Even if what happened on 7 October was the start of the problem, which it definitely wasn’t, the Israeli Government’s reaction to it is completely disproportionate and it was absurd to see David Cameron trying to make out that Iran’s attack on Israel on Saturday night, which in effect was as effective as a pop gun when it came to the amount of damage done, was some kind of outrage against the backdrop of what Israel has been doing to Gaza for months. Cameron and other mainstream political leaders in the west (and I include representatives of the leadership of the Labour Party in this) have grudgingly started to be critical of Israel’s actions, but they’ve fallen into place behind them again after Saturday - it will be interesting to see what the reaction is to the attack on Iran overnight.

It might be in this thread somewhere, but in the last week or so I read a post by James Wales comparing Israel to the various Arab states surrounding it in which he claimed that Israel was the only true democracy among them - essentially it seemed he was saying that they were more civilised than their neighbours.

In a way I agree, but with that superiority which James claims Israel has comes responsibilities. I try to think of greater examples of the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents in my lifetime by a so called civilised nation and struggle to come up with anything worse than what has happened to Gaza over the last six months or so. I strongly believe that those Western politicians who have been so quick to defend Israel over Gaza are out of step with the thinking of most of the populations of their countries in this respect.


As for comparisons with Hitler, they are nearly always made, and argued against, by people who did not live through his time in charge of Germany, so have no direct experience of what happened. However, what that holocaust survivor said to Suella Braverman about her use of language regarding immigration a few years back made a strong impression on me at a time when I was already thinking that recent times have been the closest thing I’ve experienced to living through the thirties as the Second World War approached - I don’t think people of my age or younger have ever lived through a time when Hitler comparisons were more likely to be made.