Israel

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Sky News has lost its way

From our UK edition

Occasionally I am told that I go too hard on the BBC. It is an understandable gripe which I sometimes hear from disgruntled journos from Broadcasting House. So let me start by saying that, as an equal-opportunities insulter, I would like to put on the record how completely rancid Sky News in the UK has become. To give an idea of where Sky UK has gone wrong since being sold, allow me to highlight one story as the channel reported it this week. After the targeted strikes on Hezbollah operatives via their pagers and walkie-talkies, Sky ran a story headlined: ‘Hezbollah has been provoked like never before by Israel and may be tempted to unleash its firepower.’ That is truly fascinating framing.

Paul Wood

Is Israel trying to drag America into a war with Iran?

From our UK edition

The American general David Petraeus famously asked of the invasion of Iraq: ‘Tell me how this ends.’ That’s the question as Israeli bombs and missiles fall on Lebanon and the few missiles Hezbollah has sent in response are intercepted. Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ seems paralysed with indecision. Does Benjamin Netanyahu take this as a win, the vindication of the enormous chance he took by opening a new northern front? Or, like a gambler intoxicated by success at the tables, does he press on? More airstrikes, followed by an invasion of Lebanon… and then the bombers fly on to Iran?  Some Israelis commentators are already calling this the Third Lebanon War (after the wars of 1982-2000 and 2006).

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Gretchen Whitmer’s struggle shows Democrats’ Israel problem isn’t going away

Democrats have an Israel problem that isn’t going away any time soon. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer illustrated why this weekend in a CNN appearance that had her dodging the actions of her fellow partisans. At issue is the actions of Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, who is Jewish — and who has targeted eleven campus protesters from the University of Michigan, several of whom allegedly engaged in acts of violent obstruction against police officers charged with clearing their illegal encampment. The blowback against Nessel’s decision to charge the protesters, seven of them with felonies, led to Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan to accuse her and her office of anti-Palestine bias: We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest.

Saturday

Ed Nash

Is Israel ready for a ‘new phase’ of war?

From our UK edition

The toll wreaked from the events of 17 and 18 September has been extensive. According to the best estimates, more than 3,500 people were injured and 37 were killed. The events I’m referring to, of course, were the sudden and surprise explosions of thousands of electronic devices, carried (in the majority) by members of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Among the injured were the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, who reportedly lost an eye, and allegedly several personnel from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp who sponsor and assist terrorist organisations across the world.

Thursday

Paul du Quenoy

How Hezbollah was humiliated

Explosions ripped across Lebanon Tuesday afternoon as hundreds of old-fashioned pagers stuffed with an ounce or two of explosives blew up, killing twelve and injuring approximately 3,000 more. On Wednesday, the low-tech carnage resumed, with exploding walkie-talkies killing at least another twenty people and wounding an additional 450.  The targets were militants and allies of Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim political and military organization which, together with a coalition of political allies, holds a majority in the country’s parliament. Hezbollah and the allied Iranian government, which heavily supports its activities, have blamed Israel, which has been in localized near-daily hostilities with Hezbollah since Hamas’s October 7 attack.

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Thursday

Uri Kurlianchik

Black Sunday: reckoning with October 7 a year later

October 7 was the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Some refer to it as Israel’s 9/11, though proportionally it was like fifteen 9/11s. However, numbers rarely tell the full story and here they fall devastatingly short. I was awake when it started. I’ve always been a night owl but staying up until six in the morning is unusual for me. On that bright fall morning I heard sounds like a thunderstorm and went outside to see what was going on. I live on a hill overlooking Gush Dan, the informal megalopolis that’s home for almost half the population of this stamp-sized country. When something big happens I can often see it.

October 7
Rod Liddle

The BBC’s strange silence

From our UK edition

In the long and illustrious history of race chancing, there must have been many more egregious examples than that of Noel Deans’s recourse to court because a colleague ‘fist-bumped’ him rather than shaking his hand, but I can’t think of any right now. Certainly not over here in the UK, where we still lag a little behind the inventiveness of the top American chancers. It is quite possible that, through the best of intentions, I will appear before a tribunal one of these days The case brought by Mr Deans against RBG Holdings was one of racial discrimination. He alleged that on one occasion the firm’s senior partner, Ian Rosenblatt, greeted him with a fist-bump, which is apparently a common form of greeting among the African-Caribbean community from which Mr Deans hails.

