'In all the years I have been a Conservative Friend of Israel," wrote Alastair Burt, the former Foreign Office minister, in the JC last week, "I have never known such a hesitation over actions of an Israeli government."
He was alluding to the strength of parliamentary feeling in the symbolic vote of MPs to recognise an independent Palestine. And it's a fair point. As a friend of Israel, I know precisely what he means. It seems to me unlikely that a parliamentary vote will hasten a negotiated end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but not ignoble to hope for it.
Those of us who work within the media have an obligation to explain what the practical obstacles are to achieving a just two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. Here's my explanation.
In the southern Israeli town of Sderot, a mile from the Gaza border, there is a squat, reinforced police station. If you walk through the building and into the back yard, as I've done, you see row upon row of spent rockets. Some of these are sophisticated and some are crude, and all of them are deadly. They have been fired at the town. Their remnants are carefully collected by the authorities. Thousands of missiles have been launched at Sderot in the past decade.
Regardless of its political complexion and policy on settlements, every Israeli government has the right and the obligation to defend its citizens from attack.
Israel has an obligation to defend its citizens from these attacks
Elsewhere in Sderot is a huge former warehouse. At a cost of $5 million, met by American donors, it has been converted into a heavily fortified play area for the town's children. It is a place where they can play as other children do, safely and without the trauma of fearing that death may strike at any moment - except that they must play indoors.
That is the context in which Israeli forces struck at Gaza in the summer.
Amid the inevitable fog of war were horrific scenes. Peter Beaumont of the Guardian wrote a harrowing, first-hand account of witnessing the deaths of four Palestinian boys on a Gaza beach from Israeli shelling. It stays with me. It seems unlikely that Israel's military incursion can enduringly stop missile attacks from Gaza. Israel's government is doubtless calculating, though, that Operation Protective Edge has reinforced deterrence and thereby secured a period of relative quiet.
Will Israel's tactics have that effect? Don't ask me. I'm just a British newspaper pundit. As a profession, we tend to strike strong positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict regardless of how familiar we are with the politics of the region.
Many of my peers assert that the problem is Israeli occupation, though Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
For my part, I acknowledge the force of the comment made by Tony Blair, as Prime Minister, during that Second Lebanon War. For this to stop, he said (meaning the Israeli military action), that has to stop (meaning the missile attacks on Israeli civilians).
Among the reasons I admire the Jewish national movement is that historically it has sought pluralism and been willing to face down its own extremists.
When there is eventually a sovereign Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel, that compromise will accord with the finest ideals of Jewish nationalism. But such a territorial arrangement would not satisfy Hamas as it is presently constituted, because Hamas seeks the annihilation of Israel.
There are things that Israel can negotiate, but not that, and it is frivolous for outsiders to expect otherwise.
