Where there's no hope, must there be no life?

As a bald statement of consequences, free of all history and context, it is so unexceptionable and self-proving as to be without meaning. "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress." Step forward whoever believes that as long as young people have got no hope but to blow themselves up, we are making excellent progress.

Myself, I'd go further than Cherie Blair. Why stop at young people? Surely as long as any people – the middle-aged, the elderly, the geriatric – have got no hope but to blow themselves up, we are not making progress. Unless you would argue that in the case of the geriatric we are making progress, since their blowing themselves up in large numbers would be some sort of solution to the problem of an ageing population. That is as long as they are only blowing themselves up, and not indiscriminately blowing up other people along with them. It begs a question, you see, this phrase "blowing themselves up". Indeed, it doesn't only beg a question, it buries it.

Try the sentence again, then, paying more attention to the specifics. "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow up as many other people as they can, you are never going to make progress." Put like that, progress become a rather pale word for what we are not making.

Now share the emotional adjective "young" between the people who are doing the blowing and those who are being blown. If it is tragic for one young person to be without hope, surely it is still more tragic for another young person to be without life, especially as the decision to be without life is not one he has reached in the extremity of his own hopelessness, but is thrust upon him.

The English language is subtle enough to make all the necessary distinctions. A suicide kills himself. A murderer kills other people. A murderer who chooses to kill himself in the process is no less a murderer. Even-handedness of sympathy is not the issue here. We do not need to be told later, by way of redress, that Cherie Blair is a staunch supporter of the State of Israel. You fix the problem in the text itself – the text being an indicator of the mind, and the mind an indicator of the sympathies – by not omitting to mention that it was first and foremost murder to which the latest Palestinian depressive was driven.

Terrible to be so driven, terrible indeed, but let us properly name the deed he was driven to.

Which brings us to the assumption – almost an idée fixe now, in some quarters – that between hopelessness and murder there is no moral or behavioural transition worth talking about. "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up" etc etc. No hope but to – how trippingly off the tongue that comes. How trippingly off the tongue it has been coming since 11 September, when the world woke to many surprises, not the least of them being a whole new system of measuring longevity of suffering and patience. People were fed up. People had had enough. What do you expect? Of course they flew planes into the World Trade Centre, what else were they meant to do? Not nice, of course not nice, but... The new "but", hacking away at our every compunction. No hope but to.

What collusion in grievance, and what an elision of responsibility and culpability the idea of "no hope but to" masks! Once upon a time we thought it unacceptable to deduce from our hopelessness the right to kill ourselves. (Had not God fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter?) Now it makes perfect sense to be hopeless and go kill someone else. How did we manage before? People have been hopeless for centuries without stuffing their pockets with explosives. Pushed from pillar to post, crushed, enslaved, demeaned. For how many millions of people over how many thousands of years has hopelessness been the fixed, unquestionable condition of life. There are even those, though I am not one, who would argue that it has been good for us to know such oppression, that religion and philosophy have grown out of it, that we are the better for our sorrows. Give mankind everything to hope for and it hopes to be on Big Brother. Well, Big Brother is a risk worth running, I say. Let everyone have hope, however they choose to squander it. But it is fanaticism of sympathy to grant the power of life and death to those who are dissatisfied, as though unhappiness were a sort of absolution that wiped out every other human obligation.

As for just how lacking in hope, in this instance, the actual bomber was, we have his own words to go on. Tricky, I know, to determine truth from bravado here. Of the mysteries of despair and elation, none of us can speak with certainty. A man who is down one day may well be up the next, especially if he has slaughter on his mind... But Mohammed al-Ghoul's murder-note does not evince any of that lassitude of vocabulary or defeatedness of cadence we normally associate with having nothing much to hope for. "How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy," he writes. "How beautiful it is to kill and be killed..."

The politics of active hate, not inexpectancy, speak here. And not to know the difference is to be a fool.

The best one can say for Cherie Blair is that her folly, maybe like the bomber's, is not to have thought for herself. She opens her mouth and out pops one of the unthinking commonplaces of her time and milieu. To wit: it must follow, where people are unhappy, that they resort to murder. That there will be countries where this is taken to be an endorsement of murder, I do not doubt. Because semantically – "no hope but" – that's exactly what it is.

Howard Jacobson's new novel, 'Who's Sorry Now?', is published by Jonathan Cape