World View: The soldiers finally left Beit Hanoun on Monday, but not before they had destroyed much of the small north Gaza town, demolishing homes and factories and ripping up the adjacent citrus plantations, writes Enda O'Doherty.
Though the trees have now been replanted, it will be 10 years before they are productive again.
When the Israelis defeated their neighbours in two wars in 1967 and 1973, the Jewish state attracted the greater part of Western sympathy.
Now, after a generation of annexation, occupation, bloody repression of armed and unarmed resistance and pauperisation of the Palestinian people, Israel's only reliable friend is the United States. The Palestinians have, as ever, the voluble support of their Arab neighbours and the growing sympathy of others in Europe, Russia and elsewhere.
But it is a sympathy which, weighed against the overwhelming military power of Israel and the US, is not bankable and gets them precisely nowhere.
There is now a sizeable constituency in European public opinion which is inclined to see the Middle East conflict in black and white terms: Sharon, Likud, the Israeli army and the West Bank settlers are black - there is little difficulty about that; and if there is a problem about representing Arafat as white then we can simply sidestep Arafat and substitute as protagonist "the martyred Palestinian people".
And if those people, or some of those people, kill Israeli schoolchildren in suicide bombings, well, suicide bombings, we will be told, are the weapon of the powerless and despairing. Black is still black, and if white cannot always be Persil white, well, that is "understandable".
However, such moralistic readings of the conflict - of almost any conflict - are inadequate and unhelpful for at least two reasons. First, they are nearly always partially sighted. For the more one examines the supposedly "white" party - with as much objectivity and breadth of vision as one can muster - the less spotless it will appear.
Second, this kind of political moralism implies a static rather than dynamic position: if one is right, if one has "justice" on one's side, why should one move, irrespective of the baneful effects of that immobilism on the people who are suffering most from the conflict? In the real world there can often be circumstances when moralism, for all its psychological satisfactions, is not moral.
It is increasingly argued against the Israelis that they have consciously manipulated Gentile guilt over the Holocaust in an attempt to insulate themselves from any criticism of the actions they take in defence of their state. Some even suggest there is a moral equivalence between Nazi treatment of the Jews and Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, surely an unsustainable, even obscene, charge. (The parallel with apartheid South Africa posited by the dissident Jewish scholar, Norman Finkelstein, is arguably more apposite.)
It is a prominent part of the common historical understanding of the Holocaust that Europe's Jews went meekly to their slaughter. But not all did so. Some joined the partisan bands which inhabited the forests of Poland, Lithuania and Belarus; others enlisted in the Red Army.
It was from among these tough soldiers that much of the leadership of the new Israeli state's army and intelligence service was formed.
If old Europe, by 1948 virtually empty of Jews, piously intoned "Never again", these were determined and ruthless men who, surrounded by new enemies in the Palestinian lands they had occupied, could be taken to mean it.
Arab responses to the Holocaust are various and often take the form of what barristers call a "rolled-up plea": first, that it did not happen; second, that if it did its extent has been exaggerated; and third, that the Jews brought it on themselves.
Finally, they may add, what had it all to do with us? The answer is not much directly perhaps, though there are interesting connections.
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin drew much heavily caustic comment in relation to the latter's terrorist past and more recent bellicosity. Not mentioned, however, was Sadat's frank admiration, even adulation, of Adolf Hitler, a position he was still maintaining in the 1950s.
The founders of Baathism, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar, studied in Paris in the 1930s, where they imbibed a heady mixture of Leninism, mystical nationalism and proto-fascism. Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, fled from the British during the second World War and was set up in style in Berlin where he met Hitler and other Nazi leaders, broadcast pro-German and anti-Semitic messages to the Arab world and even visited Bosnia to recruit Muslims for the "Hanjar" divisions of the Waffen SS, which were used to kill Jews and Serbs.
The kidnapping, trial and execution by Israel in 1960 of the Holocaust bureaucrat, Adolf Eichmann, was generally treated in the Arab world as an outrage.
Nor is Arab and Islamic anti-semitism all old history. David Aaronovitch's revealing Channel 4 documentary Blaming the Jews, screened last week, clearly demonstrates it is alive and well today in the TV stations and classrooms of Gaza, a foetid stew of ancient Koranic slurs and modern Nazi-racist mythology.
Brian Cowen, speaking in Syria this week, declined a journalist's invitation to agree that Israeli violence was worse than that of the Palestinians. "I do not get involved in a hierarchy of victimhood," he said. "We need to make politics work to end death and destruction."
The political hatreds of the Middle East are a serious and deadly business and not, as the sectarian tribes of Belfast seem to think, some exotic version of Celtic v Rangers.
The region boasts perhaps the greatest concentration in the world of zealots and fanatics and has indeed had more than its share of victims, destruction and death.
The expression of uncritical support - or, as it is more fashionably called, "solidarity" - for one or other of the belligerents is unlikely to encourage them at this critical stage to make politics work and seize the very small chance for peace that now exists.