World

Thursday

Chana Hughes

Why should British Jews take their skullcaps off?

I was proud when my son, then aged three, wore his kippa (Jewish skullcap) for the first time. We placed the kippa on his head and told him what it meant to be a Jew. ‘Mazel tov!’ we said as we hugged each other, prayed, and sung. We wondered hopefully what he might become – a rabbi, a doctor, an accountant – and we laughed and sung some more. A blessing on your head, mazel tov, mazel tov! He’s now 17, and for the first time in his life was asked this week to cover his kippa up. An email from his school in London suggested that, in light of

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

How are Democrats reacting to the war in Israel?

31 min listen

This week Freddy speaks to Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, about America’s response to the developments in the Middle East. On the podcast they discuss the ‘squad’ (a section of Democrats who have been making pro-Palestinian noises), how America and Israel’s surveillance system allowed the attack to happen, and the importance of the conflict ahead of next year’s presidential election.

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin has been blindsided by the Israel attack

Inevitably, some have tried to suggest the terrorist invasion of Israel was in some ways orchestrated by Moscow. ‘Russia is interested in igniting a war in the Middle East so that a new source of pain and suffering will weaken world unity,’ said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the aftermath of the attack. But if Russia was involved, why has its response been so weak and uncertain? In fact, the Kremlin seems near-paralysed by the unfolding conflict. Of course, Moscow hopes that this crisis will distract the West from Ukraine and undermine its ability to continue to fuel its war effort. It is also trying to spin useful narratives, such as

John Fenn

Will the ‘Al-Aqsa flood’ unite the Islamic world? 

The name of Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on Israel over the weekend, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, was deliberately chosen to galvanise support across the Muslim world. The group’s justification for the operation included desecration claims at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Several Palestinian uprisings (intifadas) have been given the Al-Aqsa nomenclature over the years, including in September 2000 after then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s walkabout on the historic compound. Al-Aqsa was the original direction of prayer for Muslims but is now the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. The site – also holy to Jews and Christians – is the location of the Isra wa Miraj, Prophet

Wednesday

Paul Wood

What Iran gains from the conflict in Israel

A little more than a week before Hamas carried out its Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said: ‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.’ Sullivan was expressing a consensus view, one apparently shared by the Israeli government. Then came the attacks of last weekend and, as the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, said, ‘Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed in one day.’ The surprise attacks have been called Israel’s 9/11, its Pearl Harbor, and so the question Israelis are asking is: how could this happen? And of more consequence, perhaps: who was really behind it?

Douglas Murray

Britain must stand up against those who support Hamas

It was 7 a.m. when the ‘peace rave’ outside of Re’im was reaching its peak. Outside the kibbutz, five miles from the Gaza border, the participants of the dance festival were ‘coming up’ at just the moment that the terrorists of Hamas started to come down. They arrived on motorised paragliders, with machine-guns in position, like something from Mad Max. They came by motorbike and in trucks bearing the marks of Hamas. Rockets had already started firing across Israel from Gaza, but here the twenty- and thirty-something rave attendees were soon running in every direction across the Negev desert – hunted down. At the time of writing, 260 bodies have

Anshel Pfeffer

War at close quarters: a report from the Kfar Aza kibbutz

When faced with a tragedy on the scale of Saturday morning’s attack by Hamas terrorists on Israeli communities near Gaza, it’s natural to look to history for comparisons. Many did that over this week. The event that was mentioned most often was Israel’s previous intelligence failure at the start of the Yom -Kippur War, exactly 50 years ago. Other military debacles that came up were Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Israel has tried for so many years to pretend that the Gazans don’t actually live right alongside it All had many points in common that are worth considering, but there is one major difference between

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The Middle East’s new grandmasters

On Monday, while IDF troops were clearing the last Hamas terrorists from Israeli communities near the Gaza border, Benjamin Netanyahu promised that ‘we are going to change the Middle East’. Only two Israeli prime ministers have spoken like that before. One was Menachem Begin when he waged war on the PLO in Lebanon in 1982. The other was Yitzhak Rabin when he made peace with the PLO in 1993. Neither fully succeeded, but both reshaped the regional balance.  What Netanyahu understands is that the regional balance is shifting once again. It has moved away from the West vs East bipolar order of the Cold War and on from the brief

Matthew Engel

The refreshing libertarianism of New Hampshire

Crossing a state line on one of the American interstate roads, drivers are normally greeted by a variety of signs. They may advertise the delights awaiting the visitor – ‘10,000 LAKES’ or ‘FAMOUS POTATOES’ plus instructions about local speed limits. And normally, as the coup de grâce, ‘BUCKLE UP’. Travelling north in New England on the I-95 and passing from Massachusetts into New Hampshire the message is more discreet. A small sign announces ‘Buckle up under 18. Common sense for all’. In other words, in New Hampshire, adults of voting age do not have to wear seat belts. It is the only state in the US where this is not

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Scattering my father’s ashes in Santiago de Compostela

We are in the holy city of Santiago de Compostela to scatter our father’s ashes. He and my youngest sister had planned to walk the Camino, which finishes here at the resting place of Saint James, to mark the start of her adulthood and the beginning of his retirement. Instead, my two sisters have been walking the ancient pilgrims’ route for the past few weeks. I’ve flown into the city to meet them at the end. Most of Dad’s ashes went into a smart Regency tea caddy. The funeral directors had offered us a standard-issue urn but we decided he’d prefer something jolly and Georgian. The lacquered box didn’t quite

Limor Simhony Philpott

What happened to ‘Never Again’?

