The measure of our evil

 

Observations on the deadliest attack on the Palestinian people since the Nakba

“It’s been 300 days since October 7—the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” posted UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy on X on August 1. “Many who were brutally abducted and taken hostage remain in captivity,” he added. “Today we renew our call for an immediate ceasefire and for Hamas to release all hostages now.”

That’s it? That’s the tweet? I thought, floored—though not surprised—by Lammy’s sidelining of everything else that had happened during that 300 days in Gaza.

Less than 24 hours earlier, Israel had assassinated Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran—the chief negotiator in the ongoing Cairo ceasefire talks, and a (relative) moderate who is on record as being open to Hamas laying down its arms in exchange for a two-state solution on Israel’s 1967 borders. This was hardly a move calculated to bring about an immediate ceasefire or the release of Hamas’s hostages.

Nor was the passage on July 19 of a resolution in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, by a majority of 68 to nine rejecting any two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—the declared policy of the British government of which Lammy is a part—on grounds that “The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.”  (more...)

The measure of our evil