When I was a student, my friends went on work programmes in Israeli kibbutzim. We cheered when during the Six Day War the Israelis turned the tables on their Arab aggressors. I shall put this crudely: history’s shame, the West’s remorse, have been a massive subterranean resource for a brave and outnumbered little country to draw upon. Victimhood has been a formidable weapon in the Israeli armoury.
As I write, that resource is haemorrhaging away. It’s imaginable — even likely — that Israel will emerge a bigger and more powerful country than before. It’s imaginable that nothing will halt the pursuit of a Greater Israel, annexing, after Gaza, the West Bank, where a stealthy but relentless consolidation of settler land-grabs proceeds with tacit government acquiescence.
To many in the Israeli coalition this has always been the bigger picture and Gaza only a sideshow. The moral stain seeps almost imperceptibly through civil and military policy until, one day, Israelis may wake up to find themselves counted alongside a dozen other nasty Middle Eastern countries: like their neighbours, just another vaguely unsavoury regime. “Never glad confident morning again!” wrote the poet Robert Browning, but I shall be more prosaic: there is a price tag to lost innocence — a price that should worry a people who may one day need again to call on goodwill from abroad.