“AT times of war, the art of strategy is to align military means with political ends,” Lawrence Freedman once said. Yet Labour’s timid response to Israel’s year-long war on Palestine results from a failure or refusal to recognise that Israel’s strategy — its military means — is based on what has become a very clear and transparent political end.

This is the destruction of any prospect of a two-state — or any other — solution by the elimination of any viable infrastructure that could be the basis of a Palestinian state.

If their objectives were ever “limited” to the destruction of Hamas’s military capabilities, Israel’s goals have become the realisation of their long-term nirvana — the creation of a “Greater Israel” covering all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea.