World

Friday

Limor Simhony Philpott

‘Humanitarian pauses’ will help Israel defeat Hamas in Gaza

As the IDF continues to close in on Hamas in the heart of Gaza, the US announced that Israel will implement daily four-hour ‘humanitarian pauses’ in fighting in the north of the strip. Hours after the announcement yesterday, during a press conference, the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant spoke rather differently about the pauses. He stated that Israel would not stop the fighting against Hamas until all the hostages held by the group had been returned. Only then could proper humanitarian pauses go ahead. The inconsistent messaging from the American and Israeli sides regarding these humanitarian pauses reflects the American administration’s frustration with Israel’s refusal to pause the fighting. The

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Can Germany’s ‘Rwanda-style’ migrant plan keep the AfD at bay?

Germany is facing one of the greatest political upheavals in its modern history. Polls indicate that the ruling coalition would gain only a third of the vote between its three parties if an election were to be held now. Meanwhile the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has emerged as the second most popular party. With concerns about immigration one of the hot topic issues, Scholz’s government is now considering a Rwanda-style plan to process asylum claims in partner states outside of the EU. Much is at stake. If it works, it will be a sea change on immigration policy that will affect the entire EU bloc. If it fails or

Jawad Iqbal

The pointless spectacle of the pro-Palestine march

Now that Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has defied calls to ban a pro-Palestinian march through London on Armistice Day, attention inevitably turns to what might happen on the day itself. Will there be violence? Could groups intent on causing mayhem splinter from the main protest? Will counter-protesters clash with pro-Palestinian demonstrators? How will the police maintain control of events on the ground and ensure the protest passes off peacefully?  Well down the list of questions and issues is Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, ostensibly the reason for this weekend’s public protests. That is revealing in itself: the actual conflict is almost a side show in the

Thursday

Andrew McQuillan

Suella Braverman has a point about Northern Ireland

Suella Braverman’s description of pro-Palestinian protests as being ‘disturbingly reminiscent of Ulster’ has given the Province’s political class yet another reason – not that they need one – to chunter on at length.  The professionally po-faced, from SDLP leader Colum Eastwood to Stephen Farry of the Alliance Party, dutifully trod the path to X/ Twitter, or whichever broadcasting studio would take them, to intone about how off piste the Home Secretary had gone. They said Braverman’s remarks showed how ignorant about the reality on the ground in Northern Ireland she was.  For all the claims the Home Secretary doesn’t know what she’s talking about when it comes to Northern Ireland, she

Wednesday

Anshel Pfeffer

Benjamin Netanyahu is increasingly seen as Israel’s curse

Jerusalem On Tuesday, I was driving down to an Israeli army headquarters on the border with Gaza as a massive convoy of police cars and black bullet-proof limousines forced me onto the side of the road by the town of Ofakim. In Israel, only one man travels in a convoy that large.  It was 7 November, a month after the Hamas attack on Israeli communities in which 1,400 were murdered and the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza began. Even during peacetime the Prime Minister’s movements are shrouded in secrecy until he is safely back in one of his homes or offices.  Many Israelis, including those who voted for

Slavoj Žižek

The unfathomable depths of Palestinian despair

Away from Gaza, things are getting worse in the West Bank. I’ve received many messages from Palestinian friends raging at what is going on there. To get an idea of the despair of West Bank Palestinians, remember the suicidal attacks on the streets of Jerusalem a decade or so ago. Usually what happened was an ordinary Palestinian would approach a Jew, pull out a knife and stab him, realising they would be instantly killed by the other people nearby. Obviously I condemn these acts, though it’s worth noting that they involved no message, no shouting of ‘Free Palestine!’ There was no large organisation behind them, no big political project, just

Leslie Croxford

How Egyptians see the Gaza crisis

I was invited to speak at the memorial service for my colleague and friend, Professor Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri, at the American University in Cairo. It was to be held at the downtown Cairo campus, overlooking Tahrir Square. Doris had worked as a professor of English literature at the university from 1955 to 2017. The same age as the Queen, she too had the aura of a fixed point in the firmament. I live in a new suburb 15 miles west of Tahrir Square. Like Cairo’s other new suburbs, it developed in the Mubarak years without plans for properly connecting it to the overcrowded capital its wealthy citizens sought to escape.

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

TikTok teens have an anti-Semitism blind spot

How could anyone hate Lily Ebert? The 99-year-old from Golders Green dedicates her life to teaching younger generations about the Shoah. Lily survived Auschwitz, where her mother and two of her siblings were gassed, and she went on to found the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre. For her contributions to Holocaust education, she was awarded the British Empire Medal. One of the tools she uses to reach young people is TikTok. Her account, managed by her 19-year-old great-grandson Dov Forman, has 2.1 million followers, drawn to educational videos from a woman who has lived some of the very worst of history. Then, one month ago, when Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis in one

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

‘The party of abortion’ is winning

Not so long ago, Republicans called Democrats the ‘party of abortion’ as an insult, or a pre-election attack line. Now, it is the Republicans, as the party against abortion, who are losing. This is a grim reality for Americans who believe that the unborn deserve protection.    Since Dobbs, in elections where abortion is on the ballot, the party of abortion keeps winning Since June last year, when the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs, overturning the right to an abortion under Roe vs Wade and returning the issue back to state legislatures, the Democrats have won over and over in elections all over America by campaigning to ‘preserve access’, as they like to say, to

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The frightening bigotry of the French left

France’s most infamous antisemite is back in the headlines. At the weekend, the president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, declared in an interview that he didn’t believe Jean-Marie Le Pen was an antisemite. This came as a surprise to many given that the 95-year-old Le Pen, who founded the National Front in 1972, has been condemned on six occasions by French courts for just such bigotry.  Le Pen’s most notorious declaration was during a television interview in 1987 when, discussing the gas chambers, he said that although he didn’t deny their existence they were nonetheless a ‘small point of detail in the second world war’. The remark caused uproar

Sean Rayment

To destroy Hamas, Israel must continue bombing Gaza

Israel has no other choice but to carry on bombing Gaza if it wants to destroy Hamas. Its campaign of relentless air strikes and long range artillery barrages has so far been effective at eroding Hamas’ military capability and limiting the Islamist group’s capacity to kill more Israelis. Hamas has been unable to respond in any meaningful way since Israel’s offensive began. It has been limited to hit and run attacks, inflicting only relatively light casualties. Israel’s unrelenting bombardments, combined with the internet and mobile phone outages, will have caused chaos within Hamas’ command structure. Palestinians are dying because Hamas attacked Israel and killed without mercy But the bombing campaign

Jim Lawley

Spaniards are horrified by an amnesty for separatists

When has a government ever offered an amnesty to fugitives from justice in order to stay in office? That’s what’s happening in Spain at the moment. Following July’s general election the only way in which the caretaker prime minister, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, can cling to power is by cutting a deal with a hodgepodge of small parties, including two Catalan separatist groups. Their price includes a general amnesty for those indicted for their involvement in the illegal referendum on independence for Catalonia in 2017 and the subsequent unilateral declaration of independence. In July’s election Sánchez’s left-wing party, PSOE, won just 121 seats. The support of the radical left party

Constantin Eckner

Will Germany’s ‘Rwanda-style’ migrant plan ever materialise?

Germany’s chancellor is cracking down on asylum seekers – but he is not doing so willingly. The country’s federal government is weighing up a system – similar to the UK’s mooted ‘Rwanda plan’ – for asylum applications to be processed abroad. But Olaf Scholz, who was essentially cornered into the announcement following a marathon session with regional leaders from Germany’s 16 state governments, is sceptical. ‘There are…a whole series of legal questions,’ Scholz said after emerging in the early hours of Tuesday morning from an acrimonious meeting with state leaders. The plan, a 17-page agreement, is an attempt to counter the rise of far-right parties like Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

Tuesday

Hina Husain

Why isn’t Canada cracking down on this Indian student visa scam?

