Israel

I’ve never been sorry that I left education at 17, armed with nothing but my raw talent and splendid rack. The conformity and unworldliness which you need to have if you want to basically stay at school till you’re 21 are things I despise students for – and haven’t these character traits had a lovely outing during the current ugly outbreak of campus Jew-hatred? Jews have never been popular at universities; the phrase ‘too clever for their own good’ might have been invented for them, with a world population of 0.2 per cent taking a whopping 22 per cent of Nobel prizes. The mediocre spawn of the ruling class once

‘We are the victims… therefore nobody should blame us for the things we do.’ Who do you think said this? Some blue-haired campus activist who’s convinced they’re suffering from structural oppression? A trans campaigner, perhaps, who thinks being misgendered is an act of violence? Maybe some other social justice type who feels victimised by everything from statues of old colonialists to un-PC jokes? Actually it was Ghazi Hamad, a leading figure in Hamas. Yes, Hamas is now the armed wing of the culture of victimhood. The genocidal army of the cloying politics of self-pity. One headline paraphrased his comments as follows: ‘We are victims – everything we do is justified.’ If anyone

It is hard to know what to make of the sheer mindless stupidity of some people who claim to support the cause of Palestinians in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Boxes of live rodents have now been released at a number of McDonald’s restaurants, apparently as part of pro-Palestinian protests. One incident took place on Monday in Birmingham. Video footage widely shared on social media shows a man wearing a Palestinian flag on his head, carrying a box filled with mice from the boot of his car and into the McDonald’s branch in the Star City leisure complex. He tips the mice — painted the colours of the Palestinian flag — on

So now we know what a ‘globalised intifada’ might look like. That’s what people chanted for on the streets of London on Saturday. ‘From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada’, they yelled. And now it’s happening, in Dagestan, where last night there was a violent hounding of Israelis arriving in the country by mobs shouting ‘Free Palestine’. What took place at the airport in Makhachkala was truly chilling. Huge numbers of people, some waving the Palestinian flag and holding anti-Israel placards, stormed the airport after hearing that a flight from Tel Aviv was on its way. They were hunting for Jews. It was a pogrom under the auspices of

In every round of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in the last 20 years, I have always wanted an immediate ceasefire. The way I see it, we Israelis were unwilling to pay the price it would cost to remove the Hamas regime and the dangers of Hamas had seemed manageable. Conflicts such as Operations Cast Lead (2008 to 2009), Pillar of Defence (2009), and Black Belt (2019) to name a few), seem like a futile cycle of blood-letting with immense human costs. This was the mainstream view of Israeli liberals.  But now, like almost the entirety of the Israeli left, I believe that in our current situation an immediate ceasefire

The atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October have been revealed in their terrible savagery. There are accounts of dead babies, their bodies riddled with bullets, entire families burnt alive in their homes, women and girls raped and killed. Bodies tortured and mutilated beyond recognition. Israelis thought that the world would finally recognise Hamas for what it truly is; an Islamist terror organisation seeking to destroy Israel. It did not.  Since the war started, there has been an explosion of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred. Although Western leaders and large proportions of the public were shocked by Hamas’s atrocities and expressed support for Israel, the streets of London, Paris, Toronto and

Keir Starmer is losing grip on his party’s position on Israel. So far, over 25 Labour councillors have quit over Starmer’s comments on the conflict following the attack by Hamas on 7 October. The Labour leader angered his party when he suggested in an interview with LBC that Israel ‘has the right’ to withhold power and water from Gaza. Starmer has since tried to clarify his comments by meeting with Muslim Labour MPs and calling for a ‘humanitarian pause’ in Gaza to get aid in. However, many in his party want him to go further and call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Nearly a quarter of Labour MPs have publicly

The Secretary General of the United Nations is conventionally thought of as the world’s most high-profile diplomat, charged with the responsibility of bringing calm and astute leadership to bear at times of war and international crisis. This is a core purpose and mission that appears to have escaped the attention of Antonio Guterres, the UN’s current chief. Addressing a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday, Guterres said the situation in the Middle East was growing more dire by the hour and urged all parties to respect and protect civilians. Fair enough and exactly the kind of thing that UN leaders are expected to say. It

If the Israeli public had expected Benjamin Netanyahu to take responsibility for failing to foresee Hamas’s attack on 7 October, for years of neglecting the safety and security of the towns near the border with Gaza and for allowing Hamas to build a substantial armed force – they would’ve been disappointed by his speech on Wednesday night. Netanyahu, in a typical manner, did not accept responsibility. Unlike the IDF’s Chief of the General Staff, Herzi Halvi, and the head of Israel’s general security service Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, both of whom have publicly admitted to failures for predict the attack, Netanyahu declared that an investigation into the events will take

In an address to soldiers on Saturday, Israel’s chief of staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi outlined the aims of the country’s looming ground incursion into Gaza. ‘Our task is to destroy Hamas activists and their infrastructure’. But, he added, this will not be ‘an easy task’.  That’s an understatement, to say the least. Despite the bravado and masochism expressed by Israeli generals, the war has so far caused the death of more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and troops and the kidnapping of 222 hostages (among them 30 children). Another 200 are missing. The ground invasion of Gaza will likely be even more costly in terms of lives lost. The war

It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a ‘tribalism’ that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in Kenya. One pernicious aspect of mutually hostile groupsterism is prix fixe politics. Your side shares a rigid, prescribed collection of beliefs, and joining the club entails embracing every single one, while despising a compulsory roster of enemies and backing the folks on your team – whatever friend or foe may say, whatever friend or foe may do. As in French restaurants, there are no substitutions. Letting go of indefensible positions your gang is ‘supposed’ to maintain is a relief Rarely has set-menu morality been put on more vivid display than