An invasion of Gaza is hugely risky for Israel

In a sign that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) is planning to ramp up the war in Gaza, Israel has called for evacuation of 1.1 million Palestinian civilians from the northern area of the Gaza Strip. The UN quickly condemned Israel’s announcement, claiming that an evacuation within the 24-hour timeframe given is ‘impossible’, and have called on Israel to rescind its order.

The war, which started on Saturday following a surprise attack by Hamas, saw the biggest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The horrific details of what ensued included the murder of babies, the rape and murder of women and girls, and people being burned alive. Civilians, including children and babies, have been abducted into Gaza.

In the seven days since the war started, Israel has operated in several avenues. The first, is a massive bombardment of Gaza. The aerial bombardment has targeted Hamas terrorists, essential infrastructure, tunnels and underground weapons storage facilities. It has caused large scale destruction.

Because Hamas has embedded itself deep within civilian population, including by digging underground hiding spaces for terrorists directly underneath apartment blocks, casualties have so far amounted to over 1,500, according to Palestinian sources. Many are civilians. Hamas has threatened to execute hostages if the strikes continue – a threat which has so far failed to deter Israel.

In an effort to place more pressure on Hamas, Israel has placed Gaza under siege. It cut off supply of electricity, petrol and water on Monday. Humanitarian aide is still possible, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRA) still operates in Gaza, but have relocated to the southern part of the strip. Food is in limited supply, and so is drinking water, much of which has become contaminated.

However, bombardment and a siege have limitations and cannot fully fulfil Israel’s aims. These include landing a decisive strike on Hamas and its leaders from which it will not recover, reaching Israeli hostages and re-establishing deterrence against Israel’s enemies, primarily Iran and Hezbollah. Israel has amassed a force of 300,00 soldiers ready to enter Gaza. A ground operation is the only way to advance these goals, but it is extremely complicated and risky warfare.

As part of its attack plan, Hamas has prepared itself for the option that Israel will send ground forces into Gaza. It has strategically placed bombs and other obstacles meant to slow down IDF forces and maximise casualties. Hamas’s tunnels can be used for offensives against Israeli soldiers, in much the same way that the Viet Cong successfully attacked (and defeated) American troops in the Vietnam war using the infamous Củ Chi tunnels.

Fighting in Gaza’s densely populated and extremely hostile environment has always been tricky for the IDF. Israel’s weariness of casualties among its soldiers has played a part in decisions about the use of ground forces for decades. In the second Lebanon war, fought in July and August 2006, for example, there was an over-reliance on airpower in order to avoid casualties. This greatly restricted Israel’s achievements. In Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (December 2008 to January 2009) and Operation Strong Cliff (2014), also in Gaza, ground forces were deployed for a short time period and did not go deep into the territory, staying on the outskirts. These decision were guided more by wanting to minimise casualties than by operative considerations.

Israel’s latest announcement to evacuate northern Gaza suggests that a ground operation may be imminent. It is not a decision taken lightly and it holds considerable risk. However, if successful, it will be strategically significant. Hamas’s leadership, the ones still in Gaza, are hidden deep within the territory, surrounded by civilians, and possibly, also by Israeli hostages. Holding territory and controlling it is the best way to for Israeli forces to reach Hamas’s leaders.

If Israeli hostages are rescued by military means, which is unlikely, it will only be done using ground forces. There are about 150 Israelis held in Gaza, according to estimates, and Israel suspects that many of them have already died. It is more likely that hostages will be released as past of a deal.

So far, Hamas is not deterred by the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, nor by civilian casualties. It has urged Palestinians not to leave Northern Gaza. Hamas has called Israel’s warning ‘propaganda’ and ‘psychological warfare’. If Palestinians stay, this will inevitably result in mass casualties. This serves Hamas in two ways. First, they can keep using civilians as a human shield. Second, it can turn international public opinion against Israel and place pressure on them to end the war.

If Israel commences a ground operation, it may be lengthy and costly. The old paradigm adopted by previous Israeli governments, and favoured by Benjamin Netanyahu in particular, was to accept Hamas’s rule in Gaza, as along as relative calm was maintained. This is no longer the case. After the horrific massacre, Israel cannot allow Hamas to exist. Destroying its considerable capabilities is a monumental but essential task that will require resilience and patience from the Israeli public, especially as military casualties are expected to mount as a result of a ground operation.

France’s Jews are afraid

Emmanuel Macron addressed France on television on Thursday evening. It was an opportunity for the president to reiterate his support for Israel in its war against Hamas, but also to call for his country to remain united.  

As Macron spoke to the nation, police in Paris were using tear gas and water cannons to disperse a pro-Hamas demonstration. Meanwhile, some 10,000 police in France have been deployed to stand guard outside Jewish schools and places of worship.  

The atmosphere is tense and France’s Jewish community are right to be frightened. No European country has suffered as much brutal anti-Semitism as France in the last decade.  

On Wednesday two of Macron’s ministers visited a Jewish school in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris, in a show of solidarity. Why Sarcelles? It was here in 2014 that mobs of youths went on the rampage in response to an Israeli offensive in Gaza. They attacked Jewish shops and desecrated a synagogue. Two years earlier in Sarcelles an extremist had thrown a grenade into a Kosher shop; that was the same year an Islamist shot dead three Jewish children and their teacher in a Toulouse school.  

In January 2015 an Islamic State gunman murdered four shoppers in a kosher store in Paris. As the BBC reported at the time, acts of anti-Semitism had risen by more than 90 per cent in France in 2014 and half of all religiously-motivated attacks were against Jews, despite the fact they represented under 1 per cent of the population.  

By 2022, attacks against Jews in France had increased from 50 per cent of the total number of religious-motivated crimes to 62 per cent. That figure is likely to rise again following Hamas’ murderous assault on Israel. On Thursday police announced that so far this week they have logged over 100 anti-Semitic acts and made 41 arrests.  

France isn’t alone in experiencing a surge in anti-Semitism; across Europe, from Stockholm to Berlin, Jews are justifiably fearful. In London, a city its mayor likes to claim is a beacon of tolerance, four Jewish schools have closed and pupils in other establishments have been advised not to wear their kippah on the way home. 89 anti-Semitic incidents have been recorded in the UK this week: a 300 per cent increase on the same period in 2022. 

The truth – so bitter that no political leader has yet summoned up the courage to admit it – is that through its uncontrolled immigration policy Europe has exacerbated tensions around the Palestine conflict.  

Earlier in the week, Le Figaro interviewed Pierre Brochand, France’s erstwhile ambassador to Israel and also the former head of DGSE, the equivalent of MI6. He expressed his regret that Gerald Darmanian, the Minister of the Interior, had been obliged to convene a security conference to ‘deal with the repercussions on our soil of events taking place 3,000 kilometers away’. 

But Brochand was not surprised. ‘This is just one of the many security repercussions that non-European immigration can have on our society,’ he said, adding that there is now among the French population ‘a significant proportion [who] feel solidarity with the Palestinian cause, whatever means they use.’ 

Last week, France revealed that in the first eight months of 2023 there were a record 93,000 asylum applications. Syrians, Bangladeshis and Turks represented more than a quarter of all claims.  

Of the tens of thousands of migrants who have crossed illegally into Britain in small boats since 2018, seven countries make up 83 per cent of all arrivals: Iran, Albania, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea and Sudan.  

How many of these people have brought their governments’ anti-Semitism with them across the sea? We have no idea because Europe long since gave up border checks, allowing well over a million migrants into the continent without establishing what they think of Jews, gays or women. 

The video of migrants in a Greek camp celebrating Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli women and children should send a chill down the spine of every Jewish European.  

In an interview on German television this week, Henry Kissinger described his ‘pain’ at seeing images of demonstrators in Berlin celebrating the slaughter of Israel women and children. The 100-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner issued a grim critique of where Germany and Europe have gone wrong. ‘It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that,’ he said. 

Kissinger fled Germany to the USA in 1938 to escape the Nazis; how long before a new generation of German and European Jews are forced to make the same journey because they are no longer safe in their own country? 

How Hamas fooled Israel – and the West

How to explain Israel’s intelligence and military failure? The obvious comparison – one Israelis themselves are making – is with the 1973 October War, when the country was sucker-punched by Egyptian and Syrian forces on Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance. That became known as a failing of the konzeptzia, the Hebrew term for the way we frame the world with all its attendant risks. It seems to have happened again.

In the West, Israel is generally seen as either admirably or reprehensibly tough-minded, taking the hardest line against its enemies whatever the circumstances and punching back twice as hard. The trouble is, it’s not at all clear that this is true – now at least. 

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks tough. But if you look at the way he has handled the Iran file, for example, he has been extremely cautious, authorising air strikes against IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) positions in Syria and Lebanon, but taking care not to provoke Hezbollah – and relying on clandestine rather than overt activity inside Iran itself.

Israel’s recent domestic turmoil, over the coalition government’s approach to judicial and legal reform, has, of course, taken up much of the available political oxygen for months. But both Netanyahu and many others within Israel’s national security establishment seem to have come to believe that Hamas could be contained. The organisation was primarily interested in consolidating its position inside Gaza. Its ultimate goal may have been to take over the West Bank and displace Fatah as the predominant force in Palestinian politics. But that was a problem for another day. Its access to Qatari cash and mediation, and its long-standing working relations with Egypt and Turkey gave it something to lose and brought a welcome degree of predictability.

