“We are all guilty!” This was the perennial cry of a fictional comic character, the sociologist Dr. Heinz Kiosk, in the long-running Peter Simple column of the London Daily Telegraph written by the great humorist Michael Wharton, who died last month. Well, the Heinz Kiosks have been in overdrive since Tuesday’s dramatic events in Jericho.

The capture there of Ahmed Saadat, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and five other PFLP terrorists will go down in history as one of Israel’s most remarkable military operations, comparable to the Entebbe raid or the abduction of Eichmann.

The jail in Jericho where the terrorists were being held had become a fortress in the 15 minutes that elapsed between the departure of British and American monitors and the arrival of Israeli forces to besiege the compound. In the absence of a Joshua, the walls of Jericho did not come tumbling down. They had to be blasted, not with trumpets, but with tanks. In fact, it took another 12 hours before Saadat and his men, who had been armed by their jailers, surrendered. Under the circumstances, it is astonishing that only one prisoner and one guard were killed – proof that Israel wanted their quarries alive, to stand trial.

To judge from the Heinz Kiosks at the BBC, however, you would think that Israel, the United States, and Britain were entirely to blame for the violence that erupted across the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority on Tuesday. Palestinians burned down offices of the British and US cultural missions, as well as the European Commission, in Gaza City and Ramallah, kidnapped Westerners at random, and threatened further reprisals.

The British network’s leading anchorman, Jeremy Paxman, interviewing the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, in his usual aggressive style, was visibly astonished that a leftist Israeli in the midst of an election campaign would offer warm support to a right-of-center government. Mr. Paxman apparently couldn’t get his head round the idea that Israel had acted within its rights, because the Palestinians had never kept to their side of the agreement, and could not sit idly by while the assassins of their cabinet minister were set free to strike again.

But surely the British and Americans were to blame for withdrawing their monitors from the prison? That, after all, was the view of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, who rushed back from a European trip to deal with the crisis, blaming everyone except himself. He accused the British and Americans of keeping him in the dark and of “colluding” with the Israelis, and insisted that there had been no question of Saadat’s imminent release.

Yet, as quickly emerged, Mr. Abbas (usually known by his nom de guerre Abu Mazen) had been given numerous warnings that conditions at the jail in Jericho would force an Anglo-American pullout, with the wholly predictable consequence that Israeli forces would speedily move in to snatch Saadat.

The BBC decided to believe Mr. Abbas, the man who had overall responsibility for security in the Palestinian territories, rather than their own foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who told the House of Commons that Britain had not colluded with Israel, but had pulled out its monitors because their safety could not be guaranteed under a Hamas regime. He released a March 8 letter received from the British consul-general in Jerusalem, which stated: “The pending handover of governmental power to a political party [Hamas] that has repeatedly called for the release of the Jericho detainees also calls into question the political sustainability of the monitoring mission.”

The former leader of the Conservative Party in the European Parliament, Edward Macmillan-Scott, blamed Britain, the U.S., and Israel on the BBC’s flagship “Today” program yesterday, declaring that it was a scandal that the Palestinian president had been prevented from addressing the European Parliament. Not a word of condemnation from Mr. Macmillan-Scott for the terrorists or rioters, let alone the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority It did not seem to occur to this Tory Eurocrat that Mr. Abbas ought never to have been joining the Brussels gravy train at all, while a crisis was brewing in his own back yard.

But of course it is no surprise that Mr. Abbas was on his way to Brussels: The European Union, whose flag and offices were burned on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank this week, is the biggest paymaster of the Palestinian Authority. It contributes well over $500 million a year. The election of Hamas has brought no cessation of that income stream, much of which ends up in the pockets either of corrupt officials or of terrorist organizations. Yet it is clear from this week’s riots that the Palestinian “street” is as hostile to Europe as it is to the United States. Nor does Mr. Abbas seem very grateful, either.

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Israel is not treated as an ally in the war on terror by the British media, when even the United States is depicted so badly. This week I heard a Foreign Office minister, Kim Howell, on a visit to Iraq denouncing the “swivel-eyed right-wing American intellectuals” who had caused all the trouble in the Middle East. He had in mind George Will, but I am proud to think that most of my American friends would fit that description. Maybe “swivel-eyed” will become a badge of honor for trans-Atlantic neoconservatives, rather as the British Expeditionary Force in France adopted the German Kaiser’s insult and called themselves the “Old Contemptibles.”

Actually, the Israelis do give the British plenty of help in fighting terrorists. Over recent years, for example, they have trained police officers from Scotland Yard in dealing with suicide bombers. The trouble was that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, chose to ignore the Israeli experts, whose policy is never to shoot a suspect unless they have first-hand evidence that he or she is carrying explosives or weapons.

Immediately after the London bombings last July, the London police shot dead a man on the subway whom they had identified as a suspect, but who was not carrying anything suspicious. He turned out to be an innocent Brazilian plumber. Sir Ian’s decision to ignore the Israeli advice caused a huge scandal that may yet cost him his job. Yet, funnily enough, it is the Israelis who are always depicted as trigger-happy. We pay the Palestinians a fortune, and they repay us with violence. But it is always Israel that is guilty. As Orwell might have put it: We are all guilty – but some are more guilty than others.