Israel

Thursday

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Desert storm

On this week’s episode, we turn our attention to the Middle East and the unlikely alliance of Saudi Arabia and Israel as they stare down a common enemy. We also consider whether the old adage ‘the night is always darkest just before the dawn’ holds for Theresa May, and wondering why there hasn’t been a great musical about British history. Last week saw a massive anti-corruption push in Saudi Arabia oust a number of princes. The putsch was initiated by Crown Prince Muhammed Bin Salman, and in this week’s magazine cover story John R. Bradley looks at how the young prince has attempted to align his country with Israeli interests

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Salman’s Arabia

There are two ways of seeing the extraordinary rise of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince: the blood-stained debut of a new dictator, or the long-overdue emergence of a reformer with the steel to take on the kingdom’s old guard. The British government is firmly in the second camp. Mohammad bin Salman is just 32 years old, and his effective seizure of power means he defines the kingdom for a generation. He’s seen in Whitehall as a history maker, whose ruthless impatience might not only liberalise his country but create an alliance with Israel that could change the region. Minsters talk about MbS (as he’s known in Whitehall) with admiration and awe.

John R. Bradley

Desert storm

Until last weekend, the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh’s exclusive Diplomatic Quarter was colloquially known as the Princes’ Hotel. It was a luxurious retreat from the heat, where royals could engage in the kind of wheeling and dealing with the global business elite that had made them millionaires on the back of the 1970s oil boom. No deal could be brokered without paying a bribe to at least one prince. Last Saturday that era of boundless opportunity and total impunity came to a dramatic end. The VIP guests were booted out, the front doors were shuttered, and heavily armed security forces took up positions around the perimeter. A Saudi who lives nearby

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

The problem with Britain’s guilt about Balfour

Britain’s unease about the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, our imperial pronouncement that we ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use [our] best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’, is not hard to spot. Boris Johnson lauds Balfour as ‘indispensable to the creation of a great nation’ before rueing that its ‘vital caveat…to safeguard other communities – has not been fully realised’. His shadow number, Emily Thornberry, said: ‘I don’t think we celebrate the Balfour declaration. But I think we have to mark it because it was a turning point in the history of that area and the most

Thursday

Jake Wallis Simons

The left’s sinister disdain for Israel betrays their movement’s pro-Zionist origins

In the beginning, the Guardian was a friend of the Jews. Or rather, those Jews who believed that after millennia of persecution in exile, they deserved the right to live freely in their ancestral homeland. The overwhelming majority, in other words. The Zionists. The Labour party liked them, too. Three months before the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s key declaration of support for Jewish national aspirations – the centenary of which will be marked next month – Labour compiled a memorandum of policy priorities. ‘Palestine should be set free from the harsh and repressive government of the Turk,’ it said, ‘in order that the country may form a Free State, under international guarantee, to which such of the

Thursday

Anthony Cummins

Highly charged territory

I first heard of this tragicomic spy romp around Israel and Palestine when Julian Barnes sang its praises in the Guardian a few months ago, having been ‘lucky to see an advance proof’. Lucky? Well, he and Nathan Englander do share an agent, who perhaps noticed that Dinner at the Centre of the Earth just happens to take its epigraph from a novel by, er, Julian Barnes. That’s showbiz, I guess; and in any case, a spot of sly boosterism rather suits this mixed-up tale of cloaked allegiances, which never quite supplies the facts you need to grasp what’s going on — at least not during the globe-trotting, time-toggling fug

Thursday

Bernard Wasserstein

Wandering Jews

Simon Schama is an international treasure. Whether on screen or in print, he is all energy, enthusiasm, dramatic gestures, emotional intensity. He clutches his readers in a tiger-like grip, then chews them up with relish until they are almost helpless with mirth or emotional exhaustion. If the first volume of his trilogy on the history of the Jews had something of the quality of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, this second, carrying the saga forward from 1492 to 1900, is no less of a Technicolor blockbuster. Here too we have a cast of zillions with all kinds of special effects. Composed of a dazzling succession of tableaux with linking

