WHAT was he thinking? Scotland’s External Affairs Secretary Angus Robertson meeting with a senior Israeli diplomat has, understandably, provoked fury within the SNP.

No wonder Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK, Daniela Grudsky, is smiling so profusely as she poses with Robertson. Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Gaza has left the state more isolated than ever, with public opinion dramatically shifting against it in the states which provide weapons, aid and diplomatic and political support.

The mealy-mouthed statement which was released in the aftermath of the meeting says it all. If Robertson had used the meeting to confront Grudsky over one of the great crimes of our age, you would expect a furious response – after all, Israeli authorities monster even the mildest critics.

Instead, she claimed they had discussed releasing hostages, and that Israel was “looking forward to cooperating” with Scotland in areas such as culture and renewables.

READ MORE: Gaza death toll passes 40,000 Palestinians killed by Israel

A subsequent government statement clarified he had reiterated official calls “for an immediate ceasefire by all sides in Gaza”, with no mention of the mass slaughter of civilians or arms sales. While other Western governments disgraced themselves by rushing to support what Israel’s leaders and officials made clear from the start would be a crime of historic proportions, the previous Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf took a different position.

He demanded not only a ceasefire from the beginning, but denounced Israel for collective punishment. That was courageous at the time but vindicated with time.

Some may say that Scotland must engage in order to have leverage over Israel. This is not only naive, it wilfully fails to understand the gravity of the crime.

During the days of Apartheid South Africa, it was understood that the Pretoria regime had to be isolated, rather than legitimised. Well, Israel is not just practising apartheid – as human rights organisations from Amnesty International and Israeli NGO B’Tselem have argued long before the October 7 attacks – but it is now also inflicting a genocide.

In the week Robertson posed with this delighted Israeli diplomat, the official death toll in Gaza surpassed 40,000. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz pointed out this week, as a proportion of Gaza’s population, this easily makes Israel’s onslaught one of the deadliest conflicts of our age, if “conflict” is an appropriate description for genocide.

It means around 2% of Gaza’s population has been killed in just 10 months. That is the same proportion of Syrians who perished in a civil war long regarded as apocalyptic – but that was over the course of 13 years, not 10 months.

It is double the proportion of Iraqis who died in that hideous war, except that is over 20 years. It is four times the proportion of those butchered in the Yugoslav wars, and that was over a decade.

But that 40,000 figure is likely to be a drastic underestimate It excludes thousands buried under the rubble, still classed as missing. It excludes indirect deaths: think cancer patients, those with health conditions – from diabetes to heart problems – pregnant women, newborn babies.

And perhaps above all, the death reporting system has largely collapsed because it depended on a functioning healthcare system and that – hospitals and all – has been violently dismantled. No wonder other health experts offer fatality estimates ranging from 92,000.

Bear in mind, too, that without drastic action, this horror will last for many months – even years – and many more will be slaughtered.

This is one of the great crimes of our age, and Western governments – however feebly, however inadequately – are edging away from their murderous complicity. Keir Starmer once justified war crimes: now his government is gradually shifting under pressure, albeit not enough.

So why would the Scottish Government move in the opposite direction, not least given the SNP correctly tabled a motion in Westminster in February condemning Israel’s collective punishment, and given its long principled stance on arms sales?

Scotland does not have the excuse of having some strong economic imperative for close relations with Israel.

It is making a choice. Having witnessed some of the worst atrocities it is possible to commit – consider the killing of two newborn twins this week, along with their mother and grandmother – there is only one correct position: to isolate one of the most obscene regimes on earth, not to trumpet co-operation in “culture” and “renewables”.

What Robertson has done here is offer legitimacy to a state drenched in blood, rather than use the global reputation Scotland has to punch above its weight and offer moral leadership. After tens of thousands of Palestinians have been – in many cases – slowly cooked or suffocated to death, or both, here is a moral disgrace which must not be forgotten.