What is Prince William thinking?

In a statement, the Prince of Wales says he ‘refuses to give up’ on ‘a brighter future for the Middle East’. Nobody thought he had given up, so why did he feel the need to say it? His Churchillian reference to ‘the darkest hour’ does not work. In 1940 the darkest hour was for Britain against Nazi Germany. Now it is for Israel, attacked by fanatical anti-Semites. Churchill did not call for ‘permanent peace’ but to fight back. Although Prince William mentions the plight of the hostages as well as Gazans’ need for aid, the objective effect of his intervention (if any) is to make life harder for Israel. Israel, not Hamas will attract more pursed lips of western disapproval. The Prince gives no consideration to the idea that what he calls ‘the terrible human cost’ of the war will increase if Israel is baulked from pursuing victory, in the straightforward sense of eliminating all serious military presence of Hamas in Gaza. The Prince’s statement does not address the problem that so much of the ‘humanitarian’ work is inextricably muddled up with agencies’ hostility to Israel, and sometimes even with Hamas’s military operations. It reads to me like lines coming from the Foreign Office (the phrase ‘Too many have been killed’ has often been on the lips of David Cameron in recent weeks). William is being weaponised politically. If you extrapolate Israel’s losses onto Britain’s eight-times-greater population, you get nearly 10,000 murdered and well over 2,000 kidnapped. If that happened to us, would the heir to the throne be urging ‘permanent peace’ with the perpetrators?

The Prince did at least apply the word ‘terrorist’ to Hamas. The BBC is charier. Have you noticed how, after it agreed to refer to Hamas on air as being ‘proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government’, it has now quietly dropped this clause?