Jake Wallis Simons is a columnist, broadcaster and foreign correspondent. His latest book, Israelophobia, is out now
The decades since the Islamic revolution have weighed heavy on the people of Iran. Living in fear, under extreme levels of surveillance and oppression, ordinary citizens have seen their quality of life plummet and their horizons shrink, as their country became an international pariah. Those who dared to protest have been brutally repressed by regime
A man is filmed dying under a policeman’s knee in Minneapolis. Riots break out, statues are toppled and the Western world erupts with civil unrest. More than 50,000 people are massacred, tortured and raped, leaving orphaned children to forage for food and find their drinking water in puddles. Some of it is caught on camera.
The Mossad is not known for its touchy-feely approach. Whether it was the kidnap of Adolf Eichmann in the sixties, hunting down and executing the Black September terrorists in the seventies and eighties, or dispatching a Hamas chief while disguised as tennis players in a Dubai hotel in 2010, the agency has built a reputation
It’s easy to forget that your BBC licence fee does not only fund content that you and your family consumes. In addition to the output aimed at domestic audiences, your annual payment of £157.50 funds a host of foreign language services aimed at projecting British impartiality and soft power overseas. The largest of these is
The Israeli-Saudi peace deal is, to coin a phrase, oven-ready, a source close to the negotiations told me this week. After many months of covert meetings, the detail has been agreed and the Israelis are ready to commit. All that’s needed is for the Saudis to sign on the dotted line. This means that an
Fifty-five years ago, Martin Luther King delivered a speech to 50,000 Americans in which he demanded justice for persecuted Jews behind the Iron Curtain. ‘The absence of opportunity to associate as Jews in the enjoyment of Jewish culture and religious experience becomes a severe limitation upon the individual,’ he said. ‘Negros can well understand and
What does the world’s foremost Shia power and the most notorious Sunni terror group have in common? Given that the two great branches of Islam rarely see eye to eye, the layman would be forgiven for thinking that the answer is ‘not much’. It isn’t just the layman who has concluded that Iran and Al
Israel’s remarkable vaccine rollout has been deservedly praised. But not everyone is full of goodwill. Depressingly and inevitably, commentators and human rights groups have queued up to find a reason to condemn the Jewish state. Israel, which is leading the world in the speed of the rollout, has been accused of ‘excluding’ the Palestinians from getting
The dawn of the new year is rising on a world that would have been unrecognisable 12 months ago. The scourge of Covid, the fall of Trump, the resolution of Brexit; all have carved history in unpredictable ways. But nowhere has seen greater changes than the Middle East, where, for the first time, people are
There’s a group called Palestine Action whose raison d’être is to throw red paint over the British offices of Elbit, an Israeli high-tech arms company, in an orchestrated attempt to hound it out of the country. Five members of the ‘direct-action network’, which has links to Extinction Rebellion, armed themselves with paint pots and climbed
Twitter is not always kind to the Jewish state. But the peace accord between Israel, UAE and Bahrain that was signed in Washington in September has opened the floodgates to a social media love-in. In one video, recently shared by Ivanka Trump, an Israeli called Amit Deri expresses his astonishment at finding produce from his country
The news that Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen ‘father of the bomb’ Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, met his end in a hail of bullets near Tehran today comes as no surprise. As with so many things these past four years, this is all about Trump. Whoever carried out the hit, it is all but certain that Trump gave
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seems determined to reinvent the secular Muslim country he inherited as a sort of Sunni Iranian ‘Mini-Me’: draconian, Islamist and with vaunting regional ambitions. For Western powers and their allies, the urgent question is how to deal with the mutation of a Nato ally into a ‘neo-Ottoman’ threat. A hundred years ago,
It was the question that many journalists were asking: what had become of Mrs Puigdemont and the two little Puigdemonts? Well, yesterday afternoon we found out. After a bit of elementary detective work, we photographed her driving home with her two children in the car. In other words, doing the school run. Now, Marcela Topor
One is the son of a humble baker, whose burning passion for Catalan independence has been all-consuming since he was a boy. The other, a scion of a distinguished Spanish family, is a hard-nosed political operator with a taste for cigars and bullfighting. In the heady days of the referendum, some even dared to dream that
Barcelona I was roaring through central Barcelona on the back of a motorcycle, in the midst of a pack of unionist riders adorned with Spanish flags, all sounding their horns with reckless abandon, when it hit me: this was the voice of the silent majority. Catalonia does not want independence from Spain. But let me
It was the option that had long been threatened, but few people imagined that the Catalan leader, Carles Puigdemont, would actually have the guts to follow it through. A few weeks ago, when I stood outside the parliament building in Barcelona after Puigdemont had apparently backed away from the brink, the mood was despondent as
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
Barcelona After the demonstration in Barcelona on Sunday, I happened to walk past the city’s main police station. A unionist crowd had gathered to praise the officers who had so brutally suppressed the Catalan referendum the previous week. Wrapped in Spanish flags, they were chanting Viva España and throwing flowers. Then they started performing the
At first glance, the new footage of Boris being slapped down for reciting a fragment of Kipling in Burma seemed like just another of his gaffes. Many Burmese people, however, reacted with bafflement. This was an affectionate poem expressing British love for their country through a soldier kissing a Burmese girl. (My great-grandfather, Sir William
