Israel

Twitter is not always kind to the Jewish state. But the peace accord between Israel, UAE and Bahrain that was signed in Washington in September has opened the floodgates to a social media love-in. In one video, recently shared by Ivanka Trump, an Israeli called Amit Deri expresses his astonishment at finding produce from his country in a food market in Dubai. Elsewhere, in pictures that were shared thousands of times, a vast Emirati flag is seen projected onto the façade of Tel Aviv’s city hall. Even Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has got involved, posting in Arabic this week to mark UAE’s national day, alongside a video in which he

The news that Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen ‘father of the bomb’ Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, met his end in a hail of bullets near Tehran today comes as no surprise. As with so many things these past four years, this is all about Trump. Whoever carried out the hit, it is all but certain that Trump gave it the nod. Once again, he is trying to put a stamp on the Middle East that Biden will find difficult to scrub out. His actions would hardly be without precedent; Obama, Clinton and Reagan all made last-gasp moves in the region to shape it in their image. But none of these Presidents were anywhere

‘They are S-C-A-R-E-D’. So said Binyamin Netanyahu in a famous 1999 election campaign speech, referring to the media. Now he is the one who is scared. The political mastermind who has been Prime Minister for the past eleven years stands to lose his crown. Israel’s political crisis of 2019-2020 saw three general elections without producing a clear winner. Eventually, asserting a need for national unity to combat the pandemic, Bibi masterfully managed to form a coalition under his leadership while dividing the main opposition party, Blue and White. Under the rotation agreement, Bibi is to step down after two years and be replaced by Blue and White leader, Benny Gantz.

Last Friday the UN Security Council rejected any extension of the arms embargo on Iran. That embargo — imposed in 2007 — began to get phased out after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But a ‘snapback’ provision was put in place intended to allow the return of all such sanctions should Iran violate the terms of the deal. Iran has been violating those terms for some time, but on Friday, when the United States hoped that its allies would join it in deploring this fact, only the Dominican Republic voted with it. The UK, like France and Germany, chose to abstain. On the question of whether Russia and China should

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has signed a coalition agreement, after a year of uncertainty and three elections, to create a government that should keep him in power for at least another year and a half. If all goes well with his corruption trial, set to begin on May 24 after a postponement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, he will have outwitted his opponents once again and remained in office more than a decade. How does Israel’s leader keep going when his own party never gets more than 35 seats in the country’s 120-member Knesset and he seems to have alienated parties on the left, right and centre? Netanyahu has

An Israeli startup called Vocalis Health is working with the country’s National Emergency Team to conduct a trial using voice samples to identify coronavirus. It is one of many innovative approaches being trialled in Israel as the country is radically transformed by the battle against the virus. The Israeli Ministry of Defence’s Directorate of Defense Research and Development said this week that the study with Vocalis Health would look at voice recordings and use artificial intelligence to help identify carriers of the disease. ‘These recordings will then undergo data analysis using neural networks.’ The idea is that an algorithm that would identify characteristics associated with symptoms of the virus. The obvious

Quassem Soleimani is dead but in Israel fear of his warped legacy lives on. The Iranian general was key to his country’s strategy of developing networks of militant groups throughout the Middle East. These organisations are all held together by one thing: a common hatred of Israel. And a month after Soleimani was killed in an US drone strike, Israel is worried that its nemesis’s objective might soon become reality. Soleimani was the mastermind of Hezbollah’s programme in Lebanon aimed at adding a deadly new weapon to the group’s arsenal. The intention is simple: to take ‘stupid’ (unguided) missiles and add GPS technology to make them accurate. Whereas in previous

‘In business, when I have a tough deal, people would say, “This is tougher than the Israelis and the Palestinians,”’ said President Donald Trump as he unveiled his long-awaited Middle East plan, the so-called Deal of the Century, during a White House ceremony on Tuesday. The comment, ad-libbed, not only demonstrated that the former real-estate tycoon does have a sense of humour. It suggested that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, President Trump is ready to do business when it comes to peace in the Holy Land. ‘Actually, there’s nothing tougher than this one but we have to get it done,’ he added. ‘We have an obligation to humanity to get

In the dying days of Bush’s America, when the culture war was a light skirmish over gays getting hitched in Massachusetts, ABC aired a primetime drama called Brothers and Sisters. Sally Field was the liberal matriarch of a glossy family divided by politics but united by the struggles of being rich, white and trapped in a soapy remake of the West Wing. It was simpering. It was derivative. It was camp-as-all-get-out. I never missed a single episode. In one episode, Calista Flockhart, who played an Ann Coulterish talking-head, returns home from flaming a Democrat on TV and is greeted by her lefty Uncle Saul: ‘Great show last night. As usual,

Try as I might, I just can’t seem to get anyone interested in discriminating against Indians. No one is tearing open packets of imported turmeric and cardamom and dumping their contents on supermarket floors. British academics aren’t severing ties with professors from Delhi University. If pension funds are divesting from Tata Motors and ICICI Bank, the FT is still to pick up on it.  This is strange because on Monday Narendra Modi’s right-wing government revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, site of a long-running territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. Both sides claim the entirety of the state, which has been under Indian administration since Partition, and which

Look down from the mountains outside Beirut and, on most days, you’ll see a grey blanket of smog choking the city. The smog comes from diesel generators: almost every building in Lebanon is hooked up to one because of rolling power cuts. This isn’t because Israel bombed one of the country’s few power stations in 2006, though it did. Instead, the power cuts are a constant reminder to the Lebanese of their politicians’ greed, venality and incompetence. Successive governments have failed to build new power stations. Some are supposed to be finished next year, finally, but everyone knows they won’t be enough. The Lebanese will tell you that the ‘generator