Israel

The Secretary General of the United Nations is conventionally thought of as the world’s most high-profile diplomat, charged with the responsibility of bringing calm and astute leadership to bear at times of war and international crisis. This is a core purpose and mission that appears to have escaped the attention of Antonio Guterres, the UN’s current chief. Addressing a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday, Guterres said the situation in the Middle East was growing more dire by the hour and urged all parties to respect and protect civilians. Fair enough and exactly the kind of thing that UN leaders are expected to say. It

If the Israeli public had expected Benjamin Netanyahu to take responsibility for failing to foresee Hamas’s attack on 7 October, for years of neglecting the safety and security of the towns near the border with Gaza and for allowing Hamas to build a substantial armed force – they would’ve been disappointed by his speech on Wednesday night. Netanyahu, in a typical manner, did not accept responsibility. Unlike the IDF’s Chief of the General Staff, Herzi Halvi, and the head of Israel’s general security service Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, both of whom have publicly admitted to failures for predict the attack, Netanyahu declared that an investigation into the events will take

In an address to soldiers on Saturday, Israel’s chief of staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi outlined the aims of the country’s looming ground incursion into Gaza. ‘Our task is to destroy Hamas activists and their infrastructure’. But, he added, this will not be ‘an easy task’.  That’s an understatement, to say the least. Despite the bravado and masochism expressed by Israeli generals, the war has so far caused the death of more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and troops and the kidnapping of 222 hostages (among them 30 children). Another 200 are missing. The ground invasion of Gaza will likely be even more costly in terms of lives lost. The war

It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a ‘tribalism’ that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in Kenya. One pernicious aspect of mutually hostile groupsterism is prix fixe politics. Your side shares a rigid, prescribed collection of beliefs, and joining the club entails embracing every single one, while despising a compulsory roster of enemies and backing the folks on your team – whatever friend or foe may say, whatever friend or foe may do. As in French restaurants, there are no substitutions. Letting go of indefensible positions your gang is ‘supposed’ to maintain is a relief Rarely has set-menu morality been put on more vivid display than

Last night, after a suspected Islamist fanatic gunned down two Swedish football fans in Brussels to ‘avenge Muslims’, the BBC ran a headline calling it a ‘terror’ attack. This should seem entirely unremarkable. After all, it was a terror attack, so the language had the benefit of being accurate. The problem, of course, is that the corporation has a policy of refusing to describe the butchers of Hamas in the same terms.  It is true that the BBC amended the headline pretty quickly after realising its error. The broadcaster has insisted in its guidelines that its journalists should use descriptive terms like ‘bomber’, ‘attacker’, ‘gunman’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘insurgent’ and ‘militant’ by default. As John

Over the weekend, the IDF confirmed that it killed the Hamas terrorist who commanded the attack on Israel a week earlier. It was later disclosed that the terrorist was arrested by Israel in 2005 for abducting and killing Israelis. He was released in 2011 by Netanyahu’s government in return for a captive Israeli soldier abducted in 2006 as part of a prisoner exchange deal. Netanyahu knew that Hamas received money, weapons and training from Iran The deal included the release of over 1,000 prisoners, many of them dangerous terrorists who returned to Gaza and rose through the ranks of Hamas. This controversial agreement exemplifies Netanyahu’s failed policy of containment and

This week’s political shows were dominated by the Israel-Palestine conflict, as Israel prepares for a land, sea and air assault on Gaza. Israel has said it will not supply water, fuel or electricity to the region unless Hamas releases its hostages and has instructed the people of Gaza to head south to avoid the imminent attack. A humanitarian disaster looms in an already densely populated area, and Victoria Derbyshire asked Israeli government adviser Mark Regev to respond to allegations that the actions of Israel could be breaking international humanitarian law and even amount to war crimes. Regev denied the allegations but he implied that Israel would target civilian zones because

On a patch of scrubland outside the Zikim kibbutz earlier this week, I came across a platoon of Merkava 4 tanks positioned among the trees. One of the tank commanders recognised my colleague and we exchanged a few words. ‘This is our Yom Kippur,’ he told us. ‘We haven’t even begun to grasp the implications of this.’ Yom Kippur, in this context, isn’t a reference to the annual Jewish day of atonement. Rather, it recalls October 1973, when Israel was surprised by an attack on two fronts from the forces of Egypt and Syria. The Hamas assault on Israeli Jewish communities around the Gaza Strip came exactly 50 years and a day after what Israelis

The world changed on Saturday morning with Hamas’s attack on army bases and civilian communities in Israel. What began as a Palestinian military triumph became, within minutes, the greatest single atrocity of the entire conflict to date, by either party.  Every assumption of the status quo ante has been swept aside, including much of the international etiquette around calls for restraint: Israel appears to be hours away from launching the most overwhelming assault on a modern city since Vladimir Putin’s attack on Grozny, with unreserved Western blessing. This will likely unleash every rocket in Hamas’s arsenal onto Israeli cities, and might well drag other parties into the fray, from external actors like