Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has endured for 35 years, against the will of the Palestinian inhabitants, who dearly want, and in the eyes of the world have long deserved a state of their own.

Israel has violated countless UN resolutions and amassed weapons of mass destruction, say those who oppose the war.

But whereas Israel is supported economically and diplomatically by the US — the prime mover against Iraq. Why then is Iraq singled out for yet more punishment while the Israelis get off scot-free?

'Simple justice' or so the argument goes, requires even-handed behavior by the superpower in the two conflicts. A quite distinct sort of claim is also made in the 'double standards' debate. This argument holds that Israel stands in breach of UN security council resolutions in just the same way that Iraq does, and therefore deserves to be treated by the UN with equal severity. Not so.

UN distinguishes between two sorts of security council resolutions. Those passed under Chapter 6 which deals with the peaceful resolution of disputes and entitle the council to make non-binding recommendations.

And those under Chapter 7, which gives the council broad powers to take actions, including warlike action, to deal with 'threats to peace, breaches of peace, or acts of aggression'.

Such resolutions, binding on all UN members, were rare during the cold war. But they were used against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait.

None of the resolutions relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict comes under Chapter 7. By imposing sanctions, including military ones, against Iraq but not Israel, the UN is merely acting in accordance with its own rules.

But what if, for the sake of argument, the main security council resolutions on the Arab-Israeli conflict had been Chapter 7 resolutions?

The problem would then arise that Resolution 242 of 1967, passed during the Six Day War and frequently cited in the double standards argument, does not say what a lot of people who quote it think it does.

It does not instruct Israel to withdraw unilaterally from the territories occupied in 1967. It does not condemn Israel's conquest, for the good reason that most western powers at the time thought it was the result of a justifiable pre-emptive war. It calls for a negotiated settlement, based on the principle of exchanging land for peace. This is a very different matter.

In the case of Iraq, the security council has instructed Saddam Hussein to take various unilateral actions which he is perfectly capable of taking.

Resolution 242 cannot be implemented unilaterally, even if Israel wanted to do so. Why? First is the question of borders. Some of the diplomats who drafted Resolution 242 said afterwards that they intended to allow for some changes in the armistice lines that separated Israel and its Arab neighbours before the war of 1967.

The Arabs maintain that the resolution requires a complete withdrawal from every inch. But even if this were so, the resolution cannot be implemented without arriving at a negotiated agreement.

For example the resolution calls for a 'just' settlement of the Palestinian refugee issue. Meaning what? The Palestinians say that a UN general assembly resolution, 194 of 1948, gives all the Palestinian refugees the right to return, or to get compensation.

Israel says that the same resolution stipulates that these refugees had to be willing to 'live at peace with their neighbours' and that the Palestinians having rejected the UN sanctioned partition of Palestine, were not prepared to live with the new Jewish state.

It may be possible to negotiate a compromise on this issue but there is no security council blueprint to solve it. Israel says that it has already implemented much of 242, and that it stands ready to implement the rest of it. It returned land to Egypt and Jordan in return for peace. Two years ago Ehud Barak offered the bulk of the Golan Heights in return for peace.

After the Oslo peace process Israel withdrew from the main Palestinian population centres (although it has returned to them since the intifada or uprising) pending negotiation of the final settlement.

It is commonly asserted that Israel's occupation is 'illegal'. However how far is this actually true?

Un secretary-general Kofi Annan called Israel's occupation illegal, but it is no accident that he has not repeated this claim. Sir Andrew Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford University, said it was a 'serious mistake' to describe the occupation itself, as opposed to some of Israel's actions as an occupier, in this way.

In a subsequent letter, Annan's spokesman admitted as much. The secretary-general, he said, had not intended to refer to the legality of Israel's occupation of the territories during the war of 1967, only to breaches of its obligations as an occupying power.

Here Israel is clearly on the wrong side of the security council and cannot plead innocence. After 1977, the Likud governments of Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir set out for religio-political reasons to make the occupied territories part of a greater Israel, in defiance of the UN and the logic of 242. Legal or not the occupation has lasted a terribly long time.

But this is not solely Israel's fault. In 1967 it was the Arabs who rejected Resolution 242. They certainly did not accept Israel's new post-war borders, but nor did they recognise its pre-war borders.

They did not, in fact, acknowledge Israel's right to exist at all. This posture persisted for a dozen years after 1967, when Egypt alone made peace. The Palestinians, pledging still to 'liberate' all Palestine and dissolve the Jewish state, waited longer. It was not until the late 1980's, some 40 years after Israel's birth and 20 years after the 1967 war, did Yasser Arafat's PLO indicate an interest in a two state solution.

When the Palestinians decided that they were no longer bent on its extirpation, Israel responded. In 1993 it signed an agreement with the PLO under which both sides undertook to implement Resolution 242 by negotiation, thus putting all the contentious issues, Jerusalem, the settlements and the refugees on the bargaining table.

Two years ago the talks failed, to be followed by a new Palestinian intifada and the election of the unyielding Ariel Sharon. Over the past two years, the intifada has given rise to a whole new batch of resolutions.

Resolution 1435, for example, calls on Israel to pull out of the Palestinian cities it has recently re-occupied. It has been ignored. But it makes demands of the Palestinians too, which have also been ignored. In this case, the Palestinian authority is instructed to cease all violence and incitement and to bring 'those responsible for terrorist acts' to justice.

In the long and intractable conflict over Palestine, both sides consider themselves victims. The Palestinians say that their national rights were usurped by an intruder, the Israelis that the Palestinians never accepted the Jewish right to self-determination. UN's approach has been to recognise the complexity of these respective claims, lay down broad principles, and urge a negotiated peace.

The case of Iraq could hardly be more different. That country is in conflict with the UN itself, having refused to comply with the clear instructions, under Chapter 7, to give up its weapons of mass destruction.

What about Israel's nuclear weapons? Does its status as an undeclared nuclear power put it on par with Iraq, which has tried to become one? The answer is no.

In 1981, Resolution 487 condemned Israel for bombing Iraq's Osiraq reactor, which Israel claimed was being used to manufacture a nuclear weapon, despite having been given a clean bill of health by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Noting that Israel had not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), as Iraq had, the UN called on Israel to put its nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards, as the NPT requires. This infuriates the treaty's supporters who have been striving to make it 'universal'.

But as with any other treaty, governments are free not to sign. What they are not free to do is sign, receive the foreign (civilian) nuclear help to which signing entitles them, and try to build a bomb secretly.

This is what Iraq tried to do, and may still be trying to do. Israel is thought to possess a large nuclear arsenal, about which it is not being open and honest. But it is not evidence of 'double standards'. Being a nuclear-armed power is not, by itself, a breach of international law.