Israel

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley

Gerald Kaufman: Labour hero, Jewish villain

Gerald Kaufman, who has died aged 86, was instrumental in saving the Labour Party, back when the Labour Party was something that could still be saved. It was Kaufman who pithily pegged the 1983 manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. He knew the phrase would hang around the far-left and dog any attempt to dodge responsibility for the calamity.  In his heart, he was a radical, but he parted ways with the 1980s Labour left in its mush-headed confusion of ends and means. The mush is now party policy but Kaufman expended considerable wit keeping it at bay during the Kinnock years. A multilateralist, the former Daily Mirror journalist

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Trump’s new ambassador is right: the UN is anti-Israel

The most important statement from the new administration. Clear, concise, simply and devastatingly expressed. Exactly what many of us have been saying for years – and always upbraided and denounced for so doing. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Nikki Haley, the new US ambassador to the UN, who has called out the organisation’s anti-Israel bias: Well done, Ms Haley. A woman of colour in the supposedly racist and misogynistic Trump administration. Now she‘s said it, we all can, with a bit more confidence. And my guess is that more politicians over here will say it, having been given their cue.

Monday

Nick Cohen

How can ‘needy’ Britain help Palestine when it can’t help itself?

A senior civil servant gave Andrew Rawnsley a haunting description of Brexit Britain’s new place in the world. When Theresa May visited Washington, he said, she looked ‘needy’. The diplomat summed up our future to perfection. Britain is now a needy country. The importuning Mrs May tours foreign capitals looking for emergency trade deals like a poor relation. Begging bowl in her hand and a wheedling note in her anxious voice, she can think of nothing but making ends meet. If it were not for Brexit, which never forget Mrs May opposed, the PM could act with European allies and try to bring a minimum of order to the chaos Trump

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 26 January 2017

What is a university? Sir: As a former Russell Group vice chancellor, I think that Toby Young’s appeal for more universities (Status anxiety, 14 January) needs several caveats. First, what is a university? Recently some have been created by stapling together several institutions without any substantial element of research and renaming them as a university. There is even some suggestion that research is inimical to good teaching, because some university researchers with a duty to teach shirk it. But the presence of a weighty research community lends a university an invaluable ambience. In America, many colleges that teach only to the bachelor degree are well regarded without possessing the title of university.

Thursday

The Spectator

An emperor’s inauguration

Given that Donald Trump is not the most popular president the USA has ever seen, even among his own party, it is salutary to be reminded what induction ceremonies can be like for those who devised imaginative routes to power. Pertinax, who started life as a schoolmaster, was a governor of Britain and a highly respected consul before succeeding the ghastly Commodus as emperor on 30 December AD 192. But the military did not appreciate his immediate attempts to restore discipline and financial stability, and he was assassinated three months later. There then followed an auction: the assassins put the office up for sale to the highest bidder, and Didius

Simon Wilder

Flight into Israel

I’ve always lived in London. I grew up near Baker Street and went to school in Camden. Even when I was at college in Kent, I lived in Islington and commuted. Five years ago I moved to Belsize Park and I’ve been here, the nicest place I’ve lived, ever since. I didn’t mean to stay — I was going to see the world, but my father died and my mother said she needed me to be close. She said it with a tremor in her voice, so I stayed. London is in my heart and in my blood, but the wind has changed, like it did for Mary Poppins, and I

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Donald Trump hits back

Donald Trump is dominating the headlines once again after he hit back furiously at reports that Russia had compromising videos of him in a Moscow hotel room. The president-elect denied the claims, branding BuzzFeed, who revealed the dossier detailing the allegations, a ‘failing piece of garbage’. So should the claims have come to light? No, says the Sun, which attacks the website for publishing the unverified allegations and in so doing making a ‘mockery of journalism’. The paper questions why the website – whose editor-in-chief admitted they could not stand up the claims – gave the go-ahead to release the information anyway. Contrasting it with attempts to ‘strangle British newspapers

