Israel

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

It’s little surprise that an Israeli soldier was caught desecrating a crucifix

There’s something apposite, I suppose, about the desecration of a crucifix. In this case, it was an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon who took a sledgehammer to one on private property and smashed the Jesus figure on the cross. The original crucifixion, as anyone who heard the gospels over Easter will recall, was marked by the humiliation of Jesus; this attack on the figure of one who took on suffering willingly was another humiliation, through the image. Mind you, if the charmer with the sledgehammer had reflected that the Christ-figure is, in Christian belief, not just God-made-man but God-made-Jew, he might have eased off a bit.

Lionel Shriver

‘Tea-towel-gate’: another British travesty

During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society who is of Palestinian descent. Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – ‘Here’s the wannabe Jew’ – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: ‘You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.’ A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks!

Thursday

Charles Lipson

Who’s actually winning the wars in the Middle East?

If you read the New York Times or watch the foreign policy establishment’s “best and brightest,” you will be told, with imperious certainty, that America is losing the war in Iran and was stupid to begin it. The conspiratorial wing on both the right and left add that it is all the Jews’ fault, although they usually remember to mutter they mean “Israel” instead of all Jews, a gossamer cloak over what they really mean. If, on the other hand, you watch Fox News or read blogs by conservatives or military analysts, you will be told with equal certainty that America and its ally, Israel, are actually winning – and winning decisively.  So, who is right? The answer, of course, is Carl von Clausewitz. What that old Prussian says goes to the heart of the issue.

middle east

Wednesday

Jonathan Spyer

The winners and losers of the Iran ceasefire deal

The abrupt announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the war between the US, Israel and Iran resolves none of the issues which caused the conflict. Beyond an agreement to cease attacks, the arrangements that will hold during the two-week period appear themselves unclear. Each side in the last hours seemed to commit to different versions of the ceasefire in key areas. Iran remains an aggressive and dangerous power, with the ambition of expelling the US from the region, dominating the Gulf states and destroying Israel From Israel’s point of view, the bottom line is clear. The Iranian regime has been significantly weakened in its capacities in a number of key areas. At the same time, the regime has not been destroyed or even severely damaged in its continued ability to rule Iran.

ceasefire

Tuesday

Matthew Parris

Iran’s secret weapon of self-sacrifice

From our UK edition

Much has been made of the adjective ‘asymmetric’ when discussing warfare in recent years. The word enjoys a renewed currency now that Israel and America are engaged in combat with enemies who, unable to match them with comparable armed forces, instead disperse, hide and strike at the soft underbelly of their foe. David and his sling, I suppose, when David met Goliath thousands of years ago, was a forerunner of this strategy. But I want to discuss another kind of asymmetry, and another Old Testament hero, Samson. Alone, captive and blinded, Samson reached for a secret weapon unavailable to his captors: the weapon of self-sacrifice. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their forces do not fear death.

Stephen Daisley

Israel needs to rethink its relationship with Christians

Sometimes it’s a wonder Israel can stand with all the self-inflicted gunshot wounds in its feet. Israeli police placed their country in the eye of a diplomatic and religious storm by accosting their most senior Catholic clergymen as they made their way to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Religious gatherings have been restricted during the ongoing war with Iran, which has repeatedly targeted built-up civilian areas including Jerusalem. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Father Francesco Ielpo, Custos of the Holy Land, were prevented from accessing the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday, the day when Christians mark Jesus Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.

Friday

Gearóid Ó Riain

Rise of the leftist groypers

Last month, Ana Kasparian, executive producer of the progressive YouTube channel The Young Turks (6.5 million subs), tweeted out “Hey, bitch, the goyim are waking the fuck up. Deal with it.” Ana, like many other chronically online leftists, has been making increasingly obsessive anti-Israel content since October 7. So obsessive, in fact, that it led Jillian Michaels, a co-host of Ana’s panel show Her Take, to storm off set in the middle of production saying “I don’t know how every show ends up being about ‘how do we bash Israel?’ This is not for me, I am not interested in this.” “MAGA communist” influencer Jackson Hinkle likes to use the same phrase as Kasparian with his millions of followers. Examples include, “Goyim, do not complain.

