Israel

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: tax cuts, hostage releases and highly rated horses

From our UK edition

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said, ‘We can now move on to the next phase of our economic plan and turn our attention to cutting taxes,’ having seen a reduction in inflation. Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, followed suit in the Autumn Statement, cutting personal taxes. The government was to make changes to long-term benefits. The minimum wage, known officially as the National Living Wage, currently £10.42 an hour for those over the age of 23, will rise to £11.44 an hour for those over 21 from next April. The government also drew attention to £8.3 billion allocated to mending potholes, money purportedly saved from the curtailment of the HS2 project. Households living close to new pylons would receive compensation.

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

I hope David Cameron will find time to drink the odd good bottle

From our UK edition

Back in 1989, a most unsatisfactory fellow called General Aoun started a civil war around Beirut in the hope of seizing control of the Maronite Christian portions of Lebanon. He ended up with political wreckage, which has endured. Château Berliquet 2015 is a fruity St Emilion that deserves to be better known During the fighting, I spent a few days cut off in the British ambassador’s summer residence, watching the battle going on below. We felt safer than we probably were, partly because Pauline Ramsay, the ambassador’s enchanting wife, tried to turn the crisis into a house party. So British: so best of British. We watched, helpless, as one block of flats was regularly hit by shells.

Wednesday

Toby Young

My futile morning guarding Churchill’s statue

From our UK edition

On Armistice Day I made my way to Parliament Square with some vague notion of protecting Churchill’s statue. I’d discussed the need to stop it being defiled by pro-Palestinian protestors a few days earlier with a group I’m involved with called the British Friends of Israel, but in my head this had been a theoretical discussion, not something that involved me personally. Then Allison Pearson, a member of the group, announced in the Telegraph that she intended to stand in front of the statue armed with a rolled-up copy of the paper, and I felt shamed into joining her. Not that I was worried about her being knocked over by some thug in a Hamas headband. Rather, I didn’t want her to hog all the glory if a last-ditch defence proved necessary.

Tuesday

Spectator Editorial

The fight ahead

If there could ever be a positive that comes out of the horrific terrorist attacks in Israel in October, it’s this — the battle lines have never been clearer. That may seem obvious in the context of Israel versus Hamas, but for Americans, watching the drawing of the fault lines has been extremely clarifying. In the hours that followed the atrocities, the people who reject any sort of nuance in politics wanted to “put into context” the murders of 1,400 Jews — including elderly Holocaust survivors, women and children. The Manhattan chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remains a member, tweeted support of Palestine and its intention of holding a rally in Times Square.

editorial cover
Julio Rosas

On the ground in Ashkelon

Southern Israel I woke up on Tuesday morning, October 10, having just got back from New York City covering a big pro-Palestine protest. War reporting has been something I’ve always wanted to do. I figured it might be hard to catch a flight to Israel with everything going on, but because of the large Jewish and Israeli population living around Miami, there was a direct El Al flight that evening to Tel Aviv for $800. It was the last direct flight out of Miami for a couple of days, so I thought, “If I am going to do this, today is the day.” I was planning on leaving my job at Townhall the following week to start my independent Substack, but told them I was departing that day to go cover the war in Israel. They wished me well and off I went.

Israel
Paul Wood

Is killing civilians ever justified?

Israel said its tanks had “encircled” Gaza City as this went to press, the ground offensive being stepped up after a tentative beginning — but there’s been nothing tentative about Israel’s bombings from the air. Here’s a report of one incident: at 4:30 p.m. on October 10, an explosion collapsed a six-story building in Sheikh Radwan, a district of Gaza City, killing, it was said, at least forty civilians. A man named Mahmoud Ashour had to dig through the rubble with his bare hands to find members of his family. Buried there were his daughter and her four children, a girl aged eight and three boys of six, two, and six months, all killed. They had fled there thinking it would be safer than other parts of Gaza. But, he said: “I couldn’t protect them.

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Bridget Phetasy

The year’s horrors have left me speechless

I’ve started and stopped three articles, written 1,500 words and hated every single one. This column was due days ago and I’ve been stuck. Completely blocked. I’m not sure if it’s one thing or many things — and sometimes the only way through writer’s block is to sit down and write all the jumbled, disconnected thoughts that are jamming me up. So I will start this piece and end this year with an apology to my editor and to you, dear reader. There is the thought that stands in the way of every other thought — and because I refuse to put horrifically graphic images in your head while you sip your coffee, I’ll let you fill in the blanks yourself. But the thought goes something like: “Hamas did X and Y and Z and I’m supposed to write or care about anything else?

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Daniel McCarthy

Israel’s imperial problem is ours, too

Israel will win its war against Hamas. But can it win the kind of war the United States lost in Afghanistan? Israel is facing today a dilemma that the West will face tomorrow. For more than sixty years, it has been easy for Western liberals to believe that imperialism is an unnecessary evil. When the US conquers and militarily occupies a foreign country, liberals don’t call it imperialism. It’s merely “regime change,” “nation-building” and “promoting democracy.” Such Newspeak has been powerless to alter the outcome of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars which after successful regime decapitations followed by decades of occupation and trillions of dollars spent on rebuilding failed to establish anything resembling secure liberal democracies in either land.

