Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll be grim. Because grim is the only way to describe the uncomfortable experience of sitting in the Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv.
A senior IDF commander had just told me an Iranian missile was pointed at the very chair I was sitting in.
He would not reveal how he knew this, but then the intelligence, along with his name, were top secret. Being in Israel is like living on a housing estate where all the neighbours want to throw bricks through your windows, and you cannot be sure where the next brick will come from.
Israel is a highly advanced, beautiful Mediterranean country with a comfy climate. Its people are open and welcoming. But the inhabitants go around with a sense of doom hanging over them.
I have stood on top of the Golan Heights, a natural strategic masterpiece, looking down on Syria and Lebanon, both with bricks ready to throw. The Israelis captured the mountain range from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War. Syria has wanted it back ever since and the United Nations says they should have it.
But this is such a perfect vantage point for keeping an eye on enemies that standing there with Israeli soldiers made it obvious to me why this will never happen. Yet another reason why a solution to conflict in the region seems far away. I have twice visited the country as a guest of the Israeli government. Each time I have come away with a burning sense of injustice for the way Palestinians are treated – not the impression, I’m sure, my hosts hoped to create.
But I also recognised how difficult the two state solution the West has advocated for more than 60 years will be to achieve, threatening as it does Israel’s very existence.
That was brought into sharp and tragic focus by the unspeakable massacres and kidnappings by Hamas on October 7 last year. Nothing can excuse that heinous crime, nor the subsequent rockets Hezbollah fired into northern Israel which killed children and led to 80,000 Israelis fleeing their homes. If Palestine becomes an independent country how could Israel ever tolerate it having its own standing army to which a sovereign state is entitled?
Between 1947-8 eighty per cent of Palestinians became refugees, an event they refer to as the Nakba – the “catastrophe”. A further 200,000 were displaced by the Six Day War.
Many now still live in grotty refugee camps while the Israelis build illegal settlements on their land.
These are not ramshackle shanty towns, but fabulous houses with perfectly tended gardens – bordered at the back by high brick walls to protect against snipers.
Like the Golan Heights, it is clear these are not going anywhere either. There is also some mind-boggling pettiness. I went to a new town on the West Bank built by an ex-pat Palestinian billionaire and designed to give 50,000 residents proper roofs over their heads.
It was fully equipped with a hospital, schools and delightful tree-lined pedestrian precincts, but at the time of my visit only a few hundred people were living there because it was still unfinished.
The reason was the Israelis controlled three kilometers of the access road and would not allow heavy trucks through carrying the materials essential for building work to be completed.
Their justification was they were planning to put that bit of the road into the melting pot of any future peace negotiations, but it seemed unnecessarily harsh nevertheless.
Now with a wider war in the region a distinct threat following Iran’s latest missile strike, there are calls for Keir Starmer to stop telling Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu what to do.
That would involve our PM risking breaking another of the promises he made during his 2019 Labour leadership campaign.
I know cynics will say there is nothing unusual in that. Starmer has already gone back on pledges to raise income tax for the top five per cent of earners, abolish Universal Credit and university tuition fees, give voting rights to EU nationals, and nationalise the energy industry.
But he also said he would ensure the UK was not involved in any illegal foreign wars following the Iraq debacle. A war with Iran may not be illegal, but it would be controversial to say the least and face much domestic opposition.
Which is why Iran and Israel must keep some proportionality in the level of violence used to duff each other up. If Iran, or its Hezbollah or Houthi proxies, attack US military bases in the region, America could be drawn into this war.
And Iran would not be the pushover Iraq was. Some British assets might also be targeted given we were willing to shoot down Iranian missiles.
That could lead us into war, too. And Starmer is right to do his damndest to prevent that.