Israel

Friday

Freddy Gray

America is still gripped by the gerontocracy

What do senior Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and Iran’s new Supreme Leader have in common? Not a lot, except that both men are currently being hidden from public view – and nobody seems to know for sure if either Mitch or Mojtaba Khamenei is alive or dead. Iran is a brutal theocratic regime where the truth tends to be suppressed. America is meant to be a free and democratic society. Yet the 84-year-old Senator for Kentucky has been in hospital since June 14 and rumors are spreading that he is brain-dead, on life-support, or possibly worse, and the party leadership appears to be covering up the facts about his health.

Thursday

Yossi Melman

Israel’s plan for a new Iran war

Metaphorically speaking, champagne bottles were uncorked in the Jerusalem office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Donald Trump declared at the NATO summit in Ankara that the ceasefire with Iran was over. Trump’s remarks – in which he branded Iran’s leaders "scum," "a cancer" and "liars" – were sweet music to Netanyahu and his government.  The 60-day ceasefire, brokered by Pakistan and Qatar on June 17 to end the war between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other – a war that began on February 28 – was effectively imposed on Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister, Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Air Force all wanted the fighting to continue.

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Monday

Yossi Melman

Is the US-Israel special relationship over?

Until recently, the Israeli right regarded President Donald Trump as its greatest ally. He was often described in quasi-religious terms – as a savior, even a messiah sent to rescue Israel from international pressure and the constraints imposed by previous American administrations. According to several American media reports, Trump told Netanyahu: "You’re fucking crazy" and "All the Jews are sick of you" That admiration stemmed from Trump’s unwavering support during his first term. He moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and adopted Netanyahu’s position that Washington should withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran negotiated in 2015 under president Barack Obama.

Friday

Roger Kimball

Why socialism will fail

The philosopher David Hume warned us not to mistake “constant conjunction” for causation. It’s good advice, though it is not the sort of universal disturbance in the force that some philosophers, eager to jettison old certitudes, believe it to be. Hume himself eventually rejected that “pretended skepticism” as a juvenile affectation. Like the rest of us, he recognized that reasoning from induction, from observed realities, introduces us to that great guide in the cognitive adventure of life – probability. Don’t let the appearance of a black swan down under disturb you: good mental hygiene and faith in the soundness of inductive reasoning go together. I indulge in this preliminary expectoration (apologies to Søren Kierkegaard) because I arrived in London on June 22.

Bibi
Arieh Kovler

Will Bibi go into exile?

In January 2027, Benjamin Netanyahu could leave office for the final time. In the middle of a corruption trial at home and facing arrest in many countries due to an International Criminal Court warrant, Netanyahu can’t spend his retirement traveling the world or relaxing at home.  Some have speculated that Bibi, who’s grown to enjoy the finer things in life, might follow in the footsteps of the two Yairs – his younger son Yair and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro – and head off to a luxurious exile in Florida, sheltered by the Trump administration from his worries at home and abroad.  Of course, this all depends on whether he loses the election.

Thursday

Jonathan Spyer

Can Israel fend off Hezbollah without alienating America?

As the 60-day period of negotiations stipulated by the Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US gets under way, the issue of Lebanon is fast emerging as a central bone of contention. It is also revealing significant differences in the stances of America and Israel.   Israel has sought throughout to detach its battle with the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah in Lebanon from the negotiations – and from the larger effort to settle the conflict between the US and Iran. The logic is as follows: Hezbollah intends to continue its war against Israel.

israel lebanon

Friday

Charlie Gammell

Iran’s loser victory

After years of negotiations, two wars, a succession of ruthlessly quashed uprisings in Iran and countless billions of dollars’ worth of ordnance smashing into rubble across the region, we have the bones of an agreement. Not a deal, it should be said. Instead an understanding that manages to speak volumes and yet say very little in the way of concrete details. Vice President JD Vance's trip to Switzerland may have been postponed -- after Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire over Lebanon last night -- but the Memorandum of Understanding between America and Israel has been signed, and both sides seem confident that the peace process has not yet been derailed. Who won, you might ask? Surely, Iran.

