Among the most shocking aspects of Lloyds’ behaviour is that much of it took place after the 2008 banking collapse, when it depended for its very existence on taxpayer support. By a breathtaking twist, its traders even tried to rig the rescue fund — the Bank of England’s Special Liquidity Scheme. And since we still own 25 per cent of Lloyds’ shares, the British people are ultimately losers from yesterday’s thumping cash penalty.

Yesterday, Mark Carney said Lloyds’ behaviour was ‘clearly unlawful and may amount to criminal conduct on the part of the individuals involved’. This is very strong and explicit language, especially coming from the Governor of the Bank of England. It brands the staff of one of the largest financial institutions in this country as lawbreakers, as also were those involved in the Libor scandal at Barclays, RBS, JP Morgan, Citigroup and all the other big names that have paid fines.

But if those who ran the Libor rackets were lawbreakers, why has nobody been in the dock at the Old Bailey? Come to that, why has not a single banker since the crash of 2008 yet gone behind bars for committing deceits which brought the financial system of the Western world to its knees?

If an editor can go to prison, a bank boss should do likewise if he or she is found to have presided over a culture of criminality, such as Mark Carney identifies at Lloyds in the context of the Libor scandal. The financial services industry has become such a central part of our economy, with such power over all our lives, that it is essential we should regain control of its affairs and enforce justice against its villains. We must find means to police wrongdoing that seems endemic through the system.

Kerry’s mistakes are embarrassing. A senior official in Washington on Sunday rushed to explain to Israeli reporters that the framework — the key terms of which were first published by The Times of Israel, and which then appeared in full on other media outlets — was but a draft that summed up a series of consultations between Kerry and the foreign ministers of Qatar and Turkey, Khalid al-Attiyah and Ahmet Davutoglu. But this is where the mistake begins: The US administration gambled on the camp that supports Hamas, bankrolls it and pushes it to go on shooting.

Kerry and his staff made an outrageous decision to turn their backs on the Egyptian framework for a ceasefire in a manner that encouraged Hamas to continue shooting rockets. This first mistake was exposed by none other than the political leader of the organization, Khaled Mashaal, who said in a press conference in Doha, the Qatari capital, that Kerry had turned to al-Attiyah and Davutoglu two days after the Israeli operation in Gaza began and asked them to push for a ceasefire. At the time, Kerry knew full well that a major Egyptian effort was underway to persuade Hamas to stop firing immediately. By turning to Doha and Ankara behind the backs of Cairo and Jerusalem, Washington — no doubt unintentionally — strengthened Hamas’s resolve against Egypt and Israel.

But the mistakes didn’t stop there. The farce continued with the amateurish draft that was immediately rejected by Israel’s security cabinet; it then reached new heights on Saturday in Paris, when Kerry decided to participate in an international summit on Gaza, attended by his new friends al-Attiyah and Davutoglu as well as the foreign ministers of the European Union, but not by a few players that Kerry apparently perceives as marginal – representatives of Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and, of course, Israel.

It’s hard to say what caused the Obama administration to join forces with the Muslim Brotherhood of all camps — loyally represented by Turkey and Qatar — and turn its back on the movement’s sworn enemy, the Egyptian government. The best case scenario is that it might have been amateurism or a misreading of the situation. In a less ideal scenario, Washington decided to forge an alliance with organizations and entities that would be happy to see Israel disappear from the map. I prefer to bet on the first option, the one that was discussed with such ridicule by the senior Israeli and Palestinian officials — that Kerry just doesn’t understand who’s playing against whom in the Wild Mideast.

Every nation has a story. Israel's is that Arabs have long been unwilling to negotiate with the Jewish state, and that terrorists among the Palestinians want to destroy it. For decades, three significant factors helped make this the dominant Middle East narrative. First, it's correct, at least when applied to the dangerous minority of Palestinians. Second, elite opinion-makers, including journalists and politicians in the West, embraced and amplified the Israeli case. Finally, public opinion in the West, and particularly in the United States, firmly supported Israel.

In the United States, younger Americans are far less likely to say Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip are justified. According to Gallup, these are the percentages of Americans who support the Israeli position, grouped by age: 55 percent of those over 65; 53 percent of those between 50 and 64; 36 percent of those 30-49; and just 25 percent of those 18-29.

Again, none of this is intended to suggest that Israel should bow to Hamas's demands. Israelis must defend themselves. Neither is this a case for or against Israel completing its current mission to shutter terrorists' tunnels and silence the rockets. Rather, it's a warning that Israel's decades-old public relations and political dominance is coming to an end unless the nation's leaders change the narrative and reset their strategic position with moderate Palestinians.

Now, organizations like the Telos Group and the large Christian nonprofit World Vision have joined a small army of ministers and Christian opinion-makers working to reorient Evangelicals’ stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — producing documentaries about the plight of Palestinian Christians, providing theological rationale for a more “balanced” view of the issue, and taking Evangelicals on trips to the Middle East.

The campaign has alarmed America’s most committed Christian supporters of Israel, who acknowledge their rivals’ message is gaining momentum within the church. Support for Israel is weakening among evangelical Christians, prompting a new struggle for the hearts and minds of younger members of America’s largest pro-Israel demographic group.

