Shared Opinion

Hugo Rifkind

Wednesday, 5th March 2008

If it's good that Harry was fighting the Taleban, why are we queasy when Israel fights Hamas?

Do you reckon they told all the royals? Seriously? All of them? Even the flaky minor ones, like Fergie? Or has she been gossiping with the Countess of Wessex and the bafflingly female Princess Michael of Kent, these past three months, wondering where Harry was, and whether this time he’d done something really bad? ‘Has he eloped with a butler?’ ‘Is he in a Thai jail?’ ‘Is he doing that Winehouse girl, do you think?’

Hey, they didn’t tell everybody. They certainly didn’t tell me. And I have a sneaking suspicion that they didn’t tell Jon Snow, either. That would explain a lot. Hell hath no fury like the media stalwart ignored. Imagine him reading about it on Drudge, like the rest of us, and thinking back to all those cancelled dinner parties and those evasive colleagues who kept insisting they were just off skiing, again. Only a totalitarian state could keep a newsreader in the dark, eh Jon? We might as well be living in China.

My reaction, I think, was pretty typical. ‘Gaw!’ I felt inclined to say, as the hairs rose slightly on the back of my neck. ‘Brave little tyke!’ Did you get that, too? That weird sensation where you feel yourself momentarily turning into Barbara Windsor? It is the hardwired British response to the notion of royalty in peril, even if he is behind a sandbag and firing a machine gun. Maybe Snow was brave to challenge it. Maybe he was simply too cross to notice it was there.

I don’t mean to challenge it, a week on, but it has been bothering me. Please forgive this column lurching in what may appear to be a new direction, but it has been bothering me, mainly, because of Israel’s latest onslaught in Gaza. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a hardwired response to that sort of thing, too. It’s a sick, tumbling sensation of despair, in the pit of the stomach. I can feel moral equivocation coming on. I can feel the intellectual faculties shutting down.

I’m not very comfortable writing about Israel. Prince Harry, Jon Snow, skiing holidays, I’m your man. Israel, hmm, rather not. A few years ago, I remember Richard Ingrams saying that he ignored people writing in support of Israel if they had Jewish-sounding names. It was a vile thing to say, with a vile motivation behind it, but it was particularly vile because it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. I’d know. I’m Jewish, and I tend to ignore my own thoughts about Israel. I don’t particularly trust them. I’m too conscious of my wiring.

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