Canada’s rift with India continues. It’s been almost two months since Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau accused ‘agents of the government of India’ of assassinating Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Nijjar. The two countries have been in a diplomatic stand-off ever since, with trade talks suspended and Ottawa failing to provide any concrete proof behind its claim that Nijjar was killed under direction from Modi. But the possibility that Nijjar’s death was a result of gang activity between warring factions of criminal Sikh gang members in Canada has put a spotlight on the country’s growing Punjabi community and highlighted questions over Canada’s international student visa and immigration fraud. It’s no secret

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Not even America’s legal system can stop Trump

‘I beseech you to control him if you can,’ Justice Arthur Engoron told Donald Trump’s lawyer in court yesterday. To which the only sensible reply is: ‘Good luck with that.’  Nobody can control, or stop, the 45th President – least of all, it seems, the legal system. The trials of Trump will drag on and on in the coming months, all sound and fury, signifying nothing. The Trump train will chug on towards the Republican nomination – and, perhaps, to the White House again.  The legal trials of Donald Trump will only help him politically ‘This is not a political rally,’ said Engoron, who himself seems to be enjoying the theatre a little

Monday

Sean Rayment

The danger of Hamas drone attacks

The rise of the combat drone is changing the nature of the battlefield, as Israel has already found to its cost. The 7 October atrocity began when dozens of cheap commercial drones equipped with explosives paralysed the Israeli army’s communications and camera systems surrounding the Gaza border.  It was the first crucial phase in an intricately planned terrorist attack which would end hours later with more than 1,500 Israeli deaths and a nation traumatised.  Imagery released later by Hamas on social media showed small drones exploding on communications towers and on army lookout posts. The Israeli Defence Forces – one of the world’s most battle-ready armies, which prides itself on

Leon Mangasarian

The trouble with Olaf Scholz

German chancellor Olaf Scholz still doesn’t get it. ‘Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf’ (the fish stinks from its head) is a popular German saying. It’s proven right by Scholz’s abysmal failure to lead since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He’s failing again with Israel, declaring the Jewish state is Germany’s ‘Staatsräson’, or raison d-etat, but never spelling out what this means. Scholz has flopped with his tepid attempts to explain what’s at stake for Germany and Europe in Ukraine and Israel and why Berlin should be the leadership power of the EU. This problem is partly due to Scholz’s nature. If you think you’re the smartest guy in the room

Daniel Rey

Next year’s US election promises a crisis

There’s only a year to go until the most complex and consequential US presidential election ever. Ukraine, the Middle East, geriatric candidates, big-name independents, the criminal charges against Trump, a new House speaker (who must ratify the outcome) who didn’t recognise Biden’s victory in 2020 – the complexity is staggering.  The two main candidates, Biden and Trump, are both unpopular. Biden’s approval rating stands (or rather, squats) at around 37 per cent. Polls indicate he is losing support among two traditional bastions of the Democratic party: African-Americans and young voters. Meanwhile Trump, who has still to secure the Republican nomination, lost the popular vote in his two presidential campaigns. In

Limor Simhony Philpott

Israel is in a race against time to defeat Hamas

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) declared last night that Gaza has been encircled and divided into two separate parts: north and south. The majority of the fighting is in northern Gaza, where Hamas has concentrated its bases and arms. This is a significant new stage in the war, which has so far escalated gradually. The gradual advance of the IDF ground troops had several aims. It allowed Palestinian civilians to move from northern Gaza to the safer south, close to the border with Egypt where limited humanitarian aid has been entering the strip. The majority of civilians have now moved to southern Gaza, but several hundred thousands have remain in

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Is the West losing interest in Ukraine?

There’s a very different tone coming from Kyiv these days. Speaking to Time magazine, Volodymyr Zelensky had just returned from Washington after failing to make another impassioned public address on Capitol Hill, and not even managing to get on Oprah. The Ukrainian president sounded angry. The constant struggle to maintain international support seems to be taking its toll. ‘Nobody believes in our victory like I do. Nobody,’ he insisted, but added that dragging Ukraine’s allies along with him ‘takes all your power, your energy… It takes so much of everything.’ Meanwhile, in the Economist, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, and another icon of national resilience,