You may find such calculations callous. They certainly pale in comparison to heart-wrenching photos of dead children on the beach. But they matter a whole lot: If you’ve ever read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, or played Sim City, or just looked out of your window and paid attention to your city’s changing skyline, you know that urban leaders are measured not by what they say but by what they build. And Hamas, almost exclusively, chose to build tunnels, bunkers, and launching pads for missiles.

Now, from a purely military point of view, there is something brilliant about transforming a strip of coastal farmland into a giant concrete aircraft carrier that’s impossible for your enemy to sink. But the idea that Hamas’ tunnels are intended to promote the welfare of Gaza’s 1.8 million civilians, who are forced to live on deck as rockets are fired, is bunk. If the tunnels were truly lifelines for Gazans, as Western apologists occasionally argue, one might expect any reasonably responsible leadership to avoid firing barrages of rockets at civilians inside Israel.

We are left with a harsh realization that makes so many of us, good liberal Jews reared on the principle that nothing stands outside the realm of reason, deeply uncomfortable: There’s no negotiating with Hamas. Not because of some lofty and abstract principle — we don’t negotiate with terrorists! — but because Hamas isn’t here to talk or build or heal the wounded people of Gaza. The organization’s raison d’etre is killing people in order to bring about the rule of its fundamentalist and radically intolerant brand of Islam — they shoot Jews, and they also shoot anyone else the organizations doesn’t like, including Egyptian soldiers, gays, and political opponents from other Palestinian factions.

Anyone with a genuine commitment to human rights — not to mention sympathy for the Palestinian cause — should join Israel in its efforts to rid the world of such sheer evil and topple Hamas. To leave Hamas in power is not a moderate solution to anything. It is to become complicit in the agenda and the actions of a terrorist organization in inflicting terrible and continuing pain not only on its neighbors but also on its own people.

Which is worse? France sending Russia a ship that could be used against NATO allies in the Baltic or the Black Sea? Or Britain's insistence on its right to launder Russian money through London's financial markets? It was an amusing spat, not least because it plays into the stereotypes: Britain versus France, crooked bankers versus cynical politicians. The dispute dominated headlines as Europeans debated the right response to Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine.

As they began to do business in Europe in the 1990s, the Russians learned very quickly about the importance of politically connected companies. As a result, they have begun to acquire shares in more of them. Rosneft, the state-owned Russian oil company - now the target of US sanctions - recently bought 13 percent of the shares of Pirelli, a huge Italian tire company. The president of Rosneft, who would be refused a visa to the United States, is on Pirelli's board. Last year Russian President Vladimir Putin himself came to Italy to announce the creation of a special, billion-euro Russo-Italian investment fund. The result? Italy, not France, Britain or Germany, has most assiduously blocked sanctions on Russia, and Italy is Europe's biggest supporter of Russian "interests" in Ukraine.

However, the lull appeared fragile amid diplomatic tension between Israel and its main sponsor, the United States. Sirens warning of incoming rockets from Gaza sounded in some Israeli communities near the border. Israeli troops meanwhile continued to hunt and destroy cross-border militant tunnels inside Gaza, and it was not clear if Hamas was ready to agree to a prolonged pause.

A single rocket was fired out of the battered coastal territory at the Israeli city of Ashkelon in the first nine hours of Monday, according to the Israeli military, which said it struck two rocket launchers and a weapon manufacturing site in the northern and central Gaza strip.

US President Barack Obama urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday to hold fire unconditionally, while the UN Security Council called on both sides to implement a humanitarian truce that stretched beyond Eid. Tension between Netanyahu's government and Washington has flared over US mediation efforts, adding yet another chapter to the prickly relations between the Israeli leader and Obama. Obama appeared to link Israel's core demand for Hamas to be stripped of cross-border rockets and infiltration tunnels, to a peace accord with the Palestinians that is nowhere on the diplomatic horizon.

Speaking on Sunday, Netanyahu sounded open to easing conditions for the Gaza Strip's 1.8 million Palestinians but said this must be "intertwined" with disarming Hamas. "I think you can't get social and economic relief for the people of Gaza without having an assured demilitarization," he told CNN. A poll broadcast by Israel's Channel 10 television on Sunday said some 87 percent of respondents wanted Israel to continue the operation until Hamas was toppled. Another survey, published in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, found that 86.5 percent of Israel's majority Jews oppose a truce while rocket fire continues and cross-border tunnels remain.

The difficulty for many Germans is to know which side to support: Holocaust guilt has made supporting Israel a doctrine of faith for the German government. And anything that calls Israel's existence into question is beyond the pale. At the same time many Germans are disturbed by the death toll in Gaza and don't agree with Israel's actions.

Can you criticize the Israeli state without being anti-Semitic, many Germans are asking themselves? And, in view of Hitler's legacy, do Germans have the right to tell Israel what to do? No, say some German commentators. Left-wing activists are particularly divided, not knowing if they should fight alleged anti-Semitism or defend the Palestinian victims of what the far-left refers to "capitalist imperialism".

Ironically right-wing extremists are also conflicted. Neo-Nazis have been using the chance to express their anti-Semitic views at other anti-Israel protests this week. But Germany's far-right doesn't like Muslim immigrants either. Suddenly some pretty uncomfortable alliances are being formed.