In a development that would be comical if it weren't so terrifying, Israel has once again decided to test the tensile strength of its truce with Hezbollah by bombing southern Lebanon. The bombs fell like grim punctuation marks on a sentence nobody wanted to read. Britain, ever the international schoolmaster, has wagged a finger and urged 'restraint,' as if the region’s players were children fighting over a toy tank.
The fact that such a word is even uttered in the same breath as 'Hezbollah' and 'Israel' suggests a detachment from reality that only a Whitehall mandarin could maintain. Meanwhile, the truce, which was always as sturdy as a gin-soaked wafer, trembles under the weight of geopolitical idiocy. One can almost hear the clinking of teacups in London as diplomats mutter about 'proportional responses' and 'de-escalation.
' But in the bombed-out streets of southern Lebanon, the only proportionality is between the size of the crater and the number of dead. The truce, like a patient on life support, requires constant vigilance. But alas, vigilantes are in short supply; instead, we have politicians, each more absurd than the last.
So raise a glass of dubious airport gin to the architects of peace, who build their structures on shifting sands of hypocrisy. Cheers.
