Palestine

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

Israel is an apartheid state

If you’re after evidence of apartheid in Israel, you don’t have to look very far. Amid rioting by Palestinians and Arabs, the Israel Police has declared the Temple Mount in Jerusalem off-limits. For ten days, only practitioners of one religion will be allowed to visit. For context, Temple Mount is home to the Holy of Holies, the most sacred site in Judaism, and is where the First and Second Temples stood until their destruction by the Babylonians and Romans, respectively. Following Jerusalem’s conquest by Islamic imperialists in the 7th century, a succession of caliphs worked to Islamise the Temple Mount by erecting Muslim worship sites including the Dome of the

Friday

Stephen Daisley

Is Israel facing a new Intifada?

Dizengoff Street is one of the busiest thoroughfares in Tel Aviv, a strip of bars, restaurants and Bauhaus architecture that is typically bustling with young people on a Thursday evening. Last night, it was the scene of the latest Palestinian terror attack when a gunman opened fire outside the Ilka bar, killing three and wounding nine. One of those killed was Olympic kayaker Barak Lopen, who represented Israel at Beijing 2008 and London 2012. In the past two weeks, 14 Israelis have been killed by a mixture of Palestinian and Israeli-Arab terrorists. For comparison, there were 17 terrorism-related fatalities in the entirety of last year. I asked on Coffee House

Saturday

Stephen Daisley

Priti Patel’s Hamas ban doesn’t go far enough

It’s been a rough old week for Hamas. The UK announced plans to proscribe the organisation, Justin Bieber ignored its call to cancel his 2022 concert in Tel Aviv, and even the recently friendly Labour party has vowed that it ‘does not and will not support BDS’. One minute, you’re going about your business, trying to drive the Jews into the sea, and the next you’re being treated like you’re the bad guy. Priti Patel’s decision to add Hamas to the Home Office list of terrorist organisations corrects a 20-year-old error which saw the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades — Hamas’s paramilitary wing — outlawed in 2001 but the rest of

Thursday

Max Jeffery

In Israel, there’s never an easy fix

From an Israeli army base on the border with Lebanon, I can see the village of Maroun al-Ras. An Iranian flag flies from the dome of the mosque. Nearby, strapped to a post, is a 20ft cutout of the late Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, which was put there earlier this year by Hezbollah after he was killed by an American air strike. His right arm and index finger are stretched out, pointing menacingly over the valley at Israel. Hezbollah, backed by Tehran, control Maroun al-Ras, and I can hear the buzz of a drone watching them. Some Israeli officials say Iran could have enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb

Tuesday

Jake Wallis Simons

Why Israel must win over its Arab population

Which Middle Eastern country offers the best life for Arabs? The answer, as they say, might surprise you. Take any measure you like – democratic representation, women’s rights, lack of corruption, freedom of speech, the protection of sexual minorities – and it is clear that Israel comes out on top. I remember covering an Isis gun attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul in 2017. An Arab-Israeli woman, 19-year-old Lian Zaher Nasser, was one of 39 people who lost their lives in the atrocity. The attentiveness of the Israeli diplomatic service to her family was striking, and equal to anything I’ve seen elsewhere. Years later, a senior Israeli intelligence source

Tuesday

Tom Slater

Who cares what Ben & Jerry’s think about Israel-Palestine?

When you think of the Israel-Palestine conflict, ice cream doesn’t usually come up. But that may be about to change. Ben & Jerry’s has finally broken its silence, announcing yesterday that it will ‘end sales of our ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territory’. Perhaps in the years ahead we’ll come to see this depriving Israeli settlers of Caramel Chew Chew and Truffle Kerfuffle as some kind of tipping point. We won’t, of course, because that’s ridiculous. As is a Vermont-based over-priced ice-cream brand weighing in on far-flung conflicts. But that seems to be where we’re at now – with corporate America in general and with Ben & Jerry’s in

