Throw an old dog a bone and sure enough, he’ll go chasing after it. So it is with “Palestine’s” request to join the International Criminal Court. An obvious attempt by Mahmoud Abbas to try Israel for war crimes in Gaza this year, we are told.

Or maybe a “two-edged sword” – yawns are permitted for such clichés – which could also put Hamas “in the dock”. Israel was outraged. The US was “strongly opposed” to such a dastardly request by the elderly potentate who thinks he rules a state which doesn’t even exist.

But hold on a moment. That isn’t the story, is it? Surely the real narrative is totally different. The BBC didn’t get this. Nor CNN. Nor even Al Jazeera. But surely the most significant event of all is that the descendants of the PLO – excoriated only a quarter of a century ago as the most dangerous “terrorist” organisation in the world, its mendacious leader Yasser Arafat branded “our Bin Laden” by Israel’s mendacious leader Ariel Sharon – actually wants TO ABIDE BY INTERNATIONAL LAW!

Heavens preserve us from such a thought, but these chappies – after all their past calls for Israel’s extinction, after all the suicide bombings and intifadas – are asking to join one of the most prestigious judicial bodies on earth. For years, the Palestinians have demanded justice. They went to the international court in The Hague to have Israel’s apartheid wall dismantled – they even won, and Israel didn’t give a hoot. Any sane Palestinian, you might think, would long ago have turned his or her back on such peaceful initiatives.

In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Show all 18 1 /18 In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict A Palestinian woman uses a piece of reebar she found amid the rubble, for support as she walks past destroyed homes in a street in Beit Hanun, northern Gaza Getty Images In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Palestinian men wait for their names to be called to receive a ration of food aid at a UN compound in Gaza City Getty Images In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Posters calling people to boycott Israeli products Getty Images In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Residents of a neighborhood in Gaza City gather to put out a fire at a soap factory moments after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict A Palestinian, who was injured in clashes in the Gaza strip, is carried on a stretcher to an ambulance after the arrival of a group of injured Palestinians at Ankara's Esenboga airport In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict A Palestinian, who was injured in clashes in the Gaza strip, is carried on a stretcher to an ambulance after the arrival of a group of injured Palestinians at Ankara's Esenboga airport In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Firefighters try to extinguish a fire that witnesses say was caused by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. Israel has accepted a new Gaza ceasefire proposed by Egyptian mediators and will send negotiators to Cairo if the truce holds, Israeli officials said In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Smoke from fires caused by Israeli strikes rises over Gaza City In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict People watch as a fire burns in a building that witnesses say was hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Palestinian fire fighters extinguish a blaze at a soap factory moments after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Palestinian firefighters try to put out the fire at a cleaning materials factory after it was hit by Israeli airstrike in Al-Meena neghbourhood in the west of Gaza City In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Palestinians react as they put out a fire in an apartment which witnesses said was hit by an Israeli air strike in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict A relative kisses the body of Palestinian Nader Driss, whom medics said died of a gunshot wound by Israeli troops during clashes at a protest against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, during his funeral in the West Bank City of Hebron In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Relatives of Palestinian woman Amani Baraka, whom medics said was killed in an Israeli air strike, mourn during her funeral in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict A Palestinian boy, whom medics said was wounded by Israeli shelling, is visited by members of a local aid society wearing costumes at a hospital in Gaza City In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict Jamal Doghmosh, a 48-year-old Palestinian mechanic who was injured in an Israeli air strike, recuperates at Shifa hospital in Gaza City. When Doghmosh woke up in hospital after the attack, he could not hear properly and found that three fingers from his right hand were also gone. He is one of thousands of Palestinians who have been left physically disabled by the conflict with Israel in the Gaza Strip In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict An injured Palestinian man from the Al-Elaa family sits inside his house after it was hit by an Israeli military strike in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the northern Gaza Strip In pictures: Israel-Gaza conflict - summer 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict A view of the living room of the Okasha family house destroyed by an Israeli strike, in Jebaliya refugee camp, Gaza Strip. Two female members of the family were critically wounded in the strike

Yet still these wretched Palestinians persist, after this most humiliating of insults, in resorting to international law to resolve their conflict with Israel. Here they go again, dutifully seeking membership of the International Criminal Court. Will these Arabs never learn?

