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Daniel Taub, former Israeli Ambassador to the UK, joins Damian Thompson to talk about his new book Beyond Dispute: Rediscovering the Jewish art of constructive disagreement. In a fast-moving interview, Daniel explains how the art of arguing has shaped Jewish humour and scholarship, and Damian asks him about keeping kosher, life after death – and the influence of the Talmud on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
I have kept my silence on the Middle East for ten years. I left Israel in 2015, after five years as British ambassador, as the first Jew in the role. Since then, I have turned down every request to be a talking head. Neither the world nor my successors needed another ex-ambassador pundit. But I now feel obliged to break my silence, just once, to say that the Israeli government’s treatment of the Gazan population is both wrong and self-defeating. And that it is not anti-Israel or pro-Hamas to say that withholding humanitarian aid is not the answer. The situation is the opposite of straightforward. It is not just that
It is 60 years since William F. Buckley said that he would ‘rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University’. Yet even the godfather of American conservatism would be surprised at how much more attractive the folks in the phone directory appear today. Harvard is currently having a major row with Donald Trump’s administration. It results from the way in which the university responded to the 7 October attacks in Israel. While the Hamas massacres were still on-going, more than 30 Harvard University student organisations signed a letter which claimed to hold the ‘Israeli
Two hours of yakking about Israel. That’s all you get from Giant at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Endless wittering laced with venomous bigotry. The year is 1983 and the celebrated kiddie author, Roald Dahl, has kicked up a massive stink by denouncing Israel for attacking Lebanon in late 1982. His latest scribble, The Witches, is about to be published in America but a handful of bookshops are threatening to boycott his work. Tom and Jessie, two executives from Dahl’s publishing firm, visit him at home and beg him to withdraw his anti-Semitic rant. Dahl refuses because he loathes the Jews, hates Israel and endorses all the usual myths about Jewish
The release of Edan Alexander, the last living American-Israeli hostage held by Hamas, was a moment of profound relief for his family and a rare flicker of hope for war-fatigued Israelis. The 21-year-old soldier, kidnapped on 7 October 2023, walked free on 12 May 2025 after 584 days in hell. The jubilation was quickly muddied by political spin. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ever the opportunist, claimed the release stemmed from Israel’s relentless military pressure. The truth, however, lies elsewhere: American backchannels, led by Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, secured Alexander’s freedom through quiet diplomacy in Qatar, not IDF bombs in Gaza. Netanyahu’s attempt to claim credit reveals a deeper rift: President Trump harbours little trust in Bibi.
Louis Theroux: The Settlers was never likely to be a programme with much of a narrative arc – and so it proved. In the first 30 seconds, Louis put it to a Jewish householder on the West Bank that his house was ‘quite deep in what are called the Palestinian Territories’. ‘You call it the Palestinian Territories,’ the man replied. ‘I call it the heart of Judea.’ And that, on the whole, was that. Louis travelled from one Jewish settlement to another, doing his best to challenge the inhabitants with his faux-naif questions and impressive range of quizzical expressions. And yet, of course, none of them budged an inch. The
Pro-Palestinian activists under the banner of Palestine Action have been waging what it’s not too much of an exaggeration to call a war against companies and institutions in this country that are seen to support Israel’s offensive in Gaza. In one attack last summer at a Bristol facility owned by the British subsidiary of the Israeli defence company Elbit, a van was used to smash through fencing before activists laid about the building with sledgehammers, and two police officers and a security guard were injured in the ruckus. In dozens of ‘actions’, these activists have caused millions of pounds worth of damage to companies that supply equipment not just or even
In The Builder’s Stone, Melanie Phillips reminds us forcefully that we must never forget how 7 October 2023 changed the world. On that day Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded southern Israel and brutally raped women and butchered or burned alive 1,100 Jewish men, women and children. They also dragged 250 Israelis, including three-year-old twins, grandparents and young women whom they had already attacked, into Gaza as hostages. They filmed it all on their body cameras, and perhaps the most terrifying thing they recorded was the glee with which they carried out these atrocities. Phillips, a British writer who lives in Jerusalem and London, has spent many decades fighting Goliaths. Like
Home Before flying to Washington, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘We have to be ready to play our role if a force is required in Ukraine once a peace agreement is reached.’ He told the Commons that Britain would raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of national income by 2027, funded by cutting development aid from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of GDP. The government surplus for January, when much tax comes in, was £15.4 billion, the highest ever, but far below the £20.5 billion predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Average household energy bills will rise from April by £111 to £1,849 a
In 2007, the BBC was engulfed in scandal for an embarrassing – if relatively trivial – misrepresentation of Queen Elizabeth II. A promotional clip for a documentary, A Year with the Queen, was edited to suggest the monarch stormed out of a photoshoot in a huff, when in reality, the sequence had been misleadingly spliced together. The outcry was immediate. Within hours, the BBC issued an apology. By the following day, an internal investigation had been launched. The corporation treated the matter with the utmost urgency, leading to resignations, extensive inquiries, and a near-existential crisis over editorial ethics. Fast-forward to 2025, and the BBC has once again been caught red-handed with
