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, …
The West has a deviancy problem
When and why did American life become so coarse, amoral and ungovernable? In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased …
Israel’s victory will be Netanyahu’s downfall
Weeks ago, the Israeli army came up with a perfectly serviceable plan to finish the war in Gaza. Their strategy was to simultaneously push their ground forces into the remaining Rafah segment of the strip to destroy the last of …
Should America strike back at Iran?
There’s no denying Iran’s proxy forces are great value for money. The regime’s support for its allied militias, including the Lebanese Hizbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, probably doesn’t exceed a few billion dollars per annum — perhaps even less, given …
Life on Israel’s home front
By choice, I’ve worked with victims of war and atrocity. During my lengthy career as a psychologist, I’ve cried with scores of Holocaust survivors and their children. I’ve visited the killing fields of Poland and written extensively on the psychological …
The chaos behind Iran’s grand strategy
Reporting from Israel at the end of last year stirred various emotions in me, not least a constant feeling of mild claustrophobia. Not from the Hamas rockets that incrementally forced me to duck into bomb shelters, nor from the colossal …
David Mamet on Hollywood, Hamas and Donald Trump
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and director David Mamet has, in his own words, gone from a Hollywood veteran to “the hermit of Santa Monica”. Celebrated for his plays American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Speed-the-Plow, Mamet has dedicated his formidable energy …
How Israel is battling its demons
Outside the hotel, the Mediterranean Sea winks at the winter sun. There’s a lawn strewn with toys that look like they’ve been abandoned for something more fun. But the sense of tranquillity is deceptive; the deep, dark rings around the …
Inside the Hamas media operation
As well as an atrocity, the October 7 massacre was a media sensation. With the use of $150 GoPros strapped to its terrorist foot soldiers, Hamas thrust its obscenities into almost every news channel, paper and feed in the world. …
Resignations won’t fix America’s universities
Societies rot from the head down, as fish are said to do. In the academy, too, the head rots first. Elite universities were the first to take to heart Marx’s admonition that the point is not to interpret the world, …
Meet the Iranians supporting Israel
Lily Moo is used to death threats: in the past 14 months, 19 against her have been reported to the police. An Iranian in London, she has been leading Woman, Life, Freedom marches in her adopted home — calling for …
Hamas aren’t Hollywood villains
On Christmas Eve, a kidnapped girl lies asleep in a bed that’s not her own. Her captors, two men, stand over her and discuss their plans to detonate a bomb at a holiday parade. The older, balder man glances at …