Hubert Humphrey, US Vice President under Lyndon B Johnson and a Democratic Presidential candidate in 1968, when he was narrowly defeated by Richard Nixon, once issued a statement on the power of extremism which has helped me to make sense of the dilemma now facing Israel.

According to Humphrey, “The language of the time, the rhetoric of extremes, had the awful consequences of forcing almost all of us into simplistic positions….To be heard, the rhetoric in response required claims to be just as simplistic.”

Humphrey’s point was that there was an imperative to meet extremism with extreme counter-claims, similarly expressed in oversimplified language. Nuanced debate was thus rendered impossible. There could be no middle ground in a clash where one or both parties believed that they were engaged in an........

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