Jake Wallis Simons is a columnist, broadcaster and foreign correspondent. His latest book, Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, is out now
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Twitter is not always kind to the Jewish state. But the peace accord between Israel, UAE and Bahrain that was signed in Washington in September has opened the floodgates to a social media love-in. In one video, recently shared by Ivanka Trump, an Israeli called Amit Deri expresses his astonishment at finding produce from his country
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The news that Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen ‘father of the bomb’ Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, met his end in a hail of bullets near Tehran today comes as no surprise. As with so many things these past four years, this is all about Trump. Whoever carried out the hit, it is all but certain that Trump gave
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Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seems determined to reinvent the secular Muslim country he inherited as a sort of Sunni Iranian ‘Mini-Me’: draconian, Islamist and with vaunting regional ambitions. For Western powers and their allies, the urgent question is how to deal with the mutation of a Nato ally into a ‘neo-Ottoman’ threat. A hundred years ago,
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It was the question that many journalists were asking: what had become of Mrs Puigdemont and the two little Puigdemonts? Well, yesterday afternoon we found out. After a bit of elementary detective work, we photographed her driving home with her two children in the car. In other words, doing the school run. Now, Marcela Topor
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One is the son of a humble baker, whose burning passion for Catalan independence has been all-consuming since he was a boy. The other, a scion of a distinguished Spanish family, is a hard-nosed political operator with a taste for cigars and bullfighting. In the heady days of the referendum, some even dared to dream that
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Barcelona I was roaring through central Barcelona on the back of a motorcycle, in the midst of a pack of unionist riders adorned with Spanish flags, all sounding their horns with reckless abandon, when it hit me: this was the voice of the silent majority. Catalonia does not want independence from Spain. But let me
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It was the option that had long been threatened, but few people imagined that the Catalan leader, Carles Puigdemont, would actually have the guts to follow it through. A few weeks ago, when I stood outside the parliament building in Barcelona after Puigdemont had apparently backed away from the brink, the mood was despondent as
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In the beginning, the Guardian was a friend of the Jews. Or rather, those Jews who believed that after millennia of persecution in exile, they deserved the right to live freely in their ancestral homeland. The overwhelming majority, in other words. The Zionists. The Labour party liked them, too. Three months before the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s key declaration of support
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Barcelona After the demonstration in Barcelona on Sunday, I happened to walk past the city’s main police station. A unionist crowd had gathered to praise the officers who had so brutally suppressed the Catalan referendum the previous week. Wrapped in Spanish flags, they were chanting Viva España and throwing flowers. Then they started performing the
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At first glance, the new footage of Boris being slapped down for reciting a fragment of Kipling in Burma seemed like just another of his gaffes. Many Burmese people, however, reacted with bafflement. This was an affectionate poem expressing British love for their country through a soldier kissing a Burmese girl. (My great-grandfather, Sir William
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With all the wrath of a lover slighted, the Left has turned on Aung San Suu Kyi. On Friday, Jeremy Hardy, Marxism’s comedy mouthpiece, lambasted her as a ‘racist, vain narcissist’, while a petulant George Monbiot demanded that the woman be stripped of her Nobel peace prize. ‘To Aung San Suu Kyi we entrusted our hopes,’
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George W Bush is, shall we say, not a fan of Donald Trump. He has publicly slammed the 45th President in the most vivid of terms, accusing the magnate of ‘racism’ and ‘name calling’. But as Trump flew into the eye of the storm yesterday — doing so literally, for once — and the First Lady strapped
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Which British politician would be loopy enough to defend the Venezuelan regime as it guns down protesters and arrests opposition politicians? Need a clue? Didn’t think so. This week, Ken Livingstone – once an adviser to the late Hugo Chavez – said that the reason for the country’s woes was that Chavez ‘did not execute the establishment
