Several of my previous pieces have been slightly critical about Israel. Some of the things that they have done have always given me a vaguely uneasy feeling, but it's been hard to tell exactly what the story is.

Any scales that may have been before my eyes have fallen following the release of the Goldstone Report, relating to any war crimes that may have been committed during recent hostilities between Israel and Palestine. This was released by a Jewish South African judge, Richard Goldstone. The report was very long, but the gist of it was that, firstly, Israel had committed war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanit and, secondly, that Palestine had committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.

If anyone might have been expected to release a report biased towards Israel, it would have been Goldstone. He is proud of his Jewish heritage, and has been described as a strong Zionist. Until a month ago, he was lauded by the Israeli people for being on their side.

Palestine has promised to launch an inquiry into the actions of its own citizens. How impartial this will be remains to be seen, but at least they have admitted that questions need to be answered and that their own people are not perfect.

By contrast, there have been two responses from Israel. The first was from the Israeli premier, who said that the rules of war need to be redefined. He has even set up an urgent working committee to look into it. The second has been from the Israeli people and from Jewish groups around the world, who have condemned the report. In the space of a month, Goldstone has gone from being a hero to both Israeli and Jewish people to a traitor to the cause – whatever that cause may be.

Everyone needs to take a step back here. Of all the people around the world who might have been qualified to write such a report, Mr. Goldstone was the one most likely to write something pro-Israeli. Yet even he had to admit that war crimes had been committed. In short, Israel has been criticised by the one person who might have been expected to support it.

This is not time for criticism of Mr. Goldstone. Israel needs to take a very hard look at itself, because if this report is not evidence of Israeli wrongdoing, I don't know what is. It certainly isn't proof, and further investigations are needed, but to still be in denial that something is rotten in the State of Israel must surely show that there is nothing, nothing at all, that could convince Israelis that their country is not perfect. It seems that they have decided that the country and its people are all beyond reproach.

It follows from here that if they are not perfect by the current standards, then this is not a problem with them. Rather, it is a problem with the standards, which must be incorrectly written. This is why the country can, without turning a hair, try to set up its own committee to decide what correct standards should be. This should actually be quite easy for them, because to find out what those standards are, they need only look at what their own soldiers and citizens have done.

Which brings me on to the criticism that is being meted out by Australian Jews. This should be surprising, but isn't. Some people, who should know much better, seem to know that there's a difference between a religion and a state, and to see this we need to have a look at other religions that have close associations. When anybody criticises Russia or England, Russian Orthodox and Church of England people do not take umbrage and claim that this is an affront on their religion. This is despite the fact that the religion could not exist without the state.

Yet with Israel and Judaism, the opposite is true. Israel (the one that has been around since 1948, not the ancient land that has gone the way of Assyria) could not exist without Judaism, but Judaism would have survived without Israel, and would remain if Israel were to cease tomorrow. Yet for a lot of people, the precedence seems to be reversed, and this is why criticisms of Israel are sometimes confused with anti-Semitism. So while I have some very serious concerns about Israel, I have none whatsoever with Judaism, nor with Jews. Israel is a sovereign state; Judaism is a religion. The two things have very different functions, and though there may often be a connection between two of them they can never be the same thing.

Criticism of Israel is not criticism of Judaism, of Jewish religious leaders nor of Jews in general. It is not even necessarily criticism of Israelis in general. It is criticism of a set of political leaders, no different from criticism of Kevin Rudd, John Key or Barack Obama.

I alluded at the start of this article about some of the things that they had done even prior to the Goldstone Report which had made me uneasy. For one, they are extremely keen to criticise Iran's nuclear programme. However they have yet to confirm or deny whether they have such a programme themselves. They also have not signed up to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which would restrict them to the same conditions as the other signatories.

When Iraq was invaded by American forces, the reason cited was Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam didn't deny having them, even though he indeed did not have them, and knew that he may be invaded if he maintained his position of denial. The reason that he didn't say anything was that he did not want to appear weak. The Middle East is a volatile place, and any leader who doesn't have any weapons will lose the respect of his own people and of neighbouring countries' leaders.

Does Israel have Weapons of Mass Destruction? I don't know. They live in the same volatile area. They have expressed deep (and, to be fair, often justified) concerns about some of the countries that are close to them, whom they feel may attack them at any moment – just as Saddam lived in doubt. Do they have weapons with which to retaliate? It's hard to imagine not. Are they, therefore, any better than Saddam? It seems not. There is, obviously, one very big difference, namely that Iraq was the subject of United Nations sanctions.

But there again, we need to look at why these sanctions were in place. Many, of course, were implemented by the United Nations after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but many more were bilaterally imposed by the United Kingdom and United States. In a sense this was justified, because Iraq did not always behave well. But the Iraqi invasion was long gone when the United States started its Weapons of Mass Destruction campaign, and it even fabricated evidence on occasions. 

The fact is that we have no proof whatsoever that Israel has any fewer dangerous weapons than Iraq had before it was invaded, nor even that it has fewer than it was alleged that Iraq had. However, Israel has always been very well treated by the Unites States who, rather than looking for reasons to take action, seem to be actively looking for reasons not to act. 

To me, it is a concern that Israel is relying on its traditional ally (and, failing that, its secondary allies the United Kingdom and France) to veto the Goldstone Report in the Security Council. As ever, it's not what you know, it's who you know. The criticism of the UN Security Council membership can wait for another day, but right and wrong should be decided objectively, not according to who your friends are.

Then there is the warped Israeli sense of justice, which says that one Israeli life is worth ten other lives. In fact, the ratio is often much worse, though it's always at least this bad. During the most recent spate of violence, this was about the ratio of people killed: Israel lost barely 100; Palestine lost over 1100. Having a less efficient killing machine doesn't mean that you are in the right, of course, but the fact that Israel needed to kill so many more to convince its people that it was taking action should speak for itself.

As just one of many other examples, a few years ago some Palestinians bombed an Israeli military complex, killing three soldiers. I'm not condoning this, of course. It is a terrible action, and something needed to be done. That the something in question was to send in their bombers against the compound used by then leader Yasser Arafat, killing 72 Palestinians, does, however, tend to indicate a certain overzealousness – especially when it's hard to see Israel treating its own killing of three Palestinians (should such an event occur) as unfortunate collateral damage.

Israel is also the only country, to my knowledge, whose secret service agents have been found with forged New Zealand passports. This is a definite act of hostility, and New Zealand should have taken some action – even sending the Israeli ambassador packing would have been a good start – rather than wringing its hands. Yet for some reason the American-built halo that surrounds Israel took in even New Zealand politicians, who for some reason refused to take any action whatsoever.

I've already looked into some of the reasons that Israel doesn't get criticised as harshly as it should be. One is the lingering guilt over the Holocaust – for this they can thank the German people, who have shown themselves to be better at admtting guilt than any other people in history. Another is the fact that Israel is a first-world country, whose people attend university, wear jeans and speak Engligh reasonably well. A third is the fact that there is a strong Jewish lobby in the United States, which puts pressure on the Government there to support Israel.

But all these are only superficial, and none is the difference between being a good state and a bad one. I think it's time that we stopped treating Israel with kid gloves. It is not a religion of peace, if for no reason other than that it is not, and will never be, a religion of any sort at all. It is a nation, and like all nations it is capable of harm.

Israel's citizens are only human, with the same human deficiencies as anyone else, and that needs to be remembered. It is a sovereign state, and it must be prepared to meet the same standards that it expects from other countries. It must stop being so defensive, and to accept that sometimes it will be to blame. Above all, it needs to be realise that sometimes, just sometimes, criticisms of it will be valid, and need to be treated seriously.