Netanyahu's West Bank raid finds 'deeply concerned' still overdue

The Repository of Diplomatic Language occupies the third floor of a beige building near Lake Geneva. It opens at nine. On Saturday the queue began at six.

Nineteen foreign ministries had sent staff to borrow words. The occasion was Hebron. There, Benjamin Netanyahu has announced a siege of the city and neighbouring Halhul after gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers near a checkpoint. Three more soldiers were injured. Two Palestinians were also killed in the exchange of fire.

Netanyahu said residents of the gunmen's home neighbourhoods would all be forced out. He promised mass demolitions of homes. The army has been told to prepare to fully close the West Bank.

I have seen this film before. The cast rotates. The script has not been touched since the first draft.

One copy, never returned

The library holds a single copy of the phrase "deeply concerned". It is the most requested item in the building. It has not been on the shelf since 2002.

"We asked for it back," said Hortense Vauclair, the head librarian, who has worked here for thirty years. "Several times. Each time there was a fresh reason to keep it a little longer."

The word "proportionate" went missing in the 1980s. Staff believe it fell behind a radiator. Nobody has looked, because nobody has asked.

The library does keep the Fourth Geneva Convention. Since 1949 it has forbidden collective penalties against civilians under occupation. It sits in a glass case by the door.

"Nobody borrows it," Vauclair said. "People come in, look at it, and put it back very carefully. As if it might go off."

Halfway down the queue stood a junior attaché from a mid-sized European ministry. He asked not to be named, because he was not sure his country had a position. "I've been sent for 'restraint on all sides'," he said. "If they're out, I'm to bring back 'calm'."

A sequel nobody asked for

As sequels go, this one leans hard on the original. Sealing towns, expelling families, flattening houses: the British did all of it in Mandate Palestine. My own country wrote the emergency regulations in 1945. Israel kept them.

It is the one British export that never seems to go out of stock.

I was in a hotel bar in 1982 when a man told me this would all be sorted out by spring. He ordered another gin. So did I.

"'Condemn' is restricted stock. You need a permission slip from someone very senior, and very senior people are mostly on holiday."

That was Vauclair again, gesturing at a locked drawer behind the counter. It also holds "unacceptable" and "consequences". The drawer has been opened twice this century, both times by accident.

Overdue fines owed by the nineteen ministries now exceed the value of the building. The library once considered suspending their borrowing rights.

"Then we realised nobody would notice," Vauclair said. "They know the phrases by heart. They only come here for the ritual."

Meanwhile, the checkpoints

The words travel well. The roadblocks do not move. Al Jazeera reports that roadblocks are already disrupting schools and medical care in one West Bank village. In Hebron, families are waiting to learn whose house is on the list.

None of them were in the queue in Geneva. Fox News has the shooting itself. Nobody has an account of the paperwork that follows, because it is the same paperwork as last time.

Closing time

By noon the reading room ran out of chairs. By two, "deeply troubled" had been lent to all nineteen ministries at once. The library insists this is impossible. It happens every time.

The attaché left with "calm". It was creased down the middle and smelt faintly of 1993. "It'll do," he said. "It always does."

The library closes at five on Saturdays. Vauclair switched off the lamps and left the Convention out on the counter, open at the right page.

"In case someone wants it," she said. Nobody had by the time I left. I have booked a seat for next week. I expect the same queue.