Netanyahu

Monday

Ben Domenech

How Israel won the war – and lost the PR battle

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the Gaza peace deal brokered by Donald Trump, the past two years have seen Israel achieve an unprecedented litany of military accomplishments in the Middle East. The level of damage done to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis is difficult to comprehend. The end of the Assad regime and, with American support, the demolition of the Iranian nuclear program – setting it back years at the least – were steps that many once thought impossible. Israel has emerged from the post-October 7 period unquestionably stronger in every way except one: its support around the globe, particularly among the youngest voices in the West.

Israel
Biden
Daniel DePetris

The endgame: Biden’s quest for a foreign policy legacy

President Joe Biden only has a few more months before he steps out of the White House, hands over the keys to his successor and spends his remaining days soaking in the Delaware sun. But before he enjoys retirement, the lifelong public servant has a big piece of unfinished business: scoring a major foreign policy win that will secure his place in the history books. Unfortunately, dreaming about being a statesman is one thing; being one is quite another. The two conflicts that would give the president that coveted status — the wars in Gaza and Ukraine — aren’t presently amenable to diplomatic resolution. And while Biden and his advisors may be committed to doing the impossible, all the commitment in the world won’t do much if the combatants are intent on slugging it out.

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump’s finest hour

This is Donald Trump’s finest hour. Speaking in the Knesset on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him Israel’s “greatest friend” and nominated him for the Israel Prize,” the nation’s “highest award.” Trump himself was greeted rapturously by the parliamentarians for securing a breakthrough peace deal in Gaza. Trump basked in the applause for his months-long diplomatic effort, declaring that “this is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.” But can one truly emerge? Or is this simply a temporary truce between the warring parties? Trump’s immediate accomplishment was to arrange for the release of the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages held by Hamas since its attack on October 7, 2023, when more than 1,200 Israelis were murdered.

Donald Trump

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Did Bibi miscalculate?

In her new memoirs, 107 Days, Kamala Harris recounts that in July 2024 she had an important meeting about Israel and the Gaza Strip. Harris, who was running for the presidency, hoped to show that she could pressure Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu into reaching a ceasefire with Hamas. “Netanyahu’s hooded gaze and disengaged demeanors,” she writes, “made it clear to me that he was running out the clock." His only goal was a temporary ceasefire and to undermine the Biden administration. “He wanted Trump in the seat opposite him,” Harris recalls. “Not Joe, not me. Netanyahu wanted the guy who would acquiesce to his every extreme proposal for the future of Gaza’s inhabitants and add his own plan for a land grab by his developer cronies.

Netanyahu

Tuesday

Daniel McCarthy

Trump won’t be dragged into a regime-change war

The handsome pages of The Spectator World’s July issue readers will find an essay of mine arguing that the United States doesn’t win wars anymore because we don’t even understand what a modern war is. From the French Revolution to the Cold War, and in the long, warm afterglow—thankfully, non-nuclear—of Cold War success, Western elites have tended to think about wars in terms of regimes and ideologies. Winning a war is all about changing the opponent’s regime so that it endorses one’s own ideology: turning a “dictatorship” into a “liberal democracy” through the magic of bombs and bullets.

Regime change

Tuesday

Fin de Pencier

Trump turns on Netanyahu after securing US hostage release

As the military helicopter carrying Edan Alexander - the last remaining American hostage held by Hamas – landed on top of the Tel Aviv hospital, the crowd gathered below erupted in cheers of pent-up relief. Edan, now 21 years old – but just 19 when he was captured, was finally free following 594 days in captivity. After spending almost two years underground the American-Israel looked pale and traumatized. But remarkably he walked off the helicopter unaided. His mother, then his father, practically leaped into his arms. There was dancing and singing in the crowd around me outside the Ichilov hospital, people waved Israeli and American flags. One of them was Tslil Ben Maruch, Edan’s aunt. “I have three young kids at home, all of whom love Edan.

Hostages
Jonathan Sacerdoti

The ICC’s moral reckoning over sex abuse claims

By any standard, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is in crisis. But the revelations in The Wall Street Journal – detailing explosive allegations of non-consensual sexual acts and abuse of office against its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan – have not just shaken the court’s credibility. They have obliterated it. The Journal reported that Khan faces “multiple allegations of coerced sexual intercourse,” based on documents, testimony and interviews with ICC officials. At the heart of the Journal’s investigation is a horrifying accusation: that Khan, while leading the most controversial prosecution in the ICC’s history, was allegedly engaged in a sustained pattern of sexual abuse against a junior female lawyer on his team.

Thursday

Uri Kurlianchik

Black Sunday: reckoning with October 7 a year later

October 7 was the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Some refer to it as Israel’s 9/11, though proportionally it was like fifteen 9/11s. However, numbers rarely tell the full story and here they fall devastatingly short. I was awake when it started. I’ve always been a night owl but staying up until six in the morning is unusual for me. On that bright fall morning I heard sounds like a thunderstorm and went outside to see what was going on. I live on a hill overlooking Gush Dan, the informal megalopolis that’s home for almost half the population of this stamp-sized country. When something big happens I can often see it.

October 7

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, June 2024

The rise of reverse gaslighting Sir — To an otherwise excellent article, I have a small correction. In 1860, the Southern states did not keep Lincoln off the ballot. Unlike today, where voting ballots are printed by the states, in 1860, voters were not presented with official ballots at polling stations that allowed them to check off which candidate they were voting for. Instead, a nineteenth-century ballot or “political ticket” was a slip of paper, provided by each party, listing their candidates for whatever offices were up for election. This allowed voters to easily “vote the ticket” for their party without having to know the names of every candidate and office.

letters

Thursday

Adam Lammon

Learning to live with a nuclear Iran

A mere four years after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the international agreement that had constrained Iran’s nuclear program, Iran is closer to building a nuclear weapon than ever before. Both the Trump administration’s pressure and the Biden administration’s diplomatic campaigns have failed to yield Iran’s capitulation, yet still the United States has not changed tack. Instead, it has only raised fears of a cataclysmic clash in the Middle East. To be sure, while the Trump team’s maximum pressure strategy had great success in “crushing” Iran’s economy, it was far less effective in achieving any of its stated objectives.