During their protected wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s leaders and generals could never define victory. Hamas, by contrast, has a clear understanding of what it looks like. Now that the terror group has demonstrated the failure of Israel’s …
Jerusalem is Israel’s future
For a brief moment, when I was younger, I found myself in Jerusalem. By day I studied the Talmud with my teacher, and by night I wandered its streets.
I would veer into the dark alleyways of the Old City, …
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, …
Why Netanyahu finally agreed to a hostage deal
For dozens of families in Israel, this weekend will bring joy; for scores of others, it will be bittersweet. Binyamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, will have his own swirl of emotions. The Israeli prime minister will want to take credit for reuniting …
Will Israel hand America a ceasefire?
Having choreographed their October 7 assault so skilfully, Hamas clearly had no plans at all for the Israeli counter-offensive. Nor did it plan for the inevitable cutting-off of Gaza’s electricity and water supplied by Israel, or consider the people who …
Israel’s true border crisis
Of all the lessons to be learned following Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel, one is so glaringly obvious that it runs the risk of going unnoticed: the attack was a failure not just of Israel’s border security systems, but of …
The post-America war has begun
Less than a month ago, President Biden was asked on camera if the United States could simultaneously bring conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East to a palatable conclusion. “We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake,” he responded, …
How America can stop Iran
A recent edition of The Tehran Times carried a warning: “If the Zionist regime’s war crimes and genocidal attacks against civilians in Gaza do not come to an end, the region will move towards making a big and decisive decision.”…
The defiance of Israel’s border towns
Southern Israel is a region at war. Driving down from Tel Aviv to the border towns on the frontlines of the war with Hamas, I pass a truck with an open back carrying a load of heavily armed soldiers cradling …
Will Israel-Hamas cause a world war?
As Israel continues to mourn and Gaza continues to be turned into rubble, many in the Middle East are coming to a grim realisation: that things could soon become much, much worse. Huge tectonic shifts now threaten to rupture the …
Saudi Arabia’s empire of sand
There’s a slight hush and then a ripple across the room as he enters. “That’s MBS,” a delegate mutters in French, tugging at his neighbour to stand as Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, strides into the …
I watched Hamas unleash hell
Tel Aviv
A handsome man in his 20s in a military uniform zips past me on a motorised scooter. A woman with a tattoo and piercings calmly sips a cortado in a coffee shop across from me. A young family …
On Israel, why should I love my enemy?
“Love your enemies,” a holy Jew said, a long time ago. But I am not sure I am quite ready for that. Not today at least. I am neither Jewish nor Israeli, but my wife is both, as are my …
Is Israel prepared for war?
The images beggared belief. Palestinian gunmen driving through an Israeli city, firing at passers-by from the bed of a pickup truck. The body of a dead Israeli soldier, his green uniform stained red, being dragged from a car inside Gaza …
Anarchy ended our imperial dream
It’s 1994 and Robert D. Kaplan is in China’s Xinjiang Province, home to 11 million Turkic Uyghur Muslims whom the world now knows as the Uyghurs. He soon learns they are “trapped in a grip of surveillance and brutal repression …