I DON'T usually shout at my TV but I roared at it last week. I was watching the BBC’s Question Time and the journalist Melanie Phillips was talking. Melanie is Jewish and these days, she told us, she lives mainly in Israel. She also told us that Israel was perfectly entitled to “defend itself” (her words, not mine) and that Hamas and Hezbollah, the two freedom fighter/terrorist groups involved in the Middle East conflict, want to re-enact the Second World War holocaust and eliminate all the Jewish people. 

While I found myself swearing horribly as she spoke, she did make one valid point. During the Second World War, Britain bombed civilians in German cities as part of their war against Nazism. However, as Philips almost certainly knows, copying Britain’s bombings during the Second World War doesn’t make Israel’s mass slaughter of innocent Palestinians anything other than a breach of international law. 

There are three rules governing aerial attacks in wartime: military necessity, distinction and proportionality.

Israel may claim that its bombing of Gaza is necessary to defeat Hamas, but it will have the opposite effect: just watch Palestinians lining up to join Hamas or its successor when this round of slaughter ends. 

As to a distinction between civilians and combatants, Israel is clearly guilty. Again and again it has bombed hospitals, refugee camps, Palestinian homes. 

And proportionality: well over 31,000 innocent Palestinians have been killed in response to the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7 last. You don’t need to be good at sums to see how Israel is responding in a hugely disproportionate way.

So what can Ireland do? Last weekend was St Patrick’s Day and Irish politicians had a chance to tell President Joe Biden, who supplies arms and money to Israel, that he needs to stop funding the Israeli death machine. 

An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar said he wasn’t going to be finger-wagging or ticking off the US President (good move, Leo), but he would urge Biden to bring about a ceasefire. Biden responded by saying that he’s hopeful there’ll be a ceasefire inside the next few weeks. Afterwards, Joe and Leo shook hands.  

Some news from the world of hard realities: no matter what or how Varadkar spoke to Biden, it won’t have made the slightest difference to US Middle East policy. Where it might have made a difference was in US policy towards Ireland. Biting the hands that feeds you is usually an unpromising approach to international politics. That said, self-respect demands that sometimes we speak truth to power.

There’s a lesson for us here. Might may not be right, but it tends to get its way. Ireland swings a very feeble punch in international politics world. Of course Biden is guilty of genocide by association and if he wished he could bring an end to the conflict in the Middle East immediately. If Israel’s supply of bombs and tanks was stopped, so would the bombardment of Gaza. 

A woman in the Question Time audience declared herself “a proud Jew” and recalled how the British government had refused to speak to the republican terror group the IRA, so the same should apply to the terrorist group Hamas. Her argument sort of fell apart when presenter Fiona Bruce pointed out that the British government did talk to the IRA. 

Melanie Phillips berated the studio audience: they didn’t agree with her so they didn’t know what they were talking about. Hamas, Phillips declared, had started this 'war' with its horrible attack on Israel on October 7, so of course Israel was entitled to defend itself by reducing Gaza to rubble and killing over 31,000 men, women and children. As to hunger, “the food is being stolen by Hamas". What’s more, "The Israelis do not want to kill Palestinians in Gaza; it's the last thing they want.”

The Yiddish word ‘chutzpah’, meaning barefaced insolence, could have been invented for Phillips. Her words exemplified the dictum that in war, truth is the first casualty – except that Gaza is not the site of a war, it’s the site of a slaughter.

Come November, Biden may yet regret his stubborn backing of Israel's scorched-earth carnage.