From time to time, when Hamas decided it needed to flex its muscles by firing rockets in a display of performative aggression, Iron Dome was there to intercept them. More or less everyone went home happy. Just as in Northern Ireland, where Sinn Fein and the IRA were seen as the best bulwark against dissident republicans, so Hamas could act as a bulwark against Al-Qaeda, Islamic State and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Allowing Hamas to build its own state with Gulf cash, PA transfers and revenue from employment in Israel, the theory went, might bring a sense of responsibility. It would also make it wary, at least in public, of taking too Iranian – that is bellicose – a line on general issues of Palestinian liberation. And the judicious adjustment of economic safety valves would regulate any incentives to seek Iranian cash. This month, for example, Israel re-issued permits and reopened the Erez Crossing to almost 18,000 Palestinian workers, a reward for an understanding that Hamas would reduce friction, such as recent ‘civilian’ border protests.

How illusory this all now appears. These protests, it turns out, were not simply a spectacle. They were a test of security and therefore an integral part of the preparations for Saturday’s operation.  Iran may have been consulted in advance and have provided some advice and resources. Hamas will have taken lessons from previous Hezbollah operations, particularly those designed to infiltrate Israel and seize hostages. But Hamas will have planned the exact course of the violence – the targeting of civilians, including women and children, the desecration of corpses, the cold-blooded mass murder – all by itself. And it has taken a leaf out of Da’esh’s book by filming every horror and then broadcasting the footage on social media.

Too many people seem to have persuaded themselves that Hamas was open to negotiations, and – a recurring dream – might be willing to accept a long-term ceasefire (hudna) in return for guarantees of economic easing. This meant ignoring its adamantine ideology, even if a statement of general principles, toning down the virulent and genocidal anti-Semitism of its 1988 Charter – but not abrogating it – was published for western consumption in 2017. These illusions have been shared by some British and American officials and commentators, who have sought to push Israel towards acceptance and conciliation.

Israel has for years facilitated the delivery inside Gaza of humanitarian aid from international relief agencies and NGOs, whose standard response at times of conflict is to urge Israel to end military action against terrorists who shelter among civilians and in the basements of crowded blocks of flats or hospitals. They even allowed Qatar, who we at Policy Exchange described as a ‘frenemy’ of Britain in a report last year, to send over a billion dollars of assistance as part of a package of relief measures. This money has simply enabled Hamas to evade its own responsibilities to the people of Gaza and continue to build its military capabilities.

There appear to be no examples of engagement with Islamists that have led to a positive change in that organisation’s behaviour. Usually the reverse is true. That remains the case today.  

Islamism, of course, is not a uniform entity, any more than communism was. And even within organisations like Hamas, which is ethno-nationalist as well as Islamist, there are different trends, as there were in the Comintern. But there are certain ideological basics, for example constitutive anti-Semitism, misogyny, religious supremacism and a belief that extreme violence in God’s name can be Islamically justified, that should be anathema in a liberal, secular society. As it threatens to film executions of its hostages, Hamas needs to be seen for what it is – a globally-connected group of brutal mujahidin in control of the Islamist Emirate of Gaza.

There are also lessons here for Britain. The European Union announced it will immediately review its development funding programmes in the West Bank and Gaza (even if there was some confusion about whether it was backtracking). The Foreign Office should do the same. The aim is not to stop helping Palestinians. It is to make sure that Hamas as an organisation does not benefit. The Foreign Office has allocated £17 million in development funding for Palestine in this financial year, which is set to rise to £29 million in 2024-5. We need a quick and thorough assessment of who exactly the recipients of that money are. Hamas have more than enough already for their own purposes. They do not need British taxpayers to give them any more. 

Walking the Suffolk Coast Path

When was the last time you woke up bright and early on a weekday morning, with no need for an alarm call, rested and impatient for the day ahead? My last time was a week ago, when I awoke in the Pier Hotel in Harwich, eager to walk the first bit of my latest hike, along the Suffolk Coast Path.

The Suffolk Coast Path runs for 55 miles, from Felixstowe to Lowestoft. Almost the entire route passes through an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. No ugly modern eyesores. Hurrah! As I gobble up my power breakfast (spinach and poached eggs – v healthy), looking out across the cold grey water, I plan today’s trek: along the seafront from Felixstowe, and then up the River Deben to Waldringfield, about 13 miles away.

I first got the idea of walking the Suffolk Coast Path a few months ago, when I staggered into the Pier Hotel, at the end of my trek along the Essex Way. In the Pier, saw a brochure for something called the Milsom Way. You spend the first night in Dedham, then walk to Harwich, where you spend a second night, then on to Waldringfield, with dinner, bed and breakfast at three hotels along the way: Milsoms and the Pier in Essex, and Kesgrave Hall in Suffolk. Milsoms transport your luggage. They can even pick you up en route if you decide you’ve had enough. I’d had a great time walking the first leg, from Dedham to Harwich. The second leg, from Harwich to Waldringfield, looked just as good.

Harwich and Felixstowe face each other across a broad bay where the Stour and Orwell rivers meet. The only natural harbour between the Thames and the Humber, you can see why this crucial confluence forms the border between Essex and Suffolk, and why it’s attracted successive waves of invaders – the promontory where Alfred the Great repelled the Vikings in 885AD is still called Bloody Point. To drive from Harwich to Felixstowe can take an hour. The quickest way is on the foot ferry which sails from the Ha’Penny Pier, in Harwich, landing on the beach in Felixstowe. The crossing, in a small boat, is thrilling, bobbing across the open sea.

I walk along the shingle beach, past Landguard Fort, a huge monolithic hulk built to guard the entrance to this historic strategic harbour. This is the site of the last seaborne invasion of England, by the Dutch in 1667. Rebuilt several times since then, it last saw active service in the second world war. Today it’s a museum and the surrounding headland is a nature reserve, a haven for migrating birds. Look out for Linnets and Ringed Plovers. The army left in 1957 and now nature has restored its sovereignty: the old gun batteries are rusting away; the old military tracks are cracked and blistered, buried beneath a carpet of Knotgrass and Saltwort.

Around the headland I’m in Felixstowe, surrounded by daytrippers soaking up the last of the autumn sunshine. It’s my first time here and I’m pleasantly surprised. All I’d seen of it before, from Harwich, were its rows of giant cranes, marching across the horizon, so I’d assumed it was all industrial. It’s Britain’s busiest container port, but the harbour is on the other side of the headland. Here, you’re in a traditional seaside town – a pier, an amusement arcade, a few refreshment stalls, and lots of brightly painted beach huts. ‘To you it may only be a shed but to me it’s a sanctuary,’ reads a sign.

The promenade is flanked by tidy ornamental gardens, relics of the town’s Edwardian heyday as a fashionable spa resort. The trendy bars and cafes on Beach Street are housed in old shipping containers. Children paddle in the shallows. Pensioners doze on memorial benches along the prom. I walk on and on, and Felixstowe slowly fades into open countryside. I pass a Martello Tower, built to repel an invasion by Napoleon which never came.

I stop to eat my packed lunch at Felixstowe Ferry, an antique crossing over the River Deben. Across the bay is Bawdsey Manor, a neogothic mansion which changed the course of British history. It was here, in the late 1930s, that Sir Robert Watson-Watt and his team of scientists built the first top secret receiver and transmitter towers for a new invention designed to track enemy aircraft, an invaluable asset in any armed conflict. During the second world war, RAF Bawdsey became the world’s first radar station.

Next time I plan to cross the river and walk on towards Aldeburgh, but this time I turn inland and hike upstream, along the Deben. The Saxons sailed up this river to conquer East Anglia after the fall of the Roman Empire. Why is this tranquil shoreline called Kingsfleet? Because this is where Edward III set sail for Flanders, to fight the Hundred Years War. Today the river is narrower and shallower, with mudflats on one side and reedbeds on the other, an ideal habitat for wading birds like Redshanks and Little Egrets. I don’t see any Redshanks today but I do spot a Little Egret, a speck of white, fishing for his dinner in a murky inlet. As I approach he flies away. Dinghies crisscross the languid river, tacking to and fro, eking out the best of the limp breeze.

The Deben is becalmed today, but it’s tidal all the way up to Woodbridge, and its ebbs and flows can be severe. This restless river is forever nibbling away at its marshy shore, and after a few miles I’m forced to head inland. This detour takes me through a silent hamlet called Hemley – a little cluster of cottages huddled around a medieval church, framed by two enormous, archaic oak trees. I lift the latch. The door is open. I step inside. The interior is plain and peaceful, a place of prayer for a millennium.

The footpath zigzags back down to the Deben. I walk along a muddy beach to the Maybush Inn, a pretty riverside pub in Waldringfield. Woodbridge is only a few miles away, and the Saxon burial site of Sutton Hoo a few miles beyond. I meet a nice man with a kind face out walking his dog. I ask him for directions, but he isn’t sure how to get there. I wander on for a while but the fragile footpath along the shore has been eaten away by the incoming tide. I turn back, retracing my steps to the Maybush. I plan to call Kesgrave Hall for a cab and sink a pint or two while I wait for it, but on my way back I meet that nice man again and we get chatting. I tell him I’m writing a piece for The Spectator. His face lights up. He loves The Spectator. He insists on driving me to Kesgrave. I ask for his address so I can write and thank him but he won’t hear of it. We arrive at the hotel and I invite him in for a beer but he waves me away. We say our goodbyes and I tell him I’ll buy him a drink in the next life.

Wayne Rooney and the trouble with football’s big-name managers

Birmingham City’s new American owners are hungry for success and think Wayne Rooney, the former Manchester United and England striker, is the man to deliver it. That’s why they’ve sacked manager John Eustace and handed Rooney a three and a half year contract. Tom Wagner, Birmingham’s co-owner, claims Rooney will take the club on the ‘next stage of our journey’, after dismissing Eustace for being ‘misaligned’ with their ambitions. ‘Wayne is a born winner,’ Wagner explained. A born winner as a player, yes – as a manager not so much. 

Plenty of Birmingham fans are sceptical about Rooney’s managerial track record and rightly so. In his first two jobs as manager – Derby County and DC United – he won just 38 out of 139 games (a win rate of 27.3 per cent). World-beating management this is not.

