RUTHFULLY YOURS

David Cameron has got some front. The Foreign Secretary is haranguing Israel over its tragic unintentional killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, and yet he oversaw a war in which such ‘friendly fire’ horrors were commonplace. In fact, more than seven people were slain in accidental bombings under Cameron’s watch.

It was the Libya intervention of 2011. In that Nato-led excursion, in which Cameron, then prime minister, was an enthusiastic partner, numerous Libyans died as a result of misaimed bombs. Things got so bad that the West’s allies took to painting the roofs of their vehicles bright pink in an effort to avoid Nato’s missiles.

In one awful incident, 13 people were slaughtered by our ‘friendly fire’. Their number included not only anti-Gaddafi rebels but also ambulance workers. It was in the wake of this calamity that the rebels got out the pink paint. ‘How to avoid friendly fire? Libya rebels try pink’, said a headline at NBC News.

Yet now Cameron is on his high horse over Israel’s bombing of trucks carrying volunteers from the World Central Kitchen. He is demanding a ‘full, transparent explanation of what happened’. Fine. Three of the dead were British nationals, so it makes perfect sense Britain wants answers. But you would think a former PM who was involved in wars in which other accidents happened would understand that ‘friendly fire’, sadly, is all but inevitable in bloody conflict.

This is not to downplay the horror of what happened in Gaza on Monday. That civilians were killed while trying to help people, while trying to deliver food, is horrendous. It is fitting that the Israeli president Isaac Herzog has apologised for the bombings, and that the Israeli government has promised to get to the bottom of what happened.

And yet there is something off, even something nauseating, in all the Western finger-wagging. It isn’t only Cameron. US president Joe Biden has also weighed in, saying he is ‘outraged’ by the killing of the aid workers. You can’t help but wonder whether he directed similar outrage at his own nation’s military when 37 Afghanis at a wedding party, mostly women and children, were killed by mistake in a US airstrike.

‘Stop killing Afghan civilians’, the then president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, said to the newly elected US president, Barack Obama. And who was Obama’s vice-president? Biden, of course. You would think a man whose own military has killed huge numbers of people in error would understand that these things happen, even if every decent person would rather they didn’t.

Vast numbers of civilians have been killed by accident by the US in recent years. At another wedding party in 2004, this time in Iraq, 11 women and 14 children were killed by American fire. Was there a ‘full, transparent explanation’ for that calamity?

Terrible accidents happen in war. That’s because war is hell. If you hate the war in Gaza, as you should, then you should aim your ire at Hamas, the virulently anti-Semitic terror group that started this war with its pogrom against the people of southern Israel on 7 October. The seven decent souls of World Central Kitchen would be alive today had Hamas not taken the decision to visit its racist barbarism on the Jewish State.

For once war starts, error becomes unavoidable. There are few wars in history – none, perhaps – in which innocents have not perished in the violent maelstrom. What is striking about Israel’s mistake is that it is not being treated as ‘friendly fire’ at all. Instead it is held up as proof of Israel’s evil, evidence of its malevolence.

Across social media, the cry goes up: Israel did this on purpose. It seems Israel is the only state not allowed to make mistakes. Where us decent Westerners kill friends in error, Israel does it intentionally, with malice at its heart. The double standards are staggering. It is hypocritical and ridiculous for the citizens of nations that have accidentally killed far more people than Israel to now lecture Israel about its wayward bombs.

It smacks of bigotry, too. We make mistakes, they commit crimes. We err, they murder. We should be forgiven, they should not. There’s an ironically neocolonialist bent to this fury with Israel, for it bigs up the West, despite its history of war crimes, as a suitable judge and jury of that uppity little state over there.

Indeed, it strikes me that something larger is at work here. It seems that some in the West are seeking to launder their reputations through attacking Israel. From Cameron to Biden, powerful men who have been involved in wars far more horrific and far less justified than Israel’s war on Hamas, are now pontificating against the Jewish State.

The historically illiterate left is lapping up the lectures Cameron, Biden and others are making to Israel. This isn’t ‘anti-imperialism’ – it’s the attempted rehabilitation of Western prestige on the back of bashing Israel. Shame on everyone involved.