Features

Wednesday

Anshel Pfeffer

Can Israel keep the West on side?

Jerusalem On 7 October, Israeli security officials were already questioning how long they would be allowed to fight in Gaza. As the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) hurriedly mobilised more than 300,000 reservists, one official told me that ‘destroying Hamas depends on the length of our window of legitimacy’. Last week, I was on an embed with an IDF unit in Gaza City. As the sun set over the Mediterranean, I checked the date on my watch and realised the 18th day of the ground campaign had just ended. During the 2009 and 2014 Gaza ground offensives, the IDF was forced to stop fighting by the 18th day and accept a ceasefire (brokered both times by the Egyptians and forced on it by the US).

Matt Ridley

Virology poses a far greater threat to the world than AI

Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’ He is right. There is almost no debate about regulating high-risk virology, whereas the world is in a moral panic about artificial intelligence. The recent global summit at Bletchley Park essentially focused on how to make us safe from Hal the malevolent computer.

Owen Matthews

Sanctions against Russia have backfired

Does a British government department have the right to punish individuals who have broken no laws on the basis of their political views? Are private companies allowed to discriminate against customers on the basis of their nationality alone? For the past two years, the answer to both these questions has been yes – if they have a connection to Russia. In the immediate aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February last year, the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, called the war ‘a tragedy for Ukraine, and a tragedy for Russia’. Directly addressing the people of Russia (and speaking in surprisingly well-accented Russian), Johnson said: ‘I do not believe this war is in your name.

A.N. Wilson

The greatness of C.S. Lewis

He died on the very day that President Kennedy was assassinated, Friday 22 November 1963, so it is not surprising that the event was overshadowed at the time. With the passage of 60 years, C.S. Lewis’s reputation is undiminished and the sheer range of his achievements as a writer and teacher appears ever more prodigious. For many, he is most beloved as the creator of the seven Narnia books: for others as the author of the science-fiction Space trilogy, which is not only a page-turner but horrifyingly and accurately prophetic. For still others – and for a long time this would have included myself – the great work is his scholarly but always readable contribution to literary studies.

Peter Hitchens

What prison taught me

I confess I never expected to see myself going to the lavatory on prime-time national TV. In fact, the expedition was a failure. Sharing a cell, especially with a young man with a record for GBH, is a very constipating experience. But when I accepted Shine TV’s proposal that I should submit to living alongside a large number of former prisoners, in a real but decommissioned jail, I had agreed to almost anything that might happen. Including that. Dozens of cameras covered us the whole time from every angle. We wore microphones around our necks. It is impossible to guard your tongue the whole time, and so my exclamation of ‘at last!’ slipped out. And I can see why they used it.

David Swift

Hope is not yet extinguished in Jaffa

When I first heard of the 7 October attacks, I feared it would be the beginning of a war on several fronts: in Gaza, in northern Israel, and in the West Bank. My biggest concern was that the high casualties from the retaliatory Israeli airstrikes would cause violence within Israel itself, as Palestinians in mixed cities such as Jaffa, where I live, took to the streets. This was exactly what happened two years ago, when mob violence erupted in Jaffa, Lod, Acre and other areas where Jews and Muslims live side-by-side, in response to the clearance of the Muslim neighbourhood Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. During those riots, three people – two Jewish and one Arab – were killed. In some of the most gentrified parts of Jaffa, Palestinian youths torched cars and set up barricades.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

The 2024 veep show has already started

Vice presidents are meant to be dependable – and in a funny way Kamala Harris is exactly that. Joe Biden knows that, no matter how bad his poll numbers, hers will be worse: she’s the most unpopular vice president since polling began, according to one recent survey. Biden can afford to be pitifully vague in public partly because she is so painfully annoying. He loses his thread; she loses the plot.  That’s one of the reasons why, for all the alarm in Washington circles about the Commander-in-Chief’s ‘job performance’ and the distinct possibility that he might lose to Donald Trump next year, the Biden-Harris ticket seems locked in place for 2024. Why would Biden nominate someone else when Harris is so reliably unthreatening?