Israel
harvard hamas
Ashley Rindsberg

How Harvard befriended Hamas

In the aftermath of the October 7 attack on Israel, when videos were circulating on social media showing the enormities perpetrated on Israelis by Hamas terrorists — women raped, old people and children abducted, civilians murdered en masse — students of Harvard’s leftist groups banded together to condemn... Israel. Members of thirty-four student organizations signed a letter declaring that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The spectacle of America’s elite youth engaging in a shameless act of victim-blaming sent shockwaves through the world. Reprehensible as the letter is, the reality is that Harvard’s relentless pursuit of elitism has, for generations, been a breeding ground for antisemitism.

post-Cold War era
Andrew Bacevich

Why the post-Cold War era is far from over

In various speeches this year, secretary of state Antony Blinken has declared that “the post-Cold War era is over.” The announcement passes all but unnoticed, eclipsed as it is by crises, such as war in Ukraine and the Middle East, that make Blinken’s point in a starker way. Not so long ago, it was taken for granted that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had inaugurated a new age. Now, if Blinken is correct, the lifespan of that age hardly exceeds the duration of Tom Brady’s career as a star quarterback. By 1989, the United States had ascended to the status of sole remaining superpower. No challenges to its global primacy — political, military, economic or cultural — were visible anywhere on the horizon.

jewish
Thomas Eaton

Indian Exodus: the Jewish population exits after 2,000 years

In December the Gate of Heaven synagogue in Thane, a city that links the peninsula of Mumbai with the Indian mainland, will light the Chanukah menorahs as it has annually since its opening in 1879. Among the initial members were Jews whose ancestors may have arrived in India during the time of King Solomon, when Middle East trade routes were established to exchange iron, peacocks, gems, ginger and other spices. Over the many intervening centuries, waves of Jewish immigration have washed up on the Indian shores from different ends of the earth. The varying groups came with separate traditions and practices and ways of living, but they shared prayers and faith, a distinct identity in a country where identity carries great importance.

Friday

Peter Wood

The shrinking lifespan of the college president

Twenty-five years ago I published an essay titled “Dogfish.” It was not about the little sharks that skim along the bottom of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and only rarely end up on the American dinner table. It was rather a fanciful way to draw attention to the brevity of the average tenure of the college president. Back then the average president served 6.7 years. The spotted dogfish, by contrast, was believed to live almost three times as long. A lot has changed in the intervening quarter century. For one thing, it is now believed that the natural lifespan of the dogfish is thirty-five to forty years, though some say eighty.  Meanwhile the average term of a college president has shrunk to 5.9 years.

college president

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Met in a muddle, King’s Speech and a wine production slump 

From our UK edition

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said of pro-Palestinian demonstrations: ‘To plan protests on Armistice Day is provocative and disrespectful, and there is a clear and present risk that the Cenotaph and other war memorials could be desecrated.’ The Metropolitan Police urged organisers of a pro-Palestinian march on 11 November to postpone it, but they refused. The Prime Minister then said he would hold the Metropolitan Police Commissioner ‘accountable’ for his decision to greenlight the ‘disrespectful’ demonstration. Imran Hussain MP left the Labour front bench over Sir Keir Starmer’s opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza, and Afrasiab Anwar, the leader of Burnley council, and ten councillors left the Labour party.

Anshel Pfeffer

Benjamin Netanyahu is increasingly seen as Israel’s curse

From our UK edition

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.

Tuesday

Paul Wood

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.

dershowitz nuclear option

Friday

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.

kamala harris islamophobia

Thursday

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.

israel
Bruce Anderson

The world is a mess. Why not find escapism through wine? 

From our UK edition

In most children’s stories, the good characters live happily ever after. Works suitable for older readers tend to greater realism. Even ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’, that most joyous of drinking songs, presses the case for carpe diem. ‘Get stuck in to your pleasures laddie,’ it seems to be saying, ‘before it is too late.’ With the world in such a mess – less carpe diem than dies irae – the case for a vinous route to escapism might seen persuasive. Housman seemed to think so. ‘Could man be drunk for ever,’ starts one poem, then all would be well. Not for long. ‘But men at whiles are sober/ And think by fits and starts/ And if they think they fasten/ Their hands upon their hearts.

Wednesday

Lionel Shriver

What did Hamas think was going to happen?

From our UK edition

Much misfortune the woebegone couldn’t have seen coming: a raging fire in the house next door that spreads to yours. The invention of some kooky technology called ‘the internet’ that puts your travel agency out of business. Yet other calamities are foreseeable. If you suddenly stop filing tax returns without a good excuse – like, dying – it’s a virtual certainty that the all-seeing computer will come after you. So when compounding fees and interest leave you skint, our sympathies are apt to be scant. What did you think was going to happen?

The Spectator

Letters: policing pro-Palestinian rallies isn’t an exact science

From our UK edition

Call for common justice Sir: Rod Liddle’s piece on the true desires of Palestinians was rare in its acceptance of the complexity of aspiration (‘What Hamas promised its electorate’, 28 October). People cleave to those who stand for their best hopes. They voted for Hamas. Rod ends saying only Israeli Arabs in his experience did not loathe Jews. Why would they? Presumably being the right side of the ‘peace’ wall, they had no fear of losing their birthright to illegal settlers acting in defiance of UN resolutions with official acquiescence. If the Israeli rule of law could have extended to the occupied West Bank Arabs, then there would be no indefensible double standard. It is clearly a missed opportunity and did not need a ‘two state solution’, just common justice and sense.