Even some football pundits, a profession dominated by ex-players who are reluctant to call out one of their own like Rooney, appear mystified by the turn of events. Eustace was doing a good job (Birmingham are currently in the play-off spots in the Championship) and he had previously led the club through a successful relegation battle. His sacking came after two straight home wins in which the team scored seven goals. What more could anyone reasonably want? Certainly the Birmingham fans appeared happy enough with Eustace, who has long-standing connections with the club.

Bizarrely enough, Birmingham have been down this path before. In 2016, the club sacked manager Gary Rowett when they were seventh in the Championship, replacing him with a big name, the former Chelsea star Gianfranco Zola. It didn’t end well: Zola lost his job just four months later, during which the team won only twice in 24 games.

The omens this time round are not good, either. The pressure will be on Rooney from day one and he will struggle to win over the sceptics. Birmingham are currently 6th in the Championship table. Can Rooney realistically be expected to take them much higher by the end of the season? What would success look like? Does anyone know?

The fans will be on his back from the very first game and any setbacks will be magnified. The club’s owners will certainly get more coverage and wider brand recognition because of the inevitable draw of Rooney but this counts for little on the pitch itself. All in all, it looks a risky and unnecessary gamble. 

Rooney’s appointment is symptomatic of a romantic but flawed faith across football that the great players have what it takes to be elite managers, simply because they have achieved success playing at the highest levels. In reality few, if any, make the grade.

Take the ex-Liverpool and England midfielder Steven Gerrard, a brilliant player and leader on the pitch, and once widely tipped to be a great success in management. He was sacked from his job at Aston Villa after a run of mediocre results, and he is now managing in the minnow Saudi Pro League. It is hard to see where he goes next.

Frank Lampard, also a footballing giant at club and international level, is another who was tipped to do big things in management. He is currently without a club, after a disastrous and short-lived second spell as manager of Chelsea. Would any Chelsea fans want him back?

Gary Neville, a pundit, club owner and businessman, was lauded in some quarters as the next big thing, made for a life in coaching and management. He left his post as England assistant manager under Roy Hodgson after a humiliating 2-1 defeat to Iceland in the 2016 Euros. Neville was also sacked as manager of Valencia in La Liga after just a few months in charge. The list of footballing stars who didn’t quite make it to the very top as managers also includes Bobby Moore, England’s only ever World Cup-winning captain. 

The jury is still out on Wayne Rooney: perhaps he will prove the doubters wrong and turn out to be a very good manager. It is fair to say that, so far, he has demonstrated little to suggest that he is a serial managerial winner in the mould of Pep Guardiola or Jurgen Klopp. No one should feel too sorry for him though – there is always the Saudi Pro League.

Why the Square Mile beats Canary Wharf

When a building’s construction requires the closure of a nearby airport, you know that the building is tall. But that’s the thing about the Square Mile at the moment – it’s so successful that the only way is up.

The cranes on 22 Bishopsgate (rather than the building itself) reached such a height, as the skyscraper neared completion, that they exceeded the permitted limit for City Airport, meaning that for a few short periods the airport had to halt flights. As you stand in Horizon 22, the viewing gallery that has just opened (tickets are free but booking up fast), looking down at nearby streets is like reading the A to Z. But while 22 Bishopsgate might be head and shoulders above its neighbours (912 feet, 62 storeys), there are plenty more office towers on the way.

‘Over half a million people a day come into the Square Mile to work,’ says Shravan Joshi, the City of London’s Planning and Transport Committee chair. ‘We’re now back to 85 per cent of the weekday activity from before the pandemic. Even if people stick to the “hybrid” model [working partly from home], the projected growth means we’re going to need another 20 million square feet of office space by 2042.’ The plan is to develop in two main locations: at the eastern edge (that is, near the current Bishopsgate cluster) and in the area near Ludgate Circus.

The City is reaching for the skies because it has run out of space at ground level. It isn’t like Canary Wharf, which took a ‘build it and they will come’ approach. Yes, they came – but they never really liked it. Just about anyone who’s ever worked there tells you how soulless it feels. ‘It’s true that there’s more bustle – and better food – in Canary Wharf than back in the 1990s,’ the business journalist Harry Wallop tells me. ‘But it still feels terribly ersatz. Like it is playing at being a city.’ You can’t create history in three decades. The City’s buzz is the result of centuries of activity – indeed millennia, if you go all the way back to the Romans.

As if to symbolise the Square Mile’s superiority, HSBC are moving their London headquarters from Canary Wharf to the site near St Paul’s previously occupied by BT (and 22 Bishopsgate has attracted tenants from Canary Wharf too). Shravan Joshi is keen to point out that he doesn’t see the two areas as competitors: ‘We need Canary Wharf to thrive, like they need us to thrive, and we both need the West End to thrive.’ But the City just has that magic. Walking its streets gives you a thrill, partly because they’re so narrow – you can almost feel the energy pushing the buildings ever upwards.

However trading on your history isn’t enough – success depends on constant reinvention. Just as City workers look very different from the 1950s (when future Tory politician Peter Walker was told that a condition of his employment was to wear a bowler hat to and from the office), so do City buildings. There are 20 football pitches’ worth of floor space in 22 Bishopsgate (as well as 1,000 miles of cabling), but it caters for every sort of tenant, from firms with thousands of employees right down to individuals. Freelancers can rent desk space in one of the shared areas. There’s no need for a reception desk – each tenant emails a QR code direct to their visitors, which allows access through the security barriers. ‘These days it’s really about allowing people to interact,’ says Phillip Shalless of AXA IM Alts (who manage the building on behalf of its investors). The lifts in towers like this used to restrict you to the floors occupied by your firm, but that isn’t the way here. ‘We host regular events that any of our tenants can come along to – talks and so on. There are restaurants where people can meet up, there’s a gym… It’s very different from the City of old.’ Phillip shows me the gym’s climbing wall: it’s fixed to one of the external windows, so you can look out at London as you work up a sweat. The building is dog-friendly, it has space for 1700 bikes in the basement… Peter Walker would take off his bowler hat and scratch his head.

The City’s new skyscrapers might all be tall, but no two look the same. Each has its own character and quirks. The Cheesegrater’s sloping side is to prevent it impinging on the protected view of St Paul’s from Fleet Street. The Heron Tower was named in honour of the developer’s father, HEnry RONson. The Gherkin looks nicely rounded, but amazingly it only contains one curved piece of glass – the horizontal one at the top.

Another change is that the Square Mile no longer becomes a ghost town at the weekend. It’s actually 20 per cent busier on Saturdays and Sundays than it was before Covid, after a policy of opening up to retail and leisure. The former is a return to the City’s past – Cheapside got its name because ‘chepe’ means market, and the turnings off it (Bread Street, Milk Street, Honey Lane and so on) reflected the products you could buy there. The proliferation of hotels, though, is genuinely new. Until the 1980s the Square Mile only had one (the station hotel at Liverpool Street). Now you’ve got a choice of dozens, from the Premier Inn Hub on St Swithin’s Lane right up to the Ned.

In fact, that building – home not only to the hotel but also to several bars and restaurants – is the perfect example of the City’s rebirth. Designed in 1924 by Edwin Lutyens (hence ‘Ned’), it was originally the headquarters of the Midland Bank. The counters on which you transacted your business are now where you eat, the bank vault downstairs is now a private members’ club, and one of the original pieces of furniture still in place is the set of wooden lockers where senior staff stored their top hats. No mere bowlers for them.

The nearby Bloomberg building, meanwhile, keeps a foot in both camps, business and leisure. Specially commissioned as the European HQ of the financial media company, its 10,000 tonnes of Derbyshire sandstone are the largest stone project in the City since St Paul’s. It occupies the site where the Romans built their Temple of Mithras. During construction Bloomberg unearthed 14,000 Roman artefacts – dice, sandals, combs, even the City’s first ever written record of a transaction – some of which are now displayed in an area on the ground floor. The Temple itself has been restored in the basement. Both are open (free of charge) to the public. Throw in the bars and restaurants that occupy the structure at street level, and Bloomberg pretty well encapsulates the City’s past, present and future.

When Michael Bloomberg opened the building in 2017, he drew attention to its open-plan design, in which he had ‘always been a big believer… Walls just get in the way of communicating and working together.’ This notion, while a recent introduction to offices themselves, has always been the guiding principle of the City as a whole. Lloyd’s of London was originally a coffee house where people swapped information, and the area’s winding alleyways meant you were often bumping into friends with whom you could trade gossip. Even the design of its pubs gave London the edge over continental competitors, according to Peter Rees, the City’s chief planning officer for three decades until 2014: ‘In a Paris café you sit at a table to get served, whereas in a London pub everybody stands up, which means you’re much closer together. This is great for overhearing conversations, if you’re careful and clever. And that’s very valuable, because you can take that back to the office, put two and two together and make some money.’

‘Maybe 1,800 years from now,’ said Michael Bloomberg in that 2017 speech, ‘Londoners will discover the remains of this building, just as the Temple of Mithras was discovered here. By then, they may consider the Bloomberg Terminal as primitive as the tools that we now display in the Roman temple.’ Perhaps. What’s certain is that the Square Mile is set to maintain its genius for adapting. When it comes to change, the sky’s the limit.