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

How to get rid of your saggy tattoo

Sagging angels, wilting lilies, drooping lines from love sonnets, withered swallows, flaccid snakes, limp dragons, shrivelled babies’ names: this will be the view inside the British bathroom, and at the British seaside, and in British hospital beds and morgues, in 2060, when today’s tattoo-wearers now in their prime will be in their seventies and eighties.  None of us thinks we’re going to grow old, but (as happened so cruelly to 1960s rock stars) age will creep up, and the skin will stretch, even that of the handsomest, healthiest tattoo trendsetters with the best body art money can buy.

Sean Thomas

Why I love terrible towns

There are plenty of reasons to visit Catania in Sicily, and some of them are positive. The town is impressively ancient – dating back to the 8th century bc. It boasts a handsome, lavishly voluted Baroque core. A few steps from that main piazza you can find the picturesque fish market, the Pescheria, which sequins the black tufa cobbles with silvery fish scales, and has been selling inky squid for centuries. What else? The city has a striking location, with Mount Etna squatting on the horizon, apparently benign, but occasionally sending out chuffs of smoke to remind you of its menace, like a volcanic version of Tony Benn, puffing his pipe at the edge of British politics.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Back to the future: Sunak’s big gamble

On Remembrance Sunday, former prime ministers are given ceremonial roles. When everyone assembled last weekend, it was a reminder of the recent mayhem within the Tory party. Labour’s 13-year era seemed neat by comparison: Tony Blair, then Gordon Brown. The Tories’ 13 years in power were represented by a more chaotic line-up: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak. If Tory rebels have their way, they might even try to squeeze someone else in before time runs out. ‘I was the future, once,’ the now Lord Cameron said on his last day in office in July 2016. He did himself a disservice: he is the future once more, after being recalled to serve in Sunak’s government in a plot twist that no one saw coming.

Mark Palmer

Migrants should want to go to Rwanda

  Kigali The Supreme Court’s ruling that sending migrants to a former hostel in Kigali is illegal strikes another hammer blow to the government, not least because Rwanda gets to keep the £140 million that set up the proposed deal in the first place. Never mind what happens now – and this story is far from over – if I were a migrant about to take a small boat to Britain, the prospect of ending up here, where it’s easier to start a business than almost anywhere else in the world, would hardly be a deterrent. The facts are these: Rwanda was a broken country after the 1994 genocide.

Michael Karam

Will Lebanon be dragged into a war with Israel?

Southern Lebanon In the week following the 7/10 attacks by Hamas, a journalist in Beirut put the question all of Lebanon wanted to ask to the Prime Minister, Najib Mikati: do we have to be dragged into the war with Israel? It was more of a cri de coeur than a question, because the whole country knows the answer and knows that Lebanon has no choice. Hezbollah, the Shia Islamist party and militant group, unofficially controls many, if not most, of the levers of power in Lebanon and it does not answer to the people or the government here. Hezbollah’s leader, the reclusive cleric Hassan Nasrallah, holds no public office and he doesn’t give a stuff about Mikati’s government. He takes orders only from Tehran.

Svitlana Morenets

Zelensky must be honest about the state of the war

‘Happy New Year! The year of our victory!’ said Volodymyr Zelensky on 1 January. After the liberation of the Kharkiv region and Kherson, Ukrainians entered the ninth year of the war with hope that they could win. Light will always prevail over darkness, Zelensky likes to say. But now the counter-offensive is nearly over, having made crushingly few gains. With western support waning, Kyiv needs to be honest about how the war is going and what it will take to turn the tide. Ukrainians should be told that there is a shortage of soldiers and that mass conscription is urgently needed After Zelensky, the most popular figure in Ukraine is Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the military – and he has a very different message.