And of course, the Americans are threatening to punish such effrontery. Stop those millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians. Stand by Israel’s refusal to accept any such approach to the International Criminal Court by “Palestine”. The EU – especially Britain and France – have gone along with this tosh. Israel has already decided to stop more than £80m in tax owed to the Palestinian authority.

The US State Department’s spokesman told us that his government is “deeply troubled” by the Palestinian application. It is “entirely counterproductive”, he informed the world. It does “nothing to further the aspirations of the Palestinian people for a sovereign state” – though one might have thought that membership of so august a judicial body would have done a lot to persuade the world that Palestinians were ready to shoulder all the burdens of statehood.

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After all, the Palestinians would indeed have to abide by international law and – if the law applied retrospectively – they would have to carry the burden of opprobrium themselves for both Hamas crimes and past PLO murders. The United States, of course – and this fact oddly did not feature in the flurry of news reports on “Palestine’s” request to join – has itself refused to join the International Criminal Court. And with good reason; because, like the Israelis – although this is not quite how the whole fandango was explained to us – Washington is also worried that its soldiers and government officials will be arraigned for war crimes. Think waterboarding, Abu Ghraib, the report on CIA torture…

No wonder Jeffrey Rathke, the windbag who speaks for the State Department, says that the Palestinian request “badly damages the atmosphere” with Israel, “undermines trust” and “creates doubts about their (Palestinian) commitment to a negotiated peace”. And remember, Abbas only made his request after America had voted against – it has previously used its veto more than 40 times on Israel’s behalf to reject Palestine’s self-determination since 1975 – a UN Security Council resolution to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land by 2017.

But of course, what this whole kerfuffle is really about is quite simple. The world is tired of witnessing the suffering of Palestinians. Those with an ounce of human sympathy are sickened at being slandered as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist (whatever that is) every time they express their outrage at Israel’s cruelty towards the Palestinians.

Killing more than 2,000 Palestinians last summer, hundreds of them children, was a mass slaughter. We’ve watched this grotesquerie so many times now – in Gaza, for the most part – that even our statistics have become spattered with blood.

Who now recalls the fatalities of the 2008-9 Gaza war? One thousand four hundred and seventeen Palestinians dead, 313 of them children, more than 5,500 wounded. That was the conflict upon which President-elect Obama had no comment to make.

And who knows what other gory Pandora’s box ICC membership would open? That bomber pilot who in 2002 killed 15 civilians, 11 of them children, in a Gaza apartment block to assassinate a Hamas official, for example? Wouldn’t that constitute a war crime? Don’t these outrages “damage the atmosphere” and “undermine trust”. Were these bloodbaths not “entirely counterproductive”? And the Jewish colonisation of the occupied West Bank?

Sure, bang up those behind Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide attacks for war crimes. Get the Palestinian Authority thugs who torture and murder their own prisoners. But that’s not what Israel and the US are worried about. They are concerned that, after months of arguing and rowing and delving through thousands of documents, jurists may decide that Israel – horror of horror – may have to answer for itself before international justice, something which no routine US veto could prevent.

Now just imagine if Israel and America wanted the Palestinians to sign the Rome document. Conjure the thought – for a split-second only – that Israel and America insisted that the Palestinians must abide by an international treaty and become members of the International Criminal Court to qualify for statehood. Abbas’s refusal to do so would be further proof of his “terrorist” intentions. Yet when Abbas does sign the Rome document, when the Palestinians want to abide by an international treaty, they must be punished – surely a “first” in modern history.

I can only think of two phrases that fit the bill for this scandal of the West’s politicians. Confound their politics. Frustrate their knavish tricks.

The impasse in the Middle East in a nutshell