Friday

Jonathan Spyer

Israel can’t assassinate its way to victory over Iran

The killing of the Iranian senior security official Ali Larijani this week is the most significant "targeted assassination" undertaken since Israel’s killing (in cooperation with the US) of supreme leader Ali Khamenei on the opening day of the war. These two very high-level hits have been accompanied by a long list of killings of less well-known senior Iranian officials. These have included Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) commander Mohammad Pakpour, intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, armed forces chief of staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, defense minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, military intelligence chief Saleh Asadi and many others. Around 30 officials in all have met their deaths at the hands of this campaign.

Thursday

Reid Tillman Smith

Joe Kent’s resignation was an act of political positioning

Reflecting on the resignation of Cyrus Vance, James Thomson, the American historian and journalist, wrote in the Washington Post that the former secretary of state “has done us all a great public service.” In doing so, Thomson argued, Vance gave “new life and spine to a somewhat rare and weak convention in our nation: resignation in protest of an issue of principle.” The year was 1980. Vance had resigned in protest over the Carter administration’s decision to authorize Operation Eagle Claw, the ill-fated mission to rescue American hostages held in Iran after the Islamic revolution. The mission ended ignominiously. President Carter pulled the plug after equipment failures and a deadly helicopter collision killed eight service members. Vance was vindicated.

Joe Kent

Thursday

Christopher Rufo

The right’s Israel fracture

As the joint American-Israeli military campaign in Iran continues, President Trump’s coalition is starting to exhibit some cracks. The war in Iran has emerged as a proxy battle over a broader, long-simmering conflict within the right about Israel. And the fight over Israel is, in some important ways, a proxy battle about Jews in general. Big picture, what we’re seeing now is that the traditional divisions on the right between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives, between hawks and doves, are being reshaped into a battle over Israel specifically. It’s a very difficult subject; this issue has become highly emotional and personal for those on both sides, and even in my world, it’s set friends against one another. How far do the emerging divisions go, and how should we respond?

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters: We interfere in the Middle East at our peril

From our UK edition

The West’s track record Sir: I read with much sadness Matthew Parris’s reservations about western attempts at regime change in Iran (‘Is this Starmer’s finest hour?’, 7 March). Sadness because he is quite correct, given the West’s track record in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. He rightly alludes to Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘Greater Israel’ plans amid destabilised, chaotic neighbours. In Syria in late 2010, I spoke with resident Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Christian and even Jewish residents from Homs and Hama to As-Suweida and Aleppo: well over 90 per cent pointed to their freedom of association and of worship, the women to the secondary and tertiary education they could enjoy, and all because the Assads could guarantee these things.

Lloyd Evans

Cynthia Erivo’s Dracula is tiresome

From our UK edition

Interest in Dracula seems to go on for ever. Kip Williams has chosen Cynthia Erivo to star in his new version of the yarn about a clique of blood-quaffers who bite their victims’ necks and lick the seepings. The show is staged as a read-through of Bram Stoker’s text supplemented by costumes, wigs and a few orchestral hits recorded on tape. Erivo plays all 23 roles and her performance is simultaneously filmed and broadcast to the audience on TV screens dotted around the theatre. This creates two problems. First, Erivo can’t see or interact with the crowd because she’s encircled by wardrobe assistants and cameramen who swarm around her like gnats. Secondly, the audience are expected to look at the screens and not at the stage. This is odd.

Friday

Michael Karam

Israel wants to destroy Hezbollah once and for all

At around 2:30 a.m. on March 2, Israel bombed Beirut’s mostly Shia southern suburbs in response to a Hezbollah rocket attack on northern Israel. The road heading into Beirut from South Lebanon and the city’s southern suburbs was jammed with cars filled with Lebanese fleeing further reprisals. Some 52 civilians were killed and 154 injured, a hefty butcher’s bill even in this part of the world. Most Lebanese are happy Hezbollah has been defanged, even if they wish it wasn’t thanks to Israel Hezbollah’s actions were a demonstration of their ongoing support for Iran, but goading Israel was a cataclysmic miscalculation.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Iran attacked, Iran attacks and Starmer fumbles

From our UK edition

Home Britain was not involved in the attack on Iran, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said, but a day later he gave America permission to use British bases (including Diego Garcia) ‘to prevent Iran firing missiles across the region’. He told the Commons, ‘This country does not believe in regime change from the skies,’ and ‘the only way forward is a negotiated outcome’. ‘This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,’ said President Donald Trump of America. A drone hit RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus; the destroyer HMS Dragon was dispatched there. At least 300,000 British citizens were said to be in the Gulf.

