Bernard Spiegal

It feels as though the world has become unhinged. All assumed stable reference points are suspended.

Prime Ministers and Presidents can look us in the eye and, by their equivocations, by their sophistry, by their contrived selective vision allow – allow, give permission to, endorse, support, stand alongside, watch the back of, provide the means to – the slaughter, maiming, the displacement of an entire Gazan population.

This is more than ‘complicity’. That is too mild a word. It is ‘joint enterprise’, for what does it mean to deploy one’s army, one’s naval forces, one’s air force in support of Israel’s rampaging, vengeful military machine? What does it mean to but whisper words of restraint and caution, but place no hindrance in the way of the already unfolding carnage.

Do not confuse. Do not conflate. Do not dare to justify the barbarous wrongs Israel is now unleashing on Gazan Palestinians by praying-in-aid Hamas’s obscene, murderous actions against Israelis, infants, children, women, men.

Nor, in some perverse equation, suggest that targeting an entire, civilian population is a right response to the unequivocal wrongs done to the too many grieving, traumatised Israelis.

Israel is now fearful, in pain. What it believed about itself, no long holds. So, within the fog of its own self-doubt, it reverts to habit and unleashes death and destruction indiscriminately against a people. It’s collective punishment:  ‘They’re all the same under the skin’.  And vengeance is ours saith this stricken nation.

And in response, our lilliputian leaders can do no more than go with the vengeful flow, offering blooded absolution to the slaughter happening now, and for the slaughter yet to come.