SNP councillor in ‘new Scot’ row quits

The SNP exodus continues. Only hours after Lisa Cameron MP defected to the Tories, nationalist councillor Kairin van Sweeden has now quit too after being accused of racism. The spat broke out with Labour colleague Deena Tissera after van Sweeden suggested her fellow councillor was unaware of the bedroom tax as, er, a ‘new Scot’. Blood and soil nationalism? So much for progressive…

Tissera claims that the jibe was used in the context of suggesting she ‘had just come off a boat’, penning a furious letter to First Minister Humza Yousaf and his chief executive and former spin doctor Murray Foote. The comments ‘shocked me’, wrote the Labour representative, ‘and shocked the council’:

The innuendo of her comments were that I had just come off the boat and as a new Scot – her words not mine – I am not as Scottish as others and I did not understand Scotland like her and the SNP group, this being despite the SNP council leader being of French dissent and myself holding a United Kingdom passport.

So much for an entente cordiale.

Van Sweeden later apologised for her ‘clumsy’ comments while Yousaf said it spoke to ‘the unconscious bias and discrimination that people hold and we all have to challenge ourselves’. ‘We all have it,’ he added.

Just coincidence then it always seems to be the SNP caught up in these sorts of rows…

Captain Tom’s family admit they would pocket £800,000 book profits again

Just when we thought we’d heard the last of Captain Tom’s family, the pandemic hero’s disgraced family have been at it again. Subjecting themselves to a grilling at the hands of Piers Morgan, Captain Tom’s family admitted they would still keep the £800,000 his books generated – despite the public outcry over their flashy spending.

In 2020, 99-year-old Captain Tom wrote a trilogy of books, the sales of which boomed following his epic fundraising efforts during the first lockdown. In a clip from the interview which airs tonight on TalkTV, his daughter, Hannah Ingram-Moore, admitted that the family pocketed the £800,000 from the books instead of putting the money into the charitable Captain Tom Foundation. Ingram-Moore said she did so because this was in line with Captain Tom’s wishes. 

In a new clip published today, her husband Colin has now admitted they would do it all again.

In the interview, Morgan asked the family, ‘Given all the attention that’s now been put on you as a family, all the criticism, would you, if you had your time again, keep that money?’ To which Colin replied: ‘Yes. You know, it was his money, his income. And just because the charity happened to be called the Captain Tom Foundation doesn’t mean that his assets are all suddenly owned by the charity.’

This revelation comes hot on the heels of the criticism Captain Tom’s family faced after they splashed out on a pool and spa complex at their £1.2 million Bedfordshire home. They have since been ordered to tear down the building by the local council.

Something tells Mr Steerpike this won’t be the last revelation we will be hearing from this particular family…

This is what a ‘multipolar’ world looks like. It’s chaos

The Hamas terror attack has triggered war in Gaza, a geopolitical crisis and now – from Sydney to New York City – outbursts of street-level anti-Semitism in the West. Unless it de-escalates quickly, it looks like a strategic turning point both for Palestinian nationalism and Israel.

I covered the 2014 war both from inside Gaza and on the streets with the Israeli peace movement. I’ve interviewed Hamas and seen how they operate up close. So, though I am no expert on the region, I can throw some concreteness into the current battle of abstractions.

Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy. But the international community has a right to demand proportionality, restraint, respect for international law, and condemn breaches of it. President Biden last night was right to emphasise the need for lawfulness.

People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.

They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.

Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.

The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice. In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.

What does Hamas want?

Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.

The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.

Iran’s leader Imam Khamenei, in a speech to the made International Islamic Unity Conference on 3 October, gave what now sounds like an early warning:

The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.

Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war. So why, despite its formal turn in 2017 to ‘anti-Zionism’, ditching the 1988 Covenant and its violently anti-Semitic language, did the attack take the form of a deliberate and extreme slaughter of Jewish civilians?

Here Zeev Sternhell’s rule applies: the pioneering historian of fascism taught us to ‘take fascists at their word’.

Both Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran have stated their aims of destroying the state of Israel often enough. But there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory:

Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.

‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.

Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel. Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.

In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.

Multipolarity is chaos

Contrary to the homilies of the pro-China influence networks aimed at the global south, the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.

In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic. Mass ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh; a Serbian provocation in Kosovo designed to trigger ethnic conflict; genocidal actions and rhetoric by Russia in its war against Ukraine; the genocide of the Uighur people and culture; the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar; the Sahel’s descent into warlordism, terrorism and military rule – that is a heck of a lot of genocidal activity to happen in a short space of time.

But it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.

Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.

I doubt Netanyahu, and his project of replacing Israeli democracy with an oligarchic far-right autocracy, can survive this shock long-term. His project of tolerating Hamas, to play it off against Fatah, has failed. So in framing the response of the international community, we are also attempting to frame the response of any stable Israeli government that emerges from the current crisis.

Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.

But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine. Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.

Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians. That’s what makes it a lethal environment for the latter. They can’t effectively shelter: and Hamas instructs them not to leave. There is no reason to believe that it will break from this modus operandi now.

In addition, the civilian population cannot flee – without the creation of formal safe routes south and a corridor into Egypt; and many will not move because as stateless people they believe they will never be allowed to return, nor to claim asylum elsewhere.

So if Israel launches any significant attempt to seize, hold and pacify Gaza, there will be massive civilian loss of life.

As someone who’s been there during a war, and seen extensive civilian deaths happening right at my feet, I am appalled at the prospect of something qualitatively worse. If in addition the attack is prosecuted using the kind of collective punishment we’re seeing now – ‘damage instead of accuracy’, the deprivation of water and electricity to the whole population etc. – not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.

That is what gives the international community legitimate right to demand Israeli response is necessary, proportional and legal.

Danger of miscalculation

Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas. A chilling Channel 4 News report from inside Gaza shows Palestinian civilians frantically searching for medical help for their kids, where there is none. What happens to their minds after a month under bombardment of this severity would be uncharted territory for the people of the strip.

The thought-patterns I remember from 2014 were these: people in Gaza knew that the resistance had launched rockets, or staged incursions, in order to extract some tactical concessions from Israel, and that the bombing would at some point stop. There were regular ceasefires and continuous mediation. There was food, for those who could afford it, and a continuous 3G signal for people’s cellphones. I also remember the vehemence with which in 2014, for example, Fatah sympathisers would quote Mohammed Deif’s claim that ‘Hamas only attacks the IDF, not civilians’.

The panic depicted on Channel 4 News suggests it has dawned on some people that these assumptions no longer hold. People fear they will be either massacred or forcibly expelled into Egypt, with the option of living in an Israeli occupied wasteland as the only alternative.

There may be no ceasefires, no foreign medical teams, no electricity or water. As I write, the rapid deterioration of medical care, and large numbers of child victims of Israeli bombing, already show a marked change compared to conditions at this stage of the 2014 conflict.

So Hamas now either cements the loyalty of the population or its support collapses as a consequence of defeat.

But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.

Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.

The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.

If Netanyahu’s endgame is a revenge fantasy of flattening Gaza and pushing its inhabitants into the desert, that’s not an endgame at all – only the casus belli for a regional war.

The Brics+ ideology

The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.

It’s the information-era version of Tukachevsky’s maxim: assault the enemy throughout the depths of his formation.

Both Russian and pro-China proxy networks have created media outlets, money, content and social media amplification systems for the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.

And that explains what’s happened in the West over the past five days: Palestinian solidarity movements that which were generally aligned with Fatah suddenly moving in the direction of overtly celebrating Hamas terror.

Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia. That’s why we’re seeing the phenomenon of left-wing politicians haplessly turning up to events where the crowd, as in Sydney, chants ‘Gas The Jews’ or, as in NYC, wave images of Swastikas on their iPhones, or where as in Brighton speakers hail the murder of 1200+ Israelis as ‘beautiful’.

For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained: see the bedraggled Stop The War demos here, the pathetic rallies staged jointly by Sara Wagenknecht and the AfD, the failure of Zoe Konstantopoulou’s left nationalist party in Greece.

What they were missing were the masses. But with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.

I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.

That Harvard statement…

A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began. They have been condemned by elderly conservative alumni, but I think it’s better to engage them.

The logic of the statement is pretty simple. It makes no mention of the actual terrorist attack, the calculated killing of civilians, the hostage taking or use of disgusting imagery to instil terror. Its title refers simply to the ‘Situation in Palestine’.

The only concrete reference to what is happening comes in the line:

The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.

From this implicit premise – the non-existence of Israeli victims, or Hamas war crimes or genocidal intent – flows the conclusion:

The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years.

This, of course, is a direct echo of pro-Kremlin propaganda over Ukraine, where ‘Nato aggression’ is the only thing to blame for Russia’s criminal aggression.

The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.

It is a ridiculous assertion. By the same logic Israel was also ‘to blame’ for the Black September movement, Leila Khaled, Yasser Arafat, the Oslo accords, and the two Intifadas.

The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable.

For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.

Our task – on the democratic and internationalist left – is to offer the signatories of this statement a route out of this. Learning to use formal logic might be a start. Accepting, as Marx says, that ‘history is nothing but people pursuing their aims’ regardless of how oppression structures their behaviour, might be a second. Reference to some basic shared ethical principles might be a third.

But we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:

There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.

In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.

And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.

This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.

Two irreconcilable lefts

There’s much soul searching today, especially in the US media, about why so many on the left, and in academia, have thoughtlessly cheered on mass murder. The answer is that, first over Ukraine, and now over Hamas, the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.

One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent. The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.

Today, the first is on the side of Putin, Khamenei and Assad. The second knows that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

And here’s the ultimate irony. The entire Palestinian project of a state has, since 1967, relied on resolutions passed at the United Nations and on international law. In short, on the multilateral rules based order.

Those who advocate a multipolar world without treaties, laws and norms of state behaviour need to understand how perilous such a world would be for the people of Gaza.

Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.

Solidarity to all my friends in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

This post first appeared on Substack in my newsletter Conflict & Democracy.

Is Israel ready for a full-scale invasion of Gaza? 

Israel is likely to need every one of the 300,000 soldiers it is amassing on the border with Gaza if, as now seems likely, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a full-scale invasion of the Palestinian enclave.

