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 …
The impossible truth about Afghanistan
In “The Impossible Fact”, the 20th-century German poet Christian Morgenstern tells the story of an academic who undergoes a traumatising experience. He staggers home, wraps damp cloths around his forehead and collapses into his armchair to process what has happened. …
The Arab Spring exposed America’s weakness
When Bashar al-Assad touched down in Riyadh last week, to be embraced by the Saudi king on the occasion of Syria’s readmittance to the Arab League, the Syrian War drew to a close, and with it the Arab Spring. His …
The end of Germany’s open borders
Wir schaffen das! Who could forget Angela Merkel’s one-liner on August 31, 2015 — best translated as “Yes, we can!” — after she opened her country’s borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants making their way from Syria, Afghanistan and …
The Kurds fighting the Isis resistance
“George W. Bush is a hero.” General Sirwan Barzani utters these words with quiet satisfaction. “The best thing that happened to Iraq, at least to us Kurds, was its liberation in 2003. He liberated all of Iraq from dictatorship. It …
How Israel mobilised to stop Netanyahu
When the newly appointed Justice Minister of the Netanyahu government, Yariv Levin, presented his strategy for “legal reform” six days after taking office, he looked unstoppable. The plan had been well-prepared, even years in the making.
Its first tranche alone …