The right of self-defence

Barack Obama got to the heart of the matter in July when he visited Sderot in Israel, a town in range of Hamas missiles. ‘If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep,’ Mr Obama said, ‘I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect the Israelis to do the same thing.’ No less acutely, he observed that it is ‘very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation state, does not recognise your right to exist, has consistently used terror as a weapon and is deeply influenced by other countries’.

As the rest of the world makes one of its periodic moral flyovers to scrutinise the latest round of bloodshed in the Middle East — and none can doubt the terrible human cost of the Israeli assault on Gaza — it is as well to recall the sequence of events that led to the air-strikes. Hamas (which controls the Gaza Strip that Israel quit in August 2005) and Israel had been observing a nervous six-month ceasefire brokered by the Egyptians. Israel offered a resumption of trade with Gaza if the violence ceased completely. It did not. Even at its lowest level, 15 to 20 rockets were still raining down on Israel each month. Hamas also abused the cessation of violence to re-arm itself via the underground tunnels that run from Gaza into Egypt. The Islamist terror group then announced the end of the ceasefire, claiming that Israel’s refusal to resume trade was a demonstration of its bad faith. On Wednesday, 70 rockets were fired on Israel. Three days later, Israel began its assault on Gaza.