Israel

Is Iran serious? That is the question everybody has been asking for the last 24 hours since the new Iranian President went to the UN in New York and gave an interview to CNN. A colossal outbreak of wilful optimism has followed from policy makers, ex-policy makers and media. This has been based largely on the fact that an Iranian President may have just acknowledged that the Holocaust of European Jewry occurred. Well huzzah. For what it’s worth, President Rouhani didn’t quite say that. In the CNN interview he said that it was the job of historians to look at such things. And to the extent that he acknowledged that a

Say this for George Galloway: every time you think he cannot sink any lower he finds new ways to surprise you. His latest contribution to Press TV, Iran’s propaganda station, speaks for itself. Parody is pointless. Given his history and his paymasters, we would expect him to defend the Assad regime in Syria. Even so, under-estimating his ability to sniff out the true villains is never sensible. Here’s his “analysis” of the use of chemical weapons in Syria: “If there’s been any use of nerve gas it’s the rebels that used it. […] If there has been a use of chemical weapons it was al-Qaeda who used chemical weapons. Who

Amid all the bloodshed in Egypt and Syria at the moment the fact that the Israelis and Palestinians are once again at the negotiating table has received less notice than usual. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. The intense international focus on the dispute seems to me a minor contributing reason why the dispute remains unresolved. But there is one aspect of the talks which really ought to be highlighted. That is the Palestinian demand that Israel release 104 Palestinian terrorists from prison before talks commence. While agreeing to this precondition, Israel has not asked for – and is not getting – anything in return. Of course Israel has been here before.

It’s exactly ten years since Iranian dissidents first blew the cover of a secret uranium-enrichment facility under a mountain at Natanz, in a bleak stretch of desert near Isfahan. Ever since, relations between Israel and Iran have headed inexorably towards war. Israeli leaders have insisted that they are ready to launch a military strike — unilaterally if necessary — against Iran if the uranium enrichment continues. Iranian leaders, liberals and hardliners alike, have been equally adamant that the centrifuges will continue to spin. For Israeli hawks like prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the question has been not whether to strike Iran, but when. But in the past few weeks, the diplomatic

It must be boring for you too, returning to the same complaint, over and over again. Report on the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News about the trouble in Turkey. Not a single mention, in the three minutes, of the words Islam, or Muslim, or Islamification. You had to infer everything. Without prior knowledge of what was going on, you would have been utterly mystified as to why people were unhappy. You noted that all of the protestors were young, middle class, educated and the women fashionably unveiled; well spoken, good English and so on. And you would have wondered then who the alleged ‘50 per cent’ who support the Prime Minister

It is hard to overstate the significance of Israel’s surgical strikes against Syrian military positions over the weekend. The raids targeted missiles bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon while also destroying battery launchers and other delivery systems. Beyond the obvious damage this inflicted on Syrian military capabilities, its real significance lies in the broader political objectives it achieved. Benjamin Netanyahu made a strategic miscalculation last November when he launched Operation Pillar of Defence against Hamas operatives in Gaza. He failed to inflict any meaningful damage on the group while the Hamas administration secured a number of victories, not least hitting Tel Aviv. The weekend’s air raids therefore go a long way

To my simple suggestion that Owen Jones apologise for claiming that an 11-month old child killed by a Hamas rocket was in fact killed by an Israeli ‘so-called targeted strike’, Owen appears to have answered ‘no’. He starts his reply: ‘In the last couple of years I’ve learned one thing: the right don’t like me very much, and expend a sizeable amount of energy attacking me personally rather than my writing.’ In saying that he has learned even ‘one thing’ I fear Owen exaggerates. He begins his next paragraph: ‘Hard right pseudo-intellectual [Douglas] Murray…’ Nothing worse than attacking a person rather than their writing is there? Of course it is

At the (rejuvenated) New Republic, Ben Birnbaum has a comprehensive and comprehensively-depressing survey of the last-gasp prospects for a two-state solution to the Middle East ‘peace process’. If the two-state solution (TSS) is not yet on life-support it is hardly a picture of health. The prognosis is not good and time is running out. According to Birnbaum, Mahmoud Abbas and Bibi Netanyahu are, in their different ways, the last remaining men who could make it work. Yet neither man, as he also demonstrates, has much room for manoeuver. The sketched outlines of a deal remain in place (a divided Jerusalem, land-swaps, a symbolic ‘right of return’ for a few thousand