Roger Cohen is in a bad way, down in the dumps, ashamed. What about?

I have never previously felt so despondent about Israel, so shamed by its actions, so despairing of any peace that might terminate the dominion of the dead in favor of opportunity for the living.

Let me see if I can help him arise from the mental and moral slough in which he’s mired. Before confessing his tortured state of mind he says,

There’s no point denying that a line of sorts runs from the forty-three people killed by Israeli fire near a United Nations school in Gaza on January 6 back to the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 and to Berlin, 1945.

This is a touch vague, Roger. Lots of history mixed up there, no doubt, but somehow I feel that we are no nearer the roots of your pain.

I’ve been having nightmares. I cannot see a scenario in which any short-term Israeli tactical victory over Hamas is not overwhelmed by the long-term strategic cost of this war. Khaled Meshal, the political director of Hamas in Damascus, declared fifteen days into the war that it had “destroyed the last chance for negotiations.”

Roger, I know that nightmares can be really disturbing, but I think it must be something else that’s causing yours, because if the only long-term strategic cost payable by Israel for this conflict is Meshal’s hypocritical comments about negotiations then there isn’t much to worry about. Talks with Hamas on matters of substance are not, to put it mildly, in Israel’s interests. What’s to discuss with an organization that wants to put an end your existence and which, as a really big concession and when it’s in a particularly sunny mood, sometimes says that it might be willing to delay the achievement of this goal for a while?

There are about 1.3 million Arab citizens of Israel, or a little less than 20 percent of the population. Their loyalties are divided, but never before have they protested so vigorously.

This is a bad thing, Roger? The stuff that nightmares are made of? I don’t think so. The Jews, Muslims and others in Israel who protested against their government’s actions in Gaza were just exercising their democratic rights. What’s not to like? The region could do with more of this kind of thing, especially in those countries that love to accuse Israel of the most horrendous crimes.

That’s a fair guide to the virulence of Arab sentiment, stoked by graphic around-the-clock coverage of the Gaza carnage from the al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya networks.

Come now, Roger. You are so worried and upset that you are in danger of treating Arabs like moody teenagers, brimming with uncontrollable emotions and easily influenced by TV shows of dubious taste and probity. Arabs, Roger, are people, just like you and me and there is no reason to think that they are governed by unruly sentiments or more prone to to the siren call of unreason than you or I are. Felling any better yet?

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, resorting to the same loaded World War II lexicon, has called Gaza “a concentration camp,” a term also recently used by Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace.

Bashar Al-Assad and the Vatican are not pleased with Israels actions and that has you worried Roger? I think you might be in a worse state than I imagined.

The high-tech security fence built to wall off the West Bank and the near-hermetic sealing of Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 are in the end attempts to shut out reality.

In a way, Roger, I think that you are right here. Israel has indeed been taking measures to seal itself off from reality in recent years; a reality that consists of suicide bombs and other terrorist attacks that cost hundreds of Israeli lives. And pretty effective these measures have been too. By that I mean that there are a lot of Israelis, including Arabs, walking around today and doing normal stuff that would be dead had they not been implemented.

Sometimes, Roger, blocking things out that are designed to kill you is the only way to go if you want to stay alive and hey, let’s face it, staying alive is a necessary condition for being miserable and depressed like you are now. Oh and by the way, I think that “near-hermetic” might be over egging it a bit. If Israel had done that there wouldn’t be a Gazan left with breath in his body. The valid critique of Israel’s policy of limiting the flow of supplies into Gaza isn’t helped by exaggeration.

In this context the hallucinogenic appeals of the government of caretaker prime minister Ehud Olmert to ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, asking them to realize that Hamas is their common enemy, become more understandable. Mark Regev, Olmert’s spokesman, has accused Hamas of “holding hostage” these Palestinians. Under aerial and tank bombardment from an alien power, with more than one thousand dead (about 40 percent of them women and children) and several thousand wounded, that’s not how most people would view their democratically elected government.

