Self-pity is never an attractive trait; less so when it comes from an oppressing power. It is a conventional motif in imperial ideology that, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, “we have our jackboot on someone’s neck and they’re about to destroy us”.  Thus, as  the most awesome concentration of military power in world history was busy incinerating rural Vietnam to “defend” it against the Vietnamese population, President Lyndon Johnson fretted that “[t]here are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them.  We are outnumbered fifteen to one.” That imperial powers peddle, and even believe, this self-serving victimhood is unsurprising; less clear is why otherwise sensible people choose to repeat it.

In these pages last week, Rob Mindell complained that debating whether the Israeli state can be reasonably characterised as “rogue” is “reckless” and “senseless”. “Rogue state” is of course a propaganda term that can be used to mean anything you want – Mindell’s working definition appears to be a state that does not have a “fully electric car-grid”. However, if by it one means a state that consistently flouts international law and proclaimed international norms, then there is no debate to be had. Every year the UN General Assembly votes on the legality of Israel’s occupation regime – last year’s result, 164-7 against, is representative. In July 2004 the highest judicial body in the world, the International Court of Justice, issued an advisory opinion that ruled on most of issues at the heart of the conflict. The result wasn’t even close: by 13-1, the Court ruled that the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem constitute occupied Palestinian territory, to which Israel has zero title, and that all the settlements established in the West Bank by Israel are illegal under international law. Mindell largely deals with this by ignoring it, instead offering us an idealised picture of how Israel behaves with respect to its own citizens. This argument, granting for a moment that its premises are correct, is persuasive, so long as we accept the assumption that Palestinians aren’t real human beings, and so Israel’s behaviour towards them is irrelevant.

Over the past four decades Israel, one of the world’s most sophisticated military and nuclear powers, has systematically colonised the occupied Palestinian territories, dissecting the West Bank into a series of ever-smaller and more isolated cantons and displacing Palestinian residents to make way for Jewish-only settlements. Israeli rule in the occupied territories is in effect a military dictatorship: Palestinian lives are hostage to the whims of a hostile military power, one that views their very existence as an obstacle to its “historic right” to the “Land of Israel”. They live under what Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem describes as a “separation cum discrimination regime” with “two systems of laws”, in which “a person’s rights are based on his or her national origin”. “This regime”, B’Tselem continues, “is the only one of its kind in the world”, and is reminiscent of “dark regimes of the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa.” The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that this system is “transforming the geographical reality of the West Bank and Jerusalem” towards “a more permanent territorial fragmentation”. The cumulative effect has been, the UN special rapporteur on the conflict concludes, to “convert the conditions of de jure ‘occupation’ into a set of circumstances better understood as de facto ‘annexation’”. This represents the culmination of four decades of rejectionism, dating back at least to 1971, when the Israeli government responded to an Egyptian peace offer with a curt dismissal: “Israel will not withdraw to the pre-June 5, 1967 lines.”

The permanent military subjugation of the Palestinians is punctuated, as it must be, by frequent massacres, the most recent of which killed 1,400 people, including 300 children, in the space of three weeks. The assault was designed to “punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population” (quoting the conclusion of the UN inquiry into the attack) – you can’t keep an entire population under military subjugation for four decades without breaking a few heads. That this is so exposes the disingenuousness of Mindell’s posture of liberal ‘balance’, in which he piously situates himself between the extremes of those who cheerlead for racist colonisation and those who condemn it. It is not good enough to criticise the excesses – what Mindell calls Israel’s “mistakes” – of a system that you fundamentally support. As Simone de Beauvoir understood, there are only two coherent choices: you can either accept the occupation, and all the brutalities it entails, “or else you reject, not merely certain specific practices, but the greater aim which sanctions them, and for which they are essential.”

As you read this, construction in the settlements is dramatically accelerating – glossed by Mindell as “the two sides” getting “closer to a peace agreement than ever  before” – as it does whenever a new round of “peace negotiations” begins (for instance, in the months following the 2007 ‘Annapolis process’ – remember that? – when, under the ‘dovish’ leadership of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, settlement expansion accelerated by 60%). Construction continues on the wall, a “land grab” (Amnesty International) that juts out deep into Palestinian territory and is intended to constitute a “de facto border” (UN OCHA), a project enthusiastically supported by Tzipi Livni, leader of Israel’s “peace camp”. Meanwhile the population of Gaza continues to suffer under “a regime of protracted collective punishment” (Human Rights Watch) that has precipitated what human rights organisations describe as an “unprecedented” “humanitarian implosion”. This is the context in which Mindell invites us to join him in horror at the “demoniz[ation]”  of his favoured regional superpower. Diddums.

Returning to the real world, it is widely recognised that this latest iteration of the ‘peace process’, aptly described by Henry Siegman as “the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history”, is a hollow farce, for the reasons described above. Ignoring the theatrics, it is clear that the window of opportunity to achieve a negotiated settlement to the conflict is closing, and closing fast. The Israeli peace movement warns that “[w]e are at the final hour ... any further building in the territories will destroy any chance” of a two-state solution. At this fateful moment, the US and its European allies are decisively enabling continued Israeli settlement. Earlier this year the OECD unanimously approved Israeli membership, over the objections of human rights organisations, and the EU continues to grant preferential access to Israeli exports. The British government itself has played an integral part in supporting the collective punishment of Gaza, boycotting Hamas and strangling those who voted for it even as it continues to sell arms to Israel.

Mindell is upset at people who “question Israel’s legitimacy” rather than engaging in “sensible discussion” (presumably restricted to Israel’s “mistakes”, seen  in the context of what he calls “the greatest culture clash of modern history” – in Palestinian culture, you must understand, stealing another people’s land and forcing them to live without dignity, security or protection for 40 years is frowned upon). Personally, I’m more concerned with defending tortured and dispossessed Palestinians than with playing psychotherapist to the existential angst of the state that is torturing and dispossessing them. But even if you share Mindell’s priorities rather than mine, it should be clear that, by refusing to withdraw to internationally recognised borders and end an occupation that has defined it for most of its existence, the main contemporary threat to Israel’s “legitimacy” is the Israeli state itself. Those who genuinely care about it, then, will be out on the front-lines demanding that the British government end its support for Israeli rejectionism.

Jamie Stern-Weiner is a PPS student at King's College and Co-editor of New Left Project, http://www.newleftproject.org/