Sparks: Ed Miliband has overturned decades of Foreign Office inertia on illegal Israeli settlements

For forty years the ministry drafted expressions of concern, filed them, and confirmed receipt of its own concern; a minister who issues sanctions instead of sympathy is a clerical error the file has no column for.

Ministers who watched the settlements rise and signed the same empty formula year upon year - how long, I ask, shall we call the patience of the innocent a policy rather than an accomplice?

That a government holding the forms of law should pronounce a thing illegal for decades while permitting it to flourish - this is the arrangement by which conscience is archived without ever being consulted.

Calling a thing wrong for forty years and funding it for forty years: both statements cannot be true, and the one a government acts on is the one it believes.

A wound dressed daily with words but never with medicine grows green with corruption, and the physician who recites the diagnosis each morning has mistaken the liturgy for the cure.

Forty years of statements cost nothing and achieved nothing; the wager has changed - now someone risks something, and the outrage proves only that the previous bet was comfortable.

They wrote forty years of letters deploring the theft, then one man stopped writing and seized the ledger - and the scandal is the ledger, not the man.

The department issued its 160th identical expression of concern, each one duly filed, and the settlements responded by growing another 160 times; the procedure is therefore working exactly as documented.

Riding past the new concrete on the ridge, I counted four settlements where the last traveller recorded one, and the dispatches of concern filed in between are the only fences that never moved.

"We remain deeply concerned by the continued expansion of illegal settlements." Note the verb: the expansion continues, the concern remains - both are permanent fixtures, and the sentence builds nothing so reliably as the thing it condemns.

For four decades the ministry expressed concern while the bulldozers expressed progress, and everyone agreed this was the best of all possible diplomacies - until a minister mistook his office for a conscience.

The Foreign Office deplored those settlements with a sincerity so consistent and so fruitless that the bulldozers learned to set their watches by it.

They called the yearly statement a tradition, but a fence is only a tradition if it fences something; this one stood in an open field for forty years, and pulling it down is the first act of respect it has received.