Once you’ve accepted the logic of either of these stories, each new fact falls neatly into place like a mosaic tile. During the Second Intifada, Israelis saw suicide bombings as proof the Palestinians were more interested in bloodshed than peace; for Palestinians, the attacks showed their increasing desperation under an unyielding occupation. Once the bombings stopped, pro-Palestinians said the newfound quiet showed their side’s readiness to crack down on violence and seek peace; pro-Israelis said it proved the occupation was working.

There are real-world consequences to this willful blindness. One of the more depressing episodes in the modern peace process occurred when Al Jazeera leaked thousand of official records of negotiations, which showed the Palestinians had been prepared to make far-reaching concessions for the sake of peace. But instead of demanding that Israel meet them halfway, anti-Israel journalists whipped up a storm over Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's “betrayal” of his people – forcing him to back away from compromise on sensitive issues like Jerusalem and refugees.

On university campuses and in the media, the conflict’s racial dimension gives the discussion a particularly nasty edge. It’s true that a few loathsome anti-Semites hide their hate under the “pro-Palestinian” banner. But that doesn’t excuse the way Israel’s apologists so readily resort to smearing their opponents as anti-Jewish – a charge that anybody who publicly criticises Israel soon gets used to. Not that the Left is any stranger to such tactics, with anyone who defends the Jewish character of Israel accused of supporting racial supremacism. While one side trumpets that Zionism equals racism, the other insists that anti-Zionism is racism.

None of this means we ought to throw up our hands and simply split the blame equally between the two sides. But some simple principles can help introduce much-needed sanity to the debate. Most fundamentally, we must see that neither side has a monopoly on justice. Israel is fighting a just war of self-defence against Palestinian terror, and an unjust war for the conquest of the occupied territories. And the Palestinians are fighting a just war against the occupation, and an unjust war against Israeli civilians inside the 1967 lines. Both Israelis and Palestinians deserve to live in peace and security in a state of their own – not because they’re angels, but because they’re people who have nowhere else to go.

The great Israeli writer Amos Oz has called the Israel-Palestine conflict “a tragedy in the ancient and most precise sense of the word: a clash between right and right”. He could just as easily have called it a dogfight between wrong and wrong. Either way we must do away with our caricatures of this conflict, and attempt to see the messy reality for what it is. Because in this game of cowboys and Indians, the casualties are real.