We thought the United States would step back from the abyss. We believed, and the polls led us to feel sure, that Americans would not, in the end, ha… - Jonathan Freedland

Its origin is 27 March 1945; the 77th anniversary is a little over a week away. Early that morning, at 7.21am, a V2 rocket landed on Hughes Mansions, a block of flats on Vallance Road in the East End. It killed 134 people, more or less instantly. Among them were two sisters, Rivvi and Feige (pronounced fay-ghee). Feige Hocherman was 33 and she left behind two children, a son not yet 11 and a daughter aged eight and a quarter. The little girl was my mother, Sara.
The war was in its final weeks and the bomb that fell that morning would be the very last V2 to land on London. It wasn't a targeted missile, though if it had been it could hardly have delighted its masters more. For of the 134 people killed by that Nazi rocket, 120 were Jews.

This is where you wind up when you view this conflict in monochrome, as a clash of right v wrong. Because the late Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right. Two peoples with deep wounds, howling with grief, fated to share the same small piece of land.
So, this is not a football game. It has no need for spectators who root for one team against the other, goading their chosen side to go to ever further extremes. This is not a game, for one grimly obvious reason. There are no winners – only never-ending loss.

But Hamas can enjoy a wicked smile of satisfaction: it laid a deadly trap – and Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel right into it.