The first signs of an imminent attack are so-called shaping operations – punitive strikes in a bid to test the water and see how the enemy responds. These are already happening in the form of airstrikes against Hamas’s headquarters, strong points and ammunition dumps.

At the same time, senior Israeli commanders will currently be stockpiling masses of ammunition, missiles and rockets – along with rations, water and medical equipment to deal with the scores of wounded troops in the coming months of fighting.

It is possible that Prime Minister Netanyahu may offer the two million residents of Gaza a safe route out of the area, with the warning that those who remain will be regarded as combatants. Where residents will go, however, is another matter.

On paper, a war between Hamas and the IDF is an epic mismatch. The Israeli military is vastly better trained and equipped. It has a huge technological advantage over Hamas and can wage war both day and night in close combat and at long range.

The IDF is bristling with tanks, state-of-the-art weaponry, combat jets, attack helicopters and sensors and satellites, which can pinpoint the location of a single armed terrorist.

But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, this advantage is no guarantee of success. The difference, of course, is that the war against Hamas is now much more personal for the Israelis than the war against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was for most of us in the West.

A ground assault on Gaza in some form now seems inevitable. Prime Minister Prime Netanyahu has declared: ‘What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate for generations,’ and his defence minister Yoav Gallant has added: ‘We are fighting human animals – and we act accordingly.’

Once H-hour – the time at which all military operations begin – is reached, the key tactic is likely to be overwhelming force from the air, land and sea.

Israeli commanders will most likely divide the Gaza strip up into sectors, attacking each area with a huge concentration of force simultaneously in the hope of surprising and causing confusion amongst the terrorists.

Each combat unit will have its own pre-planned objective, such as seizing a building or clearing a specific neighbourhood. The IDF will hope to isolate Hamas units and destroy them as quickly as possible.

But the cost to Israel will be high in both blood and treasure.  

Urban warfare, or Operations in a Built-Up Area (OBUA) as the military like to call it, is always a bloody business and, as most experienced combat commanders will claim, is best avoided at all costs.

The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz observed in the 19th century that: ‘Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult’ and street fighting is the most obvious example of this.

The initiative nearly always lies with the defender and Hamas will be ready. Gaza is after all their territory. They will know every side street and alleyway, the location of the best ambush sites and where highly sophisticated improvised explosive devices can do their most damage.

The Israeli infantry will bear the brunt of Hamas attacks as troops warily enter bomb damaged streets and neighbourhoods, checking the skyline for snipers while at the same time looking for mines and trip wires.

Every room in every building will have to be checked and cleared and possibly fought for, with the Israelis knowing that at the last moment the fanatical Hamas defenders may detonate explosives in a final bloody flourish.

Tanks are no use in an urban arena. Armoured vehicles are slow and cumbersome and vulnerable to attack and the vibrations they create as they trundle along bomb-damaged streets can cause buildings to collapse, adding to the chaos and confusion.

At the same time the IDF may also face attacks and incursions on its northern border from the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, as well as unrest in the West Bank.

Then there is the tricky issue of attempting to define what victory might look like and how the crucial end game of the operation might evolve. Is the plan, for example, to kill all 40,000 Hamas terrorists in Gaza?

The Israeli generals advising Netanyahu will, of course, know all of this and will no doubt attempt to heed the words of Sir Alex Younger, the former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence, who suggested that the Israelis should box clever and be wary of walking into the trap Hamas had set for them. ‘Killing terrorists only creates more terrorists,’ he warned.

Israel has been left traumatised by the events of the past week and it is easy to see why there are demands for vengeance. It is no exaggeration to equate the Hamas attacks with those of 9/11 on the United States – proportionately Israel had lost many more of its citizens that were killed in New York and Washington on that fateful day.

But what Israel does next will define its course for a generation. Perhaps the only solution is all-out war against Hamas. As Clausewitz also said: ‘There is only one decisive victory: the last.’

Do Jewish Lives Matter too?

For more than a year, English footballers took the knee in solidarity with a petty criminal who was murdered by a cop in Minneapolis. Yet after the racist slaughter of more than a thousand Israelis, the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust, England’s Football Association can’t even be bothered to light up the Wembley arch in Israel’s colours.

It is reported that the FA is ‘unlikely’ to light the arch with the Israeli flag. It is worried about being seen to ‘take sides’. It also fears ‘a backlash from some communities’. So it’s taking the knee again. This time to the feelings of certain members of minority groups who hate Israel. Apparently their emotions, their bigoted sensitivities, their right never to see the Star of David, matter more than the memory of a thousand massacred Jews.

This is surely one of the most snivelling, cowardly decisions a public body has ever made. To elevate your own fears – in this case the fear of irritating Israelophobes – over making a show of solidarity with a nation whose men, women and children have just been butchered by a virulently racist terror group is unconscionably spineless.

The BBC reports that FA officials who attended the meeting at which this yellow-bellied decision was taken expressed concerns that ‘lighting the arch could be divisive’. Oh grow a backbone. Get a moral compass. So what if you get irate emails from Hamas fanboys? The citizens of an ally of ours have just been slain in the most gruesome fashion imaginable and you should put their flag up.

What makes this chicken decision even more galling is that usually the FA loves signalling its virtue. Modern football is awash with moral gestures. There was all that knee-taking. The Ukraine flag was emblazoned on the Wembley arch following Russia’s invasion. Footballers wear Pride-coloured laces, go on about ‘kicking racism out of football’, etc etc.

Yet when it comes to the mass murder of Israelis, football’s bigwigs erm and ahh. Apparently there will be a minute’s silence ahead of the England-Australia match at Wembley tomorrow, but no lit-up arch. No Israeli colours. No paraphernalia from that most problematic of countries. There’ll be a ‘message of peace and unity’ instead. Maybe they’ll sing Kumbaya.

I normally find the flag-waving and flower-laying that follow terror attacks a tad annoying. It never feels like enough. It’s an easy, fleeting gesture in lieu of the frank discussion about radical Islam we really need to have. But it’s even worse when such virtue-signalling is called off because the nation that’s been attacked gives some people the ick.

So no Israeli flag at Wembley. No Israeli flag at the Scottish parliament. Some morons scaled Sheffield Town Hall to tear down the Israeli flag that was flying there. And don’t even think about sympathising with Israelis on social media. Look what happened to Kylie Jenner. The reality TV star shared a post on Instagram saying we must ‘stand with the people of Israel’ and the backlash from some of her 400 million followers was so ferocious she took it down.

It’s extraordinary. It was virtually mandatory to show online solidarity with George Floyd. Anyone who failed to say ‘Black Lives Matter’ on their Instagram page could find themselves hounded and shamed. Now such solidarity is outlawed. Say ‘Israeli Lives Matter’ and watch yourself get cancelled. ‘Why do you hate Palestinians?!’, armies of plummy Israelophobic loons will holler.

What a grim insight we’re getting into the racial hierarchies fashioned by identitarians and influencers. In their minds, the life of one African-American counts for more than the lives of a thousand Jews. How else do we explain that the killing of Floyd made them furious, for months on end, whereas the racist elimination of Jewish youths and Jewish grandmothers and entire Jewish families barely seems to have pricked their consciences at all. This is the inhuman hole you end up in when you organise humanity into boxes marked ‘oppressed’ or ‘privileged’ and judge their moral worth accordingly.

If it’s true, as the BBC says, that the FA is refusing to put up the Israeli flag because of a potential ‘backlash from some communities’, that is shameful in the extreme. Perhaps the FA is thinking of the Muslim community. Yes, there are a small number of Muslims who will balk at the sight of the Israeli flag. But what about our Jewish community? What about Britain’s Jews, some of whom will be going to Wembley tomorrow, many of whom will know someone who lost a loved one in Saturday’s anti-Semitic outrage?

They will know, as they walk the long approach to Wembley, towards the flag-less arch, that the decision was taken that their grief matters less than other people’s feelings. That their pain has been demoted below other people’s political beliefs, prejudices, whatever. They will know that other communities’ hatred for Israel has been accorded more moral weight by the FA than their community’s desire to show solidarity with Israel.

Shame on the FA. It still has time to rectify its dreadful moral error. Let’s hope it does. Jewish Lives Matter too.

Is Israel’s siege of Gaza illegal?

In retaliation to over a thousand Israeli dead, the country’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has vowed to besiege Gaza. In a statement earlier this week, he said: ‘We are putting a complete siege on Gaza… No electricity, no food, no water, no gas – it’s all closed.’ Israel has been as good as its word, even stopping medicine from entering the Palestinian enclave.  

Shutting off supplies to an area of 2.3 million people, nearly all of them civilians, raises grave questions about the legality of Israel’s action under international law. While international law generally accepts the blockade of enemy armies, depriving civilians of essential supplies violates international humanitarian law. Such action would be illegal even if Israel were not specifically targeting Palestinian civilians. 

One of the foremost tenets of international customary law is the notion that belligerents have limits on what they can do in war, an idea that dates back to medieval just war theory. These limits seem obvious to us: that combatants are legitimate targets in war while civilians are not and that methods of killing should not be gratuitous.  

This was a central part of the 20th-century codifications of international law. In addition to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1977 Geneva Protocol, the 1980 UN Convention and the 1997 Ottawa Convention all affirm that the ‘means of warfare is not unlimited’ and that ‘methods of warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering’ are prohibited (quotations are from the UN Convention preamble).  

In addition to this ‘principle of humanity,’ two other customary rules have emerged from the travail of war: proportionality and discrimination. According to the rule of proportionality, no more force may be used than is necessary to achieve a legitimate military objective.  

The rule of discrimination requires that civilians and soldiers hors de combat (rendered unable to fight) be spared attack. Broad agreement exists among scholars that these three principles – humanity, proportionality, and discrimination – form the heart of the customary law of war. 