Now Roger, I think it may the moment for a little of what you Americans call “tough love”. One can share your doubts about whether it’s realistic to expect Gazans to turn on Hamas but you are shooting your credibility to pieces when you start talking nonsense about Hamas being the democratically elected government of Gaza. Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. Those elections returned members for the West Bank and Gaza. They didn’t give Hamas a mandate to seize power for itself in Gaza, which is what it did in June 2007.

Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, who despises Olmert, has meanwhile talked about changing “the equation” in Gaza. The only changed equation I see over time is more entrenched hatred for Israel in Gaza: those myriad dead and wounded have relatives, some of whom may one day strap on suicide belts.

I’m afraid, Roger, that you have worked yourself into such a froth that you aren’t thinking very lucidly. The hatred of Israel in Gaza may be indeed be a bit worse now than it was before. Who really knows? But it wasn’t exactly an unknown phenomenon beforehand, was it? Rather a lot of Gazans voted for Hamas in the 2006 elections after all. Those elections took place in the aftermath of Israel’s removal of its settlements, remember? So, Roger, when the fever abates, you might be able to consider the possibility that hatred of Israel in Gaza and elsewhere is motivated by its existence, at least as much as by its actions.

And one more point here. How come the “killing them only makes them more supportive of exteremists” logic is never applied to Israelis after terrorist attacks? In such circumstances Israelis are usually admonished to learn the lesson that they’d better make some concessions fast if they don’t want to keep on getting killed. Easy now, Roger easy!! I’m here to help.

It’s been wrong since James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president, saw his attempts to get economic activity going in Gaza in 2005 thwarted by border closure and “everything getting wasted.” After a year in that job, marginalized, Wolfensohn slipped away. He told me that “the view on the American and Israeli side was that you could not trust the Palestinians, and the result was not to build more economic activity, but to build more barriers. And I personally did not think that was the way forward.”

You’re on to something here, Roger. Israel pulled out of Gaza in about the least beneficial way it could have both from its own point of view and that of Gazan Palestinians. A deal should been made with the PA, more should have been done to encourage economic development and make the lives of civilians better and something else too; a much harder line should have been taken on the question of the rockets much sooner. There was never going to be any hope for human development in Gaza as long as the rocket attacks on Israel were going to be allowed to become business as usual.

Israel has the right to hit back at Hamas when attacked-but not to blow Gaza to pieces, or deprive people of food, water, and medicine. In at least one appalling incident at Zeitoun, on the east of Gaza City, where children were found next to their mothers’ days-old corpses, the International Red Cross has accused Israel of an “unacceptable” failure “to meet its obligation under international law to care for and evacuate the wounded.” Israel denies targeting civilians, accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields, and says it works in “close cooperation” with international aid organizations. But at some point-and I would say a couple of hundred dead children in Gaza are already well past that point-such denials become pointless: the facts speak for themselves.

Well now, Roger, I am starting to really worry about you. You seem to think that wars can be fought in built up areas without innocent people getting killed, indeed you seem to have bought into the fashionable nonsense about Israel “targeting civilians”. You also don’t seem to think that anyone apart from Israel bears any responsibility for the sufferings of Palestinians in Gaza. This Roger, isn’t analysis or political thought; it’s the self-righteous bleat reflex of international dinner party opinion.

There is another right that Israel does not have: to delude its people into thinking that peace is achievable without coming to terms with the deeply entrenched Middle Eastern realities that are Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations still viewed in the US government and Congress almost exclusively through the prism of terror, but whose grassroots political movements present a far more complex, variegated picture.

Roger, Roger, Roger… Hamas and Hezbollah are indeed grassroots political movements involved in a wide range of activities other than plotting the slaughter of Jews, that’s one of the reasons that they and their stated intentions have to treated seriously. And, Roger, a basic part of coming to terms with enemies of such caliber is making sure that they don’t acquire the means to destroy you while you are sitting around twiddling your thumbs and worrying about your noble and troubled consciences.