Deborah Orr: Across the planet, male violence and misogyny go hand in hand

An emerging consensus, strengthened this week by the publication of the Demos report Hearts and Minds, contends that women hold the key to "tackling terrorism and political violence in Iraq, Israel-Palestine and closer to home". The latter phrase is fairly muted because the report was written before the London bomb attacks on 7 July.

The theories contained within the document have now been brought "closer to home" than ever. In the chapter which considers what inspires a suicide bomber, the report quotes Nasra Hassan, who interviewed almost 150 recruiters and trainers of suicide bombers, as well as suicide mission volunteers between the years 1996 and 1999.

He described his own findings among Middle-Eastern suicide bombers, and they fit pretty much exactly the broad profile of the British suicide bombers who have emerged in the past fortnight. The report elaborates: "Wounded by territorial disenfranchisement and ethnic humiliation, terrorists seethe with retributive rage. Added to this is pent-up sexual frustration, which is a common characteristic in sexually segregated societies."

Recently my colleague Johann Hari commented in this newspaper that "every Jihadist I have met - from Gaza to Finsbury Park - has been a fierce ball of misogyny and sexual repression". Likewise, every moderate Muslim, male or female, appears to agree that female emancipation is essential if progressive Islam is to disarm the forces of fundamentalism.

The report's authors, Scilla Elworthy and Gabrielle Rifkind, suggest: "Women can bring striking results in areas of conflict, since they are known to be effective communicators and to have a natural talent for building bridges. It's high time we feminised our approach to security, by actively encouraging women to introduce their particular ways of doing things into all our efforts to deal with terrorism."

Some of this sounds like the feminism of our fevered Seventies dreams, that suggested that a world run by women would be a lovely place, full of happiness. It therefore might be seen as ironic by some that another report came out this week concluding that the success of feminism had simply made women overworked and unhappy.

But it cannot be stressed too highly that the sort of feminism referred to in the report is what used to be called "bourgeois" feminism (some of the consequences of which are explored alongside my picture of the lovely Sienna Miller). This brand of middle-class emancipatory ideology has been much taken up in order to advance not just women but also (and sometimes instead) consumer capitalism.

This perhaps has been at the expense of what used to be called socialist feminism, which was always something of a contradiction in terms anyway, and which we should perhaps start redefining as social equality instead. In many areas, at home and abroad, social equality has declined as economic equality has been achieved and surpassed. Misogyny has grown with female success: witness Muslim women and Afro-Caribbean women who are powering ahead of their male counterparts in Britain, and finding themselves reviled rather than admired for it.

My own belief is that male violence and misogyny go hand in hand across the planet, and that the great failure of feminism has been its failure to persuade men that social equality is in their interest just as much as women's. One of the quiet triumphs of socialist feminism, after all, is the fact that many of the Western men who have supported female emancipation by adjusting their own roles positively have closer and more emotional relationships with their small children than ever before.

It seems crucial in the present climate to find ways of binding men to women and to children, instead of promoting division between them. That some of the bombers were fathers remains baffling, I think, to any parent. Hearts and Minds advocates such practical measures as "supporting the role of women in development and education in areas of conflict". I'd suggest that the "area of conflict" between men and women is one that needs to be tackled more urgently than ever as well.

Let's hope Israel sees the justice in its plan to withdraw from Gaza

Now that London has become a bustling hive of suicide-bombing activity, one or two Israelis have been unable to refrain from suggesting that we now might be able to understand what it's like for them. Certainly it's true that we have now come a little closer to sharing the everyday experience of Israelis. But, sadly, we need to look no further than Israel to see that undergoing the same privations as another people does not necessarily promote understanding.

Many Israelis, for example, live in a seemingly constant state of resentment and fury because the Palestinians won't, after 60 years, shrug their shoulders and decide that they don't need a homeland after all. They completely forget that this was what they themselves refused to do not for decades but for thousands of years.

Likewise, a lot of Israelis despise the UN, which they regard rightly as the legal guardians of the refugee status of many of the 900,000 Palestinians displaced in the Nakba. Again, it is a sad and sorrowful comment on the human condition that the Israelis cannot see that it is hard for a nation to submit to stateless diaspora, even though they know only too well the heights of hatred and discrimination that such a condition can leave a people vulnerable to. As for the great and terrible wall Israel is building around the West Bank, comparisons with the Warsaw ghetto are heartbreakingly painful.

I should add that the situation in Israel at present is more hopeful than it has been for some years. A right-wing government is doing what a left-of-centre one could not get away with, and is determinedly sticking to its plan to withdraw from Gaza. Israel is beginning to challenge some of its own extremists, the settlers determined to "push Palestine into the sea".

It's best to hope, for the moment at least, that this move is not strategic, but instead is an indication that Israel really is beginning to see the justice in the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

* The actress Sadie Frost sacked her "weekend nanny" recently because she had "bedded" Jude Law, her ex-husband. The film star's fiancée, Sienna Miller, found out about this and she is rumoured to have given him the old heave-ho.

Other women, shockingly, leapt to suggest that nannies, not sleazy love cheats, were the spawn of Satan. Helen Kirwan-Taylor explained in this newspaper that she'd even had to spend minutes of her precious time instructing one to put her mugs in the dishwasher, not the sink. Nannies, she opined, did not appreciate that she "subsidised their lifestyle" so that she could "work". Then Rosie Millard piped up with a similar theory.

Caring for their children may not be a privilege they want to take up themselves, but other women should understand that they're damned lucky to be doing it for them. Neither woman stopped to muse on whether they got through so many nannies because they were poor at recruiting them or because their attitude to them stank so much that they thought nothing of rubbishing them in national newspapers. When nannies do this, it is called "betrayal". When spoilt, vain women do this, it is called "their career".