What do these bedrock concepts tell us about Israel’s decision to cut off electricity, water, food, and medicine to Gaza? First, Israel clearly has the right to defend itself under international law against Hamas’s aggression. In doing so, however, Israel is obliged under international law to minimise injury to Palestinian civilians and their property. To quote the UN Convention’s preamble, Israel must avoid means of warfare that cause ‘superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering’ (the customary principle of humanity).  

Israel might defend its actions by citing the necessity of preventing further attacks staged from Gaza. But blanket interdiction of food, medicine, water, and electricity appears to violate the customary rule of proportionality. It is one thing to say that Israel will not supply food, water, medicine and the like, it is quite another to implement a siege stopping all supplies from entering the enclave. Other, less drastic means could be adopted to stop the attacks without inflicting potentially deadly conditions on innocent civilians. Israel might, for example, search incoming ships and vehicles for contraband weaponry while allowing life-sustaining supplies free transit into Gaza. 

Finally, the interdiction policy entails foreseeable consequences of immense suffering and death to non-combatants, a policy at odds with the principle of discrimination. 

These are customary rules of international law that Israel should strive to respect. But even if we disregard customary law and focus instead on written conventions, the policy of cutting off essential supplies violates Article 54(1) of the 1977 Geneva Protocol I. Thus, on grounds of both written and customary law, Israel’s policy of besieging Gaza is illegal. 

Israel has been cruelly attacked and it is fully justified in defending its national security. This right, however, does not include the authority to starve civilians caught up, through no fault of their own, in a war remote from their intentions. The malfeasance of Hamas must not be paid for in the lives of innocent people. 

Why should British Jews take their skullcaps off?

I was proud when my son, then aged three, wore his kippa (Jewish skullcap) for the first time. We placed the kippa on his head and told him what it meant to be a Jew. ‘Mazel tov!’ we said as we hugged each other, prayed, and sung. We wondered hopefully what he might become – a rabbi, a doctor, an accountant – and we laughed and sung some more. A blessing on your head, mazel tov, mazel tov!

He’s now 17, and for the first time in his life was asked this week to cover his kippa up. An email from his school in London suggested that, in light of Hamas’s attack on Israel and the backlash in Britain, it might be wise not to wear it in public.

It was sage advice, perhaps, but troubling. When he read the email, my son was shocked. He point-blank refused. Wearing a kippa is a religious duty, but it is also a display of our Jewish pride, religious affiliation, and cultural belonging. The kippa both expresses our identity and identifies us as Jews. When Jews in Israel are being murdered, kidnapped, and violated are we supposed to respond by becoming less Jewish? We need our faith now more than ever.

But many Jews in Britain are fearful. Sadly, our concerns are not only focused on our Jewish brothers and sisters abroad. Communal and police security have been ramped up as atrocities in Israel spill over into antisemitism on British streets.

This week, two men yelled abuse at my son from their car, because they could see that he was Jewish. Yesterday, a car full of women wearing hijabs cheered and jeered at parents as we picked up our children from nursery school. On Tuesday, boys on the bus were throwing bits of stationery at the Jewish kids. Many parents have stopped sending their children to school by public transport.

Last week we were gathering in celebration. Most of the British Orthodox Jewish community did not find out about Hamas’s attacks in Israel until Sunday evening. Terrorists struck during the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah, a time of joy during which religious Jews do not use technology or have access to their phones. Anxious rumours were passed around at synagogue services on Saturday and Sunday, but we did not discover the gruesome reality until that night. When, instead of clearing away and comparing anecdotes about festive dinners, our community was contacting friends and relatives in Israel, piecing together the harrowing events, and gathering to cry and pray for the victims’ families and those still missing. Since then, for every Jew in the UK and abroad, life has changed.

This week we are gathering in shock and tears. How do we tell our children that we are being targeted because we are Jews?

Jewish charities have instantly mobilised, sending supplies and essentials to Israeli troops and civilians. Community members are hosting and supporting families who have been stuck in the UK and can’t return home. Prayer groups have been established, with the names of the injured and the hostages. Social media feeds have been buzzing with photos of smiling faces of young children, the elderly and entire families. If their faces aren’t blurred out you know, before you read the caption, that they are among the dead.

In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack, and what is happening in Britain, we are sleeping less and praying more. We are doing whatever we can to support Israelis from afar and hoping with all our might that this nightmare will soon end. We are in this together. And you can be darn sure that we’re not taking our kippa off.

The winners and losers of this year’s conference season

Conference season 2023 is done and dusted, with punchy Wes Streeting having performed the final significant act yesterday via his speech depicting Labour as the great engine of NHS reform.

How has it gone? Who has done best? Has it changed the political weather overall? Those who have attended all of it will have their view, but so do those of us who followed conference coverage and news bulletins from, as they say, ‘the comfort of our armchairs’.

These are my top ten TV takeaways:

1. Keir Starmer emerged personally strengthened. His unflappable demeanour during the ‘glittergate’ rumpus will have cut through with the electorate. He showed nerves of steel and an impressive determination not to be deflected from his major task by ‘that idiot’. To put it in Desmond Morris anthropological terms, the episode has finally made him a political ‘silverback’. It also helped that what followed was the best speech of his political career skilfully eviscerating the Tories and setting out a Labour programme of renewal in pretty reasonable terms. There was even the odd flicker of passion.

2. Rishi Sunak flopped. The Prime Minister set out to make a daring pivot on infrastructure by dumping the northern leg of HS2 and redeploying resources into scores of smaller projects. It was a good idea that could have taken off with the public, particularly in the crucial red wall seats where scepticism about a new ‘executive express’ to London ran strongest. Instead, it fell apart thanks to terrible execution. Several schemes listed in a new ‘Network North’ turned out to be defunct. Ultimately Sunak claimed that the new concept, set out in official Department for Transport documents, was intended to be merely ‘illustrative’. Just what is the use of an incremental technocrat if he has not nailed down the detail of major policy changes?  
3. Nigel Farage was Nigel Farage – by turns a consummate showman and rock-solid right-wing ideologue – and Tory activists and Tory-leaning voters loved it. Farage filled a Boris Johnson-shaped hole at the Conservative gathering. The contrast with underpowered Sunak, a leader with no mandate other than from Tory MPs and limited ability to connect with voters, was very telling.
4. Old hands on the Conservative front bench have all but given up. They have been trotting out low-energy turns in the manner of veteran footballers playing in a becalmed mid-table team late in the season and already psychologically ‘on the beach’. Nobody who watched Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s speech, for instance, could have thought this was a guy who expects to be steering the British economy for very much longer.
5. Labour’s frontbench is up for it and growing in confidence. By contrast with Hunt, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves was firing on all cylinders. So was Streeting, who is cleverly amplifying the notion that only Labour can reform the NHS via an ‘only Nixon could go to China’ argument. While it is true that the current Labour top team is no match for the ‘big beasts’ that Tony Blair took in to the 1997 election, it really doesn’t have to be given the poor state of the Tory front bench.
6. The enormous level of legal immigration remains the great unmentionable for both main party leaders. Neither dwelt on it during their keynote speeches. That is understandable in Starmer’s case: the less immigration features in the political conversation the better from Labour’s point of view. But it confirms the impression given by Sunak in an interview with Paul Goodman of the ConservativeHome website back in April: he just doesn’t ‘get’ that huge swathes of the electorate are as concerned by massive regular immigration as they are by the need to ‘stop the boats’.

7. Ed Davey and his Lib Dems are effectively Starmerite Labour running under a different brand name. They have almost no significant differences with the red team’s leadership and are largely there to provide a reservoir of MPs to top up Labour support if it somehow fails to win a solid overall majority. Any Lib Dem gains at the expense of the Tories at the election next year will, in effect, amount to a ‘double bubble’ bonus for Starmer: one off the blue team, one more in his back pocket.
8. Suella Braverman was the stand-out star for the Tories, bravely re-iterating her ‘multiculturalism has failed’ message and having transformed herself from the fairly mousey figure of 2022 into a compelling communicator and potential party leader. The Home Secretary has a talent for creating advantageous dividing lines between the Tories and left-of-centre parties. The British left, both inside parliament and outside, is constantly triggered by her and the ensuing high-octane rows serve to cheer up traditionalist voters and lead them to think that perhaps there is a point in voting Conservative after all. Scenes of mass support for Hamas on the streets of British cities will have led millions of voters to think: ‘Suella is right.’

9. Kemi Badenoch grew further in authority. As bookies’ favourite to be the next party leader, she was the right-winger who didn’t need to turn the rhetorical volume up to eleven. Her biggest applause line – the one that got her the most media headlines too – was the declaration that Britain is the best country in the world in which to be black. In fact, she has used it in the Commons before. Being in charge of both the business brief (lovely new trade deals) and the equalities one (reining in the militant trans movement and hammering critical race theory zealots) gives her some good tunes to play and she has become a formidable lead violinist. She is still the one to beat when the leadership next falls vacant.
10. Labour still has lots of weaknesses: From Anneliese Dodds’ plan for a new Race Act to drive through equality of outcome, to Yvette Cooper’s obvious lack of credibility as someone who could control immigration. Starmer is also still not a master communicator and can walk into elephant traps. His interview with GB News in which he declared there was ‘no intention’ to rejoin the EU rather than flatly ruling it out is a case in point. Given that any such move could clearly only occur beyond Starmer’s career as a top-rank politician, why risk setting the Eurosceptic hare running once more? Nonetheless, after the last fortnight many more voters will think he has created an electable alternative to the Conservative party and feel at least a smidgen of gratitude for that.

