Britain's Conservative Home carries a couple of articles on the recent excesses of the Israeli military. Alex Deane loses himself in his eulogy to the State of Israel surrounded by "enemies who wish her ill", this "sliver of democracy and decency has always held my sympathy" he informs the reader.
However, pick-up a Sunday paper and you can see that Israeli policy is pretty far from decency. If even the likes of Deane are feeling that supporting Israel is now "less straightforward" then serious questions have to be asked about how long the guilt-induced whitewashing of Israel's actions can last.
Signs were emerging yesterday of a new consensus with all three parties criticising Israel's recent air raids on the Gaza Strip. However, the crux of the question is what will emerge out of this new climate of criticism. In other words, will we see concrete calls for increasing stringent sanction to be applied to Israel while it continues to violate international law with impunity?
Much will depend on the attitude of the incoming US President, Barack Obama. Sadly, there is little hope of a more stringent line emerging from an Obama administration. Visiting Israel last summer he said;
"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that."
All of which sounds very reasonable but does little to address the complexities of the vast power disparities in the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the cause-effect relationship between the actions Israel takes and why Hamas enjoys the support it does amoung the Palestinian population. Put simply, Israel's problem is that it has been allowed carte blanche for far too long and that is as damaging to it as it is to the innocents that it rolls over. Thus we see that when Israel launches these actions it gives no heed to the 'collateral damage' it incurs. The Guardian reports;
"The raids had been expected to begin tomorrow, and the fact that they took place mid-morning rather than at night meant many official buildings and schools were full. Some of the missiles struck densely populated areas as children were leaving school. Parents rushed into the streets to search for them.
Television footage from Gaza showed bodies scattered on a road and the dead and wounded being carried away. Civilians rushed to the targeted areas and tried to move the wounded in their cars to hospital."
We can expect more scenes that David Cameron would describe as 'horrific' to result from a ground incursion and we can expect the unrelenting cycle of destruction to continue. The prevailing mood in Israel is that this is a cut-and-dried military conflict which it isn't and that thus it's vast technical superiority will ensure it's 'victory' which it won't. Technical military superiority is worth nothing when it comes to facing an opponent which can count on a substantial social base nourished by an embittered and impoverished population. Israel will never stop the rocket attacks while it thinks in military terms for that reason; neither will it make the painful concessions necessary because they will be seen too widely as a 'retreat' by a population which is swamped in the same siege mentality that Deane gives eloquent testimony too; so, the cycle won't be broken.
While there are signs that the right, at least in this country, is becoming increasingly alienated from Israel's actions the left usually loses itself an abstractions about which form of state is best to 'solve the problem'. Instead of proceeding from what actually is we proceed from how we would wish the world to be; in some cases that means undoing 50 years of history in others it means simply asking two hostile communities to have a touching 'Kodak moment' and forget the river of blood and bitterness that divides them.
It could however, be broken, if the international community was determined and resolute in bringing Israel to heel. Suddenly, the Palestinians would see that maybe their best route to salvation may not to be offer succor to the bigots of Hamas and that there is another way. Israeli's meanwhile would be forced to face the fact that the 'easy' solution to living in fear is not the right one; that the only way to end the attacks is to make some painful but necessary concessions to win the hearts and minds of Palestinians.
Concretely, the international community has to consider sanctions of some form against Israel and certainly the suspension of all armament sales. It may also have to consider offering some logistical support in the form of peacekeeping forces. Such an undertaking would no doubt be perilous but unlike the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq would be worth the 'end game'; lasting peace and stability in a troubled region and a serious ideological blow against terrorism.