Mourners gather, politicians preen. A shooting in Israel has left one dead and five wounded, a tragedy that has prompted the United Kingdom to dust off its finest ceremonial robes and reaffirm its 'ironclad commitment' to the region. Because nothing says solidarity like a press release.
The blood had barely dried on the pavement before Whitehall's finest were tripping over themselves to issue statements of undying loyalty. 'We stand with Israel,' they declared, as if standing with a country means anything when you're sitting comfortably in London. The dead man has a name, a family, a life.
But in the theatre of geopolitics, he is already reduced to a statistic, a footnote in a diplomatic telegram. And the wounded? They are five reasons for a foreign secretary to furrow his brow for exactly 0.
7 seconds before moving on to matters of trade. Meanwhile, the shooting itself passes into the mists of predictable outrage. Social media churns, columnists opine, and somewhere a bureaucrat is drafting a motion of condemnation.
How efficient. How utterly pointless. The 'ironclad commitment' is just that: a commitment to iron, to tanks and fences and the language of violence dressed up in the vocabulary of alliance.
What of the commitment to peace? To the lives that spill through the cracks of every six-point plan? But that would require imagination, and imagination is the one thing that chancelleries lack.
So we will have more statements, more reaffirmations, more rituals of solidarity. And the dead will stay dead. The wounded will limp on.
And the ironclad commitment will remain, as ever, a monument to our collective failure to see beyond the next headline.
