Israel

 Gstaad I am looking out of my window at the green landscape and forested mountains rising beyond, as peaceful a scene as there is in this troubled world, but this is Switzerland, a country that hasn’t fought a war in 700 years, resisting both Napoleon and Hitler through friendly persuasion and by having banks that don’t talk. No longer. The new big bully on the block, Uncle Sam, in cahoots with the vermin that is the EU, is forcing the Swiss to open up and spill the beans. What I don’t get is why the Swiss are lying down and playing dead. Sure, they have all sorts of referendums, but

In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips suggests that anti-Semitism is on the rise, fueled by the events in the Middle East. Douglas Murray and Ben Soffa, Secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, discuss whether this is the case in this week’s View from 22 video special. Here’s an extract from Melanie’s piece. The full article will be available tomorrow: The mask has been torn away. Supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. In Paris, predominantly Muslim mobs screaming ‘death to the Jews’ have repeatedly tried to storm synagogues, torched cars and burnt Jewish-owned shops to the ground.

I suppose viewers of Jon Snow’s Channel 4 News don’t expect impartial journalism, any more than viewers of Fox in the States expect their political opponents to get a particularly fair hearing. This is, after all, a journalist whose first reaction when the Malaysian airline plane was shot down over Ukraine was to express concern that the deaths might distract attention from Israel’s war with Hamas. Awful danger that the shooting down of flight MH17 will provide cover for an intensification of Israel’s ground war in Gaza — Jon Snow (@jonsnowC4) July 18, 2014   But what an extraordinary way to present the situation in the Middle East: Hamas as

One event I regretted missing on my last visit to London was a party at the Polish Club, which has been refurbished and has a new Polish prince as its president and has good Poles and active members such as Ladies Belhaven and Hamilton, both friends of mine, keeping the home fires burning. I have often written about my love for Poland, a heroic country that has been betrayed by everyone throughout its history, but has always remained proud, refusing to play the victim, with 90 per cent of Poles belonging to the Catholic church in today’s greedy secular world. A Polish pope was the first to challenge the Soviets,

  Gaza The main entrance to Al-Shifa Hospital was crowded with what seemed to be journalists. This wasn’t unusual. They wait here most days for ambulances ferrying in the dead and wounded from Israeli air strikes; but this time there seemed to be more of them. Getting nearer, I saw that what I had taken to be microphones in their hands were in fact slippers. These weren’t hacks, they were angry Gazans, come to fling shoes (the ultimate insult in the Middle East) at Jawad Awad, the minister of health of the Palestinian Authority, paying a visit from Ramallah. This was an important day in the current round of bloodletting between

Is Israel drifting away from the West? That was Hugo Rifkind’s claim in his column in the magazine last week. Hugo wrote: ‘Israel drifting away. Never mind whose fault it is; that’s a whole other point. But it’s happening. It’s off. No longer does it exist in the popular imagination as our sort of place. Once, I suppose, foes and friends alike regarded it as a North Atlantic nation, but elsewhere. Then a western European one, then, briefly, a southern European one. When was it, do you think, that Israel stopped being regarded as fundamentally a bit like Spain? Early 1990s? Then they shot Yitzhak Rabin, and Oslo didn’t happen, and