John Roughan: No end to war until the land is shared

A young Palestinian who cut my hair on Wednesday muttered several times, "It's not fair". He was not referring directly to the war in Lebanon, though we had been talking about that. He had answered my queries about the attitudes of the different national and religious strains in the Middle Eastern mosaic, then, unbidden, he started on the subject that was clearly bedrock for him.

"They took my father's land," he said. "It's not fair."

His family left Palestine more than a generation ago. He has never been there. He grew up in Kuwait but there is a village near Tel Aviv that he still calls his own though he has not seen it.

"They gave my father's house to a black Israeli immigrant," he said. "It's not fair."

I would exchange all the words written and broadcast about the Arab-Israeli conflict for raw insights like this. In all the reportage from Lebanon, all the analysis of the forces behind Hizbollah, even in Robert Fisk's disgusted daily catalogue of civilian casualties, we seldom get a sense of the real burning reason for the resentment that unites Muslim societies.

We know, of course, that an essentially European Jewish state was imposed on Arab territory not quite 60 years ago, but we do not know what that meant, and continues to mean, on the ground. We have no idea of the brutal active expression of the concept of "promised land".

I had no glimmer of it until I met a Palestinian on a media trip a few years ago. As a member of Fatah, that man was a radical once. Now, with the same secular views, he is a moderate. He could not abide the encouragement of children to be suicide bombers.

That was one subject that made him emotional. The other was the way Israelis were still acquiring land in the occupied territories.

They just come and take your house, he told me. Soldiers arrive and tell Palestinian families to move. Their home is needed for settlers on the promised land. Think about that; that has been the reality on the ground.

If you can put all that aside, Israel is perfectly justified in attacking the towns and Beirut suburbs that harbour Hizbollah. What country would tolerate on its borders a hostile Army well supplied by rival states with missiles that can reach its cities and a well-proven intention to use them?

Israel's massive retaliation to Hizbollah's pinprick seizure of two soldiers is opportune and understandable. And I can't share Helen Clark's particular outrage that UN peacekeepers have been killed in the crossfire. The term UN peacekeepers deserves a Tui billboard.

But you can't ignore the character of Israel in any honest quest to find the root cause of this, the only 20th century mess that survived the millennium. All the rest, from communism on the left to apartheid on the right, were tidied away in the century's last decade.

But the Arab-Israeli dispute remains, and now serves as a touchstone for radical Islamic resentment of the Godless West.

It used to be possible to believe that Arabs are benighted people grossly ill-informed by dictatorial regimes who used Israel to distract their populace from rising up and demanding democracy.

But the occupation of Iraq has put paid to that idea. Every outbreak of democracy George W. Bush has brought to the Middle East has resulted in the election of a party more militantly Islamic and antagonistic to Israel than the dictators they displaced.

Perhaps for correspondents such as Fisk, living there, the root cause of the resentment seems too obvious to labour. He knows we know the creation of Israel was tough for Arabs in Palestine. But once the death camps were discovered at the end of World War II, the case for a Jewish national refuge was undeniable.

Palestinians just had to accept the premise that their land had been divinely promised to people of a different religious descent.

According to a young barber in Auckland, Palestine is his promised land too. Because 2000 years ago Palestinians and Jews were the same people, he believes. It was not until Mohammad founded Islam, he says, that the paths of his ancestors diverged. Some converted, some stayed with Judaism.

That is his story. History is powerful. If Palestinians believe in a shared heritage, why would Israel argue with it?

The answer is that peculiar xenophobia called Zionism, on which, sadly, Israel was founded.

Zionism looks like racism until you note that Israel admits Jews of any race. The barber's family home was given to an African. Zionism is based instead on a single religious heritage steeled by persecution in Europe.

Palestinians who do not share that heritage have fled since a Zionist state was created, and the last thing Israel wants is for them to return.

Watch next time there are some tentative talks of a peace settlement. The issues are always the same and the one that is more important to Israel than any of them, more important even than control of their holy city, Jerusalem, is the Palestinian refugees. Israel says it will never agree to their return.

How different things might be today if Israel had been established on a shared heritage. It would have been possible. Islam, like Christianity, grew from a Judaic root. The Koran contains the same characters and events that feature in the Bible. Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities co-existed quite well for four centuries under the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Watching Israel's troops on TV this week I was struck by the ultimate futility of their fight. No society can survive indefinitely under siege. Israel has been determined for nearly six decades but so have Palestinians. Neither is likely to give way until they can fairly share the place they both hold sacred.