The Foreign Office has issued its customary denunciation, a ritual as predictable as the seasons. ‘Destruction of the future,’ they call it. But let us be blunt: the future has been dead in East Jerusalem for decades, and the bulldozers are merely dancing on its grave.
This is not a sudden surge of Israeli demolition. This is the logical end of a policy of slow, grinding absorption, a process as inexorable as the tides. The Palestinians are furious, of course.
They should be. But fury without strategy is just noise, and noise pleases no one but the extremists on both sides. We have seen this before, in the fall of Constantinople, in the clearances of the Highlands.
The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. The question is not whether Israel will stop, but whether the world will pretend to care while the machinery of displacement grinds on. The Foreign Office condemns, but condemnation is cheap.
The real tragedy is not the destruction of homes. It is the destruction of the illusion that two-state solutions and peace processes ever meant anything at all. We are watching the slow, ugly death of a political fiction.
The bulldozers are just the undertakers.
