Israel

Tuesday

Cockburn

Is ‘Dear White Staffers’ losing favor with the left?

From our US edition

“Dear White Staffers”, an Instagram account that blew up just a couple of years ago for reporting alleged mistreatment of staff on Capitol Hill, is now under fire from some members of the progressive left for allegedly engaging in performative activism. The account joined Instagram in 2020 and quickly built a reputation for being a place where congressional staffers could anonymously share horror stories about their offices and dissuade others from joining toxic work environments. The account has more than 100,000 followers and is closely watched by members of Congress — and now the Biden administration, as White House employees have started making their own submissions to the “Dear White Staffers” DMs.

dear white staffers
joe biden gaza gaffe
Daniel DePetris

Biden’s Gaza gaffe risks relations with the Democratic base

From our US edition

One of the first rules of politics and policy is to keep expectations low, lest you disappoint your constituents and embarrass yourself for being hopelessly naive.  Apparently President Joe Biden didn’t get the memo.  During a stop in New York City this week for a taping of NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, Biden was eager, if not downright giddy, about the prospects of a temporary ceasefire in Gaza. Ice cream cone in hand, the president told the White House press corps that Jake Sullivan, his national security advisor, believes a truce is close at hand.  “My hope is that, by next Monday, we’ll have a ceasefire,” Biden said.

aaron bushnell airman fire
Cockburn

Can the US airman who set himself on fire ‘Rest in Power?’

From our US edition

The war in Gaza has claimed another victim — this time on American soil. Airman Aaron Bushnell died on Sunday night after lighting himself on fire in protest of the war. Bushnell filmed his protest in front of the Israeli Embassy on Sunday and livestreamed it on Twitch, quickly becoming a martyr for the far left. Well, some of them. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” Bushnell said in the video. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.” Bushnell then lit himself on fire while screaming, “Free Palestine,” until he fell to the ground. The video shows police officers working for more than a minute to put the fire out.

Thursday

Spectator Editorial

How foreign policy will impact the 2024 election

From our US edition

Donald Trump’s long march through the Republican primaries leaves little doubt about the inevitability of a Biden-Trump rematch in November — court cases and old age notwithstanding, of course. Unlike previous contests, foreign policy looks set to be at top of mind for many voters. Which, if you’re a Biden supporter, isn’t great news. In a recent AP poll, four in ten American adults named foreign policy as issues the government should work on in 2024. The president’s decisions abroad broadcast weakness, lack of direction and myopia, traits that have come to define his first term. The deadly and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was only a sign of things to come, as more conflicts and crises sprang up around the world.

policy
Bruce Anderson

I’m a rosé convert

Paris is more than a city. It is a state of mind, an aspiration. Though it glorifies the military, it remains feminine and beguiling. Its heroes moved effortlessly from triumphs on the battlefield to triumphs in the boudoir. The very stones of Paris seem redolent of the dreams and ecstasies of past lovers, and of their frustrations, follies and pains. Heloise and Abelard loved and suffered here. We had come to perform two simple tasks: sitting in judgment over wine and food In many respects, alas, contemporary Paris has fallen a long way from romance. Everyone has stories of rubbish, dirt and rats. The days when bon chic, bon genre set the tone for the Grands Boulevards are long gone. Today, the scruffiness is enhanced by McDonald’s and Starbucks. The very crimes lack grandeur.

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

The miracle of limoncello

Consider the paradox of lemons. In Italy, one associates them with scented groves. A few years ago, Helena Attlee wrote the book The Land Where Lemons Grow, in which citrus fruits become a golden thread running through the history of Italian agriculture. Yet though the lemon is arguably the most beautiful of fruits, its tart taste is bracing. A spremuta di limone finds a swift route to any shaving nicks. Most limoncello is produced on the Amalfi coast but there is an outlier from Godalming But the lemon can be sweetened, in the form of limoncello, an after-dinner drink of no great subtlety, good for pouring over puddings but hardly a match for the fortified wines of the Iberian peninsula. That said, there is an exception.