No wonder Britain’s prisons are almost full

It’s finally happened. Our prisons are almost full. Last night the Times reported that ‘Lord Justice Edis, the senior presiding judge for England and Wales, has ordered that sentencing of convicted criminals who are currently on bail should be delayed from Monday’. Prisons in England and Wales are now unable to find cell space for every criminal that judges believe should be jailed.

This means that next week people convicted of very serious crimes, including historic sex offences, may be found guilty then sent home on bail. Beyond the obvious public protection concerns this delay to justice will further traumatise victims, and reduce confidence in the whole system.          

Anyone could have predicted this crisis. Last November, Damien Hinds, the prisons minister,  activated Operation Safeguard – which makes police cells available to house prisoners for a maximum of one night if no prison cell is available. It is still in use.

In March this year judges were urged to sentence more leniently in light of prison overcrowding.  In May, Andrea Albutt, president of the Prison Governors’ Association, warned of a ‘capacity crisis’. Then the Chief Inspector of Prisons wrote about a prison population ‘crisis’ in August.

The numbers make the problem clear. Over the last year the government has created about 90new prison places per week by making two prisoners share a single person cell, delaying maintenance work, transferring low risk prisoners to open conditions, deploying temporary prison cells, and opening new prisons (once they overcome local planning processes). However, each week up to 200 new prisoners enter the system.

The Ministry of Justice blames a ‘higher than usual number of offenders coming into prison this year’. Again though, this rise should have been expected. The 2019 Conservative manifesto promised 20,000 additional police officers, and in April of this year the PM announced that this had been achieved. It doesn’t seem surprising that 20,000 more police officers might result in more arrests, but the rest of the system seems entirely unprepared.

Similarly, in 2020 the government announced that violent and sexual offenders would spend longer in prison. While protecting the public in this way is popular, the result is further strain on our limited prison capacity.

Our courts system is crumbling figuratively and literally and this creates further pressure. Before the pandemic the number of remand prisoners (those awaiting trial or sentencing) was around 9,500. During lockdown, with the courts disrupted, that number rose to around 13,000. While barristers were on strike in 2022 it rose to 15,500. By the end of June this year 15,500 prison spaces were occupied by remand prisoners.

In the long-term we need to make prison work, reducing our high reoffending rate so that someone returning to prison become rare. But that work will take years. Right now the government needs to free up capacity in the prison system. This means looking at who can be released early. Home Detention Curfew, or ‘tagging’ allows low-risk, non-violent prisoners who have displayed good behaviour during their sentence to spend the final months before their conditional release date on curfew at their own homes. At present curfew is only available in the last 180 days of someone’s sentence. Increasing this period to nine months, or even 12, would free up a substantial number of open prison spaces. As a result, lower risk prisoners would transfer to open prisons, creating capacity throughout the system.

Another option is to adjust sentencing policy, avoiding the use of very short sentences of a few days or months. Much of the public may find this unpalatable if the result is prolific offenders being spared prison.

In the same way we struggle to build rail and power capacity it seems we can no longer plan and create enough prison infrastructure. Politicians enact popular, aspirational policies, putting more police on the streets and jailing dangerous criminals for longer, when there’s no serious chance of the prison system achieving the necessary capacity. It all feels emblematic of a government and state that has lost its ability to plan or function.

SNP MP defects to the Tories

Oh dear. It seems that Humza Yousaf’s first conference as party leader has been spectacularly upstaged. Three days before the big SNP shindig in Aberdeen, one of Yousaf’s MPs in Westminster has decided to cross the floor to join, of all parties, the Conservatives in the House of Commons.

Lisa Cameron – by common consent, one of the nicest members of parliament – says she has defected to the Tories over ‘toxic and bullying’ treatment from colleagues. She attributes her treatment from colleagues to her decision to speak out in support of the harassment victim of fellow SNP MP Patrick Grady. Cameron told the Scottish Daily Mail:

I do not feel able to continue in what I have experienced as a toxic and bullying SNP Westminster group, which resulted in my requiring counselling for a period of 12 months in parliament and caused significant deterioration in my health and wellbeing as assessed by my GP including the need for antidepressants. I will never regret my actions in standing up for a victim of abuse at the hands of an SNP MP last year, but I have no faith remaining in a party whose leadership supported the perpetrator’s interests over that of the victims and who have shown little to no interest in acknowledging or addressing the impact. It is also true that I have received no contact from party leadership in the past weeks, despite members of every other main political party contacting me to offer support and compassion during what has been an extremely difficult time.

Ouch. Rishi Sunak has welcomed Cameron to the fold, hailing it as a sign that ‘we are the party for those who will make constructive, long term decisions for a brighter future for the whole of the UK.’ Even if, er, they were elected on a platform of breaking it up? Still, while Cameron’s journey from nationalist to unionist is somewhat puzzling, Mr S is nevertheless enjoying the fury from her erstwhile colleagues, spitting feathers at her audacious defection.

Even the SNP’s ever-growing army of spin doctors will have a tough time spinning that one at party conference…

Britain’s sluggish growth is nothing to celebrate

So, the doomsters have been proved wrong again – not least the Bank of England, which a year ago forecast recession throughout 2023. GDP figures released by the Office of National Statistics this morning show that the economy grew by 0.2 per cent in August, partially reversing a sharp contraction of 0.6 per cent in July.  Across the three months to August – which is a rather better guide to what is happening than the volatile monthly figures – show growth of 0.3 per cent. It is not possible now – by the usual definition of two consecutive quarters of negative growth – for Britain to suffer a recession in 2023, and neither does it seem all that likely that we will be experiencing one in six months’ time. But no-one should get too excited.

There is plenty of bad news in today’s figures. July’s economic performance was actually revised downwards, from -0.5 per cent to -0.6 per cent. Moreover, economic growth in August was not general across the economy. Production – which includes manufacturing – fell by 0.7 per cent, and construction by 0.5 per cent. While services as a whole rose by 0.4 per cent, consumer-facing services fell by 0.6 per cent, suggesting that the strain of higher interest rates is beginning to tell on consumers. The worst sector was arts, entertainment and recreation, where output plunged by 7.2 per cent – although this came after rapid growth in July, showing volatility in month-on-month figures.

Take away the noise and the situation is pretty well unchanged over the past couple of years. The economy has recovered from the deep hole into which it fell during the pandemic, but it has not recovered even to the lukewarm growth we saw during the decade to 2019. Rather, long term economic growth has levelled off. We are experiencing stagnation, and there is little sign that we will be returning soon to the levels of growth that we took for granted in the six decades following World War 2. Bear in mind that the population is growing at a rate of around a third of a percentage point per year, and economic growth of 1 per cent or under is even less impressive.

There are several possible reasons for stagnant growth: an ageing population, low productivity, high government borrowing and taxes, the shift to a service-based economy where it is more difficult to increase productivity (you can make a machine to hammer out multiple pairs of, say, scissors but a hairdresser can only cut one person’s hair at a time). It is easy for Labour to blame the Conservatives for an anaemic economy, but it is hard to see how the party, should it win power next year, will succeed in changing any of the factors that are holding back growth.   

The desperate plight of Humza Yousaf’s relatives, trapped in Gaza

Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf has his flaws as a politician but when it comes to the brutal attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists, his response has been clear, dignified and – given his family’s current circumstances – courageous. Yousaf has risen to the moment.

The SNP leader’s parents-in-law, Elizabeth and Maged El-Nakla of Dundee, are currently trapped in Gaza, running out of food and fearful for their lives. The First Minister’s wife, Nadia, is said, unsurprisingly, to be distraught.

Having spent several hours trying to make contact with her parents, in Gaza to visit her elderly grandmother, Ms El-Nakla has been able to speak to her mother who described the impact of Israel’s retaliation to Saturday’s terrorist outrage during which hundreds were murdered.

‘I’m afraid the situation is dire,’ said Yousaf. ‘They had a terrible night. Rockets were falling all around them, the house was shaking, the children were screaming most of the night. They have, according to my mother-in-law, one day of supplies left. They’re terrified to try to go out to any market, given that they’ve all been told to stay indoors.’

‘Of course, they’re being told to leave, because we all know what’s going to happen to Gaza. But they’ve got nowhere to go. They have no way of getting out. So we’re in a really desperate situation where the family is still trapped.’

The First Minister’s brother-in-law, who is a doctor, also lives in Gaza with his four children, including a two-month-old baby.

In a letter to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, Yousaf has asked UK ministers to lobby their Israeli counterparts to allow both safe passage for those who, like his in-laws, wish to leave Gaza and the creation of a ‘humanitarian corridor’ for the delivery of supplies – including food, fuel, water, and medicines – to those who are unable to flee.

This seems a reasonable request. Israel’s right to defend its people is absolute and its desire to retaliate against Hamas is just. But the punishment of innocents for the evil of others is impossible to justify. 

Yousaf’s letter to Cleverly is devoid of politics. Rather, it makes a compelling humanitarian case. Yousaf’s position on the brutality of Hamas has been clear. In the aftermath of Saturday’s invasion, he strongly condemned their barbarity. There could, he said, be neither justification nor equivocation for their actions.

Naturally, this was not enough for some who will never accept a Muslim First Minister. The racist and Islamophobic abuse Yousaf has received online since Saturday is both depressing and entirely predictable. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has faced the same.

Of course, Yousaf’s condemnation of Hamas and his expression of solidarity with Scotland’s Jewish community after the attack on Israel are the minimum requirements of a First Minister at a time such as this. But that should not allow us to lose sight of the courage he displayed in speaking as he did.

Hamas controls Gaza through fear. With an extended family living in the area, it may have been tempting for the First Minister to pull his punches.

Yousaf – with his liberal views – is already the wrong kind of Muslim for Hamas. Speaking as he has in recent days is not, I’m afraid, without risk for Scotland’s First Minister and his loved ones. It is hugely to his credit, then, that he has put the duties of leadership first. 

