Well there's culpability, there's discrimination, there's previous conflicts, there's demonisation, there's theft of land, there's refugee crises, there's proxy fighting, there's standoffs between Arab nations and the west, there's terrorism on both sides, there's blinker-wearing. How far do we go back? 1948? Back to the rampant antisemitism of the 19th century, or to the Holocaust? The Crusades??

So many grievances on all sides and a mass of incompetent interference from western regimes. We all utterly condemn the barbarism perpetrated by Hamas, rightly so. But if you stop at that, you're not seeing the whole miserable picture and you may be indulging in kneejerk I-told-you-so bigotry. We've seen plenty of that in the last ten days.

We need to remember the ordinary people in Gaza and Israel caught up in all this, most of them probably just like us, not particularly political but vulnerable to persuasion by evil people. Hoping against hope, but perhaps the ordinary people in our democracies will be so revolted by all this that they'll eventually get the message through to our leaders, get this stopped. This much and no more. :-(