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 …
The shallow triumph of Sinwar’s death
At dawn on 22 March, 2004, a half-blind paraplegic cleric was returning home after his prayers in the Mosque in Gaza City when he was assassinated by two low flying Israeli helicopters. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the founder of Hamas, …
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 …
Has Israel’s strategy changed?
Largely unremarked amid the drama, risk and controversy of its reaction to the October 7 attack is that, over the past year, Israel has experimented with a new type of warfare: targeting its enemies’ entire command structures. The occasional tactical …
A year of hatred
Of the images I have not been able to clear from my mind over these past 12 terrible months the most tenacious is that of two young women: one in an elegant hijab, one not, laughing for the camera as …
Why Israel deserves our support
New York. London. Paris. Madrid. Over the past three decades, at various times, these cities have been yoked together under a pall of terror that has spread right across the West. It has set populations against each other, leaving everyone …
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 …
In Israel, we are masters of uncertainty
I’ve treated scores of terror victims, traumatised soldiers and bereaved families, since I moved to Jerusalem as a psychologist in 1986. I thought I’d seen it all. Nine friends and neighbours murdered by suicide bombers, drive-by shootings, and stabbings; and …
Has Netanyahu lost control of his war?
For decades, Benjamin Netanyahu touted himself as Mr Security, the leader Israelis could count on to keep them safe. Then came Hamas’s October 7 assault, which killed 1,200 people, and took at least 230 hostages, shattering the Prime Minister’s image …
Why Lebanon can’t be saved
In 2018, Henry Kissinger observed that Donald Trump was one of those historical characters who “appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The same could …
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 …
The Israel-Gaza war has changed everything
Analysts, journalists and strategists are all required to ignore the near-impossibility of truly understanding a war as it unfolds. Failing to do so would send us into a morass of self-doubt, and our work would become a useless succession of …
Is this the end of Israel?
So have we reached the end of the line? Do the latest failures and miscalculations — the relentless assault on the al-Shifa Hospital, the fatal airstrike on aid-workers, the targeting of an Iranian General in Damascus, while Hamas’s hostages languish …
Should you watch footage of terrorist attacks?
On Friday evening, an X personality called Ian Miles Cheong posted a video of Isis terrorists marauding through the entrance of a concert hall in Moscow, calmly shooting to death scores of civilians in their path. I don’t follow Cheong, …