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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?

Deeply weird country, Israel. I’ve only been there once. Jerusalem, I thought, was a total basketcase of a place. The Old City sums it up, chopped into ill-conceived factions like the execution of a badly drafted will, with hundreds of little cliques that have essentially just been being wildly unreasonable to each other for at least a thousand years. Take every Big Brother contestant that ever was, pack them into a city, and leave them there. Go back in a few millennia, and that’s Jerusalem. Bonkers.

Tel Aviv, by contrast, seemed a lot of fun. It’s a proper Mediterranean city, going about its business. The mad mullahs who want to push the Jews into the sea, the academics who debate Israel’s ‘right to exist’, they can’t have been there. Such sentiments are meaningless in Tel Aviv. It is there. It is stuck. It won’t wipe off.

Quite recently, I heard an Israeli diplomat expressing dismay about this ‘right to exist’ business. Suddenly, he said, it wasn’t a given. The goalposts had shifted, back beyond first principles. Particularly in the UK, he said, he was being called upon to justify what Israel was even doing there. How do you argue that, about any country? The mind starts to spin.

So that’s my wiring, on Israel. It’s a mess. When they send in the gunships, when they kill 120 Palestinians in a week (and more, I’d bet, by now), over a few wee rockets in a few wee towns, it goes into freefall. And I’m struck, and baffled, by the contrast between that and my Prince Harry wiring, the wiring that goes all Babs and wants to buy him a pint, and is confident and comfortable in what it thinks. Because when Harry fired that machine gun, at whom was he firing? We have chosen our enemy in Afghanistan, because we have decreed, pretty circuitously, that they pose a threat to us. And yet it’s not like rockets are raining down on Dover, is it?

Wearing my diarist hat, I had some fun with the Ku Klux Klan last week, after the loveable sheet-wearers published a firm statement on their website denying reports that they were backing Barack Obama for the US presidency. To what, one wonders, do they object? His views on affordable healthcare? His speaking style?