Tuesday

Boyd Tonkin

An outcast among outcasts: Katerina, by Aharon Appelfeld, reviewed

From our UK edition

‘Nothing escape’s the wolf’s fangs,’ thinks the narrator of Katerina. Through an outlandish sequence of chances and choices, somehow its author did just that. Aharon Appelfeld, a child of assimilated parents, lived in the old Jewish heartland of Bukovina. In 1940, short-lived Soviet occupation gave way to Nazi control. His mother was murdered and his father disappeared. Young Aharon escaped the Czernowitz ghetto and survived as a wild child in the forests, sheltered by a village prostitute, then as the ‘slave’ of a Ukrainian bandit gang. When the Red Army arrived he cooked for them before, via a peril-strewn route through Italy, he migrated to Mandate Palestine.

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Jacob Heilbrunn

Kamala’s brand new, same old last-minute policy platform

After weeks of studious silence, Vice President Kamala Harris has been issuing a flurry of policy proposals that she’s touting as “A New Way Forward.” But is it really new? Or is it the old way forward? In the early hours of Monday morning, she unveiled a series of proposals for the first time on her website about the economy, immigration and foreign affairs. Harris is careful to contrast her proposals, again and again, with what she terms “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda.” Poor Trump. He has repeatedly disavowed the Heritage Foundation tome calling for everything from banning IVF to purging the civil service. But it hasn’t helped as the Harris campaign presents it as his campaign platform.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The joy of our deluded politicians

From our UK edition

There are a number of joys in life that do not get enough attention. One is the sheer, unadulterated pleasure that can be gained from watching a politician speak about something they know nothing about. This season Kamala Harris is giving especially abundant material for connoisseurs. Recognising that there is plenty she doesn’t know about, her campaign team are hoping that, Starmer-like, she can glide into office without having to say anything about what she might do once there. On the rare occasions when she does sit down and get asked questions, she is a master in her peculiar field.

Mary Wakefield

No one will change their mind about Hamas

From our UK edition

Earlier this summer, my son and I biked over to fashionable east Hackney where it’s normal to pay £4.20 for a coffee and £3 for a croissant and everybody complains about the cost of living. The croissants, by the way, must come from the Dusty Knuckle bakery. I don’t know if it’s the same in other parts of London, but here in the north-east we have our standards. ‘Israel is literally a fascist state. Literally criminal. Soon it won’t exist at all and that’s great’ We’d biked a fair distance, so we found a café that sold Dusty Knuckle croissants and settled in. My son read his book while I eavesdropped on the conversation between three interesting-looking youngish people at the next table. Interesting because they all looked so very typical it was almost surprising.

Charles Moore

Starmer’s double standards

From our UK edition

Sir Keir Starmer’s readiness to do ‘whatever it takes’ to support Ukraine seems to be qualified by his fear of offending the Biden administration. He wants to let Ukraine use British Storm Shadow missiles inside Russia but dares not, for fear of the White House. Surely if the special relationship were really strong, its junior partner would be confident enough to diverge occasionally. Think of Mrs Thatcher saying to George Bush senior, at the time of the first Gulf war, ‘This is no time to go wobbly’. In fact, however, Sir Keir is not even consistent: he is prepared to annoy the United States by making the worthless gesture of an embargo on tiny, selective arms-related sales to Israel, but not on missiles which could work decisively against Vladimir Putin.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: UK cancels Israel exports, Grenfell fire report released and AfD victory in Germany

From our UK edition

Home The government cancelled 30 out of 350 export licences for arms to Israel on items that it said could be used by Israel for ‘offensive purposes’ in Gaza. Israel Katz, the Israeli foreign minister, said: ‘A step like the one taken by the UK now sends a very problematic message to the Hamas terrorist organisation and its backers in Iran.’ Nine offshore wind farm contracts were awarded by the government; last year there were no bidders. The previous government had increased the maximum guaranteed price from £44 to £73 per MWh. The headquarters of GB Energy, a new UK government-backed energy company, will be in Aberdeen.

David Hare

What’s gone wrong at the National Theatre?

