Has Israel lost it?
Can the Gaza War of 2008-09 (1,300 dead)
and the Lebanon War of 2006 (1,006 dead)
and all the other wars and now yesterday’s killings mean that the world will no longer accept Israel’s rule?
Don’t hold your breath.
You only have to read the gutless White House statement
– that the Obama administration was
“working to understand the circumstances surrounding the tragedy”.
Not a single word of condemnation.
And that’s it.
Nine dead.
Just another statistic to add to the Middle East’s toll.
But it’s not.
In 1948, our politicians – the Americans and the British – staged an airlift into Berlin.
A starving population
(our enemies only three years before)
were surrounded by a brutal army, the Russians, who had erected a fence around the city.
The Berlin airlift was one of the great moments in the Cold War.
Our soldiers and our airmen risked and gave their lives for these starving Germans.
Incredible, isn’t it? In those days, our politicians took decisions; our leaders took decisions to save lives.
Messrs Attlee and Truman knew that Berlin was important in moral and human as well as political terms.
And today?
It was people – ordinary people, Europeans, Americans, Holocaust survivors
– yes, for heaven’s sake, survivors of the Nazis –
who took the decision to go to Gaza because their politicians and their statesmen had failed them.
Where were our politicians yesterday?
Well, we had the ridiculous Ban Ki-moon, the White House’s pathetic statement, and dear Mr Blair’s expression of “deep regret and shock at the tragic loss of life”.
Where was Mr Cameron? Where was Mr Clegg?
Back in 1948, they would have ignored the Palestinians, of course.
It is, after all, a terrible irony that the Berlin airlift coincided with the destruction of Arab Palestine.
But it is a fact that it is ordinary people, activists, call them what you will, who now take decisions to change events.
Our politicians are too spineless, too cowardly, to take decisions to save lives.
Why is this?
Why didn’t we hear courageous words from Messrs Cameron and Clegg yesterday?
For it is a fact, is it not, that had Europeans
(and yes, the Turks are Europeans, are they not?)
been gunned down by any other Middle Eastern army
(which the Israeli army is, is it not?)
there would have been waves of outrage.