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that, to guarantee the security of Ukraine, he was ‘ready and willing’ to put ‘our own troops on the ground if necessary. I do not say that lightly’. Parliament would be allowed a vote on such a deployment, the government said. Earlier, Sir Keir took an unannounced telephone call from President Donald Trump of America about their forthcoming meeting. Afterwards, Mr Trump said: ‘We have a lot of good things going on. But he asked to come and see me and I just accepted his asking.’ The Chiltern Firehouse hotel in Marylebone burnt down. The Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill,
Imagine the uproar if a white Christian doctor refused to treat a Muslim Arab patient – or worse, boasted of killing them under their care. The public would be outraged, not only at the cruelty but at the sheer incongruity of such malice from a profession defined by care and a faith defined by compassion. Yet when two Australian nurses – Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh – publicly declared their willingness to kill Israeli patients, the horror was accompanied by something more chilling than shock: recognition. Their depravity felt like an affirmation of the darkest fears about imported hatreds and their place within our institutions. The video that
The question now facing Israel is this: will the war in Gaza recommence? The ceasefire agreement was signed less than a month ago, and it is already looking shaky. The first phase of the deal has not yet been completed. Sixteen of the 33 Israeli hostages scheduled to be freed in this phase have been released, and so have 656 of 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. But Hamas has now announced the postponement of the release of an additional three hostages, which was scheduled to take place this Saturday. US President Donald Trump has expressed support for abandoning the phasing of the deal, and demanded that all hostages be released by Saturday at noon –
Even if the third phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal is successfully completed and all hostages, alive and dead, are handed over, Hamas will still retain its most treasured and most deadly warfare advantage: hundreds of miles of deep tunnels and bunkers known as the Gaza metro. From day one of the Israel Defence Forces’ retaliatory invasion of Gaza, the search began for the tunnel complex which their opponents were using to hide command bunkers, weapon-making plants, munition stores, fighters and the 250 hostages seized from southern Israel on 7 October, 2023. The IDF may have killed an estimated 17,000 of Hamas’s 30,000 soldiers, but the remnants of the battered
Once you get beyond trade and maritime borders, you will find that much of international law is, pace Clausewitz, the continuation of policy by other means. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was continuing policy by other means when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. The two stand accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes over Operation Swords of Iron, Jerusalem’s response to the Palestinian invasion of its territory and mass murder of its citizens on 7 October 2023. Israel has protested the Court’s actions, which were prompted by chief prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, as a one-sided interference in the military actions of
The Foreign Secretary describes his approach to diplomacy as ‘progressive realism’. One can legitimately ask what is progressive about a closer accommodation with the slave-labour-deploying Leninists of Beijing or what is realistic about ceding the UK’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to China’s ally Mauritius. But David Lammy seems happy in his work. His choice of words serves to give an updated gloss to what most observers would readily recognise as the Foreign Office’s traditional approach – appeasement of our enemies and embarrassment at anything which appears to be a reminder of our colonial past. Whatever the aptest description of this government’s foreign policy, it is fair to say Donald
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, flew to Brussels for an EU summit, sought a ‘reset’ of relations and had celeriac soup and sea bream for dinner. AstraZeneca dropped plans to invest £450 million in a vaccine manufacturing plant in Speke, Liverpool, blaming the government’s ‘final offer compared to the previous government’s proposal’. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that she supported the expansion of Leeds Bradford Airport; she had already backed a third runway at Heathrow and the reopening of Doncaster Sheffield airport. Water bills in England and Wales will rise to an average of £603. Some councils will be allowed to raise their tax by
Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire agreement. Though the ancients would have employed oaths, the practical ancient Greeks often ensured there was a flexibility about them: the real world might intervene. For example, treaties between city-states were agreed between opposing generals. Hostages were exchanged, oaths sworn and the terms of the treaty widely inscribed on stone and bronze pillars, but it was citizens who oversaw the treaty’s maintenance. In a Greek democracy, however, there was no saying how, under the influence of different leaders, policy might change and annul a treaty at a stroke. Then again, though treaties could be sworn to last forever, ‘circumstances’ were very unlikely to remain
In late 2018 a Saudi journalist living in exile in Canada, who liked to work out in between recording YouTube critiques of his government, ordered some protein powder online. When a text message landed on Omar Abdulaziz’s smartphone notifying him of a DHL delivery, he clicked on it without hesitating. The portrait Deibert paints is a million miles away from the Cold War binary world of John le Carré The DHL invitation was fake digital bait. By clicking on it, Abdulaziz had enabled Pegasus, a spyware program designed by a now infamous Israeli company, NSO Group. It proceeded to hoover up his emails, contacts, photos and WhatsApp exchanges, which included
The former US president Jimmy Carterdied, at the age of 100, just before news of an imminent deal to free the last of Israel’s hostages in Gaza. Carter’s presidency was crippled by his own hostage crisis, American diplomats held captive in Tehran. Freeing them became his administration’s highest priority, and he worked on it for every single one of the 444 days the crisis lasted, often to the exclusion of anything else. By contrast, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, resisted massive domestic pressure to do a deal for his hostages in order to pursue the war aim of destroying Hamas. You could call this statesmanship, or something else, but