Wednesday

Ian Acheson

Keeping the peace: the politics of policing protest

Armistice Day is meant to be a moment of solemn national unity. Yet this year it is expected to coincide with the rather less harmonious ‘Million March for Palestine’, as hundreds of thousands gather in central London on Saturday to protest against Israel’s war on Gaza. Are these events compatible? Should the protest be banned? The Prime Minister says holding the protest on Armistice Day is ‘disrespectful’ but insists that only Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, can act to stop it. So Rishi Sunak is, in effect, saying his government cannot be blamed if there’s trouble at what Suella Braverman, his Home Secretary, calls a ‘hate march’. It’s all on Sir Mark. ‘My job is to hold him accountable,’ says Sunak. We don’t need more laws.

Michael Simmons

Why was an erroneous graph used to justify the second lockdown?

Two stories are emerging from the Covid Inquiry: one that it wants to tell and one that it does not. The first is a tale of foul-mouthed incompetence, of which there’s no shortage of evidence dredged from the private messages of the main actors. The more important story can be found in the submitted statements – hundreds of pages of thoughts, documents and reflections. They raise an important question which Baroness Hallett’s inquiry shows little interest in answering: was lockdown based on a false premise, conjured up by poorly drafted models? Only later did No.

Anshel Pfeffer

Benjamin Netanyahu is increasingly seen as Israel’s curse

Jerusalem On Tuesday, I was driving down to an Israeli army headquarters on the border with Gaza as a massive convoy of police cars and black bullet-proof limousines forced me onto the side of the road by the town of Ofakim. In Israel, only one man travels in a convoy that large.  It was 7 November, a month after the Hamas attack on Israeli communities in which 1,400 were murdered and the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza began. Even during peacetime the Prime Minister’s movements are shrouded in secrecy until he is safely back in one of his homes or offices.

Slavoj Žižek

The unfathomable depths of Palestinian despair

Away from Gaza, things are getting worse in the West Bank. I’ve received many messages from Palestinian friends raging at what is going on there. To get an idea of the despair of West Bank Palestinians, remember the suicidal attacks on the streets of Jerusalem a decade or so ago. Usually what happened was an ordinary Palestinian would approach a Jew, pull out a knife and stab him, realising they would be instantly killed by the other people nearby. Obviously I condemn these acts, though it’s worth noting that they involved no message, no shouting of ‘Free Palestine!’ There was no large organisation behind them, no big political project, just pure despair.

Damian Thompson

What do sugar and cocaine have in common?

Stephen Fry is a national treasure whom half the nation can’t stand. He drops his façade of loveability mid-chortle as soon as Brexit is mentioned. He threw a spectacularly pompous Remainer wobbly a few weeks ago and I remember thinking: is he determined to make the people he disdains actively hate him? If so, it’s working. Last weekend Fry was on John Cleese’s GB News chat show, talking about his former cocaine habit and its connection to his adolescent consumption of sugar. He mentioned the sweets in the shape of cigarettes that were sold at his school tuck shop. As he put it: ‘When I was a teenager, I had this vast empty hole in me that said, “Feed me, I need this sugar, I need it.

Leslie Croxford

How Egyptians see the Gaza crisis

I was invited to speak at the memorial service for my colleague and friend, Professor Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri, at the American University in Cairo. It was to be held at the downtown Cairo campus, overlooking Tahrir Square. Doris had worked as a professor of English literature at the university from 1955 to 2017. The same age as the Queen, she too had the aura of a fixed point in the firmament. I live in a new suburb 15 miles west of Tahrir Square. Like Cairo’s other new suburbs, it developed in the Mubarak years without plans for properly connecting it to the overcrowded capital its wealthy citizens sought to escape. But the current President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has been energetically advancing public works projects.

Christopher Howse

How to speak London

Cockney is dead, but so is the King’s English. Long live Standard Southern British English. The Cockney Barbara Windsor yelling ‘Ge’ aah-a my pub’ is as fossilised as Eliza Doolittle. And what a shock it is today to hear the late Queen, aged 21, declare: ‘My whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family.’ She seems to say devated, sairvice and end (for ‘and’).