Palestinian Awareness Week is upon us: and being aware of the Palestinian tragedy is not quite the same thing as being sympathetic to Yasser Arafat, the corrupt and dysfunctional fool whose leadership the Palestinians, in addition to all their other woes, must stoically endure.
They have other crosses to bear, of course, and these include their friends: the foremost in Belfast being Feilim Ó Hadhmaill, a convicted IRA terrorist who said he had "no regrets" after being convicted of conspiracy to cause explosions in England 10 years ago.
Why would Palestinians want such a person to be their organiser in Belfast? Are they interested in securing friends from across the community? Or are they more interested in attracting people with a certain exotic background? Because if that is the case, their ordeal is likely to last far, far longer than it should; and it has gone on long enough - longer, indeed, than most people are aware.
We have just passed the 65th anniversary of a little known war crime. In September 1938, a British patrol was ambushed by Arab insurgents on the Iqrit-Al Bassa road, close to the Palestinian border with Lebanon. Four soldiers were killed, one of them a popular young officer named Law, who had just won the Military Cross. In revenge, British soldiers raided the village of Bassa, killing all the men they could find, and raping all the women.
This was a truly dreadful affair, but it was merely an extreme version of a savage policy of reprisal and communal punishments by which the Arab uprising was put down. The overall commander was Maj Gen Bernard Montgomery, whose ruthless tactics of reprisals and murder-gangs (called Night Squads) could in different circumstances have resulted in a war crimes trial.
There might have been a local memory of the atrocity of Bassa, but 10 years later another calamity ensured that there was none: the first Arab-Israeli war erupted, and most Arabs fled their homes. Arab refugees from the Bassa-Acre area moved en masse into the Lebanon, where their descendants live to this day, many of them still in refugee camps. Settlers from Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia - themselves refugees from the greatest crime in world history - moved into the lands the Arabs had left.
You can write the tragedy of Bassa a hundredfold, for it stands as a terrible testimony to the fate of the Arab peoples who were caught and broken by the iron jaws of vast historical forces. A great wrong was done them: but that wrong cannot now or ever be undone, and it is futile to talk as if it can be.
As we all know, an even greater wrong had been done the Jewish people; and that wrong is locked not merely into their brains, but became a building block of the Israeli state. We can deplore the perpetualisation of the Holocaust, if we so wish, but little good it will do us: those with whom the Palestinians must do business with are not amiable Martians with no history, no anger, no fears, but people for whom the death-camps are a badge of identity and who must bear the burden of far too much history, far too much anger, far too much fear.
Of course, much the same can be said of the Palestinians. So how can the world resolve this appalling tragedy, which has taken so many lives and will continue to take more? A first step might be for the Israelis to relax their security measures against the Palestinians. Can the Palestinian representative here, Ali Halimeh, give an undertaking that Hamas or Islamic Jihad will not avail of relaxed security to kill more Jews? Of course - being an honest man, I presume - he can't. He knows that the moment the Israeli boot is removed from the Palestinian neck, more Jews will die: and no Israeli prime minister can survive another wave of suicide murders. Yes, the Israeli Defence Forces could stop targeted killings - nice term for assassinations - which might, just might, be excusable if they killed only terrorists, but are simply inexcusable when they kill innocent people, as on Monday night. But you don't need me to say that: very many Israelis are saying it already.
The truth is that on the Palestinian side there are two clear agendas: the official agenda which seeks settlement, and the fundamentalist one, which seeks the elimination of the state of Israel and the ejection of any surviving Jews into the sea.
And on the Israeli side there are two agendas also: there is the official state policy of dialogue and accord, and there is the other one, which seeks continuing Jewish settlement on the West Bank.
What are we to do when confronted by two extremes which will use conciliation as a means to advance their causes? How can Israel yield an inch in security when the certain price is dead Jews? How can Palestinian moderates engage in meaningful talks while well defended Jewish settlements continue to spread over an already overcrowded West Bank? And most of all, what are we to do when the entire Arab world, at 3.5 million square miles, the size of the US, is almost permanently deranged by a dispute over the state of Israel which, at 8,000 square miles, is 1,000 square miles smaller than Munster? So, it's Palestinian Awareness Week. How much during the week we will we hear of the intolerable complexity of the problem, of the evil culture of Islamic fundamentalism, and of the tortured history that Jews must carry where ever they set their feet? Answer: not much.