Probably a betting person would say Lindsay Hoyle is still likely to cling on to his job, but from a historical perspective he’s now become one of the very few Speakers who does/did not enjoy more or less universal support and respect among MPs. I suspect it will bother him greatly that several dozen MPs have openly called for him to go. In his quieter moments he must wonder if he would be on firmer ground today if he hadn’t made the bizarre decision to visit Israel in November with the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, described in her Wikipedia biography as a “far right diplomat”.
But there are any number of people who would be on stronger ground now if they hadn’t said and done some very strange things back in the autumn. I’ve gone back and taken a look at an article put out by the Spectator on 15th October entitled ‘Ireland’s disgusting response to the Israel attack’. What was so disgusting about Ireland’s response? Basically a number of tweets by random people (which of course the Irish government had no control over) and Leo Varadkar urging the Israelis to act responsibly. The bastard. What you’re about to read are genuine quotes from the Spectator. They are not a parody.
“Rather than offering unequivocal support and succour to the Israeli people, he began scolding them and stood up in the Dail to warn that any response ‘must be proportionate’…What does that even mean? More than a thousand Israelis have been slaughtered. Young women were raped over the bodies of their dead friends. Holocaust survivors have been kidnapped and brought to Gaza as human shields (or worse) and 260 children who were attending a rave in the desert were brutally slaughtered and defiled. And Varadkar is worried about a disproportionate response?…To make matters worse, Varadkar warned the Israelis that they would quickly lose international solidarity if they went ‘too far’…Varadkar then slammed Israel for cutting off water and electricity to the Gaza Strip, saying: ‘To me, it amounts to collective punishment. Cutting off power, cutting off fuel supplies and water supplies, that’s not the way a respectable democratic state should conduct itself.’…The sickening scenes in the Dail continued throughout the week. Mary Lou McDonald, head of Sinn Fein, ludicrously called for an immediate cease fire.”
Can anyone doubt in retrospect that Leo Varadkar and Mary Lou McDonald had it completely right and the Spectator had it completely wrong? You’d be forgiven for thinking from the text above that the scale of the 7th October attack by Hamas somehow made it arithmetically impossible for any Israeli response to be disproportionate, and yet here we are, only a few months on, and at least 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel – around thirty times the number of Israelis killed by Hamas in October. At least 12,000 Palestinian children have been killed, around thirty-three times the number of Israelis killed at the music festival.
And it’s not as if Varadkar needed any special foresight to know that Israel was likely to go much too far unless it was pre-emptively reined in by the international community. Time and again over decades we’ve seen that Israeli responses to attacks have been crazily disproportionate and have ended up causing ten, twenty, thirty times as many civilian deaths as the original attacks. It was entirely rational in October to be largely preoccupied with the unspeakable horrors the innocent Palestinian civilian population was about to face – unless of course you’re a Spectator columnist who thinks one Israeli life is worth as much as one hundred Palestinian lives, as in fairness most Spectator columnists probably do.
With the benefit of hindsight, the few western leaders who got the tone spot-on by extending huge sympathy to Israel but warning that there could be no blank cheque for revenge attacks do not look like the “disgusting” ones.
