the brilliantly leaping gazelle

One would have thought that given the commemoration’s to mark D-Day being just a few days ago now, people might finally come to their senses about the realities of war. 

Namely, that in order to successfully prosecute a war there are certain unavoidable circumstances one has to accept from the start.  Tragic as it is, there will be civilian loss of life, especially if one’s enemy combatants have deeply embedded themselves within the civilian population. There will be destruction of housing and infrastructure, because the very nature of sustained bombing makes that inevitable.  And many others.

Quite why these inescapable truisms seem so difficult to comprehend, and allowed this impossibly absurd distortion of reality to become a fashionable virtue to signal, has no more egregiously offensive manifestation than in the very public condemnation of the way Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza.

I’ve thought this from the beginning of the war in Gaza, the way in which Israeli military actions are continually judged against an unrealistic and constantly altering number of moral precepts. Precepts, it has to be noted, that none of the countries now condemning Israel, have themselves ever followed when at war.

The USA and its ‘collateral damage’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The UK’s notion of ‘precision drone strikes’ in Afghanistan. Turkeys own genocide against Armenians and more recently, war crimes in Syria. The French in Algeria. South Africa in Angola and Namibia. You get the gist.      

The only thing to account for any of this is not that the conduct of war has changed, but more that expectations regarding how a war is prosecuted have changed, and it seems to me that these higher expectations are only expected of Israel.

 Hence we had another outbreak of delusional posturing in, shock horror, yesterdays Guardian, ‘Israel has destroyed or damaged 80% of schools in Gaza. This is scholasticide’ 

Hooray they’ve created a new word whilst also ignoring reality. Does the sub headline, ‘The attack on Palestinian education, educators and cultural knowledge isn’t new, but it has reached horrifying new levels,’ make any kind of sense to anyone with even the most basic understanding of what bombing means?

The article explicitly makes the point that the Israeli’s are deliberately targeting educational establishments, as opposed to them just being part of an urban landscape that has been violently remodelled.

What, one wonders, would the writer of such an obscenely reductive piece of blame-mongering – if she can make up words, then so can I – have made of the bombing of the French town of Caen in Normandy in June 1944? Over 6,000 tons of bombs were dropped on it by the Allies. 73% of the town was destroyed. Deaths necessarily ensued.

But efforts to take Caen had been thwarted for nearly two months because of heavy German resistance.  Both sides were aware of the strategic importance of Caen, of how crucial it was to the liberation of France and to the eventual defeat Germany.

Had any of this this criticism by armchair generals and all of this dangerously naive absurdity that we see now happened then and had we had lost the war, then all of my Jewish friends would never have been born, and the freedoms we take as a given would never have been.

Either you set out to win a war or you are destined to lose it. 

Shit happens.