civilians during their recent attacks on refugee camps, they would have to make a two-part argument in defence of their actions. They would have to make the case that it was reasonable for them to go into the camps to root out terrorists in the first place. Then, they would have to show that the circumstances they faced in the camps were such that civilian deaths were the kind of “proportional, incidental damage” that the Geneva Convention accepts is sometimes necessary in achieving a military aim.

They should not have difficulty showing it was reasonable to go into the camps to deal with terrorists. Terrorist-inspired violence had reached epidemic proportions in Israel in the weeks before the Israeli assaults. Terrorists hide in civilian areas in order to shelter behind the civilian population, and, in doing so, they know perfectly well that they put those civilians in the gravest kind of danger.

Having shown it was reasonable to enter the camps in pursuit of terrorists, it would remain for the Israeli Defence Force to justify the damage they did, and the civilians killed or injured, in their hunt for terrorists. In the case of Jenin, the camp on which much attention is focused, the Israelis offered the gunmen holed up there safe passage out so as not to put civilians at risk. They refused. The easy way of dealing with that problem, had the Israeli Defence Force been indifferent to the fate of civilians, would have been to bomb the camp from the air. Instead, the IDF went on a highly dangerous house-to-house clearance operation, during which they lost more than a score of soldiers.

It was interesting to read a couple of paragraphs at the tail end of an article published in the Guardian — a newspaper I would not have thought was a particular friend of Israel’s — about the operation at the Jenin camp.

“Palestinians admit the camp was liberally mined two or three days before the assault. But the strategy failed because Israel had no compunction about razing homes to make roads for its tanks. The thing we did not count on was the bulldozer. It was a catastrophe. If the Israelis had only gone one by one inside the camp, they would never have succeeded in entering,’ said Mr. Damaj (a camp resident).”

The rest of the European press, or perhaps to say most of it would be more accurate, seems in no doubt that the IDF massacred many of the residents of Jenin. There isn’t a lot of physical evidence to that effect, but Palestinian allegations seem to have been sufficient to convince them of the guilt of the Israelis.

The Independent, for example, described what happened in Jenin as “a monstrous war crime”, in a story that failed to offer up a single piece of evidence to support using that phrase, or even to define what was meant by the phrase ‘war crime’.

The following day, theIndependent alleged there was “fresh evidence” of a massacre, that evidence being simply some quotes from a doctor who thought it highly suspicious that one of the Palestinian dead had been shot both in one foot and in the back.

The eagerness of Europeans and others to believe in Israeli guilt seems sometimes to be matched only by their eagerness to believe in American guilt as well. The US and Israel are countries much of the world just loves to hate.

At the United Nations Conference Against Racism, Racial Intolerance, Xenophobia and/ or Related Intolerance in Durban, for example, America and Israel were denounced over and over again.

Of all people, Mr. Mugabe of Zimbabwe called on Britain and America to “apologise unreservedly for their crimes against humanity”. No doubt he threw Britain in to the equation for having the temerity to suggest he should end his policy of terrorising white farmers. The Organisation for African Unity demanded that reparations for the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsis should be paid...wait for it...by America.

Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, then France’s Defence Minister, insisted that the United States was dedicated to “the organised cretinisation of our people”.

David Brooks, senior editor of the American magazine The Weekly Standard, has recently written a fine, two-part essay on the reasons for this kind of demonisation. It exists, he says, because of bourgeoiseophobia — the dislike by some people of others they consider inferior. “In much of the world’s eyes,” Mr Brooks wrote, “two peoples — the Americans and the Jews — have emerged as the great exemplars of undeserved success. Americans and Israelis in this view, are the money-mad molochs of the earth, the vulgarizers of morals, corrupters of culture, and proselytizers of idolatrous values.

“These two nations, it is said, practise conquest capitalism, overrunning poorer nations and exploiting weaker neighbours in their endless desire for more and more. These two people, the Americans and the Jews, in the view of the bourgeoisophobes, thrive precisely because they are spiritually stunted. If is their obliviousness to the holy things in life, their feverish energy, their injustice, their shallow pursuit of power and gain, that allow them to build fortunes, construct weapons and play the role of hyperpower.”

Europeans, and others, sneer at the Americans for their shallowness, their commercialism and what they see as a simplistic, cowboy mentality.

The Arab world is humiliated by the success both of the Americans and the Israelis — they tried modernisation and commercialism themselves, and failed. They have tried to destroy Israel by force of arms on three occasions, not to mention a constant, low-level irregular campaign that has not stopped since the state of Israel came into being in 1948. Despite overwhelming superiority in numbers, the Arab armies failed on all three occasions.

This latest campaign to destroy Israel, whose strategy is to break the will of the Israeli people by attacking them directly, can claim overwhelming superiority in numbers of a different kind. In the public relations battle which pits Israel and the United States against much of the rest of the world, so far, the Arab world is making good progress. They are assisted by a bourgeoisophobia so strong it seems to have suspended the critical faculties of normally sensible people all over the planet.

gshorto[AT]ibl.bm.