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

Jared Kushner’s Israel connection will delight Benjamin Netanyahu

Why, do you suppose, are people getting worked up about the nepotism angle of Donald Trump appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior policy adviser, with particular responsibility for the Middle East, when there’s so much else to worry about it? The one thing that should concern us is that it means that a friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, perhaps the most destabilising figures in Israeli politics, is now effectively in charge of policy in respect of the Israel–Palestine question. That’s right; Kushner is the young man who introduced Netanyahu to Trump. He was also presumably behind Trump’s incandescent response to the US abstention on the UN Security Council vote on

Thursday

Andrew J.

Get ready for a wild ride

Every American president since Harry Truman has arrived in the White House committed to globalism — a belief that America must lead always and everywhere — as the central organising principle of US foreign policy. In recent years, we have seen Barack Obama’s faith in globalism waver. The prospect of President Donald Trump abandoning globalism altogether is real. For US allies as varied as Britain, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Israel, American globalism has been the gift that has never stopped giving. Nations enjoying a ‘special relationship’ with Washington have relied on American power to shield them from danger and, to some extent, from bearing the consequences of their own folly,

Wednesday

Tom Tugendhat

Britain was wrong to back the U.N’s anti-Israel resolution

Like all the best mistakes, it was done for the right reasons. Knowing that for once the US wouldn’t veto, the UN Security Council passed a resolution condemning settlement building in the occupied Palestinian Territories. The UK was no doubt keen to be with the consensus but we were wrong to back the Resolution. This time was different. Not because Israel has changed, nor the expansion of the settlements is exacerbating the efforts towards a settlement, but because the world has changed and so have we. The Arab Spring showed that the Israel-Palestinian conflict doesn’t matter. This may sound harsh for a country generating more news than any people can

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

How Donald Trump emerged as Israel’s unflinching champion

On Wednesday John Kerry managed to attract more attention with what amounted to a declaration of failure than any success he has achieved during his tenure as Secretary of State. In his speech blasting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which came on the heels of US abstention on a United Nations resolution condemning settlements, Kerry all but conceded that a two state solution is as dead as the Dodo bird. Leading Democrats such as Senate minority leader Charles Schumer criticised the speech and want nothing to do with anything that might drive traditionally Jewish Democratic voters to the GOP. Obama himself had long washed his hands of any attempt to

Thursday

Steven Poole

When reasoning goes wrong

It’s the intellectual bromance of the last century. Two psychologists — Danny, a Holocaust kid and adviser to the Israel Defence Forces, and Amos, a former child prodigy and paratrooper — meet at the end of the 1960s, and sparks immediately begin to fly. They spend countless hours locked in rooms together at Hebrew University and elsewhere, and eventually co-write a series of papers that will revolutionise the field, and lead to the surviving partner being awarded the Nobel prize in economics. Not, however, before this extraordinary partnership has itself fallen apart, like a love affair, in regret and mutual recrimination. Our heroes are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, celebrated

Thursday

Taki

High life | 24 November 2016

 New York   If only my wordsmith friend Jeremy Clarke had been with me. What fun he’d have had with the ungallant thing I did last week. Jeremy’s writing thrives on such occasions, but alas he’s in the land of cheese and impressionism. I had just finished lunch with my friend Alex Sepkus, a designer of unique jewellery, and a Catholic priest whose name I will not reveal in view of what followed. After all, the Catholic Church loves sinners, but hooliganism is discouraged. I was walking up Fifth Avenue, which was packed to the gills with shoppers, hawkers and tourists. When I got to 56th Street, it was blocked

