We are cursed to live in a time of great historical significance: when future historians look back at 2023, the distinguishing feature of this year will likely be the recurrence of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. In just 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 …
The tomb of Palestinian liberation
Ramallah is a dusty city built, you soon realise, around a fort. This is the Mukataa, or the “headquarters”, separated from the streets by walls and watchtowers. Mandate officials, Jordanian officers and the IDF have all been based here …
Human rights died in Gaza
Religions die hard. They promise something better, something truer, more powerful and lasting than our familiar cruelties, corruptions and deaths. Their traditions take shape over time; they develop rituals, build communities, give life order and meaning, and at their best …
The NYT is wrong about Israeli intelligence
The bad-faith reporting of Israeli news in The New York Times can overcome even the simplest arithmetic. Last month, there was a day-long rally for Israel in Washington that filled its Mall, with police attendance estimates ranging between 250,000 and …
The self-delusion of secular Jews
What can we Jews not accomplish? There were three years between the ovens of Auschwitz and the foundation of the Jewish State. And then the Israelis transformed the wasteland between the River and the Sea into an agricultural phenomenon, supplying …
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 …
Who will win Israel’s oil and gas war?
When we talk of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we tend to focus on the latter’s political, social and humanitarian dimensions. But often this comes at the expense of considering an important economic dimension — one which recent events in Gaza have …
Why MBS wants peace with Israel
The 1945 meeting between American President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz, which laid the foundation for their nations’ enduring relationship, is often portrayed as an exchange of oil for security cooperation. But in reality, oil was hardly discussed. …
What do Christian Zionists think about Jews?
When Jerry Seinfeld took his family to an “anti-terror fantasy camp” in the West Bank in 2018 to “play war games with the IDF”, the backlash was swift and impassioned. Intrigued, the following year, I travelled to the controversial Gush …
Can the media trust this doctor in Gaza?
In the weeks since Israel launched its offensive against Hamas, one doctor’s reports from Gaza’s hospitals have proved more valuable to the media than any other: those delivered by Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon. Indeed, when Abu-Sittah held a …
Israel has no plan for Gaza
Following the October 7 atrocities, the imperative to respond in fury was irresistible, and Israel’s Prime Minister reached immediately for the blunt instrument of his formidable war machine, vowing to break Hamas’s back. But, as Clausewitz noted, war is not …
Israel is turning into Lebanon
Beirut, in the mid-20th century, was a synonym for Middle Eastern glamour, its Rue de la Phénicie a nocturnal haunt for Hollywood movie stars and Arab oil barons. In the early Fifties, when the city was in the Western press, …