Jake Wallis Simons | The Spectator columnists & writers

What Amnesty International gets wrong about Israel’s vaccine programme

Israel's remarkable vaccine rollout has been deservedly praised. But not everyone is full of goodwill. Depressingly and inevitably, commentators and human rights groups have queued up to find a reason to condemn the Jewish state. Israel, which is leading the world in the speed of the rollout, has been accused of ‘excluding’ the Palestinians from getting the jab and giving it to ‘settlers’ instead. 'Denying Covid-19 vaccines to Palestinians exposes Israel’s institutionalised discrimination,' Amnesty International has claimed. To people familiar with stories about bogeyman Israel, this is an easy narrative to get behind. But it fails to account for a simple fact: the Palestinian leaders themselves haven’t complained.

Jake Wallis Simons

The Arab-Israeli conflict may finally be over

Jake Wallis Simons

The Arab-Israeli conflict may finally be over

The dawn of the new year is rising on a world that would have been unrecognisable 12 months ago. The scourge of Covid, the fall of Trump, the resolution of Brexit; all have carved history in unpredictable ways. But nowhere has seen greater changes than the Middle East, where, for the first time, people are daring to believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is over. In January 2020, Israel was as isolated as ever in the region. Its ‘cold peace’ agreements with Egypt and Jordan, which were not matched by affection on the street, were as good as it got. The Arab League’s notorious threefold rejectionism — no to peace, no to recognition, no to negotiation — seemed unmovable. Trump’s peace plan was dismissed out of hand by the Palestinians in February, and things hit a new low in May.

Jake Wallis Simons

Britain is right to pursue closer military ties to Israel

Jake Wallis Simons

Britain is right to pursue closer military ties to Israel

There’s a group called Palestine Action whose raison d’être is to throw red paint over the British offices of Elbit, an Israeli high-tech arms company, in an orchestrated attempt to hound it out of the country. Five members of the ‘direct-action network’, which has links to Extinction Rebellion, armed themselves with paint pots and climbed onto the roof of the Elbit offices in Staffordshire in September. Activists also targeted sites in London, where they not only hurled paint over buildings, but also over several Jewish people, who had gathered to stage a peaceful counter-demonstration. Quite why the protesters choose to target an Israeli arms manufacturer rather than, say, a British company like BAE – which sold Saudi forces fighter jets as they bombed Red Cross and MSF hospitals in Yemen – is a question where the obvious answer is probably the correct one.

Jake Wallis Simons

A Sudan-Israel peace deal could be Trump’s crowning achievement

Jake Wallis Simons

A Sudan-Israel peace deal could be Trump’s crowning achievement

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 referred to the Arab state as ‘our new friends’. These were not empty tweets.

Jake Wallis Simons

Why this Iranian assassination is all about Trump

Jake Wallis Simons

Why this Iranian assassination is all about Trump

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 near as belligerent or pro-Israel. First there was intense speculation that Trump was building up to a last-minute attack on Iran.

Jake Wallis Simons

Arab states are fighting back against Turkey’s ‘neo-Ottomanism’

Jake Wallis Simons

Arab states are fighting back against Turkey’s ‘neo-Ottomanism’

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seems determined to reinvent the secular Muslim country he inherited as a sort of Sunni Iranian ‘Mini-Me’: draconian, Islamist and with vaunting regional ambitions. For Western powers and their allies, the urgent question is how to deal with the mutation of a Nato ally into a ‘neo-Ottoman’ threat. A hundred years ago, the Turkish Republic was founded on secularism. Ataturk banned religion from the public realm, prohibited the Arabic call to prayer, and encouraged men and women to mix. But for years, Erdoğan has done all he can to reverse the Turkish liberal consensus in favour of a new authoritarianism – and is taking on muscular adventurism abroad. For Israel and the US, Iran is unlikely to be knocked from the top of their worry list.

