Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says this is a war between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism, and he is right – though not in the sense he intended. There are many reasons for the West’s seemingly endless tolerance for Israeli violence in the West Bank and Gaza of which the most important is the belief that Israel is basically a European country that ended up in a bad neighbourhood. This sort of thinking is not just the province of rightwing zealots. Writing for The Spectator in 2014, British columnist Hugo Rifkind lamented that Israel’s drift to...