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Vance
Ben Clerkin

Israel is the new Ukraine

J.D. Vance didn't call Benjamin Netanyahu out by name, but in sternly reprimanding the "Cabinet of the Israeli government" from the White House podium on Thursday, he sent Israel and its Prime Minister a clear message. In demanding more respect, raising the threat of severe consequences and ordering the country to get in line, the Vice President echoed the public fight he picked with another world leader and US ally: Volodymyr Zelensky. It wasn't quite as spectacular as the now infamous Oval Office blow up in February last year between Trump, Vance and the Ukrainian president. But Vance went further in his criticism of Israel than any other US President or Vice President in recent memory.

Thursday

Daniel DePetris

Only Iran is happy with Trump’s peace deal

President Trump might have thought that negotiating an interim diplomatic understanding with Iran was going to be the hard part. But selling the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding to the public is proving to be just as laborious.  Trump deserves blame not because he negotiated a poor peace deal but rather because he decided to go to war in the first place Less than 24 hours after the document was released, virtually nobody is particularly satisfied with it. Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, normally deferential or wholly supportive of Trump’s agenda across-the-board, are already expressing nervousness at the terms and demanding a full briefing from the administration about how the White House plans on executing them.

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Trump
Ben Clerkin

Is Trump going to defund Israel?

Cutting US military aid to Israel was once an impossible dream of the most extreme fringe of the Democratic party. Today axing the $3.8 billion annual package is a bipartisan issue being spearheaded by the GOP. The number of free US tax dollars that Israel would receive to spend on its military under a GOP plan being discussed by both governments would be reduced to zero. The brainchild of Marlin Stutzman, a staunch Israel ally and Republican congressman from Indiana, the proposed memorandum of understanding, which would come into effect when the current deal ends in 2028, now forms the basis of the negotiations and was endorsed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Monday

Daniel McCarthy

Trump can forge a lasting peace

President Trump is giving peace a chance in the Persian Gulf, and for Iran’s leadership this is literally a matter of life or death. If Iran had continued to fight, one of two things would have happened. Either the war would have resumed its original tempo, leading to the extinction of another generation of Iranian leaders and the loss of yet more of the nation’s military capabilities, only for Tehran to strike a deal much like this one after realizing the futility of its efforts; or the war would have escalated, as the US employed greater force, potentially including ground troops, to force open the Strait of Hormuz. The latter scenario would have been costly to America, and the world, but it would have been fatal to Tehran.

Trump Iran

Monday

John Power

Sixteen times that Trump nearly ended the Iran war

Today marks a hundred days since America and Israel began launching strikes on Iran on February 28. The very next day, Donald Trump told the Atlantic that Iran’s leaders "want to talk," saying they should have made a deal sooner and that "they played too cute." Three days after Trump said this, Iran announced that the Strait of Hormuz was closed. Since then, we have been told dozens of times that we are on the brink of a lasting deal between Iran and America, often in the President’s statements on Truth Social. At the end of last month, Axios reported that US and Iranian negotiators had reached an agreement on a 60-day memorandum which would reopen the Strait, which simply needed Trump’s sign off.

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Israel Iran
Ben Clerkin

Is the US-Israel alliance breaking down?

This morning at 5.53am, air raid sirens sounded across Tel Aviv. War-weary locals largely went about their business as usual unfazed by the eerie wail, while out of towners headed at speed to the nearest bomb shelter. The ballistic missile was fired from Yemen and intercepted by the IDF.  At 7.02am, again, mobile phones buzzed with warnings to take shelter. Iran had fired a barrage of ballistic missiles. The beach volleyball game being played outside my hotel didn’t stop. The missiles "disintegrated” or fell harmlessly.  Israelis hardly batted an eyelid, yet regional experts say that this could be the start of a new war between Israel and Iran, the third of the year. While Iran claimed it had ended its military operations against Israel.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sturgeon speaks, Henry Nowak’s killer is jailed and Mandelson messages are released

From our UK edition

Home Vickrum Digwa, 23, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 21 years for the murder of Henry Nowak, 18, who was stabbed several times; the victim was handcuffed and arrested while he was telling police he had been stabbed and saying ‘I can’t breathe’. Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that he ‘felt sick’ watching bodycam footage of the incident. Nicola Sturgeon, in a remarkable interview with the BBC about the embezzlement of £400,310.65 by her now-estranged husband, Peter Murrell, said she expected ‘a legal process to recover the money from Peter’, but she emphasised that: ‘I am not guilty of that embezzlement, so nothing that belongs to me should be part of that.

