Israel

‘Trump Make Israel Great’ reads the banner on the deserted hotel next to the new American embassy in Jerusalem. Unlike most of the world population, Israelis regard the US President as a big improvement on Barack Obama. In government, his decision to move the embassy here from Tel Aviv has elevated him to near godlike status. ‘We are very lucky that the strongest kid in the classroom is on our side in this crazy school,’ is how Yoav Galant, Israel’s housing minister, puts it. There is evidence for Trumpophilia all over the place. Signs proclaiming the US President a ‘friend of Zion’ are dotted around the Holy City and ‘God Bless America’ booms out in restaurants.

Gaza has a galvanising effect on Europeans. Jeremy Corbyn, for example, appeared to have no consolatory words for France after last week's Islamist knife attack in Paris, yet on Monday he posted messages on Twitter and Facebook expressing his disgust with Israel. Likewise in France, the far-left, curiously quiet whenever there's a terrorist attack on their patch, have this week staged protests in Lyon, Marseille, Rouen, Paris and Bordeaux to voice their opposition to Israel's killing of 62 Palestinians, the victims including several children and fifty members of Hamas, an EU-designated terror organisation. But what do the protestors in France hope to achieve?

Oh Israel, why must you do it? Why must you make such an almighty balagan of these things? Hamas is out to provoke you and you are evidently in the market for provocation. Would it kill you to step back and find a way of resolving a crisis that doesn't involve dead Palestinians and international censure? You could have dispersed the crowds without opening fire on them. You could have used non-lethal rounds. 'T'nu L'Tzahal L'Natzeach' is fair enough when you're bombing Hamas installations but these were unarmed protestors. If you haven't spent the past few days with these thoughts rattling around your head, you are a stauncher Zionist than I am. And I once had to explain to a university professor why I kept referring to Jordan as 'Eastern Eretz Yisrael' in an essay.

When Donald Trump pledged to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I was sceptical. Too many presidents had given then broken their word; Trump, before he ran for the White House, was lukewarm on Israel. When President Trump issued a proclamation recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, I was still sceptical. Why would Trump the America-Firster deliver a neoconservative’s dream? Well, aren’t I just Wrongy McWrongface, Mayor of Wrongtown? Today, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before an ebullient crowd at the dedication ceremony for the new US embassy in Jerusalem, Israel. ‘Jerusalem, Israel’. That’s how they referred to it throughout. No more mush about an ‘international city’.

Was it, do you reckon, a felicitous birthday present from the Eurovision judges for Israel, with Netta standing in, a bit incongruously, for a 70-year old state? If so, it’s a tribute to the way that a Middle Eastern country actually counts as European to at least the same extent as Turkey just across the Bosphorus – actually probably more so. Israel seems like an intelligible outpost of our kind of culture and values in what now is the Muslim world. If Netta is Israel, she’s a terrifically attractive embodiment of its most appealing aspect; way more than the country’s embarrassing president. She’s its avant garde side: an Orthodox Jew who raps in Hebrew, to huge acclaim at home.

Jerusalem It’s a sunny day in Jerusalem where Israelis are waking up to fresh conflict on the country’s border with Syria. I’m in town as part of a Bicom delegation and the picturesque scenes give little indication of the events of the night before which saw 20 rockets fired by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards at Golan Heights overnight. In response, Israel upped the ante and sent more rockets back - targeting Iranian weapons depots, logistics sites and intelligence centres. This marks a serious ratcheting up of tensions between Israel and Iran following increasing unease about Iranian presence in Syria and Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday. It is the first time Iranian forces have fired directly on Israeli troops.

Donald Trump's election as US president has meant the whole notion of 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' is now very much part of a wider conversation. But for decades before the Trump era, more honest or open-minded journalists were aware that some of their colleagues often didn't tell the whole truth about all kinds of matters, or cherry-picked what they reported. And perhaps no subject has been so misreported as the Palestinian issue. Western media has often focused on this issue to the detriment of many other conflicts or independence movements throughout the world. The BBC, in particular, has devoted an inordinate amount of its budget and staff to covering the West Bank and Gaza in thousands of reports over the years.

One of the many problems with the effort to bring back the death penalty in Israel is that it never went away in the first place. Israel is only a partial abolitionist, banning the death penalty for ordinary crimes in 1954 but retaining it for war crimes and offences against the state. The last execution was in 1962, when Eichmann was sent on his merry way. Capital punishment technically remains in place but a mixture of procedural rules and queasiness about its use have prevented any further trips to the gallows.  That may be about to change after a ‘death penalty for terrorists’ bill passed its first reading in the Knesset.

Outvoted on a resolution on Israel, on the wrong side of international opinion, the United States ambassador responded with an intemperate address to the UN General Assembly. America’s diplomat told the countries assembled: 'The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act… A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of anti-Semitism… has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty — and more — to the murderers of the six million European Jews.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth over Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital continues, but the President’s critics are missing a more important part of his statement. For one of the first-times since he made it to the White House, Trump has now seriously resurrected the ‘two-state solution’ as an option. For Israel’s staunchest defenders and some elements on the American right, Trump’s silence on Palestine had been interpreted as proof that the idea of a Palestinian state was dead and buried. But now, by talking up the two-state solution once again, Trump seems to have confirmed that this isn’t the case: the ‘ultimate deal’ to bring peace to the Middle East that Trump promised could be back on.