gaza Archives

Tuesday

November 7, 2023

Alan Dershowitz: when Israel must consider the nuclear option

Professor Alan Dershowitz is one of Israel’s most prominent defenders outside the Jewish state. He has just written — in record time — a book about the events of October 7: War Against the Jews — How to End Hamas Barbarism. It will be published next month and will argue, among other things, that the Hamas attack “has required Israel to consider its nuclear option as a last resort to assure its survival.” I spoke to Professor Dershowitz and asked him first, about another of the book’s arguments, that there should be no absolute distinction between civilians and combatants in Gaza, but instead “a continuum of civilianality.” "It existed in Nazi Germany," he said.

Friday

November 3, 2023

Cockburn

White House announces effort to counter Islamophobia as antisemitism rises

War is raging in Israel and Kamala Harris is holding down the home front with the same political aplomb she handled the border crisis — that is to say, poorly. With thousands of lives lost in Israel and an increasing number of antisemitic attacks in the US, Harris is proud to announce the White House's new program to target... Islamophobia. “Taking on hate is a national priority. Today, @POTUS and I are announcing the country’s first National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia. This action is the latest step forward in our work to combat a surge of hate in America,” Harris shared in a post on X Wednesday evening. https://twitter.

Thursday

November 2, 2023

Ben Domenech

Does Joe Biden have an Israel problem?

Welcome to Thunderdome, where for the first time some cracks are showing in the emphatic Democratic support for Joe Biden. Even with his many widely apparent defects as a candidate and a president, Biden’s support from strong Democratic constituencies has remained largely consistent throughout his tenure. The loss of Independent support at this juncture is rationalized away by many Democrats, who feel that once Donald Trump is presumably the GOP nominee, they’ll be able to get all those leaners in the center back in the fold. But now, thanks to his policy choices on Israel, Biden is suffering a major blow among a significant Democrat constituency made more important given its geographic concentration in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania: Arab Americans.

Wednesday

October 25, 2023

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Tory by-election misery, ‘jihad’ chants and emergency aid

From our UK edition

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, on his return from Israel (where he spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister) and to Saudi Arabia (where he spoke with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince), told the House of Commons: ‘Hamas is not only a threat to Israel, but to many others across the region. All the leaders I met agreed that this is a watershed moment. It’s time to set the region on a better path.’ Twelve Britons had died in the Hamas attack, and five were missing. Of the blast at Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital on 17 October, which killed numbers of people into the hundreds, he said it was likely to have been caused by a missile fired from within Gaza. He announced £20 million extra in emergency aid to Gaza.

Rod Liddle

What Hamas promised to its electorate

From our UK edition

Things you do not hear very often, number one: a pro-Palestinian protestor denouncing Hamas for the barbarity of its incursion into Israel on 7 October, appalled at the savagery of those attacks upon children, grandmothers, etc. It may seem as if, in saying this, I am stating the obvious – because support for that pogrom was, I would suggest, strong among some of those carrying Palestinian flags on marches through London and elsewhere. Six Arab language journalists were suspended by the BBC when it was discovered that they retweeted messages glorifying in that day’s murder. They were not members of Hamas. Ordinary Palestinians interviewed, cowering in the rubble of Gaza, were not quoted condemning the attacks which led directly to their present misery.

Peter Oborne

Britain should back a ceasefire

From our UK edition

Six weeks ago, I invited Ahmed Alnaouq, a young diplomat who recently joined the Palestinian mission in London, to stay for a cricket weekend in Wiltshire. He resisted all entreaties to play the game but was in every other way a delightful guest. On Sunday, Ahmed learnt that his family in Gaza has been wiped out by an Israeli bomb. His father, siblings, and more than 15 nieces and nephews had all been killed. Twenty-three dead, no injuries. Another brother was killed by an Israeli bombing in 2014. His mother died three years ago because, he says, Israel denied her medical treatment. When I sent him a text message saying that he and his family were in my thoughts and prayers – it felt hopeless, but what else can one say? – he replied: ‘My family is gone Peter. All of them.

