Imagine yourself to be a visitor from another planet - fluent in English, curious to find out about the Middle East for the first time, and dependent on the British media for news.
After scouring the net, TV and the papers for a bit, you'd get the impression that the only significant deaths in the region during the last few days have taken place aboard a boat.
You'd also get the impression that these deaths were connected to hostility between somewhere called Israel and somewhere called Gaza. It wouldn't be unreasonable to presume that these are the two most important places in the Middle East.
You'd learn that something called the United Nations, and most governments, are critical of the something called Israel, in this instance. You might glean, if you scouted the net a bit, that what happened on the boat is ferociously contested.
You'd probably also gather from your enquiries that the something called Gaza has something to do with something called Hamas and something else called the Palestinians - and get the general impression that if the Israelis and Palestinians could sort our their differences, all in the region would be well.
You'd have got the same impression if you'd landed from your planet during the Israel-Hamas conflict the winter before last. And much the same, too, during the Israel-Hezbollah clash during 2006 (even though that didn't involve Palestinians).
It's an all-pervasive impression - and completely, utterly, totally wrong: a humiliating, shaming commentary on our media's collective complacency, and inattention to Britain's national interest.
Before I argue what that interest is, let me declare mine. I'm what I think could reasonably be described as an extreme moderate on Israel/Palestine. I want to see a secure Israel alongside a viable state of Palestine.
I believe that two driving causes of the conflict are the refusal of the Palestinians, over time, clearly to recognise Israel, and the refusal of the Israelis, over time, to stop the settlements. I now step back, and wait to be denounced, variously, as an instrument of the World Zionist Conspiracy or Islamist Terror International.
As a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism with an interest in Islam, representing for ten years the largest number of Muslim constituents of any Conservative MP, I think it's fair to say that I had an interesting time in my former seat - High Wycombe.
For better or worse, I supported Israel's action in the Lebanon and opposed it in Gaza. I explained my position on Israel/Palestine in meetings with my Muslim constituents (and others), and didn't make the speeches and take the actions which they'd have liked.
These discussions could fairly be described as "full and frank". Talking of my relationship with my Muslim constituents, I want to put it on record that the amount of personal anti-semitism which I encountered in ten years in Wycombe was, as it were, statistically insignificant.
My background was well-known. It didn't stop me polling somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent of the Muslim vote - on a rough but informed assessment - in 2001 and 2005. This total was probably as high as that of any other Conservative candidate in the country.
Goodness knows what my Muslim constituents thought of my views. I explained many times what I thought of theirs: namely, that while I understood their identification with the Palestinians, and supported a Palestinian state, the Israel/Palestine conflict is, frankly, a sideshow - from the point of view of the British national interest (which I hoped they were bearing in mind).
Which takes me where I want to go. Suppose Israel vanished tomorrow - was "wiped off the map", to use a fair translation of the words of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's President. Would the problems of the Middle East be healed?
Answer: no. Because the driving cause of the Middle East's problems isn't the existence of Israel. Rather, it's the region's collective failure to build stable, just, literate and prosperous societies.
Consider just one fact: "The Arab world translates about 350 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The accumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Maa'moun's time is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year."
That quote's from a United Nations Development Programme report published in 2002. It was written by Arab scholars and policy-makers. As Chris Patten noted in a lecture two years later, it caused a sensation: over a million copies were downloaded from the net.
"Why," Patten asked, "had wealth per head in this region fallen from a fifth of the OECD level to a seventh? Why were productivity, investment efficiency and foreign direct investment so low? How could the combined GDP of all Arab countries be lower than that of a single European country, Spain?"
Different people will risk different answers - ones that sometimes say as much about themselves as about the questions. For myself, I suspect the answers are complex, but prove nothing about the capabilities of Arabs, who built a civilisation which for centuries matched or outstripped Europe's, or the capacities of Islam, a religion for which I've high regard. (See here.)
But whatever the answers may be, wouldn't the "Arab world" and the "Muslim world" do well to rage a bit less against Israel, and think a bit more about how to be better governed, better educated, more prosperous - and more effectively to utilise the talents of half its population: namely, women?
And wouldn't the British media do well to cover Israel/Palestine a bit less, and the rest of the region a bit more - including the great struggle into which Israel/Palestine is being absorbed, namely, that between Sunni and Shi'ite Islam?
Conflict between Sunni and Shi'ite is historically rare - far more so that between, say, Catholic and Protestant. But it's happening. One one side of the lines are Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel (yes: you read that correctly), and possibly Fatah, or at least parts of it. On the other are Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, or at least much of it.
Other Arab and Muslim countries either line up broadly on one side or the other or, like Turkey, are "in play". (Turkey, once firmly in the former camp, is drifting towards the latter.)
The British national interest lies fairly and squarely in reading this conflict correctly and reacting to it shrewdly. And it should be admitted at once that the issues at stake are less straightforward that they seem at first sight.
Shi'ite Iran, for example, hasn't to date been a major exporter of terror to Britain or Europe. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is the crucible of Wahabism - the extremist, fanatical, neo-Kharijite ideology which drives Al Qaeda.
At home, Wahabiism - or at least variants of it - is clearly our main security challenge. This is why Pauline Neville-Jones, now Security Minister, indicated in her "Uniting the Country" report for the Party that foreign funding of British religious institutions should be stopped.
Abroad, Shi'ite Iran's race for the bomb threatens to spark a nuclear arms race. If Iran gets it, the Saudis will want it. If the Saudis get it, others will want it - and get it. And we can't assume that the rules of deterrence which held during the Cold War will hold among the states so accurately depicted in that 2002 UN Report.
The British national interest in the Middle East lies primarily in stopping this arms race - since a nuclear exchange in the region would probably blow the world's economy up with it. Compared to the Sunni-Shi'ite struggle, Israel-Palestine is a sideshow. And a few deaths aboard a boat a sideshow of a sideshow.
I hope that I'm as sorry about them as any of the journalists who, for reasons best known to themselves, believe that they deserve more coverage than other killings in the region - and that, presumably, they're more vital to our national interest than the spectre of nuclear catastrophe.
Paul Goodman