Friday

Stephen Daisley

The progressive imperialism of Keir Starmer’s Palestine policy

There are two ways to look at Sir Keir Starmer’s call for the Prime Minister ‘to press for a renewed international agreement to finally recognise the State of Palestine’ at the G7 summit. The first is cynical: that the intended audience was not the government benches or the international community, but the voters of Batley and Spen, currently weighing up whether to elect another Labour MP in next month’s by-election. At the 2011 census, almost one in five residents were Muslim and knowing what we know about how progressives view religious and ethnic minorities, it is not a stretch to assume Sir Keir was merely electioneering. This mindset, which sees

Sunday

Jake Wallis Simons

The problem with the New York Times’ Gaza coverage

While war raged between Israel and Gaza, the New York Times published a powerful montage of 64 minors said to have been killed in the conflict so far. Under its famous motto ‘All the news that’s fit to print’, and with the headline ‘They Were Just Children’, America’s paper of record informed us that ‘they had wanted to be doctors, artists and leaders’, and invited us to read their stories. It was impossible to look at those innocent faces without feeling deeply distressed. This was the human cost of the Israeli war machine, brought directly to your breakfast table, in a way that the vicious Turkish assault on the Kurds

Wednesday

Julie Burchill

The problem with Palestine’s showbiz supporters

One of the many reasons I hate wokers is because they indulge so shamelessly in what Bebel coined ‘the socialism of fools’ – anti-Semitism – under the convenient cover of sticking up for the Palestinians. Pretty much all socialism is for fools these days and as we see the Tories ditch misogyny, racism and austerity (Chancellor Sunak ‘Soak the rich!’ – Sir Keir Starmer ‘No!’) we have seen anti-Semitism cross the floor too. This is not the sniggering Jew-hatred of the smug Surrey golf club; this is where the pampered and resentful spawn of the bourgeoise get down to the rapper Wiley, MBE, he of the profoundly inclusive tweets like

Wednesday

Joanna Williams

School playgrounds are no place for ‘free Palestine’ protests

GCSE and A level assessments. Enforcing social distancing. Catch-up provision for pupils who fell behind during lockdown. Mental health support. Behavioural issues. Headteachers have more than enough to worry about right now. The conflict between Israel and Palestine? This one, at least, can be filed under ‘beyond my pay grade’. Or perhaps not. Should pupils be able to wear lanyards that show the Palestinian flag? Or display pro-Palestinian posters? Some see engaged teenagers exercising their right to free expression; others a stoking of racial tensions. Getting the balance right, particularly in a large, ethnically diverse school, is not straightforward. Mike Roper, headteacher at Allerton Grange school in Leeds, faced this

Monday

Stephen Daisley

Tala Halawa and the progressive media’s anti-Semitism blindspot

The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First we learn that this BBC journalist proclaimed during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war that ‘Israel is more Nazi than Hitler’ and that ‘Hitler was right’. Then we encounter her assertion that ‘ur media is controlled by ur zionist government’ and her sharing on Facebook the same image that saw MP Naz Shah suspended from the Labour Party in 2016, an image that advocates the ‘transportation’ of Israel to the United States to end ‘foreign interference’ in the Middle East. Next up is a graphic Halawa tweeted showing a child being burned

Saturday

Efraim Karsh

Hamas doesn’t want a Palestinian state

Do Hamas’s supporters in the West know what this organisation really stands for? The reality is that Hamas is no liberation movement in search of a Palestinian nation. Instead, it seeks the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic empire on its ruins. How do we know? Because senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar has said so: Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state… In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state… This is a holy land. It is not the property of the Palestinians or the Arabs. This land is the property of all Muslims in all parts of the world…

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The disinformation war continues between Israel and Hamas

The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel has started, and the gates to Gaza have opened for the international press. Now a new battle will begin over numbers and ratios. There will be calls for investigations, and endless debates about who ‘won’. Israel’s claims of precision targeting will come under scrutiny, but so too should Palestinian accounts, including claims of mass civilian deaths. At least 243 people are reported to have died in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s military action, including a reported 65 children. These figures rely on claims by the Gaza Health Authority – an unreliable body under Hamas control. The IDF says many civilian deaths are the result of

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Why do parts of Britain erupt whenever Israel defends itself?

