Prince William should keep quiet about Gaza

‘William: Fighting in Gaza must be brought to an end’, bellows the Daily Telegraph‘s front page today, next to an image of a distressed-looking Prince of Wales. Call me a Cromwellian, but what century are we in? I thought the days of British royals haughtily issuing moral instructions, least of all to foreigners, were behind us.

I find William’s intervention in the Gaza crisis deeply troubling. To be fair to him (briefly) he didn’t quite order the Israelis to quit their pursuit of Hamas. But he did signal his moral revulsion for the war. And that raises serious questions about the role of the royals. Do we really want our future king wading in on geopolitical matters? I don’t.

My first question is this: why is William, it seems, more moved by this conflict than by other recent wars? He laments the ‘terrible human cost of the conflict’ and the ‘sheer scale of human suffering’. Okay. No one will deny that what is happening in Gaza is awful. But there has been human suffering in Yemen in recent years, too. And Myanmar. And Darfur. Where were his agonised reflections on those calamities?

Thousands have died in the Myanmar civil war in recent years. More than two million have been displaced. Hundreds of thousands have perished in the Saudi-Yemen conflict since 2014. Then there’s Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. William made no grand official comment on that imperious outrage against humanity. Instead we had to rely on reports of things he was overheard saying at an event.

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Sean Thomas

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So what about those wars, William? Do you believe ‘too many’ were killed, as you now say about Gaza? If you did, why didn’t you say so, on official princely paper? That’s the trouble with his public emoting over Gaza, his press-released pain for the world to see: it invites speculation on his feelings towards other global conflicts.