Tuesday

Steerpike

‘Where is he?’: No-show Corbyn heckled at Israeli fringe event

This year’s Labour conference has been largely overshadowed by a row about anti-Semitism. At a Labour Friends of Israel event on the final night of the party’s conference, Jeremy Corbyn had a perfect opportunity to send a message of support to worried Jewish Labour members. Instead, he didn’t show up. Labour MP Joan Ryan, who was chairing the event, said she was ‘disappointed’ Corbyn didn’t come. Some in the crowd were not happy either at the Labour leader’s decision to stay away, with cries of ‘Where is he?’ and ‘Why is he not here?’ greeting the announcement that Corbyn would not be coming: It’s something of a surprise that Corbyn didn’t show up:

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Speech therapy

Oslo opened in the spring of 2016 at a modest venue in New York. It moved to Broadway and this imported version has arrived at the National on its way to a prebooked run at the Harold Pinter Theatre. It’s bound to be a hit because it’s good fun, it gives a knotty political theme a thorough examination, and it’s aimed squarely at the ignorant. In the early 1990s Norwegian diplomats set up ‘back-channel’ talks between the PLO and Israel. The play follows that process and it treats geopolitics like a flat-share comedy. The bickering partners are hauled in by the lordly Norwegians and forced to hammer out their differences

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

Britain has an anti-Semitism problem. Here are the numbers that prove it

A new report on anti-Semitism in Britain makes uncomfortable reading all round. The study, a joint enterprise by the Community Security Trust and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, is an in-depth exploration of anti-Jewish attitudes, the role of animus towards Israel, and the prevalence of prejudice in 2017. It is a sober analysis and the researchers tend towards restraint – sometimes a little too much restraint – in drawing conclusions from their data. It is this very interpretive modesty that makes the findings all the more concerning. While the report caps the ‘hardcore’ anti-Semite population at five percent, it detects a further 25 per cent who feel negatively about Jews and

Saturday

Seth J. Frantzman

Iran’s growing influence points to a bleak future for the Middle East

After six years of fierce fighting and with hundreds of thousands dead, the Syrian civil war finally appears to be settling down. The country is now divided into various pockets of influence, with Turkish-backed rebels in the north, US-backed Kurdish forces and their allies in the east and the Syrian regime and its Iranian-backed militias in the centre and the capital, Damascus. This now gives Iran, with the influence it already has in Lebanon and Iraq, a sphere of authority stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. The spread of Iranian influence in the region is largely a result of the country’s ability to capitalise on the tumultuous recent history of the Middle East. The

Thursday

John R. Bradley

Iran is our natural ally

The Saudi town of Awamiya — like so many countless cities across Iraq, Syria and Yemen that are witnessing an unleashing of the ancient hatred of Sunni for Shia — now exists in name only. Last month, days before an assault on its Shia inhabitants by the Saudi regime, the UN designated it a place of unique cultural and religious significance. But under the guise of fighting Iran-backed terror cells, the Saudis then subjected Awamiya’s entire civilian population to the indiscriminate use of fighter jets, rocket-propelled grenades, snipers, heavy artillery, armoured assault vehicles and cold-blooded executions. More than a dozen Shia, including a three-year-old boy, were killed. Hundreds of young

Emily Rhodes

Mysticism and metamorphosis

‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following a straight line out of the forest, the more appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest …’ Like the author, this character is called Nicole, lives in Brooklyn, and is a writer and mother. Struggling with her work and her marriage, life is indeed a ‘forest dark’, and we follow her through the tangle of it. Interleaved with Nicole’s half of the novel, is Jules Epstein’s — a bombastic, wealthy, older New York Jew, who we meet when the ‘strong weather of being Epstein no longer

Sunday

David Patrikarakos

Combating 21st-century terror: what Europe can learn from Israel

Spain, Finland, Russia: in the space of a few days, Europe is reminded, yet again, that terrorism – like the virus it is – kills brutally, indiscriminately and, critically, transnationally. On Thursday, August 17, a van rammed into crowds of people in Barcelona’s Las Ramblas boulevard – a hub of tourism and social life. Thirteen were killed with dozens more injured. The atrocity was followed by a knife attack the very next day in the Finnish city of Turku, which killed two people and injured eight. Another knife attack, this time in the Siberian city of Surgut on the 19 August, injured eight. Islamic State has claimed responsibly for all the

