NOT since the idiot Gavin Williamson has the Ministry of Defence been occupied by someone so out of their depth as Grant Shapps.

A defence ministry in an imperialist state like Britain is best led by someone dwelling in the real world rather than the fantasy domain inhabited by this huckster in a hurry.

Shapps’s sabre-rattling speech this week had him in full deranged mode, dressing his gallop through the world’s hot spots with the tattered raiment of his “rules-based” international order.

Even those who are opposed to Britain’s sycophantic submission to the Atlanticist delusions of the new cold war have an interest in the great offices of state being occupied by rational beings who recognise the balance of power and probabilities.

More than any in the West Asian conflict zone, the Palestinian people have a very firm grasp of regional realities and a very clear idea that rules do not apply to their opprerssors.

They know, given the present balance of probabilities, that there will be no decisive pressure exerted by Israel’s patrons on the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.

They understand that the solution to their national question lies in the best possible combination of resistance and pressure exerted by their allies throughout the world on the Anglo-US imperium.

There has been a decisive change in the balance of world opinion, with the global South opposed to Israel’s Western-backed war on the Palestinian people and very sizeable numbers, even majorities, in the developed capitalist world, wanting a ceasefire.

This has a moral dimension but also reflects the changed political and economic realities that have arisen as the contradictions between the West and the rest open up a whole range of divergent interests.

Where the world’s TV screens show the destruction wrought by Israel’s war machine these images find very little reflection in the Israeli mass media where a strictly policed regime reinforces the notion that the genesis of today’s conflict lies in the events of October 7 rather than in Israel’s foundational flouting of the UN resolutions which established it on a rather more limited portion of Palestinian land than it presently occupies.

Where official Israeli ideology turns on the notion that the post-war establishment of the state of Israel was conceived of by the victorious UN as a solution to the Jewish national question made urgent by the Holocaust it suppresses the fact that this also entailed the establishment of a secure and sovereign Palestinian state.

It is important to remember that many Israelis themselves are from families that were expelled from their Arab and North African lands of origin and have no other citizenship. For them — and all people living on the land from the river to the sea — a national home for Palestinians is the only guarantee of peace and security.

But so long as zionist opinion denies Palestinian rights and even desires the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, there can be no peace, no security and no “rules-based international order.”

Millions of Jewish people throughout the world, especially young Jews in the US and elsewhere, are drawing close to the truth that the question of a secure national home for Jews is bound up with securing a just peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

For such a conception to gain traction among Israelis there must be a recognition that Israel is a multinational state in which a distinct Israeli nation has formed, distinct from the historic Jewish communities in Europe and the diaspora and that the malign conflation of the signs “Jew” and “Israel” is not the future.