Lee Langley

Joking apart | 24 November 2016

A horse walks into a bar.… David Grossman takes the opening line of an old joke for his title, which could be a signal of comedy to come; and indeed he strews his novel’s pages with punchlines — good, bad-taste and groan-worthy. But this is gallows humour at its darkest: Grossman beckons us into a basement comedy club in an Israeli town, and uses the world of stand-up to explore not jokes but the nature of guilt. We stick with the comedian Dovaleh G from the moment he stumbles on to the stage till he exits two hours later. There are Israeli in-jokes — ‘How do paratroopers commit suicide? Jump

Sunday

Andrew Lycett

Meet the man who created the Middle East

When turbaned warriors from Daesh (or Isis) advanced on Raqqa in Syria two years ago, they whooped wildly about having ‘broken the Sykes-Picot Agreement’. They were celebrating the destruction of national frontiers which had stood for nearly a century, since the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1918. They were also venting their spleen against the two villains (as they saw it) of the piece — one British, Sir Mark Sykes, and the other French, François Georges-Picot, who, after months of diplomatic haggling, had drawn metaphorical lines in the desert sand to reach their secret 1916 agreement apportioning Ottoman lands and creating the modern Middle East. In doing so, Sykes

Sunday

James Somper

The troubling truth is that anti-Semitism in Britain is alive and well

Growing up as a Jew in England, I’ve always felt proud of my heritage. The ugly spectre of anti-Semitism seemed a thing of the past – and it felt safe to share my faith and ancestry with the world. But not any longer. It’s not difficult to see why. In the first half of 2016, there was an 11 per cent spike in the number of anti-Semitic incidents. Britain might still be one of the safest places in the world to be a Jew, but Jews here are increasingly becoming a target. Last year saw the third-highest annual total of anti-Semitic hate incidents in the UK ever recorded. The same

Thursday

Taki

High life | 3 November 2016

Sixty years ago this week all hell broke loose: Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest and put down a nationalist uprising in a very bloody manner. Down south Anglo-French paratroopers jumped into the Sinai and, in cahoots with the Israelis, took over the Suez Canal in a last gasp of colonialism by the Europeans. And in Washington DC a very peed-off President Eisenhower ordered the Anglo-French to go home or else. They went home and only the Israelis howled that Ike was an anti-Semite and many other things. And where was your intrepid foreign (future High life) correspondent while all this was going on? On an aeroplane flying from New York

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 20 October 2016

After the Fawlty Towers incident, I decided it was best to research the origin and extraction of all future B&B guests on arrival, before the builder boyfriend got stuck in. You may remember that he accidentally on purpose got a piece of gaffa tape caught on his top lip and held some ceiling felt at a jaunty angle during the stay of the Airbnb customers from Bavaria. Thankfully, they were in another room and didn’t see but I had to shush him because he was making a bad job of whispering, ‘Don’t mention Brexit! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it!’ A girl from Taiwan

Thursday

Will Cohu

The fallen Angel

Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian-born businessman, a son-in-law to Nasser and a political high-flyer in the administration of Sadat, who fell off the balcony of his flat in Carlton House Terrace, central London, in June 2007. His death was watched with incredulity by business colleagues assembled in an office across the road, who recalled seeing two burly, possibly Middle-eastern figures framed in the tableau. Investigations were inconclusive. Marwan, then in his sixties, wasn’t well, but hadn’t seemed suicidal. On the other hand, he had been afraid, and with good reason, because plenty of people wanted him dead. Marwan had been a spy. That seems to be the most concrete element

Saturday

Charles Moore

Christian criticism of Israel is myopic

A Methodist church in Hinde Street, London, is exhibiting ‘You cannot pass today: Life through a dividing wall’, a reconstruction of a border control point between Israel and the occupied territories. The purpose, needless to say, is not to show how to deal with a terrorist threat, but to attack Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. A Jewish human rights group which has written to protest has been told, soapily, by the minister, ‘I respect your passionate concern for these issues…This exhibition… has been carefully curated… to promote reflection and prayers for peace.’ I have noticed these wall protests popping up on campuses etc., and they never seem either reflective or prayerful.