In what might be a world first, the Australian parliament has just dealt a death blow to counter-disinformation legislation that threatened to fundamentally reshape the country’s free speech landscape. The bill, which would have created a two-tier system of speech …
The ICC has emboldened Netanyahu
International law has spoken once again. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, are now wanted men. The International Criminal Court has, for the first time in its 22-year history, issued arrest warrants for …
How Israel and Lebanon can stop the slaughter
In the Middle East, transitions between US presidential administrations are often times of bold attempts at diplomacy. It was in the last days and hours of the Clinton administration that intense final status talks were advanced for an Israeli-Palestinian peace, …
The rebel cult of Murakami
For middle-aged Japanophiles, the recent Japan boom among the young can at times feel exhausting. Japanese pop, rapid and relentless, sounds like something put together by toddlers on a sugar binge. Meanwhile, the popularity in the West of manga and …
North Korea is ready for war
When Trump returns to the White House next year, he’d be wise not to ignore one of the obsessions of his first term: North Korea. For while the Kim regime has been prodded from the news agenda over recent years, …
Xi Jinping has a peasant soul
The Chinese rock band Varihnaz is more likely to sing about pesticides and rice than love and loss. Its part-farmer, part-musician bandmates appeal to young Chinese who dream of a simpler, slower way of life beyond the frenzied cities. Its …
Gaza’s children have no future
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 …
Israel’s plan to weaken the Iranian regime
Before Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei set out to conquer the Sunni Arab world in 1989, there were self-imposed rules that set real limits to Arab-Israeli warfare. In all the conflict between Israel and Arab states since May 1948, the world …
The end of Lebanon’s French connection
A day after the Beirut port blast shattered the city in August 2020, Emmanuel Macron arrived in Lebanon as a self-proclaimed saviour. Like JFK in West Berlin, or Fidel Castro in post-revolutionary Havana, the French President toured the streets. Thronged …
Israel and the trials of liberal solidarity
October 7 kicked Israel into terror of body and mind. The savage massacres, unfathomable in themselves; the mounting evidence of rapes, beheadings, immolations; the government’s colossal failure; the nightmare of Israelis, young and old, captive in Hamas tunnels; the foreboding …
Will the Brics inherit the earth?
A momentous global shift is currently underway. One which finds expression today in the Russian city of Kazan where the Brics bloc is holding an international summit hosted by the supposed global pariah Vladimir Putin.
Since the onset of the …
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, …
Could killer robots terminate us?
In the summer of 2020, the Afghan military received an unusual report. Transmitted by their US allies, it warned of a possible Taliban attack in Jalalabad, a city in the fertile country’s southeastern plain. Suggesting the assault would come between …
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 …