Our Atlantic partners might be a bit mad, but they still care – about their country, about its future. Polarisation has its many negative effects, but one of its positives is its ability to galvanise that passion.
What Sir Keir and Labour MPs say in the Commons is worth keeping an eye on.
The current minimal-confrontation approach too often seems to leave officers tacitly enforcing the codes of the ugliest and most violent sections of society.
First, Islamist extremism will use woke like a human shield. Then, once it has exhausted its purpose, it will cast aside, like that LGBT flag last Saturday.
Doing so will be immensely difficult and will involve fighting in densely populated urban areas, creating enormous risks for both the Israel Defence Forces forces and Gazan civilians.
The Hamas support network in the UK is entrenched. But the wider network is also comprised of those who – wittingly or unwittingly – bolster Hamas’s narratives by framing their acts as merely ‘resistance’.
Netanyahu may have said: how would you feel, were you lectured by countries without an independent judiciary, let alone the free press, minority rights and fair elections that we have in Israel?
A situation when Labour, representing the vast majority of seats and votes of British Muslims, becomes a party of Palestine and the Conservatives one of Israel would be antithetical to national harmony.
Our Editor in conversation with Katy Balls and James Heale about yesterday’s Commons statement on the Middle East.
On the evidence of yesterday’s Commons statement, Labour backbench opinion is broadly pro-Palestinian – so pressure on the party leadership’s line is likely to intensify during the weeks ahead.
Hard-nosed politicians and commanders, and their legal departments, might be able to mount coherent defences of the IDF. But that won’t necessarily help them in the propaganda battle.
But the Prime Minister also upheld with steely determination “Israel’s right to defend itself in line with international humanitarian law”.
Politicians urge zero tolerance – but there’s a gap between law and enforcement. If the Met can arrest 155 anti-lockdown protestors, why can’t it do the same to pro-Hamas ringleaders?
Each demands an unequivocal response from the United Kingdom and other Western nations committed to defending both our values and our security.
Perhaps most importantly of all, a carefully calibrated and adaptive approach by the UK to Israel could help constrain the cycle of escalation that is all too familiar in the Middle East.