Over the last two years, through all the cultural and political convulsions that have arisen out of Israel’s destruction of Gaza – a campaign of mass slaughter carried out with the more or less steadfast assistance and support of powerful western governments – a particular expression has come to characterise the response of those of us who have opposed this moral monstrosity.

Again and again, in all manner of contexts, people speak of this or that person being on either the right or wrong side of history. Francesca Albanese is on the right side of history; Ursula von der Leyen on the wrong side. Palestine Action is on the right side of history; Keir Starmer the wrong side. So on and so forth.

I understand the impulse to speak and think in this way. The genocidal campaign in Gaza, and the moral and intellectual treason of so much of the western political and media class that has facilitated it, has been a profoundly disorienting experience for millions of people.

And the growing suspicion that none of the perpetrators of this atrocity will face any kind of meaningful justice brings with it the sense that we are living in a world increasingly ungoverned by moral norms.

It is a comfort, in such a world, to believe that we will eventually, and inevitably, arrive at some sort of reckoning, and that it will come in the form of the judgment of history.

This idea strikes me as a secular incarnation of an old belief that was once central to a Christian understanding of the world: the immortality of........

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