Sunday

Stephen Daisley

John Fetterman’s noble support for Israel should be no surprise

Politicians are like bad boys: never fall in love with them, they’ll always hurt you in the end. But try as I might, and I have tried mightily, I can’t fight it anymore. I’ve fallen head over heels for the junior senator from Pennsylvania. Friday night tipped it for me. John Fetterman was at home in Braddock, a rundown Pittsburgh suburb where he lives with his wife and three children, when an anti-Israel mob gathered outside and began chanting: ‘Fetterman, Fetterman, you can’t hide; you’re supporting genocide!’ Another Democrat might have requested a police evacuation or issued a cuckish statement of solidarity with the demonstrators in the hopes they would leave him alone, but Fetterman took a rather different approach.

Saturday

Alexander Horne

It will be difficult for Israel to ignore this ICJ ruling

Yesterday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an interim ruling on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Its decision is likely to please neither side of the debate, but seems broadly balanced: it criticised Israel, but failed to demand a suspension of the conflict.  The court, which sits in The Hague, was formed in 1945 and is one of the principal organs established by the Charter of the United Nations. It is the UN’s highest court.  On 29 December, South Africa brought its proceedings in the ICJ under Article 9 of the Genocide Convention of 1948. It claimed that Israel was engaging in genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Tuesday

Cockburn

WATCH: Joe Biden heckled by pro-Palestine activists at rally

From our US edition

President Biden was in Manassas, Virginia this evening, at a rally intended to be focused on federal abortion rights, shortly after the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. But some pro-Palestine protesters in the audience had other ideas. “Genocide Joe: how many kids have you killed today?” a man bellowed at Biden. “Israel kills two mothers every hour!” a woman yelled immediately after. More and more hecklers started interrupting the president. “This is gonna go on for a while — they’ve got this planned,” he told the crowd. Shortly after, he appeared to brand the protesters as "MAGA Republicans" — not a notoriously pro-Gaza group... https://twitter.

joe biden gaza
Nigel Jones

Conrad Black adheres firmly to the ‘great man’ view of history

George Orwell has a story that when Sir Walter Raleigh published the first volume of his projected history of the world while in prison, he witnessed a brawl outside his rooms in the Bloody Tower which resulted in the death of a workman. Despite diligent enquiries, Raleigh was unable to discover the cause of the quarrel. Reasoning that if he could not even ascertain the facts behind what he had observed he could hardly accurately report what had happened in distant lands centuries earlier, he burned his notes for the second volume and abandoned the entire project. No such doubts assail the 79-year-old Conrad Black, sometime proprietor of The Spectator, who, like Raleigh, has written the first of a projected three-volume global history.

Friday

Charles Moore

Nikki Haley is respectable. Will she find that inhibiting?

From our US edition

In June 2022, I interviewed Nikki Haley on stage for JW3, a Jewish organization in north London. She was personable, clear, well-briefed and pleasingly normal, with the interesting exception of her Sikh background growing up in small-town South Carolina (she later became a Christian by conversion). Her conservatism seemed strongly felt, coherent and not extreme. I also liked her way — now highly unusual in US politics — of addressing foreign policy and setting it in the context of her general political beliefs. At that time, she was mulling the presidential bid she launched the following year. After Iowa, she remains in the race, but only just. Why would such a presentable and decent person not be preferred to Donald Trump?

Haley

Thursday

Amber Duke

The war against Hamas on campus

From our US edition

Harvard University has borne the brunt of the backlash for the antisemitism of its student protesters in the last few months: their president had to step down over her mismanagement of the issue and a plagiarism scandal. But Harvard is far from the only elite school in the nation in botching their approach to pro-Palestinian activists. It's not even alone in its city. Boston University sits just over a mile away, across the Charles River — and its administration has avoided the same level of backlash for its failure to tackle open hatred of Jews and Israelis on campus.

boston university hamas
Bruce Anderson

I’m raising a glass to the Tory party’s future

Wine stimulates the wits, emboldens debate, and inspires the mind. Judicious quantities, abetted by judicious quality, encourage the participants to attack the important questions. Thus it has been over the past few days, discussing God and the Universe. I was talking to an astronomer, whose day is spent contemplating the vastness of interstellar space. Consider one single light year, and how far that would take us from our own celestial neighbourhood. Then let your mind give way before the unimaginable distances. Already daunted, move onwards to the queen of the sciences, theology, and the question posed by that outstanding 20th-century theologian, Mr Prendergast in Decline and Fall. He could not explain why God had bothered to make the world.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Post Office scandal, Tube strikes off and dog meat banned

Home Although it had long been known that between 1999 and 2015 more than 700 sub-postmasters were convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud (based on the faulty Horizon computer accounting system software), the government suddenly proposed to do something about it because of a public outcry following an ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The Metropolitan Police was investigating the Post Office over fraud possibly arising from money being ‘recovered from sub-postmasters as a result of prosecutions or civil actions’. Paula Vennells, who held high office in the Post Office from 2007 to 2019, said she was handing back her CBE ‘with immediate effect’, although it is the King’s role to annul it; more than a million people had signed a petition calling for its revocation.