Toby Young

Why I don’t trust the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative

From our UK edition

You almost certainly haven’t heard of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), although you probably should have. It’s a BBC-led consortium of the world’s most powerful news, social media and technology companies that seeks to cleanse the internet of ‘disinformation’. It carries out this mission by doing its best to discredit sites that challenge the prevailing narrative on topics like lockdowns, Covid vaccines, electoral fraud, the Ukraine war and climate change. It was founded in 2019 by Jessica Cecil, a senior BBC executive who, in 2021, was part of the Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, a shadowy group of ‘experts’ convened by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to monitor criticism of the government’s pandemic response.

Bryan Appleyard

No one should trust the camera in the age of AI

From our UK edition

This war is being fought with pictures more than words. The poignant shots, often selfies, of families, children, even babies, who were to become victims of Hamas butchery, the wailing mothers and children on stretchers in Gaza, the missile strikes and collapsed concrete buildings. We know politicians on all sides lie, but photography is a mechanical process; these pictures must, surely, be the truth? Almost all these photos have been taken with mobile phones. To a rough approximation, everybody now has a smartphone. There are said to be seven billion smartphones in use around the world – there are only eight billion people. (Sales of what we used to know as cameras have crashed by 85 per cent.

Charles Lipson

Time for Biden to change course from Obama’s failed Middle East policies

When a long-silent former president finally speaks out, the public listens. So do foreign leaders, especially when the former president is closely tied to the current one. That’s why Barack Obama’s comments on the war in Gaza attracted attention. Anyone who remembers President Obama’s foreign policy knew what to expect: criticism of Israel and a delicate dance around Iran’s malign behavior. In fact, he did not mention Iran at all. He totally ignored their role. His audience expected him to add a few words of moral self-righteousness, warning Israel about future civilian casualties, as if Israeli Defense Forces hadn’t taken enormous and costly steps to avoid them.

Thursday

October 19, 2023

Daniel DePetris

Biden’s Oval Office address was a sales pitch

A primetime address in the Oval Office is the pinnace of presidential speechifying. Ronald Reagan used the room in 1986 to console the nation after the Challenger blew up on live television. George W. Bush declared the global war on terrorism there. Donald Trump leveraged the weight of the Resolute Desk as he talked to Americans about a deadly but mysterious virus called Covid-19 for the first time.  Tonight, it was Joe Biden’s turn. The topics, the wars in Ukraine and Israel, couldn’t be more different with respect to the players, the stakes or the circumstances leading up to them. Even so, Biden tried to convince the American people on the idea that the two wars were one and the same.

Charles Lipson

A lie can get halfway around the world

The charge damning Israel with bombing a hospital in Gaza has circled the globe at lightning speed, time and again. But slowly the truth is getting its pants on. The evidence is increasingly clear that Israeli Defense Forces did not bomb a hospital in Gaza, either deliberately or inadvertently. A video, now publicly available, shows the rocket coming from inside Gaza, not from outside or from a plane. CNN has had experts confirm that analysis. The US has confirmed that point with sensitive (and still secret) signals-intelligence. So has Israeli intelligence, independent of the US. There is also at least one captured phone call among jihadists acknowledging that the rocket was fired from inside Gaza. That, too, is publicly available.

Juan P. Villasmil

Protests and confusion follow the Gaza hospital blast

On President Biden's last-minute trip to Israel Wednesday, the commander-in-chief pledged America's support to the Jewish state alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Following what the world’s media covered as Tuesday’s massive explosion of the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital in Gaza, Jordan abruptly canceled a summit set to be held in Amman with leaders from Egypt and Palestine. The country’s king, Abdullah II, called off the four-way summit, blaming the Israeli Defense Forces for the explosion that, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, killed around 500 Palestinians. The Jordanian demanded an immediate end of Israel’s offensive, labeling the event a “shame on humanity.

Saturday

October 14, 2023

Jonathan Spyer

An Israeli ground assault would be devastating for Gaza

From our UK edition

On a patch of scrubland outside the Zikim kibbutz earlier this week, I came across a platoon of Merkava 4 tanks positioned among the trees. One of the tank commanders recognised my colleague and we exchanged a few words. ‘This is our Yom Kippur,’ he told us. ‘We haven’t even begun to grasp the implications of this.’ Yom Kippur, in this context, isn’t a reference to the annual Jewish day of atonement. Rather, it recalls October 1973, when Israel was surprised by an attack on two fronts from the forces of Egypt and Syria. The Hamas assault on Israeli Jewish communities around the Gaza Strip came exactly 50 years and a day after what Israelis call the Yom Kippur War.

