Jonathan Sacerdoti

If anti-Israel agitators wish to avoid being described as terrorists, they might begin by ceasing to terrorise ordinary people. The smashing of the Gail’s branch in Archway, north London, red paint flung across its walls, slogans sprayed beside its door, is the latest instalment in a now familiar pattern: vandalism presented as virtue, intimidation dressed up as solidarity. The activists call it protest, but let’s call it by its real name: menace. To vandalise Gail's in the name of Gaza is a deliberate effort to intimidate and must be treated as such The branch’s windows were broken twice within a single week. Slogans reading “Reject corporate Zionism” and “Boycott” were sprayed across the frontage, an anarchist symbol scrawled beside the entrance.

Perhaps the biggest talent of humanity is our gift to adapt to challenging circumstances with creativity and ingenuity. It may also be our biggest fault. Just two days after I stood in the central Gaza Strip, touring the area and seeing the Yellow Line for myself, the IDF yesterday announced another serious breach of the ceasefire. The Yellow Line is a mutually agreed demarcation. Both Israelis and Palestinians are supposed to remain on their respective sides. When I was there last week, officers explained how frequently that boundary is tested. They spoke about sniper fire, explosives planted near positions, and attempts to edge forward under cover. The pattern, they said, is persistent. Israel holds its fire unless a clear threat emerges. Hamas probes.

The European Union has finally done what it long argued it could not. Yesterday, the bloc formally designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation, placing it in the same legal category as al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The decision was framed by Europe’s foreign ministers as a response to mass repression, extrajudicial killings and the systematic use of terror by the Iranian state against its own population. ‘Repression cannot go unanswered,’ said Kaja Kallas, vice-president of the European Commission, announcing the move. It was not a symbolic flourish. The designation means the EU can now freeze assets, assign criminal liability and enforce travel bans.

Life expectancy across Europe is 81 years. An 81-year-old European dying today would have been born on the day Auschwitz was liberated. It has taken one average European lifetime for us to forget the lessons of the Shoah. How many Jews do you think there are in the world? Out of 8.1 billion people alive today, we are just 0.194 per cent of the world’s population. There are only around 15.7 million of us. The worldwide Jewish population has not yet fully recovered to its pre-Holocaust numbers. From 16.6 million before the war, only 11 million remained after. It was a genocide. In the 81 years since then, we have still not reached the population levels of 1939.

Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi. The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian.

The Middle East has entered a phase where events no longer necessarily resolve into outcomes. They pause, harden, and then reappear elsewhere. Ceasefires freeze wars without settling them. New councils are announced before their purpose is fully explored or revealed. Violence recedes in one arena and resurfaces in another. What looks like diplomacy is often just deferral or distraction. Europe remained vocally engaged on Gaza, conspicuously restrained on Iran, strategically vague on Syria, and angrily petulant on Greenland Gaza is the clearest illustration. The ceasefire ended active fighting while leaving the logic of the war intact.

The Middle East has long been organised around two competing logics: pragmatic alignment and ideological alignment. Before the 7 October war, these logics produced two regional blocs that structured most political, diplomatic and security behaviour. The Palestinian attack and invasion that triggered the war ruptured both systems. Incentives shifted, alliances frayed, and assumptions collapsed. What followed has not been the emergence of a calmer order, but a reconfiguration in which ideology has returned in new forms and pragmatism has narrowed, and hardened, requiring deliberate encouragement and support to survive. For more than a decade, regional politics moved along these two tracks. Pragmatic alliances rested on interests that could be negotiated, measured and enforced.

I did not come to Islam through theology. I came to it through fear, threat and hatred directed at me and the world I live in. I think the first time I became aware of something called Islam was in 1989, when Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’ for writing his novel, The Satanic Verses. Images of furious men immolating books spread around the world and seared themselves into my childhood mind, fixing fear and confusion to something I did not yet know how to name. My father, a bookseller, insisted on continuing to sell the book, but decided, soberly, that it would have to be kept behind the checkout desk, available only if a customer asked for it by name.

When Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Florida at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in a few days’ time, near the top of his agenda will be a sober accounting of Iranian military activity and what it may yet presage. He will brief the President on a sustained sequence of Iranian ballistic-missile drills conducted across multiple regions, the visible movement of missile units, launchers and support infrastructure by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Israel’s assessment that these actions serve a dual purpose. They resemble routine exercises in form, yet replicate with unnerving fidelity the preparations that would precede an actual strike.