Another day, another tragedy in the Holy Land. This time, a shooting has left one dead, and Scotland Yard's counter-terror unit is now liaising with Israeli police. The details are still murky, but the pattern is as old as the hills: violence, grief, and a weary world watching.
Yet, what strikes me is the reaction: a British police force, itself mired in its own crises of knife crime and extremism, reaching across the Mediterranean to offer expertise. Is this genuine solidarity or a desperate attempt to appear relevant? The Fall of Rome saw provincial governors begging for legions; now we have bureaucrats swapping intelligence files.
The lesson of history is that empires overstretch, and here we are, pretending that a shooting in Israel is somehow a London matter. It is not. It is a local tragedy, a symptom of a regional disease that no amount of transnational policing can cure.
The Victorian era would have called this 'splendid isolation' but we now call it 'globalisation'. The reality is that we cannot police our own streets, so we police everyone else's. This will not end well.
The victim deserves more than a bureaucratic footnote; they deserve a world where shootings are not routine. But routine they are, and we dance to the same dreary tune. Scotland Yard's involvement is a reminder: the Empire is dead but its ghost haunts us still, wrapped in the garb of counter-terror cooperation.
We will hear of 'lessons learned' and 'closer ties', but the lesson is always the same: violence begets violence, and the experts are always late.
