Limited, Localised and Targeted?

Only utter fanatics call Israel "she" and "her" in English. It is a very good way of spotting them. Keir Starmer is one such. He has as good as confirmed that Britain is involved in the bombing and invasion of Lebanon, and will be involved in the bombing of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, as it has been involved in everything else that Israel has done over the last year, and indeed for a lot longer than that.

Even before he came to office, Starmer was far more extreme in his support for Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir than anyone in the then British Government was in public, even including any of the present candidates for Leader of the Conservative Party. If France did not defend Lebanon, then Emmanuel Macron would have turned it, too, into just another American colony.

Elsewhere among centrist caricatures, Mark Rutte has today become Secretary General of NATO because that is the will of Viktor Orbán; centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. But Rutte also owes his elevation to the backing of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has promised to support Lebanon "with all our means", and who has told Netanyahu that, "Like Hitler, you will be stopped sooner or later."

Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon have their faults, but if anywhere in the region is to be described as "moderate", then it is certainly not Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, or the United Arab Emirates. That last was recently deemed so unfit to own two small-circulation newspapers and a tiny-circulation magazine that, with cross-party support, the Statute Law of this land was amended to prevent the acquisition. And I had updated my CV and everything.

Russia wrongly invaded Ukraine to protect populations that had historically been in Russia and wanted to be so again, and to eliminate elements that were overtly Nazi and therefore, as a first principle, an existential threat to Russia. Even so, that invasion was wrong, as is Britain's arming of those Nazis, under a puppet President whose term of elected office has expired, and now even Britain's permission of them to use those weapons inside Russia, which is a direct act of war.

Likewise, Hezbollah does want to destroy Israel, as a first principle. But no one in Lebanon wants to live in Israel, nor do the Israelis want them to. It wants to clear them, or, to use the BBC's word, "cleanse" at least the land south of the Litani of them, before settling its own people in their place. If the Russian invasion of Ukraine was wrong, then the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, to which the Iranian bombing of Israel is a direct response, is even more so. And if the British arming of Ukraine, which we have no treaty obligation to defend, is wrong, then the British arming of Israel, which we have no treaty obligation to defend, is even more so, and even more so again after the use of those weapons to murder British military veterans who were serving as aid workers.

If any of this has anything remotely approaching a silver lining, then it is that, from the Ukrainian occupation of a small corner of Kursk, to the Iranian bombing of Israel, it is the theory of nuclear deterrence that has been blown to Kingdom Come. Even Mossad's headquarters has been hit. It is in a densely populated, civilian area of Tel Aviv, the inhabitants of which must therefore be "human shields".