Howard Jacobson: The Palestinians might be winning the propaganda war, but at what cost?

Here's a question. Who said, about whom, "It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Xs, but remains hard hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them"?

Answer: Hitler. Which makes the poor tormented Xs, of course, the Jews. He liked a joke, Hitler. He saw the funny side of things. In this instance what he was seeing the funny side of was the Evian conference called by Roosevelt in 1938 to address the issue of resettling refugees from Europe, the majority of them Jews. By any standards the conference failed. America insisted its quotas were already liberal enough. Britain said it was not "a country of immigration". And the German papers exulted, "Jews for sale – Who wants them? No One." Only Hitler managed an observation that could by any stretch of the imagination be called moral. But then it's easy to take a high satiric tone about the world's empty gestures of compassion.

Were I a Palestinian living in Gaza right now, and wondering if I might live to see another day, I would be just as scornful. So many friends, so little help.

Of the countless tragedies which have befallen humanity since that conference in Evian, the confining of Palestinians to hellhole refugee camps ranks high. Israel should without doubt have done better. Shown more imagination and magnanimity as victors in no matter how many wars it was made to fight, been more courageous, attended less to its own fanatic religious minorities. Zionism was intended to disburden Jews of religiosity, not find another forum for it. But it was up to the Arab world to do better still. It closed its doors as firmly as America and Britain did in 1938. Defeat and dispossession, whatever the circumstances, leave men bitter. But freedom to move and find a world elsewhere can alleviate some of the misery. Better to be an exile than a prisoner. And there should have been a whole brave new world for Palestinians to move freely in and, yes, if that was what they wanted, imagine their return, just as Jews had imagined theirs for centuries. But the closed borders with Israel were closed borders with Arab states as well.

As propaganda, it has worked splendidly. The festering sore of Gaza and the West Bank has disfigured Israel's reputation. Who, outside of America, has a good word to say for Israel now? In this country infants in their prams lisp anti-Zionist slogans. But what good has this propaganda done the Palestinians? What single advantage has accrued to them as a consequence of those millions and millions of gallons of oozed sympathy?

The lesson should be that it never helps to misunderstand or simplify a complex situation. Don Quixote teaches the harm that misapplied kindness always does. The well-meaning knight blunders into the middle of events the historical whys and wherefores of which he grasps nothing and then rides away on Rocinante leaving everything more problematic than it was before. Don Quixote is a comedy bordering on a tragedy. Those who demonstrate outside the Israeli embassy, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, or the Hunnic empire at its most savage and rapacious – the quick to be disgusted or enraged, the ill-taught and the ill-teaching, who do not know where else to wear their consciences but on their sleeves – are similarly comic bordering on tragic. People are ridiculous when they perform actions automatically, say what you know they are going to say, and believe in the moral value of their own tears. Self-righteousness, as Dickens and Ben Jonson knew, is savagely preposterous. The tragedy lies in the waste of human energy, and in its failure to produce anything but the opposite of what it intends.

If the ultimate aim of those who would sooner express contempt for Israel than breathe is the cessation of hostilities, or even the cessation of Israel, they have little to show for their efforts. Israel is grown hard by our incomprehension of its rights and fears, and Hamas and Hizbollah are grown illusioned by our sympathy for theirs.

Tragic to behold, and yet a sense of the tragic is precisely what we lack. Oh, we do lamentation; it would appear to be in weeping and wailing – half the time over matters of no more importance than whether we are going out of a dance competition – that the 21st century has found itself. Ours is a society forever on the brink of tears. But we have no imagination of catastrophe as ovewhelmingly beyond and above us, of suffering and sorrow as inevitable or foreordained, determined by the discordant music of the planets, or in the giving and withholding of the gods. We do not, or we will not grasp that there exist differences which are eternal and intractable, needs that will never be satisfied or reconciled. Someone is always to blame in our understanding of human affairs, some politician, some social group, some country. David Hare is our dramatic poet of choice, whereas we need Aeschylus or the author of the Book of Job.

Once we walked through the valley of the shadow of the death, now we go on marches and demos and write letters to the editor. We cannot grieve for our fellow men without pointing a finger. Politics has overtaken metaphysics, and more often than not it is the politics of the simpleton.

It is easy to understand how we got to this. Liberalism promised an end to all our ills, but television nightly shows the same cruel, unequal world. We cannot bear the slaughter. Someone must pay. But is it beyond us to feel and think at the same time? I play the blame game myself. Try telling people living in range of the rockets Hamas is still firing into Israeli towns and cities – I say to those who cry foul or "disproportion" – that they have not died in sufficient numbers yet to equalise the world's compassion. Try telling them to wait until their casualties make better television. But I know the rocket firers believe they too have a score to settle, so back and back we go into the retaliation logic – "we will tear the Zionist enemy into pieces of flesh" is Hamas's latest stirring promise to its people – of a conflict too obdurate and ancient to disentangle.

Israel could not have done other than it is doing, but that makes its action neither right nor wise. Rightness and wisdom are sometimes nowhere to be found. Israel has walked into another PR trap because there is nowhere else to go. But what have the Palestinians walked into? Tragedy, nothing less.

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