FROM LILLIPUT

THE BIBLE SAID an eye for an eye. Gandhi said that would just leave the whole world blind. Today, a new committee meets for the first time to decide just how many Palestinian civilians Israel has a right to kill following the attack that killed 1,200 if its own citizens on October 7th of this year.

“To date the Israelis have killed 10,000 plus Palestinians,” says Oscar Rubik of the International Committee for Proportionate Responses which has its headquarters in Geneva. “Our job is to decide whether that’s enough, or whether they can justifiably kill more; and if they can how many and who. It’s not just a simple measure for measure, there are many other considerations.

“Naturally, we have taken US Secretary of State Blinken’s views, along with those of people like Leo Varadkar, the Irish leader, who thinks Israel has strayed from justifiable response towards pure vengeance.

“There’s a formula we will use, drawn up by actuaries using computer algorithm. If we get it right, we will actually be able to inform individual Palestinians whether or not their time has come. Allows them to get their affairs in order. If they have any affairs left.

“We should have liked to have been able to advise the Israelis who were slaughtered by Hamas of what was coming, given the actions of Israel over the decades but we have only just received a budget and the ink is not yet dry on our charter. We haven’t even had time to order champagne or co-opt celebrities as ambassadors.

“Naturally, the Israelis are angry, and they want to kick ass. The world has been down this road before. I mean, remember the Americans after 9/11. They just wanted to hit anyone. Or, at least, the Bush administration did. It’s often the case that a government is anxious to dismember perceived enemies in order to cover up its own incompetence. That was certainly a suspicion back in 2001-2003. Some say the Netanyahu administration in Israel is at least marginally impelled by this motive. And, of course, he holds a lot of hot heads in his government who need to be appeased. Indeed, he himself might be considered a moderate compared to some of his colleagues.

“Hamas has committed what is called in the trade ‘an action that cannot be forgiven’. This is often done by guerrilla/terrorist groups to actually bring down hell on their own civilians, thus forcing them into further support for the guerrilla/terrorists. It’s an old strategy, and works a treat when the enemy’s blood is up. Unfortunately, trying to tweezer-out guerrilla/ terrorists from even a marginally sympathetic civilian population is virtually impossible. You would have to kill virtually everyone. Even Israel cannot achieve that. Try as some of its people might.

“They could displace them, push them by sheer force of violence into the Egyptian Sinai, but that just moves the problems a small distance and also makes Egypt unstable. The last thing Israel wants is an Egypt on the warpath. That’s why our work is really cut out for us. We have numbers to calculate, strategies to analyse and proposals to make. Lives are at stake. If we can just work out how many Palestinians the Israelis can justifiably annihilate then we can see if this business can be ended.

“Of course, by that stage we’ll be planning for the next Palestinian proportionate response, won’t we?”