In this story on the BBC website, Tim Butcher writes about the fate of Palestinians who are accused of collaborating with Israel. Towards the end of the story, he talks about the treatment meted out by Palestinians to one such suspected collaborator:

‘In front of a large crowd, Muhammad Mansour was beaten, shot at close range in the side of the head and then the mother of one of the men he betrayed was then called forward to stab his lifeless corpse and pluck out his eyes.’

Appalling stuff. But then Butcher says this:

‘It was a display of Old Testament-style brutality and I wondered if it might one day be applied to the villagers of Dahaniya. Many of them, like the 17-year-old Mohammed, are the sons or grandsons of Arabs who collaborated, so perhaps they would be let off. But does not the Old Testament say something about the sins of the father being visited on his offspring?’

Come again? ‘Old Testament-style brutality’? But this was Palestinian violence towards Palestinians. Yet to Butcher, it appears that when Arabs commit violence they turn into Jews! Is this because the BBC – which was so taken with this thought that it used it for a sub-head on the story in bold type -- really does think that only Jews do brutality, while the Arabs can only ever be its victims?