When I was a boy, growing up in Gaza, we used to play a game called “Arabs and Jews”. Two children would be designated captains and pick their teams, then we would find some sticks, pretend they were guns, and …
Yahya Sinwar was a monstrous ideologue
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind who had the bad luck of crossing paths with a team of 19-year-old Israeli grunts in Rafah on Wednesday morning, was an intractable religious ideologue who saw his life’s purpose in extravagant historical terms. He …
How Netanyahu duped Nasrallah
On 27 September, Hassan Nasrallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Beirut. Barely had the bombs dropped than commentators were already describing Nasrallah’s demise as a transformational moment in Middle Eastern politics. And why not? Benjamin Netanhayhu declared that …
Can Lebanon survive without Hezbollah?
Over the last fortnight, everything has changed in Lebanon. Hezbollah, which had dominated the country’s politics for more than 20 years, has seen its leadership decapitated, its arsenal diminished, its anti-Zionist credentials tarnished. All the while, its civilian base, huddled …
My year of horror in Gaza
I have lived in Gaza all my life, and for 30 years have been a journalist, which means I have witnessed a lot of violent conflict. But when I woke up to the booms of rockets being fired towards Israel …
What will replace Hezbollah?
In the summer of 2019, I took one of Beirut’s vintage Mercedes taxis to the city’s southern suburbs. I was in Dahieh to meet Lokman Slim, a prominent Lebanese researcher and fierce critic of Hezbollah. Slim, together with his German-born …
Why Israel can’t give up the Philadelphi Corridor
What’s in a name? Only 350 feet wide and nine miles long, the “Philadelphi Corridor” is little more than a speck. Yet it has, in recent weeks, assumed outsized proportions. Before October 7, this tiny sliver of land separating Egypt …
The intellectual dishonesty of Shlomo Sand
I saw Shlomo Sand speak once. It was at a public event in 2008, but I remember him well: a preening man with a leather jacket and a manner of such monumental self-regard that he reminded me of an Israeli …
Interview 1896 – Pandemic Babies and Polio Peace (NWNW 565)
This week on the New World Next Week: Facebook partner admits to “Active(ly) Listening” to you through your phone; the Israelis agree to a ceasefire so WHO workers can jab Gazan kids; and pandemic babies are showing developmental problems as …
The problem with banning masks
We can surely be grateful that, more than two years after Covid mandates were relaxed across most of the United States, it is possible to go days without encountering a masked face. Even in the Democratic-run parts of the country …
The No-State Solution
When the guns eventually fall silent in Gaza, Israelis and Palestinians will confront a decades-old reality that cannot be overcome by violence and political half-measures. Both Jews and Palestinians will continue to assert privileged ownership of Palestine, citing centuries of …
Episode 463 – The Gaza Holocaust
As we approach the ten month mark of the slaughter in Gaza, it’s time to peel back the layers of deception surrounding October 7th, the Israeli response, and the true meaning of this conflict. We must call things by their …
How Hamas became radical chic
Any thinking Jew today hears the alarm resounding like a shofar blast in days of old, announcing rising floodwaters or marauding Cossacks. Confronted with a worldwide, increasingly violent explosion of antisemitism, the mind turns to dark mysteries. Why have radical …
Safetyism doesn’t belong on campus
I have just spent a week in the US: one in which the main news stories were not about Gaza, but rather about university encampments and occupations protesting what is happening in Gaza. Everyone seemed fascinated by this strange shadow …
Columbia has learnt the wrong lesson of 1968
The barricades. The passion. The patchouli. A campus protest and student rebellion that threatens to engulf a tired establishment. This time round, the police used flash-bang grenades rather than tear gas to clear out Hamilton Hall. But this is a …