Seventeen dead in southern Lebanon. A familiar headline, is it not? The Israeli air force has once again visited destruction upon its northern neighbour, and British officials have responded with the customary call for 'restraint'.
One almost admires the consistency. The same script, played out decade after decade, as if we are all participants in some grim theatrical production written by a committee of the morally exhausted. The Romans called it 'pax' when they crushed revolts in Judea.
We call it 'de-escalation' when we bomb villages in the 21st century. The vocabulary changes, but the underlying reality remains: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. And the British, once masters of an empire that knew how to project power without this endless hand-wringing, now content themselves with issuing press releases from Whitehall, as though words could halt missiles.
It is a decadence of the spirit, this belief that diplomacy can replace deterrence. Or worse, that it should. The victims in Lebanon are not numbers.
They are the collateral of a failed regional order, an order whose breakdown we have watched with the same detached horror that educated Romans must have felt as the barbarians crossed the Rhine. But let us not pretend that the current violence is a mystery. It is the direct consequence of a strategic vacuum, of a West that has lost the will to enforce its own red lines, and of adversaries who have noticed.
The Israeli government, facing existential threats from Hamas and Hezbollah, acts as any state would: it defends its borders with overwhelming force. We may deplore the civilian casualties, but we cannot feign surprise. The only true surprise would be if British calls for restraint were ever backed by anything more substantial than diplomatic notes and sombre statements from the Foreign Office.
I suspect the 17 dead in southern Lebanon would be unimpressed by our fine words. But then, the dead rarely have a vote in how the living conduct their moral theatre.