Maureen Lipman

I refuse to be cancelled

From our UK edition

I have been opening a play. It is called Allegra and is about a woman who is relentlessly happy. This is not typecasting. ‘Why do we actors have so much self-esteem and so little self-respect?’ demanded Edmund Kean in the eponymous play Kean,which I last saw in 1990. Funny, I never forgot that line. I’d been bobbing along merrily in rehearsals, learning, improving, rejecting and rejoicing. Now, suddenly, it was a technical rehearsal in a real theatre, the Brighton Royal, and there was a microphone taped under my wig, battery packs belted to my underwear – real orchestrations, quick-change shoes. My ancient make-up sticks must be laid out and lip and tongue exercises from my Lamda days, 60-odd years ago, must be performed.

Wednesday

Daniel McCarthy

Where Thomas Massie went wrong

What happens when a Republican congressman turns his primary election into a referendum on Donald Trump? What happens when he turns it into a referendum on Israel? The answer to those questions should be stunningly obvious. There was never a reason to expect Kentucky to return a different verdict than anywhere else. Quite the contrary – it’s a staunchly red state. Asked to choose between Trump and a congressman who’d lately been garnering favorable coverage in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Republican voters were not about to abandon the president. The very things Thomas Massie’s newfound friends liked about him made him unacceptable to the people who actually vote in Republican primaries.

Massie

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump is clinging to a mirage in the Middle East

Well, well, well. For all the head-scratching that it initially occasioned, President Trump’s hasty abandonment of "Project Freedom" – his grandly titled plan to open the Strait of Hormuz – turns out not to be so mysterious after all. Trump’s reversal, NBC News revealed late yesterday, came at the behest of America’s Gulf allies, foremost among them Riyadh which told Washington that it would suspend the US military’s right to use its airspace. Now Trump, who has described his current exchanges with Iran as "very good," is breathing optimism about a one-page peace memorandum that he claims will be completed by the end of the week. Iran, by contrast, merely says that Trump’s proposal is “under review.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Anti-Semitism is a virus – and it’s spreading

From our UK edition

To eradicate a virus, one needs precision. The origin of the threat needs to be identified, as do the circumstances of its incubation and spread, and the vulnerability of specific hosts. The wrong response risks making things worse. Anti-Semitism is a virus, and, as the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained, one that mutates over time. Originally, it was a religious prejudice; post-Enlightenment, it developed into a racial hatred, fuelled by a twisted version of social Darwinism. It was thought that after the unique evil of the Holocaust, the single greatest crime in history, when man became wolf unto man, the virus had at last been defeated. But in our own time a new variant has emerged.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

The inverted imperialism of the royal visit

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Christian Turner, the UK's new ambassador in Washington. He’s only been in post three months, yet he’s already had to handle a string of bilateral crises – none his fault. US-UK relations are under intense strain over Iran, Ukraine and now the Falklands. And the Jeffrey Epstein stench still lingers thanks to his predecessor, Peter Mandelson. The King’s visit was meant to gloss over all that unpleasantness. Word went round last week that a grateful Donald Trump would pack King Charles and Camilla off and promptly declare the US-UK trade deal had been finalized. Then, on Tuesday, the first morning of the visit, news broke of a leaked tape.

Toby Young

Worried your child is being radicalised? Try this tip 

From our UK edition

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian published an article entitled: ‘“I feel like I’m losing her”: the families torn apart by older relatives going far right’. It was full of heart-rending tales from metropolitan liberals about how their dim-witted parents had been duped into believing anti-Muslim conspiracy theories by following people like Rupert Lowe on social media. One particularly exasperated man suggested a course of therapy for his mother, fearing that she might want to join Reform. But is it really the online radicalisation of elderly parents that’s putting families under pressure in the run-up to the local elections? I suspect it has more to do with their children, particularly their daughters, embracing a toxic strain of identity politics imported from America.