Another terrible mass murder in Israel; 20 dead and 45 injured in a restaurant bombing in Haifa. While these atrocities are perpetrated by Arabs, the West –particularly Europe — itself has some of this blood on its hands. For the past 40 years, it has encouraged terror by responding to every outrage with promises to address the grievances that are its ‘root causes’.

Now, even worse, Europe funds, lionises and supports a Palestinian cause which is fuelled by demented, homicidal Jew-hatred. In America, despite the war on terror, President Bush — egged on by Tony Blair and the State Department — launched the road map to annihilation, which promises the Palestinians a state as a reward for terror.

Every breach of that wretched document by the Palestinians has been ignored. The very premise on which it was launched, that Arafat would be sidelined by a proper statesman, was proved false from day one, as Arafat asserted and then consolidated his grip. Yet Bush brushed this aside, in the deluded belief that if only the Palestinians were given their state, a major source of the poison in the Middle East would dissipate.

Wrong, wrong wrong; it’s the other way round. The Israel/Palestinian impasse will not be broken unless and until the sponsors of Jew-hating, America-hating, western secular democracy-hating terror in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are dealt with. The Palestinians could have had a state when it was offered to the Arabs in 1948; they could have had it any time between 1948 and 1967, when the West Bank was illegally occupied by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt; they could have it after 1967 when Israel offered the conquered territories to the Arabs in return for peace, which was refused; and they could have had it in 2000, when almost all the land was offered again at Taba, and to which the response was the past three years of mass murder by the Palestinians.

The Bush road map and the Europeans’ approach constitute a strategy that is not merely mistaken. It has the catastrophic effect of encouraging yet more terror. This will only be addressed if Bush, Blair and European leaders finally tell the Palestinians that the game is up and that they will get no more money or support unless they stop both terror and its incitement.

But instead, victim and victimiser in the Middle East have been stood on their heads. Israel — whose settlement policy is wrong and morally corrupting, but that is not the fundamental issue here — has instead been demonised and dehumanised, and blamed for trying to prevent its citizens from being murdered, a defence which is represented as aggression; while the Palestinians’ deliberate targeting of the innocents is said to be legitimate or understandable self-defence. It is this denial of truth, logic and history, this grotesque moral inversion, which is driving the violence in the Middle East –which, like all such terrorism, seeks to achieve precisely this kind of reversal in public opinion, in which the Europeans and Americans between them are so hideously complicit.