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News from the Middle East is so awful, opening such dreadful vistas, that I am left numbed. Hamas’s terrorist attack, its hostage-taking are inexcusable; at the same time Israel’s political course prompted a BBC journalist to ask a pundit yesterday, ‘Could Israel not see this coming?’ I keep thinking of a sequence from Spielberg’s Munich from 2005. Avner Kaufman’s Mossad unit, working secretly, winds up in Athens sharing let accommodation with a Palestinian group. Tension is high, yet there is the possibility of encounter at a human level. There’s a wonderful scene with a radio. Out in the hallway, the leaders of each unit talk – really talk, with a flicker of understanding. They could be brothers. A door could be opening. At the end of the exchange, one says, as if speaking for both, ‘Home is everything’. The following day they are fighting each other to the death. There is a parable in this. Unravelling now in the Holy Land is the curse of Lamech, ‘If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold’ (Genesis 4.24): a spiral of vengeance with no end. Men must choose to end it, led by the voice of God, one of whose Biblical names can be read to mean, ‘He who says: Enough!’