Paul Wood

Paul Wood, James Heale and Robin Ashenden

From our UK edition

23 min listen

This week Paul Wood delves into the complex background of the Middle East and asks if Iran might have been behind the Hamas attacks on Israel, and what might come next (01:11), James Heale ponders the great Tory tax debate by asking what is the point of the Tories if they don’t lower taxes (13:04) and Robin Ashenden on how he plans to introduce his half Russian daughter to the delights of red buses, Beefeaters and a proper full English (18:36).

Friday

October 13, 2023

Roger Kimball

What does a ‘proportionate’ response to Hamas look like?

As the world stumbles through the fog of war following the savage attacks on Israel by Hamas last week, I thought it might be worth pondering two things. First, since the news is full of headlines warning against Israel’s conducting a “disproportionate” response, I wonder what a “proportionate” response to the wholesale murder and mayhem perpetrated by Hamas would look like? Second, I know that I am not alone in sensing that the attack, though brutal, was but the opening gambit of a plan whose origin and course is, as of this writing, still unknown to the public. As to the first, this was the strophe: on October 7, hundreds of Hamas terrorists suddenly and without warning swarmed across the border separating the Gaza Strip and Israel.

Thursday

October 12, 2023

Ben Domenech

The Ronna Romney RNC is utterly useless

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week the 2024 election had its first real sea change in priority and policy focus thanks to the horrific, detestable and utterly evil attacks on Israel by Hamas. The general rule in politics is that foreign policy doesn’t matter for voters, and that’s been true in... actually, wait a minute... not even the majority of presidential elections in the past half century! In 1980, 1984, 1988, 2004, 2008 and 2016, foreign policy played an outsized role in the candidate selection of Republicans and Democrats, and you could even argue that Joe Biden’s false promise of foreign policy normalcy was decisive in 2020.

Wednesday

October 11, 2023

Paul Wood

What Iran gains from the conflict in Israel

From our UK edition

A little more than a week before Hamas carried out its Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, said: ‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.’ Sullivan was expressing a consensus view, one apparently shared by the Israeli government. Then came the attacks of last weekend and, as the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, said, ‘Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed in one day.’ The surprise attacks have been called Israel’s 9/11, its Pearl Harbor, and so the question Israelis are asking is: how could this happen? And of more consequence, perhaps: who was really behind it? The sheer scale of the attack may not have been planned.

Joanna Lumley

Patsy would have just ignored Rishi’s cigarette ban

From our UK edition

On Monday night, still shaken from the weekend’s news, I went to a small dinner in the basement of a charming restaurant in Chancery Lane, with fellow supporters of the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). The brave MSF doctors and nurses are rather like fire-watchers in their turrets, scanning the world for where they are needed next before diving into danger at a moment’s notice. No war zone is too perilous. They have been entrenched in Gaza for years and are used to functioning under the most difficult conditions. This week, they had to work out of tented operating theatres, erected between bombed-out ruins, because ambulances cannot be used because of the risk of aerial bombardment.

Charles Lipson

Biden must rethink US policy in the Middle East

Responsibility for the catastrophe now unfolding in the Middle East belongs to Hamas and its sponsor, Iran. The atrocities we are now discovering — the deliberate killing of innocents, the capture of hostages — were an integral part of Hamas’s military strategy and grew directly out of its vicious hatred of all Jews — and of Western civilization. These are acts of true evil and, in committing them, Hamas has the full backing of Iran. President Biden spoke for America when he said, bluntly, “The brutality of Hamas’s blood thirstiness brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS. This is terrorism.” It is important to begin with these basic points before discussing mistakes made by Israeli and American leaders.

Tuesday

October 10, 2023

Stephen L. Miller

Mainstream media sanitizes Hamas terror attacks

For years, the Gaza Strip conflict has been as much about media optics as anything else. Hamas, the controlling party in Gaza, have become expert media manipulators. They carefully stage propaganda for the mostly sympathetic international media and our own media here in the US. In the wake of the worst terror attack against Jews since World War Two, however, that has seen the death toll rise to more than 1,000 victims and 150 hostages, you would think Hamas would be about to lose the optics war. Not so fast.What began as breaking news reporting by American outlets quickly shifted to the default position of sympathizing with Palestinians, and focusing almost solely on Israel’s retaliation, as has usually been the case with this conflict.