Jake Wallis Simons

Carles Puigdemont’s descent into mockery is complete

Jake Wallis Simons

Carles Puigdemont’s descent into mockery is complete

It was the question that many journalists were asking: what had become of Mrs Puigdemont and the two little Puigdemonts? Well, yesterday afternoon we found out. After a bit of elementary detective work, we photographed her driving home with her two children in the car. In other words, doing the school run. Now, Marcela Topor – she uses her maiden name – has long stood four-square behind her husband in his quixotic battle for independence. For all we know, she could have no objection to him leaving her holding the babies (she did not respond to my request for an interview). But as I caught sight of the harassed expression on her face as she ferried her two girls home from school before dashing on to another appointment, it was hard to shake the impression that her husband was rather a cad.

Jake Wallis Simons

Madrid crushes the Catalan independence movement with brutal efficiency

Jake Wallis Simons

Madrid crushes the Catalan independence movement with brutal efficiency

One is the son of a humble baker, whose burning passion for Catalan independence has been all-consuming since he was a boy. The other, a scion of a distinguished Spanish family, is a hard-nosed political operator with a taste for cigars and bullfighting. In the heady days of the referendum, some even dared to dream that the Catalan David would beat Madrid’s Goliath. Yesterday, however, when Mariano Rajoy crushed Carles Puigdemont with merciless efficiency, it was obvious that this was the way it was always going to end. It was a day of high drama shot through at every turn with irony. Ever since declaring independence on Friday, Mr Puigdemont talked a good fight. In a televised address to his countrymen, he called on civil servants to ‘peacefully resist’ Madrid’s efforts to seize the levers of power in Catalonia, and vowed that he would return to work on Monday unless he was ‘forcibly prevented’.

Jake Wallis Simons

Catalonia’s ‘silent majority’ does not want independence from Spain

Jake Wallis Simons

Catalonia’s ‘silent majority’ does not want independence from Spain

Barcelona I was roaring through central Barcelona on the back of a motorcycle, in the midst of a pack of unionist riders adorned with Spanish flags, all sounding their horns with reckless abandon, when it hit me: this was the voice of the silent majority. Catalonia does not want independence from Spain. But let me begin at the beginning. Yesterday afternoon, the word was put out on Twitter that a group of unionists were intending to parade through Barcelona on two wheels before riding out to the port, where a battalion of national police were barracked in a ship. There they planned to serenade officers and shower them with flowers and Spanish flags. These were the same police, you understand, who cracked down so brutally on the Catalan referendum at the beginning of the month; when seen through nationalist eyes, they were simply doing their jobs, and had been unfairly vilified by the world’s media.

Jake Wallis Simons

In Spain, the words ‘civil war’ will now be on everyone’s lips

Jake Wallis Simons

In Spain, the words ‘civil war’ will now be on everyone’s lips

It was the option that had long been threatened, but few people imagined that the Catalan leader, Carles Puigdemont, would actually have the guts to follow it through. A few weeks ago, when I stood outside the parliament building in Barcelona after Puigdemont had apparently backed away from the brink, the mood was despondent as thousands of separatists, wrapped in Catalan flags, saw their dreams going up in smoke. Today, however, they were punching the air and partying after Catalonia’s regional parliament voted to declare independence following the referendum earlier this month, in defiance of the consistently aggressive dialogue from Madrid. But their jubilation may very well be short-lived. There are now real fears that the Spanish government, which presided over the brutal suppression of Catalonia’s illegal referendum that made the world gasp in alarm, will respond even more forcefully this time.

Jake Wallis Simons

The left’s sinister disdain for Israel betrays their movement’s pro-Zionist origins

Jake Wallis Simons

The left’s sinister disdain for Israel betrays their movement’s pro-Zionist origins

In the beginning, the Guardian was a friend of the Jews. Or rather, those Jews who believed that after millennia of persecution in exile, they deserved the right to live freely in their ancestral homeland. The overwhelming majority, in other words. The Zionists. The Labour party liked them, too. Three months before the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s key declaration of support for Jewish national aspirations – the centenary of which will be marked next month – Labour compiled a memorandum of policy priorities. ‘Palestine should be set free from the harsh and repressive government of the Turk,’ it said, ‘in order that the country may form a Free State, under international guarantee, to which such of the Jewish People as desired to do so may return, and may work out their salvation, free from interference by those of alien race or religion.