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

My adventures in rosé

During the festive season, I usually spend far too much time thinking and talking about politics. But the latest was an exception. One hostess fixed me with a gimlet eye and announced that she had forbidden any discussion of Israel/Palestine. At a recent dinner party, the table had been repeatedly banged, someone had stormed out and others were now on non-speaks. I quoted the late Clarissa Eden. During the Suez crisis, she felt that the Canal was running through her drawing-room. This girl gave a hearty nod in agreement. I was happy to agree with the ban, but declared my surprise. How could anyone be so sure of the solution? The most I could come up with was ruminative gloom.

Tuesday

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Septuagenarians behaving badly: Stockholm, by Noa Yedlin, reviewed

My grandmother wore a bikini long after she’d turned 60. As a teenager, I couldn’t think of anything more embarrassing than to be seen with her on the beach. When the day came, on an inescapable family holiday, I begged her to reconsider. ‘I’ve never understood why they say the body betrays you,’ she replied. ‘The body is simply doing what it’s supposed to. It’s the soul that refuses to do its part in the deal.’ I remembered this reading Stockholm, a delightful dark comedy by the Israeli author Noa Yedlin about four elderly people conspiring to conceal the sudden death of their friend, the renowned economist Avishai Har-Nof, so as to secure his award of a Nobel prize.

Wednesday

Spectator Editorial

The fight ahead in 2024

From our US edition

Are you desperate for a deal? Usually the start of a new year provides the patient ones among us the chance to snag a bargain in the January sales. Good things come to those who wait, the old adage goes. Yet 2024 seems set to offer us more of the same. The usual stalls are at the market — all of them trying to hawk shoddy wares to Americans. Take the primary process for our presidential elections, which kicks off in Iowa and New Hampshire this month. If the prognosticators are to be trusted, we are set for a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump. Biden’s approval rating doesn’t seem to be improving and the cries for him to drop out and let a younger candidate step in are still sounding — and they come from more and more prominent people every day.

2024
israel democrats
Ben Domenech

How the Democrats went anti-Israel

From our US edition

The migraine arrived suddenly and unexpectedly — a headache of global proportion that made every sound a shrieking cacophony, impossible to ignore. Tuning it out, as the Democratic coalition had managed to do successfully for the better part of a decade, was no longer an option. The nightmare had arrived, and it had a throbbing mantra, carried across the bluest corners of the country in pixels and TikToks and in the bellow of a boiling mass of blathering, megaphone-wielding youths: “From the river to the sea.” Even before the horror of the October 7 attack and the war on Hamas that followed, Israel has carried the potential to cause political tribulation for Democrats in the post-Obama era.

Tuesday

David Christopher Kaufman

Our culture of cheapness and vulgarity

From our US edition

There are many things in short supply these days, but cheapness and vulgarity are not among them. They’re everywhere right now — in politics and pop culture, among the royals, within the legacy media and across social media. Most obscene is the cheapness and vulgarity that has pervaded the conflict between Israel and Hamas and its accompanying explosion of global antisemitism.  It would be easy to attribute this collective rot to mere coincidence, but it’s more a case of compounded indecency. And nowhere more so than at the top. The coarse bravado of then-candidate Donald Trump a decade ago metastasized during his presidency into the corruption and cravenness that now dominates — and could possibly derail — his third stab at the White House.

John R. MacArthur

Our strangled language on Israel and Gaza

From our US edition

As a left-wing sympathizer to the Palestinian cause, I cringed when I heard reports that college students around the country, including at Columbia University, my alma mater, had expressed support for Hamas’s murder of Israeli civilians on October 7. My first thought was that “woke” students had lost their minds — confusing the perfectly legitimate defense of Palestinian rights with the usual laundry list of “resistance” clichés that pay little attention to history, morality or the subtleties of the English language.