Israel today bombed Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, killing over 200 people and wounding many more. Many observers expect ground forces to follow in a limited invasion shortly. Once again Israel has timed its actions precisely; ahead of domestic elections and timed to coincide with the transition of the US presidency from George Bush to Barack Obama on January 20. As ever it will be gambling that it can gain what it wants before the US, western nations and the likes of China and Russia respond to Arab outrage and opinion in their own countries (outside the US anyway) that the Israeli action must cease. Israel took a similar gamble in its recent invasion of Lebanon and that backfired disastrously, Hamas there fought back and the Israelis were forced to withdraw in a de facto defeat. Already there are the usual noises; the UN secretariat has condemned the assault, the US and Britain have said, steady on chaps but it's still the fault of Hamas for firing a few rockets (disregarding the year-long wholly illegal Israeli siege of Gaza) while the Israelis maintain that they are protecting their borders and themselves (although Gaza isn't Israeli territory, even by the most elastic Israeli definition). As ever the key player will the United States. Israel is wholly dependent on US money and weaponry. In the Yom Kippur War in the 1970s it very nearly lost to Egypt and Syria when the US was initially reluctant to bail it out as Israel had refused to retreat to the its original borders following the Six Days War in 1967. Since then the US has supported anything and everything that Israel has done, seeing it as a buttress against hostile middle eastern nations and a possible launching pad for action against Iran. Even the Republicans, who had previously devoted their time to keeping Jewish people out of their smart golf clubs, became fully signed-up supporters of the fantastically powerful US Jewish lobby, previously the territory of the Democrats. So unless this is all done and dusted in a couple of weeks, highly unlikely in the Middle East, Barack Obama will have yet another nightmare to deal with. He can hardly, with a name like his, turn round and tell the Israelis where to get off. Which is exactly what the Israelis are banking on. But Israel is no longer the plucky, amazingly liberal and courageous outpost on the Mediterranean that, rightly or wrongly, was ceded to persecuted Jews in the aftermath of the Second World War (the original, typically ambiguous, Balfour declaration from the British government offering Jewish people a Palestinian homeland was in 1917). It's now increasingly behaving like a flat track bully towards its neighbours. And the country is increasingly dominated by right-wing extremists, many of the most eloquent from New York. So we look as though we have yet another full-on Middle Eastern crisis on our hands as we go into 2009.