Putin has been blindsided by the Israel attack

Inevitably, some have tried to suggest the terrorist invasion of Israel was in some ways orchestrated by Moscow. ‘Russia is interested in igniting a war in the Middle East so that a new source of pain and suffering will weaken world unity,’ said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the aftermath of the attack. But if Russia was involved, why has its response been so weak and uncertain? In fact, the Kremlin seems near-paralysed by the unfolding conflict.

Of course, Moscow hopes that this crisis will distract the West from Ukraine and undermine its ability to continue to fuel its war effort. It is also trying to spin useful narratives, such as the unproven assertion that Western weapons donated to Ukraine have turned up in the hands of Hamas. However, despite counter-claims that Wagner mercenaries trained the terrorists, there is no evidence that Moscow played any role, despite its continuing willingness to talk to Hamas. Rather, it was clearly caught unawares, with no sense of where its interests lay.

As Israel mobilised and declared itself in a state of war, Moscow belatedly fell back on old and dated platitudes. On Monday, two days after the initial attack, Kremlin press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, finally said that Russia was ‘extremely concerned’ at the risk of ‘further escalation and expansion of the conflict.’ Only on Tuesday did Vladimir Putin say anything, but even then, it was essentially to try and blame Washington, calling this a ‘vivid example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East’ in which the U.S. ‘was not concerned with finding compromises acceptable to both sides, but, on the contrary, promoted its own ideas about how it should be done and put both sides under pressure.’

Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, meeting the head of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said that creating a ‘Palestinian state that would live side by side with Israel’ was the most reliable path to any resolution. Former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, staying depressingly true to recent form as the most rabidly tone-deaf voice in the government, turned to social media to blame ‘Washington and its allies,’ saying that ‘instead of actively working to resolve the Palestine-Israeli [conflict], these idiots have picked a fight with us and are helping neo-Nazis with might and main’.

Even though there are Russian citizens (or joint citizens) among the dead and kidnapped, there was no condemnation of the horrific outrages carried out by Hamas on civilians. Yet nor was there any real enthusiasm for the Palestinians’ attacks. Instead, as one Foreign Office official put it, there seemed to be ‘intense awkwardness’ as Moscow tried to ‘respond without actually saying anything.’ Instead, it is falling back on the blandest of bromides, offering nothing of meaning to anyone.

Moscow benefits from a certain level of chaos and uncertainty in the Middle East to give it some leverage, but a conflagration like this, which poses very real strategic challenges, is a very different matter.

Russia has developed a quietly close relationship with Israel. Putin and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have found considerable common ground. Ironically, there is also much admiration for Israel and its military and intelligence agencies amongst Russian nationalists, who often hold it up as an example. At the same time, Moscow has maintained relations with Palestinian movements, and also has a pragmatic but strengthening connection with their real backers, Iran, which has become a crucial source of drones and sanctions-busting know-how.

For all his macho public persona, Putin does not take tough decisions easily or quickly, and when he is faced with what seem to be no good options, he often becomes paralysed. This seems to be the case here. If he backs Hamas, he alienates Israel, a country that until now has held back from arming Ukraine. He would also, in effect, become an extra in Iran’s power play. Iran is not so much an ally, let alone a friend, as a frenemy of convenience. They share a common interest in undermining the Western-dominated world order, but they are also competitors for influence in the Middle East. Putin hardly wants to burn his relationship with Israel just to further Iranian ambitions.

On the other hand, if he backs Israel, he angers Iran, and potentially jeopardises one of Russia’s few partnerships these days, as well as losing influence in the Arab world. With Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on the one hand working on normalising relations with Israel and yet on the other cooperating with Moscow through OPEC+ to manage the global oil market, Lavrov is desperately trying also to triangulate where they fit. The Saudis continue to pay lip service to the Palestinians’ cause, but have shown little enthusiasm to back Hamas, and also see Iran as their main regional foe.

Whatever the inanities to be found on campus or at the political fringes, Western governments generally found themselves in the unusual position of finding morality and geopolitics in alignment, and could condemn the terrorism and pledge their support for Israel without qualification or hesitation.

For Putin, by contrast, the situation is much more complex. Russia has backed Assad in Syria but switched off its air defence systems when the Israelis wanted to bomb the Palestinian militias who were also fighting on Damascus’s side. It has worked closely with Iran against the sanctions regime, yet cosied up to Saudi Arabia and tried to sell weapons to Iraq. Above all, it has presented itself as a friend to the Arab world – even using wayward Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov as an informal ambassador – while cultivating Israel.

For so long, Putin has tried to have his cake and eat it. Now, he seems to be choking on it.

Will the ‘Al-Aqsa flood’ unite the Islamic world? 

The name of Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on Israel over the weekend, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, was deliberately chosen to galvanise support across the Muslim world. The group’s justification for the operation included desecration claims at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Several Palestinian uprisings (intifadas) have been given the Al-Aqsa nomenclature over the years, including in September 2000 after then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s walkabout on the historic compound.

Al-Aqsa was the original direction of prayer for Muslims but is now the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. The site – also holy to Jews and Christians – is the location of the Isra wa Miraj, Prophet Mohammad’s night journey (Isra) to the ‘furthest mosque’ (Masjid al-Aqsa) and ascension (Miraj) through the seven heavens. Some claim the event is proof of Islam’s superiority, because of the special status given to the prophet. All three Abrahamic faiths agree that the End of Days – Judgement Day and Resurrection – will take place here.

The deadly attack will embolden jihadist groups around the world and could lead to ideological differences being set aside for short-term gains. Al-Qaeda (AQ) branches were quick to praise Hamas and urged Muslims to support the group’s goal of liberating Al-Aqsa. The AQ branch in the Indian Subcontinent called the attack the ‘crown among all military operations’ which had ‘wiped off the marks of humiliation and disgrace’ from past Arab-Israeli conflicts. AQ’s Arabian Peninsula branch lavished praise on the ‘daring operation.’ AQ in general positioned the operation as part of a wider jihad aimed at expelling ‘Jews and Crusaders from Muslim lands.’

Further away, the Taliban in Afghanistan opined on the repercussions. Abdul Qahar Balkhi, the group’s foreign ministry spokesman, said they were ‘deeply concerned about the recent decision of the Zionist regime to deprive the people in the besieged Gaza Strip of essential resources such as electricity, food & water supply.’ He urged the international community, especially the UN, to ‘fulfil their responsibility in preventing the apartheid Israeli regime from collectively punishing the oppressed Palestinian people for the failure of Israeli security forces.’

A statement on the Taliban foreign ministry website also positioned the operation as an inevitable ‘outcome of the violation of the rights of the oppressed Palestinian nation and the continued defilement and desecration of Muslim holy sites (Al-Aqsa) by the Israeli Zionists.’

So-called Islamic State did not shower any praise because they consider Hamas to be ‘apostates’ for accepting support from Shia Iran and for not supporting their aim of a Caliphate. You can be sure, however, that many IS grassroot supporters found a way of celebrating the attack on platforms like Telegram.

Historical Sunni-Shia grievances have been set aside by Hamas and Iran and the latter’s backing of the terrorist group is now common knowledge. Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad told BBC News that Tehran gave its support to the surprise attack. Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi spoke to the leaders of Hamas, and Islamic Jihad after they joined the offensive, and then took to the airwaves to offer support to the Palestinians.

The Iranian regime has historically placed great emphasis on Al-Aqsa. The late Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the last Friday of Ramadan to be marked as al-Qods Day (al-Qods being Jerusalem in Persian, al-Quds in Arabic) shortly after the 1979 revolution and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, still to be proscribed in the UK as a terrorist organisation, named its elite military unit the ‘Qods Force’.

Iran’s proxy army in Lebanon, Hezbollah, praised the ‘heroic’ actions over the past few days. A statement said ‘resistance’ was the only recourse in ‘confronting Israeli occupation’ and that the attack was a clear message to those seeking to normalise ties with Israel. The finger was of course pointing at Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Analysts have speculated that the timing of the attack was intended to derail peace moves between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Past Arab peacemakers have certainly paid a heavy price just for visiting Al-Aqsa. A Palestinian assassinated King Abdullah I, of then Transjordan, inside the Al-Aqsa mosque in 1951 for supposedly accommodating the Jewish population too much. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat also offered a hand of peace, and made a historic visit in 1977, but the gesture cost the former president dearly: his assassin, who has since had a street in Tehran named after him, claimed he was motivated by Sadat’s signing of the Camp David peace accords.

The ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ operation certainly raises questions for Western policymakers. Footage of the gruesome attacks and of the horrific treatment meted out to some hostages was shared widely online. Where does this leave the UK’s pending Online Safety Bill? This content surely falls under the terrorism and incitement to violence categories, and social media companies, search engines and messaging platforms will soon be obliged by law to block and remove it or face heavy financial consequences. The likely effectiveness of these legislative attempts to counter online hate remains questionable in my view. Do we really think they will be able to contain the shocking footage of the next atrocity? The EU already has the Digital Services Act, designed to heavily regulate the actions of ‘very large online platforms’ visited by more than 45 million Europeans every month, but Telegram, which hosts much of Hamas’ digital output and many Islamic State channels and group chats, claims to fall just under this definition so will not be as strictly controlled. Furthermore, where do you draw the line between news reporting that highlights war crimes and incitement to violence?

The online sharing of some television content should also face much greater scrutiny. Hamas’ own Gaza-based Al-Aqsa television channel routinely calls for Jews to be stabbed and glorifies attacks against Israelis. The channel has broadcast music videos of fighters urging compatriots to restore their honour by liberating Al-Aqsa from Israeli control. Hezbollah’s Manar television carries similar fare, promoting the role of its martyrs on the battlefield and set to video montages of Al-Aqsa.