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

The good Palestinian

Shubbak, meaning ‘window’ in Arabic, is a biennial festival taking place in various venues across London. The brochure reads like an A to Z of human misery. All the tired phrases from the Middle East’s history lurch up and poke the onlooker in the eye: ‘revolution’, ‘dystopia’, ‘cries of pain’, ‘ruins’, ‘waking nightmare’. The agony is leavened with slivers of earnest pretention. Corbeaux is a ballet designed for Marrakesh railway station by dancers who ‘take possession of public spaces’. Ten women with hankies over their hairdos move in ‘geometric alchemical arrangements’ making ‘piercing sounds and extraordinary cries’. I decided to give that a miss and plumped instead for Taha at

Saturday

Stephen Daisley

Unesco has enacted a grim piece of historical revisionism against Israel

Until its liberation in the Six-Day War, Jews were not allowed to climb beyond the seventh step outside Ma’arat HaMachpelah, the Cave of the Patriarchs. Despite being built on land purchased by Abraham almost 4000 years ago, despite being the burial place of the patriarchs and matriachs of Judaism, despite the stone walls around the location being erected under King Herod, successive Arab and Islamic occupiers forbad Jews access to their second holiest site. Unesco has kicked Jews back down the steps. The UN body nominally responsible for promoting peace through culture has voted to designate Ma’arat HaMachpelah a Palestinian heritage site. It is a grim act of historical revisionism,

Thursday

Jonathan Steinberg

The appeal of mysticism

This extraordinary book has two main characters: Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), an early Zionist and the founder of the modern study of traditional Jewish mysticism, and the author George Prochnik, who was 28 when he first moved with his then wife to make a new life in Israel. Stranger in a Strange Land has as subtitle ‘Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem’; but it also tells the story of Prochnik’s search for his own identity. If this sounds complicated, it is. The reader needs to pay attention to the shifts from one period and place to another. Scholem went to Palestine in 1923 when hardly anybody from the German bourgeoisie made

Thursday

John R. Bradley

An unholy alliance

Israel’s Channel 2 news station improbably made history last week by airing a brief interview with an obscure policy wonk named Abed al-Hamid Hakim. The subject was the blockade of Qatar imposed by the Saudis and a couple of other despotic Sunni Arab rulers to punish the country for its ties to Iran, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. It obviously wasn’t what Hakim had to say — religion should not be used to justify violence and extremism; we should all try to live in peace and harmony — that aroused interest. Rather, it was where he was sitting when he said it: Jeddah, the commercial capital of Saudi Arabia. For

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Kissin in action

Is Evgeny Kissin, born in Moscow in 1971, the most famous concert pianist in the world? Probably not, if you stretch the definition of ‘concert pianist’ to encompass the circus antics of Lang Lang, the 34-year-old Chinese virtuoso who — in the words of a lesser-known but outstandingly gifted colleague — ‘can play well but chooses not to’. But you could certainly argue that Kissin has been the world’s most enigmatic great pianist since the death of Sviatoslav Richter in 1997 – though, unlike the promiscuously gay Richter, his overwhelming concern with privacy does not conceal any exotic secrets. He has recently married for the first time, but chooses not

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

When will the Six-Day War finally end?

This week, Israel is marking the 50th anniversary of its improbable victory over Arab assassins. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser saw annihilation of the Jewish state as a uniting mission for his project of pan-Arab nationalism and had declared: ‘Our path to Palestine will be covered with blood.’ In June 1967, he enlisted Syria and Jordan in his plans for invasion and few thought Israel, then a meagre strip of land nine miles wide at its narrowest point, could withstand the onslaught. Herzl’s dream in the desert was about to be unwilled.  In a stroke of tactical cunning, though at the time it looked to be an act of suicide, Israel