I've just been watching Prime Minister's Questions, something I rarely get the chance to do, but I'm off work not very well in this heat so I happened across it today.

Is Blair always so patronizing towards Campbell? It's a good job Ming's one of those polite well-bred advocates - though I dislike PMQs as a rule, even I would say Ming could be a bit more pugilistic against the arrogance of Tone. Anyway, Ming was of course right to ask about mid-east ceasefires and about why, in particular, the rest of the world is not being terribly forthright in demanding one of Israel.

But Blair's response gives me the hook for something I've been pondering about writing since the latest Israeli attacks on Lebanon began last week. Blair was responding to the notion, implied by Campbell, that Israel's response to Hezbollah's kidnapping and subsequent rocket-bombing of northern Israel is "disproportionate".

Set aside for the moment the question of "which came first" (because although it's clear that this immediate inflammation is ostensibly a reaction to the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers it' not at all clear for example that Hezbollah would have been shelling northern Israel quite so strongly - 1600 rockets according to Blair - if they themselves were not now under attack). The big problem I have with Blair's response was that it appeared to place Hezbollah and the Israeli government on a level of moral equivalency they simply do not share.

What's happened is that a more or less maverick and self-selecting group, which yes, has some influence at the government level of the country (Lebanon) in which they base themselves, but over whom the civil government of that country is hopelessly ill-equipped to exercise control, has taken it upon themselves to commit criminal acts against citizens of the neighbouring country.

Hezbollah is a terrorist organization under any definition of that word. Ehud Olmert heads an elected government. Moreover he heads a government whose forces are amongst the best armed in the world, in quantity and technology, and whose intelligence services have, or at least had, a reputation second to none for the most part. A government that is fairly elected. It can be said to be better representative of the people of Israel for example than Tony Blair's can of Britain's. Much moreso than representing merely their idea of political policy, they stand as representatives of the moral conscience of their citizens.

So, in the red corner, we have a bunch of criminal thugs. They may or may not have a real grievance against Israel over their perception of justice that has put dozens of their colleagues in Israeli prisons, but they go about addressing that using criminal means - kidnapping on some kind of tit-for-tat basis. But they are criminal, immoral, or at best amoral.

In the blue corner, we have one of the most advanced and sophisticated nations on the planet. One would have thought that even if they were so frustrated by the inability of the neighbouring government to exercise control over the criminals harrying their citizens from the other side of the border, and having concluded that diplomatic efforts were a waste of time (if they genuinely tried, which I doubt, given the reaction of clear surprise around the world), and so deciding to do something about it themselves, a surgical strike of some kind against the criminal organization itself would not be beyond the bounds of their capabilities.

But what route do they in fact take? They aim to "set Lebanon back twenty years". They cut the country off from the rest of the world. And far from any technologically surgical attack they lob shells from T-17 tanks and motorized artillery all over the place, destroying civil infrastructure. They kill countless of for all we know totally innocent and Hezbollah-hating ordinary civilian citizens of the Lebanon. Of course the destruction of the infrastructure has the pretense that it is used by those criminals or their supporters on occasion, but that does not mean it's justified to so affect the ordinary lives of ordinary Lebanese, to terrorise them, trapped by blown up bridges, ports, airports and expecting their homes to be shelled any minute.

This has all the morality and justice of hanging any ten men, women and children in in the village square because you believe some insurgent might have operated from there. It is not the action of a moral state. Iain Dale at the weekend mentioned that Olmert was never a military man and had to prove his credentials, but when that assuredly involves killing civilians, turning their world upside down in a foreign country, it is just as evil as any terrorist. It is the politics of the old testament - "Saul has killed his thousands, David his tens of thousands" - immoral.

Yet the rest of the world's reaction is what really gets me. We sit here scribbling in the media and so on about whether the response is justified, proportionate, yet do very little about it. We are too comfortable. We have four million counsellors counselling people affected by reading about the London bombs in their newspaper the next day; we cannot imagine what life is like when everything is suddenly taken away and there's no help on offer. It's bad enough when such a tragedy is inflicted by nature, and we all jump to help with aid appeals and so on, but when it's inflicted by other humans, humans moreover that are the moral agents of their countryfolk, and the world does so little to help, it's sickening.