It’s not Netanyahu’s fault that Jews in Europe are afraid

Have you seen the prices for houses in Israel? Astronomical, mate. You wouldn’t believe it. An arid and perpetually embattled country which everyone has recently decided to hate, and with a bloody great big wall topped with razor wire running through the middle of it — I’d have expected the cost of a nice four-bed would be comparable to what you’d pay in Rwanda, say, or Myanmar. Not a chance. Down south, in Eilat, it’s millions and millions and millions of quid, just to be oven-basted by the extremist sun and then eaten by a shark. It’s not much better in the nicer parts of Tel Aviv, either, such as Jaffa — more than a million pounds for 150 square metres of living space, without a view of the torpid Med.

I suppose you could get a decent-sized home in Sderot comparatively cheaply — a mile from the border with Gaza and described (although probably not in the estate agent’s brochure) as the ‘bomb shelter capital of the world’. Every day or so, a rocket pings across from the supposed nation of Palestine, bang, you’re dead. That would keep you on your toes, no? Except not many Sderotis are killed this way, because Israel is incomparably more competent than Hamas and shoots the rockets down, the rockets sent by a terrorist administration which has made a living out of pretending to be a victim and somehow convincing the PC world of this delusion.

Most popular

Arthur Roffey

Douglas Murray has been blacklisted in Berlin

There are the newer settlements on the West Bank, out towards the River Jordan — they might be good value, couple of olive trees in the back yard, lights of Amman twinkling in the distance. But do you want to be woken in the middle of the night by some maniacal jihadi with the IQ of a bowl of stewed okra tunnelling into your open-plan kitchen-diner, a pound of Semtex taped to his stomach, yelling the Allahu Akbar business? Probably no worse than living in Tower Hamlets or Bradford, mind.