Today there was a vote at the UN about whether or not Israel has committed war crimes during its invasion of Gaza. You'll know what I think about the situation if you follow my Twitter feed - but I was interested in the pattern of voting. The US opposed investigating. It was as far as I could see from a quick glance the only country to do so. Most European countries choose to abstain, and the rest of the world wanted to carry out an enquiry.
I assume that you'd only vote for an investigation if you thought that war crimes by Israel had indeed occurred. I can't imagine many UN delegates were voting out of curiosity. So we have the odd situation that America thinks Israel is basically in the right, Europe can't quite decide and everyone else is opposed to them.
And yet the salient facts are known to everyone. Israel was set up by European Jews who seized a modestly sized territory by force. They were opposed by the original inhabitants, and their neighbours. This would seem to be a state starting out with a fairly clear moral deficit. But there are mitigating factors that might make you more sympathetic. For a start the Jews in Europe had a pretty appalling time during the Second World War. You can sort of see why they felt so strongly that they need their own state. Also Jews throughout the Arab world were expelled in retaliation. So from one point of view you could argue that Israel was a sort of pre-emptive compensation.
You could argue that dividing Palestine between the original inhabitants and the settlers was the fairest outcome. It isn't a strong argument, because even if you can get the balance about right between Jews as a group and Palestinians as a group, it is still going to create winners and losers on both sides. If you've lost your house it isn't much comfort knowing that it is part of an overall equitable settlement.
But it is almost impossible to argue that the Israelis are entitled to effectively control the whole of Palestine and to impose whatever settlement they think fit on the original inhabitants. That this is indeed the actual situation is simply the result of the Israelis having so far succeeded in establishing the military upper hand. It would be better if they didn't commit war crimes while they were at it, but whether or not they have is a relatively minor matter compared to occupying somebody else's country.
But debating the rights and wrongs of the situation is a bit specious. Are we going to intervene and put things right? Even if we knew the optimum solution I can hardly see it being the cause for the United Nations to invade and impose a solution. The Israelis are lording it over the Palestinians because they can and only sending in an army larger than the one they have is going to stop them. The world community is not going to do that. We might as well accept the fact. If the Palestinians ever get the upper hand - and looking at history suggests that they might well do so at some point - they will no doubt impose a solution that suits them. I imagine that would be the extinction of the state of Israel, or at least a very considerable reduction in its size. They won't be able to do this without human rights outrages at least as bad as those that have been imposed on them.
So the reality is that what goes on in that part of the world has been bad, will quite likely stay bad and may well get a lot worse. The world is going to observe from the outside wringing its hands. Why do we continue to have an opinion on the matter? And why is that opinion so divergent across the globe?
There are some politics going on here obviously, with many of the less powerful countries taking a rare opportunity to have a pop at the United States. But the reality is that this is just another example of the way humans like to adopt a position not on the basis of reason, or even morality, but as a way of expressing the kind of person they are.
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