There has been a huge amount of comment in recent days on the latest round of exchanges between Israel and the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. As usual whole slews of celebrities and other important figures on the international stage have lamented the fact that Israel has put so much effort into the defence of its own citizens. As usual these ignoramuses cry about ‘disproportionate’ death tolls. As though it would all be a lot fairer if Israel turned off the Iron Dome system for a night or two and let the increasingly sophisticated weaponry of its enemies rain down, unmolested, upon its people. But all this,

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Israel, Palestine and the EU’s humiliating attempt at diplomacy

This week, Hungary defied Brussels and refusing to back a joint EU declaration on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The bland EU statement calling for an end to the violence was underwhelming in itself – but with Hungary rejecting the bloc’s ‘one-sided’ approach, Brussels has been left embarrassed by its inability to coordinate a unanimous response to the fighting. The proposed statement from the bloc’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell read, ‘the priority is the cessation of all violence and the implementation of a ceasefire’, and said that: ‘we support the right to defence for Israel and the right to security – also for the Palestinians – and we consider that security

Paul Wood

Is the worst yet to come in the Middle East?

Beirut We can’t say yet if the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas is the start of ‘the big one’, a new Palestinian intifada, or uprising. That possibility was raised by the grandest of Middle East commentators, Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times. Friedman is sometimes mocked for his prognostications. A ‘Friedman’ is defined as six months because of his repeated statements that the ‘next six months’ would be critical for the US in Iraq, the light at the end of the tunnel visible only then. He also praised the ‘new ideas’ of Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, before it turned out that one of those new ideas

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

What’s the real reason so many people hate Israel?

Did you know that for the past three weeks Turkey has been engaged in a military assault on Iraqi Kurdistan? It’s been brutal. The Turks, who have one of the most powerful military forces on Earth, have used F-16s, F-4 Terminators and other terrifying hi-tech weaponry to pummel Kurdish positions in northern Iraq. Families have fled their homes in terror. Livelihoods have been destroyed.  ‘Every day, every night… we are being bombed. Our lands are being destroyed. We cannot grow our crops’, says a Kurdish farmer.  It’s unclear how many people have died. According to Turkey, dozens of Kurdish people, mostly militants, apparently, have been killed or captured. Have you seen

Wednesday

Bassem Eid

Hamas, not Israel, is to blame for the latest bloodshed

I was born in the Jordanian-occupied Old City in Jerusalem and lived in a UN refugee camp from 1966 until 1999. During the First Intifada, I worked for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and in 1996 I founded the Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring group. With my background in Palestinian campaigning and as a resident of East Jerusalem today, you might assume that I am against Israel’s current military actions. But this could not be further from the truth. The blame for this month’s bloodshed lies solely at the feet of Hamas. Those who wish to divert attention from Hamas’s war crimes would

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

British cops shouldn’t support Palestine – or Israel

Picture the scene. A female police officer — hi-viz police jacket, regulation black hat, facemask slipping from her nose — punches the air, proclaiming: ‘free, free Palestine!’ Her words are met with cheers from the crowd at the anti-Israel rally in central London that she was supposed to be policing. Actually, you don’t have to bother picturing the scene. Just watch the video clip below to see a perfect symbol of the toxic blend of state authoritarianism and hard-left politics that is creeping across British institutions today. After I posted the video on Twitter, the Metropolitan Police said it was ‘reviewing the footage’ and would provide an update ‘shortly’. One

Monday

Steven Barrett

Barristers should stay out of the Israeli-Palestine conflict

The world of barristers had something of a minor civil war at the weekend. The cause? The lesser known ‘Bar Human Rights Committee of England & Wales’ (BHRC), decided to weigh in on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. In a letter to the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, the BHRC called on ‘the UK Government to urge Israel, its friend and ally, to cease all violations of its obligations and responsibilities as an occupying power immediately, including its assault on Gaza’. It said: ‘We urge the Government to issue a statement of unambiguous support for an independent investigation into alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory by the ICC’ Who needs or