Can we be honest about Israel and Palestine?

Qui tacet consentire videtur: who keeps silent is seen to consent. That Latin tag haunts the western response to the situation in Israel. We’re already seeing, amid the rage and grief, people being called out for what they don’t say as much as for what they do.

But what are those of us – the ordinary schmoes, the many bystanders – who don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of Israel/Palestine, a clever take on the geopolitical implications, or a shrewd understanding of the hidden hands at work, to say? Who see only horror clambering over horror, to which any amount of historical or geopolitical subtlety seems, viscerally, to miss the point. What is the appropriate response?

There are voices who will insist that condemning Hamas’s terrorist atrocities is only meaningful if you condemn, or already have condemned, the dozens of Palestinian children killed each year by the IDF.