From our UK edition

Now we have a Labour government, it would be nice to feel repertory will return to the National Theatre. It used to be possible to come to London for a week and see six plays. Audiences loved it. New writing spoke to old in ways which enriched both. Today, you’re more likely to see Ibsen, O’Neill, Molière and Marlowe in the West End. What happened to the library of world drama? The new practice is to offer only a couple of straight runs, sometimes first-rate. So there’s nothing to stop any random producer saying: ‘Hey, the Lyttelton seems to be empty this autumn, can I hire it to do one of my shows?’ Shaw and Granville Barker wanted to assert that theatre was art, not commerce. The model was European, not American.

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

The US should stop raising false hope of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire

The months-long ceasefire and hostage release negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been the diplomatic equivalent of Groundhog Day. And the US officials tasked with bringing those talks across the finish-line have contributed mightily to the very bad, never-ending movie we (not to mention the hostages’ families and the more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza) have watched since President Biden rolled out his ceasefire plan in late May. In the months since, Washington has committed verbal blunder after verbal blunder by getting over its skis and proclaiming progress where no progress exists.

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Monday

Jonathan Spyer

Iran and Hezbollah don’t want a war with Israel

From our UK edition

Hezbollah’s response to the killing of senior official Fuad Shukr, when it finally came, was a more minor event than anticipated. For weeks, both the Lebanese Shia Islamist group and its Iranian patron have been threatening a terrible revenge for the recent assassinations in Beirut and Tehran. It is now clear, however, that neither Hezbollah or Iran wishes to risk a descent to all put war at the present time. Iran appears to have relegated its response to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran to some point in the future. Hezbollah, meanwhile, sought to target two sites of high significance – the Mossad headquarters, and the HQ of the IDF’s signals intelligence unit, 8200. Both are located close to Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, in central Israel.

Freddy Gray

John Mearsheimer on Ukraine, Israel-Gaza and the US election

From our UK edition

44 min listen

Professor John Mearsheimer joins Freddy Gray to discuss the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, and the influence of both on the US election. The Israel-Gaza conflict has led to internal divisions within the democratic party, how will Kamala Harris deal with this? And as the Russia-Ukraine conflict shows no signs of ebbing, what does he see as the west’s role in the war?  Produced by Natasha Feroze and Patrick Gibbons.

David Abulafia

Labour’s outrageous attack on academic free speech

From our UK edition

In an extraordinary outburst, a government source has described the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, introduced by the Conservatives, as a ‘hate-speech charter’. This is an outrageous distortion of the new laws that aim to guarantee free speech within universities. The best that can be said about that phrase is that, so long as we retain free speech, people are free to describe it that way. But doing so raises worrying doubts about what the new government thinks free speech means.   Universities have a special role in the promotion of free speech. They are, or should be, places where those teaching and those taught can try out ideas, some of which may on closer examination turn out to be misconceived.

Sunday

Jake Wallis Simons

Israel’s strikes on Lebanon bring Jerusalem one step closer to regional dominance

From our UK edition

As the dust literally settles across southern Lebanon in the aftermath of the Israeli airstrikes, we are starting to see an answer to the question of whether this will be the escalation that leads to all-out war. Hezbollah has declared an end to the first phase of revenge for Israel’s assassination of its most senior military commander Fuad Shukr, who masterminded the killing of 241 marines and 58 French soldiers in 1983, in Beirut last month. Its planned attack on the headquarters of Mossad and Unit 8200, Israel’s fabled military intelligence directorate, has been averted. Casualties appear to have been very limited. Jerusalem’s spy chiefs have flown to Cairo to continue the hostage negotiations, which have not been derailed.

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

The US is unwise to lift restrictions on the sale of bombs to Saudi Arabia

To the extent Joe Biden had anything to say about Saudi Arabia during the 2020 presidential campaign, it largely centered on shaming the oil-rich monarchy into changing its ways. Coming off the 2018 state-sponsored murder of Washington Post columnist and former royal court insider Jamal Khashoggi in a Turkish consulate, Biden aired numerous complaints about Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. He pledged to make the kingdom a pariah state during a Democratic presidential debate, accused the Saudi air force of killing children in Yemen — it wasn’t as much an accusation as a fact — and committed himself to reassessing US arms sales to Riyadh. The Saudis didn’t like what they saw during the Biden administration’s opening months.

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