Foreign affairs in a native land

Went to London today, not to see the queen, but to attend the Foreign Office job fair being held off King Charles' Street. Accompanied by Jon Williams, we went through the rudimentary rucksack checks, de rigeur for any access to government premises, and onto the rarerified surroundings of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It was a freebie fest. I picked up one ringbinder folder, one map of Europe, one keyring, one ribbon keyring holder that you put round your neck, one CD-ROM of Foreign Policy Matters (ho-ho, what a pun), two pens (one UK Trade and Investment, the other UK Office of the European Parliament), one bookmark detailing how much power each country holds in the European parliament, one toffee sweet a bit like Finnish salmiakki, one over-sweet cake from the Indian subcontinent, a savoury pastry wrap with meat inside also from India and many, many brochures. And that wasn't all that was going on offer. Lucky, I took a rucksack (although there were FCO bags that wouldn't look out of place in Selfridges available). With the food alone, it shouldn't have been a recruitment day for the Foreign Office, they should have invited in the homeless. It was so crowded around every table it was hard to see the attractions. I wasn't impressed by the MENAD (Middle East and North Africa Department) table - they weren't giving away anything. There was a video in the Locarno Suite, with talking heads gushing about all the work they did. There was one rather exciting part where officials were rescuing British nationals from forced marriages in Asia. First, an official in glasses was saying to frightened women "we'll take you directly to Islamabad [and from thence to an airport]" and then it was like "go, go, go" as they hurried through dusty backstreets (with all the jerkiness of a handheld camera) and into a waiting minivan and then quickly sped off. The video did include the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sherard Cowper-Coles, whose name I think was intended to rattle any oiks not fresh out of Oxbridge. In the main courtyard, they were some rather vacuous displays with cringeworthy exhibits in perspex boxes. To illustrate climate change, one box had a dehydrated shrub sticking out of a clump of sandy earth; another, to show how important international finance is, had a pile of old Financial Times papers inside. Pitiful. There were plenty of jovial Foreign Office people wandering around, happy to take questions, so you could avoid the crush at the tables, but neither Jon nor myself availed ourselves of the opportunity. The tables were a bit of a red herring anyway, since you would get posted wherever the FCO deemed you should go. I had got the basics of what the Foreign Office was like from two officials present at a voluntary lecture at Kent Uni back in May 2005. We were there for an hour and coming out at 11.45am, we observed a massive queue to get in, snaking round the corner of King Charles' Street and right back along it, whereas we had next to no queue at all.
I've been doing some thinking with all these historical comparisons flying about being applied to Israel. My initial feeling motioned towards the Empire of Germany in 1914, feeling surrounded by enemies and lashing out, incidentally causing a world war. With the news that more than half a million Lebanese are internally displaced by this war, my mind turned to Serbia and its wars in the former Yugoslavia, but you can't say that. Those wars were a result of nasty old Slobodan Milsosevic, cuddly Ehud Olmert couldn't do that. I don't want to disown those images altogether, but a more prescient idea has come to mind. Israel is the Millwall of the Middle East. "No-one likes us, we don't care," is their mantra and they take to extreme violence to prove how hard they are, to cite a few of the similarities. Some Millwall supporters would say that, this too is a historical comparison, given their attempts to clean up their off-field antics. Though the Israelis may believe it, it's not the case that everyone doesn't like them - the US government, for example, which is shipping 'smart' bombs to them, just as Israel criticises Iran and Syria for smuggling rockets to Hizbullah. Maybe, because they were smuggled weapons rather than being above-board licensed destruction was what Israel took offence at. The UN, the EU, Russia and China all take an opposing view.