The conflict in the Middle East is so horrifying because it is saturated with so much hate. Climb inside the head of the suicide bomber, perhaps the most desperate and sinister phenomenon the modern world has witnessed. You have to hate extraordinarily if you are prepared to immolate yourself to visit death on others. The economic and social conditions that incubate such a readiness must also be desperate, and the religious promise of an eternal afterlife certainly helps, but these alone are insufficient to explain such acts.

The additional trigger is hate. The individual calmly sitting down in a crowded restaurant wearing a belt of high explosive is offering his or her own life to take the lives of others - and those others have to be hated. No trace of recognition that they too are human can be permitted, nor that what you are doing transcends all boundaries and rules of human association. The bomber may have been indoctrinated so that hate is laced with a sense of worthy sacrifice, but the culture that permits such indoctrination is itself embedded in hate.

This is what confronts Israel and why its actions last week were so self-defeating. It is locked in a vortex of hatred. Its rage and loathing of Palestinians is denying it its own humanity and capacity to use its overwhelming military power to achieve the security it wants. The armed invasion of the West Bank, whatever its successes in finding arms dumps or killing individual Palestinians, will not make Israel secure.

If prime minister Sharon thinks that he is creating a political dynamic that will depose a generation of Palestinian leaders to be replaced by those more compliant to Israel, then he has become deranged by hate and incapable of simple empathy. Of course Arafat will seize the moment to become a potential martyr. Of course Palestinians, racked by powerlessness and a sense of injustice, will redouble their efforts to find some way of maintaining their honour and self-respect. They will hate more. The next cohort of suicide bombers has now been recruited.

Anybody with an ounce of imagination and a capacity to empathise would surely have realised that. Israel's show of force has, paradoxically, reduced its security and, as more Israelis worry whether life under the ever-present threat of unpredictable death is worth living and consider emigration, perhaps even endangered the long-term future of the state. Hatred has blinded Israeli reason.

Sharon, the self-proclaimed 'warrior', is an important cameo of the conservative mind in extremis. He scorns dialogue and process. He sees no reason to make the effort to get inside the heads of Palestinians and imagine what it feels like to suffer generations of exile and loss of land. He despises liberal sensibilities. He hates, and gives himself permission to hate, because of the alleged failings of those he hates. This is a conservatism parallel to that of the American militias, the British National Front or France's Le Pen.

Sharon is condemned to fail. Over the past 18 months, I have become convinced that the kind of thought experiments that the great liberal political philosopher John Rawls argues underpin the principles of a just society apply not just within a national community, but internationally. At the heart of Rawls's philosophy is the consequence of empathy. Rawls claims that the moral basis of the social contract is the degree to which the advantaged in society consider the position of the disadvantaged fair; the litmus test is whether the advantaged person would consider his or her lowly circumstances legitimate if the roles were reversed.

As a minimum, he argues, the disadvantaged must have access to basic living standards, civil rights, liberties and opportunity. If this is not the case, then the basis of human association is fundamentally undermined. As a result, all societies need to create an infrastructure of justice that ensures that the advantaged and disadvantaged alike can be members of the same society.

Argument rages whether Rawls has provided a foolproof case for income redistribution and to what degree, but what I like about his position is the role played by empathy. He wants us to make a thought-leap about what it might be like to be in someone else's skin, the antithesis of conservative thinking. The conservative accepts the Darwinian struggle as the natural order, and that the prime responsibility of any human being is to follow his self-interest, an instinct conservatives consider to be natural, so distrusting initiatives to change the consequent social order as statist or coercive. The instant empathy enters the equation, though, a whole different set of processes is set in train; hatred and the justification for palpable inequity become impossible.

If this is true nationally, it is also true about relations between states and peoples. The West, Israel included, is never going to get the better of terrorism unless it is prepared to empathise with what is going on in the heads of terrorists. Bush's speech last week, insisting that Israel had to ease the daily humiliation of Palestinians, was an important and very unconservative moment. The United States is beginning to acknowledge what is denied by the majority of Israelis who back Sharon - hate breeds hate and it falls to the stronger of the two parties to initiate the break in the cycle.

But we are still a world away from where we need to be, most especially within Israel and in the West's broader intellectual and political climate. The emotion in short supply is empathy and the politics and attitudes it generates. The great conservative conceit is that its principles most closely correspond to human nature.