Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak made a trip to Israel the other day, meeting Israeli tech entrepreneurs. He told the press in Jerusalem: “If Hamas halted the rockets, Israel would not attack them. Peace.” Israel would like us to believe that.

In the battleground of international public opinion, Israel’s message is very simple: “We’re not fighting the Palestinian people. We’re fighting Hamas. When the rockets stop, the war stops.”

But ‘peace and quiet’ is not the same thing as peace.

In a world of sound bites and oversimplified information, during the latest ‘50-day war’, Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to link his cause with the West using a brazenly false narrative. Recently, he tweeted: “Hamas is ISIS. ISIS is Hamas. They are branches from the same poisonous tree.” If only this narrative were true.

To disagree, you get one of two responses: either you don’t understand the complexity of the situation or you are anti-Semitic.

Hamas is defined by Israel, the US and the EU as a terrorist organisation and we refuse to negotiate with it. But to the Palestinians it is best understood as a resistance movement to occupation and the democratically-elected representatives of Gaza.

ISIS has no legitimacy – elected by no one. Odious to all, they emerged from a power vacuum in a civil war. They are spuriously linked to Hamas through the one-size-fits-all term ‘Islamist’.

Understanding the primacy of Hamas in Gaza requires some understanding of the historical context.

Since 1948, Israeli armies, through seizure of lands in a succession of wars, expropriated the land of Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes into the squalor and poverty of barbwire refugee camps, their houses razed to the ground, their villages destroyed in their hundreds and renamed with Jewish names. More than 3.8 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants were displaced since 1948.

All this was done against international law.

After the 1967 war, the UN Security Council unanimously passed resolution 242 calling on Israel to withdraw from land seized illegally in line with pre-1967 borders, thus returning the West Bank in its entirety.

The Israelis never conformed. Rather, they built huge illegal settlements in the West Bank in such a way as to make a future Palestinian State unviable. Peace negotiations have gone nowhere but the land theft has accelerated. Since 1967, there has been no progress for the Palestinians.

A few days ago, Israel annexed another 1,000 hectares of land in the West Bank near Bethlehem, where it will build a new Jewish city. Five hundred thousand Jews live in 200 illegal settlements and outposts in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in areas putatively considered Palestinian.

The rancour gestating in the Arab world is far more dangerous than a regional dispute

The only thing remotely resembling a Palestinian State is Gaza, a 25-mile by nine-mile strip of land, which has been under blockade for the last seven years.

With only two armed points of entry, it is, in practice, an open-air prison. The most densely populated strip of land on earth, it is home to 1.8 million people, 80 per cent of whom live in utter poverty.

Over the last two months, 2,100 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children; 250,000 people have been made homeless due to the destruction wrought and hospitals, schools, sanitation systems and power stations have been obliterated. The average age in Gaza is just 17.

For nearly 70 years, the Palestinian people have had to stomach the gut-wrenching injustice that Israel illegally occupies their land and has never been held to account by the international community for doing so. Israel would appear to be above the law.

In the latest conflict, 30 Palestinians have died to every Israeli, mostly civilians, women and children. The UN accuses Israel of war crimes and we’re met with a muted silence from our leaders.

The implications affect us all. By making an exception for Israel and allowing it to act with impunity, the message the international community is sending out to the rest of the world is: we will pick and choose who we hold to account and to whom we apply the law.

It undermines the moral authority of the West, particularly the legitimacy of the US in policing and safeguarding its interests in other parts of the world.

To critics of the Western values, this approach amounts to out-and -out rank hypocrisy. How can the international community turn to Russia and ask it to respect the territorial integrity of the Ukraine when it’s not prepared to enforce the law in Palestine?

For most of us, as long as it didn’t affect us, we held our noses and looked the other way but the rancour gestating in the Arab world is far more dangerous than a regional dispute.

The fragile ceasefire in effect will not hold because for the last 50 years the underlying causes of injustice have not been addressed. A rethink in the approach is necessary. When does an ally become a liability?

Israel needs to be confronted with the uncomfortable truth: it cannot break the law with impunity. For Israel to comply, it may mean the withholding of aid and arms, even pressing sanctions. Israel should be held to account and subject to the rule of international law.

Whether anyone has the courage to face it is another matter entirely.