Another day, another precision strike. The assassination of a Lebanese general by an Israeli car bomb is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the squeal of indignation from London, where the Foreign Office has called for an emergency UN session. One would think that the British had spontaneously remembered their own history as a mandatory power in the Levant. But no. This is the same Britain that has spent decades apologising for Suez, for Balfour, for anything that smacks of imperial assertion. Now it wants to lecture Israel on the rules of war? The hypocrisy is as thick as the smog over Whitehall.
Let us strip away the cant. Israel does not fight wars of attrition. It fights wars of assassination. It has neither the manpower nor the patience for a long, slogging ground war. Instead, it sends drones and missiles to pluck off its enemies like a gardener pruning dead leaves. This is efficient, ruthless, and utterly Victorian in its disdain for the niceties of international law. Lord Cromer would have approved. The trouble is that the British, who once ruled Egypt and Palestine with an iron fist, now pretend that such tactics are barbaric. Yet they do not propose to send troops. They do not propose to sanction Israel. They merely call for a meeting. How terribly civilised.
And what of the Lebanese general? He was a cog in the machine of Hezbollah, a proxy force of Iran. His death will not alter the strategic balance. Hezbollah has a deep bench. But it will provoke the usual cycle: retaliatory rocket fire, Israeli airstrikes, civilian casualties, and another round of hand-wringing at the UN. The spiral is endless because no one wants to break it. The West wants to contain Iran. Iran wants to bleed Israel. Israel wants to survive. And Lebanon, poor Lebanon, is the stage for their dramas.
The real question is why Britain pretends to have a role. It has none. It is a former imperial power reduced to issuing statements. It cannot even keep its own streets free of migrant boats in the Channel. Yet it lectures Israel on the necessity of restraint. One might call this intellectual decadence: the inability to see that the world has moved on from the 1945 settlement. International law is a luxury for the strong. For the weak, it is a trap. Israel understands this. Britain, with its post-imperial guilt, does not.
The emergency UN session will achieve exactly nothing. Resolutions will be drafted. Vetoes will be cast. The general will remain dead. And the wheels of history will grind on. The only lesson is that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. The British, once strong, now merely suffer the illusion of relevance.
