Stone me! I back Cherie

I had to go and lie down in a darkened room last week, to recover from the unfamiliar experience of sympathising with the Prime Minister's wife. Whatever reservations I have expressed about Cherie Blair in the past, I could scarcely believe the way her unexceptional remark about Palestinian suicide-bombers was manufactured into a full-scale political row. Labour MPs rightly accused her critics of bullying and there was a whiff of misogyny about the whole business, with Mrs Blair cast as a kind of Lady Macbeth, her hands supposedly stained with the blood of young Israelis. Downing Street was sufficiently alarmed to apologise for any offence caused, a tactical error that can only have heartened Mrs Blair's tormentors.

Not that they need much encouragement. The row is largely synthetic, the creation of newsdesks and columnists who sense that the Prime Minister, who once seemed immune from their attacks, is unexpectedly at bay. There is nothing they would like more than to portray the Blairs as a British version of the Clintons, a scenario in which the wives are cast as a sinister influence on their weak, unprincipled men. This is a great deal to hang on a single sentence uttered by Mrs Blair, and the fact that so much was made of it in right-wing papers demonstrates how desperate they are to push that agenda. Equally revealing, however, is the light it casts on the way the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is reported in this country.

Suicide-bombing is a horrible phenomenon. Mrs Blair said nothing to suggest either that she supports it, or that she lacks sympathy for its victims. But no one, especially not someone as prominent as the Prime Minister's wife, is allowed to deviate from a script in which Israeli citizens are being attacked by mindless terrorists who are motivated by religious fanaticism and envy. In this Manichean universe, the Israeli government has nothing to answer for, Ariel Sharon is one of the earth's peacemakers and most Arabs are, if not actually terrorists themselves, active supporters of organisations like Hamas and Hizbollah. This is not merely a perverse fiction but an active obstruction to any kind of lasting settlement, which is why Mrs Blair's suggestion that terrorism has political causes, and that suicide-bombing is a tragedy for the perpetrators as well as the victims, struck a chord with so many thinking people.

I loathe the spectacle of idealistic young Palestinians being persuaded that murdering Israelis of their own age, the kind of people they might in other circumstances encounter in lecture halls and discos, is the only way to further their cause. But I can see how it has come about, for romanticising death is the hideous destination of too many lost causes. In that sense, characterising suicide-bombings as a manifestation of religious fervour is a mistake; the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the group behind some of the recent atrocities in Israel, is secular, as are the hunger strikers who are currently dying in a campaign to publicise their protest against prison conditions in Turkey.

The death instinct is an extremely powerful force in the human psyche and the great world religions are only as guilty of failing to divert it as some extreme Marxist-Leninist parties. A significant death is the aim that remains when healthier human ambitions – political, economic, cultural or personal – are thwarted. People who unthinkingly support the Israeli government, which is to say those headline-writers and commentators in this country who piled into Mrs Blair last week, have very good reasons for not acknowledging this; if they did, they would also have to recognise that Sharon's policies, by denying any hope to the Palestinians, might have been designed expressly to ensure that the suicide-bombings continue.

Building walls, occupying more Palestinian territory, refusing to dismantle illegal settlements, dismissing UN resolutions: the Israeli government can do all these things, but the price it pays is a state of ghastly, unavoidable, asymmetrical war. I realise that expressing such views is enough to get myself branded, like Mrs Blair, as an apologist for terrorism, but I have the luxury of being able to treat such accusations with the contempt they deserve. The Prime Minister's wife is in a more vulnerable position, but the drubbing she received last week says more about the misogyny, bias and spite of a swathe of the British media than it does about her.