Children come first. Press and television, in their own codes of conduct, echo that concern. And not just for Euan Blair or Prince Harry Windsor. If children perish, as they perished at Dunblane, we do not want to see the bodies in the playground nor the parents, engulfed in emotion, talking unwillingly to a prying camera. Children, in the purest sense, are innocents.
Children come first.
But on the West Bank or Gaza, children come first in a different way. Try to compute the victims of this latest uprising, this supposed war, and most of the 130 or so dead already are Palestinians - and, overwhelmingly, most of them are kids, teenage lads well short of their legal majority. Thus mothers sob and fathers choke before our eyes. Schoolteachers talk sadly about empty desks. Oh Arabs, pay attention - the Palestinians are getting killed.