Naim Zidane, reported the Telegraph last week, is a 70 year old Palestinian who all his life has worked in a vineyard owned by the Italian priests at the West Bank Salesian monastery of Cremisan, near Beit Jala, not far from Bethlehem. They've been working together as a community for 120 years. But soon, it appears, the Israeli security barrier will drag this last West Bank vineyard into the Israeli side of the wall, just as they have ripped away the livelihoods of thousands of other West Bank Palestinians with the closing off of many olive groves over the past few years.

Meanwhile, last night, they once again attacked civilian infrastructure in another sovereign state, Lebanon, closing Beirut airport with rocket attacks, in reprisals against a geurilla organization, Hezbollah, sponsored and many say, I gather, controlled by a third, Syria, for kidnapping two Israeli military personnel. And in the past few days seventy Palestinians and one Israeli, including, as always, mostly civilians, and with them lots of children, have been killed in Israeli incursions into the largest concentration camp on the planet, the Gaza strip, also, it seems, because some of their fellow "countrymen" if Palestine can be called, yet, a country, kidnapped an Israeli soldier who was, presumably, on his way to maim and kill more Palestinians.

I really hesitate to post about Israel. If I am lucky my visitor numbers will rise. But probably at the expense of abuse that seems to be meted out against anyone who says anything negative about Israel. I'm a pacifist. And I understand that things have been difficult, shall we say, in that part of the world for several decades. I believe, I think, in a two state solution, not because I support Israel - if Israel hadn't carved itself out of the desert in the first half of the twentieth century I certainly wouldn't be creating it now. But it exists, and as a pragmatist, I believe there are a whole load of peace-loving Israelis, who arrived there and brought their families up there, hoping for some kind of peaceful co-existence with those who also viewed that land as part of their history and we should work for that peaceful co-existence.

But can you imagine the uproar there would have been if, say, the US military had gone about searching for those two of their soldiers, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, who were kidnapped by allegedly al-Qaeda linked insurgents in Iraq, by killing civilians and bombing civilian infrastructure there? Like the battle of Falluja? Despite all my misgivings about the US government's lack of respect for the rule of law, I cannot for the life of me see why Israel gets away with these things, almost unremarked upon.

Our seeming collective myopia disgusts me - note to any hardcore Zionists about to yell at me - not Israel per se, but us, who seem to let this violence trickle through in the inside pages of newspapers and down in the bottom half of the news hour, with hardly a mention, either to condemn, or to discuss solutions. Maybe this latest attack on the civilian infrastructure of a country that in recent years, despite the upheavals caused by the death of President Rafik Hariri a while back, has been getting itself back on its feet, will refocus attention on what's going on in the area.

Punishment attacks are the weapons of a desperate regime. They are disgusting. Against the rule of law. People who support, as I do, a two state solution (though I have to say with deep, deep misgivings about the carving out of settlements whenever it suits them leaving the West Bank looking like a land strafed with bomb craters like the Somme battlefield) will eventually lose sympathy and wonder what it is we actually support - which ones are the murdering terrorists. Because terrorism is exactly what's been going on in Gaza; state sponsored terrorism, and state sponsored theft as in the case of Naim Zidane's employers' vineyard.

And I for one am losing patience with it. Whatever the hurdles, whatever the attitudes of those they feel are ranged against them, Israel can be the "better man" in its response, respecting the rule of law. When I was young, I just about remember Entebbe - we were I think in Kenya at the time. We thought the surgical precision of Israeli special forces when they wanted to be was second to none in the world. Maybe that was naive (I was only seven I think and soldierly antics were exciting, not threatening), but it seems to me they have become little more than the terrorists they condemn. And if we lose patience with the situation, if we give up hoping for a peaceful, adult, settlement, then I would imagine that Israel's death throes could be as bloody as its birth-pangs. And we will not care, because we'll have grown used to the bloodshed, and really have stopped trying to work out who are the good guys or not.