For Jews everywhere, there was an eery familiarity about the terrible violence unleashed on Israel during Saturday’s attack by Hamas. This was no simple act of terrorism. It was a pogrom. Pogroms were violent attacks against Jews living in the Russian empire in the 19th and early 20th century. They, much like the atrocity this weekend, included homes being torched, the abuse and execution of civilians and the rape of women. In the kibbutz of Kfar Aza, close to the Gaza border and scene of the most depraved Hamas violence, no-one was spared, whether they were female, young or old. All suffered the same fate. All were targeted for being

Tuesday

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

For too long, the UN has been gripped by Israelophobia

It is something of an understatement to say that there has been no shortage of shocking posts on social media in recent days. Up there has been the footage of the mobs chanting ‘gas the Jews’ outside Sydney Opera House and those flying the Hamas flag in London. But one above all stood out. Step forward the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Yesterday, as scenes of medieval anti-Semitic savagery were playing out across southern Israel, it put out this message: ‘On Monday afternoon, [we] observed a moment of silence for the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere.’ The only thing more conspicuously absent from

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

What Britain should do about Hamas

London is, at last, beaming Israeli flags onto its most recognisable buildings. This is an improvement on how some of the city’s residents have been marking the mass murder of Jews but beyond that it’s empty symbolism, as these flag projections always are. They’ve become the most visible – and often the most substantive – western response to terrorism in the past decade or so. Perhaps it’s comforting, as you bleed out in a bullet-riddled Paris theatre or under the wheels of a truck in a Berlin Christmas market, to know that your country’s national standard will soon adorn the White House and the Palace of Westminster, but I doubt

Adi Koby

‘I just want to live’: A survivor’s account of the desert rave massacre

When I arrived at the all-night rave near the border with Gaza the party was in full swing. It was 5am and thousands of revellers had gathered in the desert. A few hours later, hundreds would be dead or injured, women raped, dozens of people missing – some snatched across the border. The first sign of trouble came at 6am. We heard the gunshots before we saw the terrorists. We ran to our car to escape. Bullets flew past our heads. Already there were many wounded and dead. But our road out of hell was blocked: hundreds of cars were all trying to leave, and off-road desert paths were impossible

Monday

Angus Colwell

Netanyahu: ‘What we will do to our enemies will echo for generations’

Just a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was urging Israelis to take a break. He said citizens should ‘go for a walk in our beautiful country’ during the Sukkot holiday. He posed for photographs with his wife Sara in the Golan Heights, the two of them smiling as the sun set. Tonight, he prepared citizens for an immense retaliation campaign against Israel’s foes. He said that the air strikes seen so far against Gaza are ‘just the beginning’, and that ‘what we will do to our enemies in the next few days will echo for generations.’ Earlier today, his defence minister ordered a ‘complete siege’ of the Gaza strip, cutting two

Limor Simhony Philpott

Israelis are furious at Benjamin Netanyahu

Israelis are livid. Their fury is directed not only at Hamas for massacring over 700 people, wounding thousands and abducting at least 130 including women and children, but also at the Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) for failing to prevent this terrorist invasion. How did Israeli security forces – among the most sophisticated in the world – not foresee Hamas’s attack? A postmortem is already underway, but what is clear is that Netanyahu’s government was caught napping, distracted by its attempts to force through unpopular judicial reforms. This stole attention away from the worsening security situation in Gaza, the West Bank and the

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Why are Jews being blamed for Hamas’s attack on Israel?

‘Victim blaming’ is one of the sins that is most deplored by the social justice movement. When it comes to the Jews, however, different rules seem to apply, at least when it comes to rape, murder and mutilation. The events of the past few days could not have been more clear-cut. This was an unprovoked assault by Islamist fanatics who rampaged across southern Israel, revelling in savagery against the innocent. The atrocities you have seen on television have been the tip of the iceberg. Women have been butchered, their bodies paraded and desecrated, while grandmothers have been kidnapped with their carers and executed. Families have been gunned down in bomb

Sunday

Efraim Karsh

The death of the two-state solution

Hamas has achieved something that no Arab army has done since the 1948 war: captured several Israeli localities and held them for hours. Yet the magnitude of this initial success, in which they took Israel by complete surprise having lulled its famed intelligence services into false complacency, may prove a double-edged sword.  Yes, they have a huge bargaining chip, with as many as 50 civilians and soldiers believed to have been captured and taken to Gaza, many of them women and children. But it is likely now that Israel will end its decade-long policy of containment in favour of an attempt to totally destroy Hamas’s military capabilities, despite the possible

Seth J. Frantzman

Israel faces a new kind of war

Israelis awoke to sirens on Saturday. They began after six in the morning on the border of Gaza as Hamas began to fire thousands of rockets at Israeli towns and cities. By eight o’clock the rocket fire had reached Jerusalem. By the evening the full extent of the massive attack had become clear. Over 5,000 missiles were fired as Hamas launched an unprecedented attack across the border, infiltrating a dozen communities and massacring civilians.   I drove down to the border of Gaza after hearing the sirens in the morning in Jerusalem. Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system was active, intercepting rockets over my head. This is routine in Israel’s wars: the sound

Arieh Kovler

Israel has faced its darkest day for 50 years

While preparing to head out to synagogue to join the dancing and celebration for the Simchat Torah festival, the rocket sirens started sounding. As we grabbed the kids and ran to our safe room (all new Israeli houses are built with one), I assumed there must have been some incident overnight, some Israeli escalation to trigger this rare but not unprecedented rocket fire on Jerusalem. I was wrong. In a mass surprise attack, Hamas launched a huge barrage of rockets from Gaza at southern and central Israel. But this bombardment was only cover for the real attack: hundreds of armed Hamas terrorists, organised in military fashion, on technical vehicles, poured