TO DEFEND Israel today is to be either callous or wilfully ignorant. Had Julie Burchill bothered during her visit there to cross the few miles from Israel to Gaza or the West Bank, she would have seen such human suffering as to disturb even her frenetic adulation of Israel. She might have seen the daily lot of nearly three million Palestinians as they battle with army checkpoints, curfews, random shootings, arbitrary arrests and air raids. She might have found that the “superJews” she so admires humiliate and oppress Palestinians at a whim: last year, at the Nablus checkpoint, a middle-aged man was made to strip, get down on all fours and bark like a dog before he could enter his city. Women in labour routinely wait at checkpoints until some give birth there and see their babies die.

Those that survive live a blighted childhood. Since September 2000, Israel has killed more than 660 Palestinian children and wounded 9,000 — such as little Iman, sprayed with bullets when walking to school in Rafah last month, even after she died. Thousands of children are traumatised by the daily horrors they witness. For a Palestinian child, life under Israeli occupation means turning 15 and seeing the army come to arrest you if you are male, or seeing your friends bleed to death because no ambulance is allowed to rescue them.

It is difficult to convey the scale and effect of Israel’s abuses of Palestinian lives through statistics alone. But these are horrifying enough: since 2000, nearly 4,000 Palestinians killed, and 30,000 injured; 400 were assas-sinated; and 25,000 homes were demolished. In addition, hundreds of acres of farmland were destroyed. No state on earth, except Israel, could get away with these atrocities, now routinely justified as “defence” against Palestinian “ terrorism”.

The truth is that the West, which created Israel, cannot bear to see what it has done. In trying to solve the problem of Jewish persecution in Europe, which culminated in the Holocaust, Western powers helped to establish the Jewish state as a refuge for the Jews and their own consciences. A compelling argument at the time, it became unassailable when Old Testament stories about the ancient Israelites and their exploits in the Holy Land were thrown in.

But these were European sensitivities arising from European events that had nothing to do with the people who paid the price for Israel’s establishment. Most Palestinians are Muslims who do not accept the Biblical version of events. So why were they sacrificed to assuage European guilt and fulfil Zionist ambitions? And who cares to compute the cost to the Palestinians of creating Israel 56 years ago? Far easier to ignore all that and cling to the romantic illusion of an Israel of fearless pioneers and liberal upholders of civilised, Western values. But the ugly reality behind this myth is showing and people like Julie Burchill will have to take note some day.

• Ghada Karmi is a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter