And most people will have thought it unfair that Mrs Blair should be descended upon like a ton of bricks for expressing a personal opinion.

Yes, she is the Prime Minister’s wife and cannot forget it. But Denis Thatcher was a Prime Minister’s husband and sometimes did forget it — yet I do not recall that his occasional inflammatory remarks about people and politics ever hit the front pages. They were never a big story, though his opinions were a better guide to the true opinions of his spouse than Cherie Blair’s are likely to be.

Her comments were important and interesting, and would have been important and interesting whoever she was. So was the response. The minority who were angry were very angry. I heard the same anger last week when, on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, it was put to the columnist Melanie Phillips that suicide bombing might be placed in a different moral category from the terrorism in which the perpetrator is not willing to sacrifice his own life.

I suspect the fury with which this is denied arises from an unconscious recognition by those who deny it that they are spitting into the wind. All through human history and myth, the willingness to lay down your life for a cause has been recognised, I think instinctively, as somehow ennobling, regardless of whether the cause is good, bad, or (as in the case of murdering Israelis) wicked.

I suppose Samson was the original suicide bomber. It is worth looking briefly at Samson’s career, for here is a terrorist who is also a hero and an archetype.

Samson had a grudge against the Philistines who had wronged him. So he caught three hundred foxes, attaching firebrands to their tails, and used them as animal torches to devastate the cornfields, vineyards and olive groves of the Philistines.

The Philistines responded by burning Samson’s wife and her father.

“And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease.” He then smote them hip from hip, and caused a great slaughter.

The Philistines tricked and captured Samson; but he burst the bonds with which they tied him, and with the jawbone of an ass slew a thousand Philistines, “heaps upon heaps”. The Philistines swore revenge.

... and this is all getting a very familiar ring.

They got their revenge. Through the wiles of Delilah they discovered Samson’s secret: his hair. His hair shorn, he was powerless. The Philistines put out his eyes and sent him to Gaza, where he was imprisoned.

Taken from his prison to be mocked by a crowd of Philistines, Samson gripped the two central supporting pillars of the house where they had gathered. “And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines, and he bowed himself with all his might and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were therein.

“So the dead which he slew at his death were more than he slew in his life.”

Some few of those who read this story may believe it is the literal truth. Those who do should note that the Lord was pleased with Samson, and in the Book of Judges the story is told as a simple tale of strength, nobility and self-sacrifice. Samson was a Hebrew terrorist, and, even in death, Samson won.

But that great majority of us who do not believe the story should be the more discomfited by it; for if it is not true then it is a myth and parable, and the point about myths and parables is that they speak to the moral psyche of the reader. The story of Samson tells us something we may already know about ourselves: that revenge is human nature, that self-sacrifice is ennobling, and that the greatest self-sacrifice of all is to embrace death. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Greater love hath no man ...

Into the valley of Death/ Rode the six hundred ... O the wild charge they made/ When can their glory fade?

... I need not elaborate. It could even be argued that the Christian religion itself places at its centre an act — the Crucifixion — which can be interpreted as the embrace of death. If Jesus had tried to escape but had been caught and killed, His crucifixion would lose much of the moral potency it has for Christians.

There is hardly a page of any reputable dictionary of quotations which does not provide further evidence of how deep in our moral reasoning lies the idea of ennoblement through the embrace of death. It would not surprise me if Israelis understood this more keenly than most.

That is why this particular action by Palestinian zealots so enrages them, for it communicates with them in their own moral language. They shudder. When, during the Vietnam War, Buddhists set themselves ablaze in protest against the United States, did we not likewise shudder?

To this argument comes — and came, for instance, on The Moral Maze; came as Mrs Blair’s critics blasted her for “not mentioning” the Israeli dead — the response that any nobility or pathos claimed for a suicide bomber is eclipsed by the injury he does to innocent souls.

But, though deeply felt, such a response moves the argument deftly away from self-sacrifice and on to sacrifice: can it ever be other than wicked in a violent conflict intentionally to sacrifice the lives of non-combatants? This is a different question; and if you will bear with me I should like to pursue it; to show how little we disagree about the answers; and to whittle away the “moral” arguments which conceal, at their core, a practical one.

For to the question whether the uninvolved should be targeted, most of us offer a more or less cautious No.

So it is this stable of words and phrases — “the innocent”, “non-combatants”, “civilians”, “the uninvolved” — which emerge, I believe, as the only grounds of real dispute between even the most extreme on the two sides of this debate. To recapitulate:

Both sides agree that self-sacrifice can be, on the face of it, noble.

Both sides agree that killing other people may sometimes be justified in a violent conflict.

So both sides must agree that encompassing your own death in the killing of other people may sometimes be justified, even noble. If you or I could have brought down the temple in which the Third Reich sat, killing ourselves too, that might (I presume we agree) have been a noble act.

Now we can narrow yet further the disputed ground. The insistence with which Palestinian extremists argue that Israeli civilians are not in the truest sense non-combatants suggests to me that even these Islamist militants would feel morally uncomfortable with the idea of killing people who were not complicit in an enemy’s cause. So do the Israelis: their spokesmen lay great and repeated stress on the wickedness of the murder of civilians, but I have never heard an Israeli spokesmen complain in moral terms about attacks by Arab militia on Israeli soldiers.

Are Israeli civilians, then, by their very presence, aggressors? The argument reduces to this question.

And now we can narrow the dispute one final notch. I do not think that in his heart an Israeli would deny that, if your enemy has taken land that is rightfully yours and occupied it, then not just your enemy’s army but his wife and son and daughter and servants and all who, under his protection, come to live and make their living on the stolen land, are aggressors. By their presence they aid and abet the occupation. If the Palestinian Authority were to enter and occupy parts of Israel proper, for instance, and bus in Arab farmers and merchants and builders to live there, would an Israeli in a refugee camp in Cyprus not see these as legitimate targets?

There is therefore only one question left to resolve: who are the owners of the disputed territory? This is not really a moral question at all.

In history ancient and modern, some great disputes do wheel around real moral differences between the participants. This is not one of them. It is a very Semitic war in which the principal values of all three Semitic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, are widely shared. The dispute is about the ownership of land, not about what behaviour is justified in protecting that ownership. On that we agree. The moral maze is a mirage. The turf war is real. It will be decided by force.

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