Let us not mince words. The killing of an infant by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank is not an accident, not a tragic mistake, and certainly not a footnote in the daily grind of occupation. It is the logical, hideous endpoint of a polity that has long abandoned any pretence of moral restraint.
The Foreign Office’s call for ‘accountability’ rings hollow, a reflexive bureaucratic bleat in the face of atrocity. We have seen this play before, from the Dardanelles to the Punjab. Empires in decline do not clean up their messes; they multiply them.
This is not about one rogue soldier or a faulty weapon. It is about a system that treats Palestinian lives as disposable collateral, a system that has learned nothing from the fall of Rome, the disgrace of the Raj, or the blood-soaked twilight of every other empire that mistook military might for moral authority. The real rot is intellectual, a failure to see that every bullet fired at a child is a bullet fired into the foundation of one’s own civilisation.
When we outsource our conscience to a foreign power, we become accomplices. The Foreign Office’s statement is worse than silence: it is a comfortable lie that allows us to sleep at night while a baby’s blood soaks into the earth of the West Bank. History will not forgive our complicity.
It never does.