Jake Wallis Simons

Franco’s fascism is alive and kicking in Spain

Jake Wallis Simons

Franco’s fascism is alive and kicking in Spain

Barcelona After the demonstration in Barcelona on Sunday, I happened to walk past the city’s main police station. A unionist crowd had gathered to praise the officers who had so brutally suppressed the Catalan referendum the previous week. Wrapped in Spanish flags, they were chanting Viva España and throwing flowers. Then they started performing the Nazi salute. I hung around to report on it (a video that I shot on my phone was retweeted many thousands of times). The fascists, I realised, had based themselves in a pub next door. I went in, filming on my GoPro, and saw police drinking with far-Right thugs, smiling as they were serenaded with Sieg Heils. I just filmed these guys doing Nazi salutes outside Barcelona police station to praise last week’s brutal riot cops pic.

Jake Wallis Simons

Bien-pensant Britain is abandoning Burma

Jake Wallis Simons

Bien-pensant Britain is abandoning Burma

At first glance, the new footage of Boris being slapped down for reciting a fragment of Kipling in Burma seemed like just another of his gaffes. Many Burmese people, however, reacted with bafflement. This was an affectionate poem expressing British love for their country through a soldier kissing a Burmese girl. (My great-grandfather, Sir William Carr, as it happens, did more than that. He married her and brought her back to Britain – with their eight half-Burmese children.) What was wrong with that? It seems that bien pensant Britons are more sensitive about our colonial past than the Burmese, who are understandably rather more preoccupied with dealing with their country’s agonising transition to democracy. The confected Brit-on-Brit hysteria came after St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in another Rhodes-must-fall moment, removed a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi from display.

Jake Wallis Simons

The Left has turned on the Lady of Burma

Jake Wallis Simons

The Left has turned on the Lady of Burma

With all the wrath of a lover slighted, the Left has turned on Aung San Suu Kyi. On Friday, Jeremy Hardy, Marxism’s comedy mouthpiece, lambasted her as a ‘racist, vain narcissist’, while a petulant George Monbiot demanded that the woman be stripped of her Nobel peace prize. ‘To Aung San Suu Kyi we entrusted our hopes,’ he complained in a column last week, lamenting that he and his activist friends now feel ‘cruelly betrayed’. The heart bleeds. How things have changed. Until recently, Suu was an icon of human rights, enthroned in the pantheon with Mandela, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. Now, if the bien pensant are to be believed, she’s a racist. My great-grandmother was Burmese. Although I have never met Suu personally, I know a number of her close friends and extended family.

Jake Wallis Simons

The Donald’s disaster plan is simple: do the opposite to Dubya

Jake Wallis Simons

The Donald’s disaster plan is simple: do the opposite to Dubya

George W Bush is, shall we say, not a fan of Donald Trump. He has publicly slammed the 45th President in the most vivid of terms, accusing the magnate of ‘racism’ and ‘name calling’. But as Trump flew into the eye of the storm yesterday -- doing so literally, for once -- and the First Lady strapped on her four-inch flood busting stilettos, it was Dubya who had done America’s most volatile leader a great favour. Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, marked the beginning of the end for George W Bush. His presidency hobbled on for its full term, but the scandal continued to dog him and his reputation remains tarnished to this day. Twelve years on, his humiliation has played into the hands of his nemesis, providing Mr Trump with a kind of anti-playbook for dealing with national disasters.

Jake Wallis Simons

Venezuela’s crisis exposes the true depravity of the hard-Left

Jake Wallis Simons

Venezuela’s crisis exposes the true depravity of the hard-Left

Which British politician would be loopy enough to defend the Venezuelan regime as it guns down protesters and arrests opposition politicians? Need a clue? Didn’t think so. This week, Ken Livingstone – once an adviser to the late Hugo Chavez – said that the reason for the country’s woes was that Chavez ‘did not execute the establishment elite’ when he came to power. For good measure, he added: ‘America has got a long record of undermining any Left-wing government as well… it’s not all just down to the problems of the [Venezuelan] government.’ While reporting recently on the appalling collapse of that country, I found myself staring into the barrel of a gun held by a masked teenager, high on cannabis, in one of Caracas’ lawless suburbs.