I don't get the way Blair and Bush look at this. I don't get the way Margaret Beckett can go against her principles for the sake of her job. I don't get how people are blaming 'Islam' and 'Axes of Evil' and all that kind of manipulative stuff. I don't get how these politicians can look at the pictures of dead babies and not give Israel a bloody good bollocking.

I'd like to think it is because they are working softly, softly behind the scenes to persuade Israel that it's acting totally unacceptably. Really I think they don't give a damn. They don't have brown babies, so they don't care.

I've surprised myself how angry I've been about Israel on this, and I know that it began when I saw the picture of the little boy with a bandaged head screaming. He looks just like Little 'Un (because I had the effrontery to marry a 'wop dago bastard' as Husband was once so memorably described).

I suppose in a world where it is ok for the US to invade and wreck two countries in response to terrorism (and when it is ok for Blair to have Owd Blokes arrested for heckling under the Terrorism Act), then it is equally fine for Israel to blow the arses off another country's innocent civilians in response to the kidnap of a couple of soldiers.

Except that's just the excuse they were waiting for.

Then all the way through it's presented as though this is an insoluble problem: that here's two sets of folk who both want the same land and ho hum, what can you do? Hezbollah is supposed to recognise Israel's right to exist - but why should it? Why is there no question about Isael's right to exist? Israel exists because it was created out of land that belonged to other people. If a new nation state was declared for Muslims in Texas, would Bush be happy about it? So why can't he understand the anger of those who were evicted? Why can't Israel?

Instead, we are presented with this view that Israel is the last barricade between the West and Big Fat Scary Islam, and that we have to support Israel or prepare for subjugation.

Israel isn't the solution, it's the problem. I'd instinctively felt it for ages, had always sympathised with the Palestinians, but made myself be even-handed because I told myself I was being anti-semitic and that I was too ignorant to have a view. I finally sussed that Zionism isn't Judaism and that Bush is more ignorant than me, and he has no such qualms.

Orthodox Jews United Against Zionism
True Torah Jews Against Zionism

But as usual, I'm open to persuasion....