Israel’s choice of damned or dead

WAR is always terrible and to be avoided if humanly possible.

War in Gaza, where Hamas terrorists are embedded within densely crowded areas, is particularly awful.

No one wants to see civilians killed.

Every decent person will be dismayed that it has come to this.

What is profoundly troubling, however, is that as the Israeli ground offensive escalates hostilities still further, so many people don't understand that, appalling as this war is, the alternative is even worse.

This is a war that Israel spent more than seven years trying to avoid, while no fewer than 6000 rockets and other missiles rained down from Gaza upon its southern towns.

No other country would have sat on its hands while its traumatised children were raised in bomb shelters.

Far from acting out of opportunism, Israel has taken massive risks with this operation. It almost certainly means many of its soldiers will die.

If just one of its shells were to go astray and hit a school or hospital, a hostile Western world would unleash the furies against it.

And in Lebanon, Hezbollah may launch its ferocious arsenal of rockets pointing at northern Israel.

But the brutal fact is that tiny, besieged Israel is damned if it does and dead if it doesn't.

While Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas blame Hamas for provoking this war, it is Israel drawing Western protests.

The main complaint is that Israel's response is "disproportionate", since some 460 Palestinians have been killed compared with "only" four Israelis.

This is absurd. In World War II, 20 times more civilians were killed in Germany than in Britain. Did that make the war against Nazism "disproportionate"? Of course not.

Then there's the belief that the Hamas rockets are some kind of homemade, harmless Dad's Army effort.

ButT the only reason more Israelis haven't been killed by them is that in the south, the population has been all but living in bomb shelters.

And there is nothing "homemade' about the Russian-designed Katyushas and Iranian Grad rockets.

Contrary to Arab propaganda, the Israelis are taking enormous pains to avoid civilian casualties.

The United Nations has confirmed that 75 per cent of the dead in Gaza have been Hamas terrorists. Given the huge number of bombing sorties, it proves the Israelis are aiming at Hamas infrastructure.

Alas, the civilian toll will unavoidably mount, which is deeply regrettable.

But what must be understood is that Hamas have deliberately situated their weapons under apartment blocks, in mosques and in hospitals. The Israelis build bomb shelters for their civilians - Hamas stores bombs underneath its civilians to manipulate world opinion.

What people find so hard to grasp is that Hamas actually wants to maximise the number of Palestinians killed because, as they boast: "We desire death as you desire life."

Despite this fanaticism, many fear Israel's attack will create yet more suicide bombers. There is a grain of sense in this - but only a grain. This is because every act of self-defence against Islamist aggression is used as a recruiting sergeant for the Islamic holy war.

So if this dictates world responses, no one can ever defend themselves - not just in Israel but in Afghanistan or against al-Qaida anywhere.

Islamists such as Hamas are galvanised into battle by the perceived weakness of their victims, and are deterred only by implacable strength. That's why the ferocity of suicide bomb attacks actually rises after peace initiatives.

Gaza's rocket barrage went up by 500 per cent after Israel ended its occupation. And the 2000 Intifada that killed thousands of Israelis was the Palestinians' response to being offered more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza for a state of their own.

What is so distressing is the desperate unfairness of so much Western reaction.

Thus Israel is accused of causing a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, even though it is allowing hundreds of trucks of supplies through the crossing points.

Few are aware that wounded Gazans - 65 per cent of whom voted for Hamas - are being treated in Israeli hospitals.

By contrast, in a Gaza hospital, Hamas shot dead five suspected Palestinian "collaborators" - and murdered another 30 elsewhere.

Many in the West think that the Palestinians are the rightful inheritors not just of Gaza and the West Bank but Israel itself. But this is totally false.

The Jews are the only people for whom "Palestine" was ever their nation state, hundreds of years before Mohammed was even born.

No other country on the planet has ever been expected to make suicidal concessions to its enemies even while they continue to try to destroy it.

Yet the world expects it of Israel.

An immediate ceasefire would effectively mean victory for Hamas.

British PM Gordon Brown wouldn't dream of calling a ceasefire with al-Qaida. Why a double standard for Israel?

Most important, this war isn't actually about Israelis and Palestinians. Hamas is controlled by Iran.

Unless Hamas is stopped, Iran's growing influence will be entrenched and the West in even greater danger from Islamist aggression and blackmail.

The Middle East conflict will not end until and unless the West comes to realise that Israel is in the front line of the West's own fight for survival.

Melanie Phillips is a writer for Britain's Daily Mail