Freddy Gray

Operation Epic Fury is already tearing the MAGA movement apart

When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American ‘rats’ were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him. The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-era ‘forever wars’ are no more. Plus, these days the comedy communications come from the American Commander-in-Chief. At the weekend, as missiles rained across the Middle East, Trump’s cabinet officials mostly avoided attention-grabbing interviews. The boss, however, embarked on his own heroic PR campaign.

Toby Young

Why I’m a proud Zionist

The bomb shelter reserved for ‘volunteers’ at Kibbutz Dafna near the town of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel was definitely substandard. It was damp and smelly, more like a lavatory than a fortified bunker, and not considered fit for the kibbutzniks: a pampered species compared to us. But when the Soviet-built ordnance started raining down on us, it did its job. We emerged, unharmed, the following morning, blinking into the dawn light. The terrorists had not succeeded in hitting the kibbutz with a single Katyusha rocket. No, I’m not embedded with the Israel Defence Forces on the Lebanese border, although the area surrounding Kiryat Shmona was under fire from Hezbollah earlier this week. This was in 1981 and I was just 17.

Matthew Parris

Is this Starmer’s finest hour?

From our UK edition

A friend met Mary Wilson on the Isles of Scilly, where she and her husband, Harold, had a home. She confided in him that Harold, now in the grip of senile dementia, was slipping away from her; and she felt the lonelier because in the eyes of the world his achievements as prime minister were slipping away as well. My friend rehearsed with her the list: the Open University, etc. Then he added this: there is a kind of achievement in high office which by its very nature is unlikely to burn brightly in the world’s imagination after a leader has gone, but is no less luminous for being forgotten. I mean (he said) declining to do something foolish. On behalf of our country (he said), your husband politely declined Washington’s invitation to join the Vietnam war.

Sunday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

How Israel killed Khamenei

From our UK edition

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, was presented with irrefutable evidence yesterday, including footage, confirming the death of Iran’s so-called ‘Supreme Leader’: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on his compound in Tehran, marking a pivotal blow to the Islamic republic regime. Initially Netanyahu only hinted at the fact that he was dead, but as the evening progressed more and more sources confirmed it until President Donald Trump eventually took to Truth Social to declare ‘Khamenei, one of the most evil people in history, is dead.

Saturday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Is this Trump’s Sarajevo moment?

Here we go again. Switch out Saddam Hussein for the Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmed Chalabi for Reza Pahlavi and you have a fresh war for regime change in the Middle East, this time with Israel as America’s sidekick. With Operation Epic Fury, the American and Israeli bombing of Iran and push for regime change, the self-proclaimed “President of Peace” runs the risk not only of triggering wider upheaval in the Middle East, but also globally. Is this a new Sarajevo moment? With Trump’s own generals having warned him that attacking Iran could be a debacle, he may have torched his own presidency Unlike George W. Bush in 2003, who worked to bolster domestic and international support for attacking Iraq, Donald Trump has disdained the slightest effort to justify his war publicly.

iran
Freddy Gray

Trump launches a remote-control regime-change war on Iran

"We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground," said Donald Trump, as he stood at the lectern in his white USA cap and announced the launch of a "massive and ongoing" military operation against Iran.  "It will be totally, again, obliterated." He had to say "again" because he has insisted over and over that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been "utterly obliterated" last summer, after Operation Midnight Hammer.  But the objective of these latest midnight or very early morning strikes, conducted again by US and Israeli forces working together, is already far broader than the wiping out of weapons of mass destruction – whether that be uranium enrichment sites or Iran's ballistic missile capabilities.