There is a denial at the heart of most debate and commentary on the Middle East conflict, as though speaking the truth may leave one open to charges of anti-Semitism or sympathy with terrorism. The denial has to do with the historic injustice that flows from the way the state of Israel was established in 1948, the banishment of the majority of the Arab population at the time, mainly into refugee camps, and the stubborn refusal of Israel and its allies to confront this reality and the problems that flow from it.
The justification for the state of Israel takes a number of forms. One of them speaks of a fundamentalism, far more brazen and menacing than what is called Islamic fundamentalism. It is that God ordained in the covenant with Abraham that the lands of Palestine eventually would be inhabited and owned by the Jewish people. The covenant is "revealed" in Chapter 17 of the Book of Genesis. It quotes the Lord (God) as saying to Abraham: "I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land where you are not an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God."
It is this quotation that justifies for many Jews and increasing multitudes of Christians the Jewish entitlement to the lands of Canaan, which, incidentally, far exceed the present territory of the state of Israel.
There is hardly any arguing with those who seek justification in the literal words of the Bible, no point in quoting back at them other elements of the Bible which, clearly, are deeply repulsive and elements that are manifestly absurd, even to "believers".
Another justification is based on the claim that the Jewish occupation of the land of Israel occurred at a time when the land was sparsely populated - in other words, nobody was deprived of their entitlement to land, since the land was unoccupied. A variant of this is that there was Arab immigration into these lands after the Jewish immigrants had started to make the land fruitful from the late 1890s up to the 1930s and these Arabs had no more entitlement to the land than did the immigrant Jews.
The claim of an empty land is simply untrue. For instance at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 (the communication from the then British foreign secretary to Lord Rothschild of the World Zionist Organisation, that the British government would use "its best endeavours to facilitate" the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people) there were 600,000 Arabs in Palestine and just 60,000 Jews.
The reality is there was a clear Arab majority in Palestine at the time that the Jewish state was founded in 1948. A majority of the population was forced to flee in the course of the war that broke out on the state's founding. That largely refugee population of 750,000 had been denied the right of return (because their numbers would "swamp" the number of Jews in the state), whereas any Jew anywhere in the world is permitted to reside in Israel and given Israeli citizenship. Israel passed a law denying the right of the dispossessed Arabs to the property they lost in 1948, The Absentee Property Act.
That historic injustice is at the core of everything that has happened in the Middle East since 1948.
It is not realistic to undo entirely that injustice now, for, given the passage of time, that would involve further injustice. But the reality of that injustice should have informed all peace proposals since then.
As a start, the confines of the state of Israel have to be returned to those former boundaries (ie, the pre-1967 boundaries). Jerusalem should be extracted from the state of Israel, and established as an international entity in itself. All settlements in the West Bank should be dismantled and a massive compensation package should be provided to reflect the injustice done to the Palestinians in 1948 and since.
And all Israeli control of and aggression towards the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has to be forfeited unconditionally.
But this won't happen because the United States doesn't want it to happen. Not primarily because of the Jewish lobby in the US, probably much exaggerated, but because what Israel wants fits into America's global master-plan - in this instance, the dominance of the Middle East by interests allied to America. Israel has felt free to ignore the norms of civilised and proportionate conduct in pursuit of what it says are its national security interests, with no regard at all for the injustice it inflicted on the Palestinians and the anger it has stirred up in Islamic societies surrounding it.
What is happening in Lebanon is now an outrage. Of course there was proximate provocation from Hizbullah and Hamas but the scale of the murderous response has represented a further inflammation of the conflict.
The ultimate political and military outcome may be uncertain, but what is not uncertain is that once again innocent lives - by far the greater number being innocent Arab lives - will pay the price.