When I got there he was seated in his chair in the garden as if it was any nice afternoon in July. It was a hot day. Grandma had put a white teacloth over his face, as if she couldn’t bear to see him. She stayed in the house but told me I could go out and look at him. He’d have wanted that, she said. I was as close to her as I had been to him.

I lifted off the cloth: I was silently afraid. But it was him, and he looked calm, or patient. I was surprised to see how still a face is when breath has stopped. I found this comforting and for several minutes I studied his face. I could look at it, and the abandoned self. I was 17, I think, caught in the expectation of being grown up soon, and about to do big things.

On the other side of the hedge beyond the garden a couple of kids passed by. It was still hot. They were talking and chuckling, and of course they didn’t know about our garden and what had happened there. If they looked over the hedge in passing, they might have seen an old man sitting in a chair. They wouldn’t have realized, and if I’d called out, “Look, my grandfather is dead”, they could have said, “Oh, that’s sad, so sorry” — that sort of thing — and kept on going with their afternoon. It wasn’t their loss or disaster. Nor mine, really. That belonged to Grandma who was sitting in the house as still as her husband in the garden. She wasn’t weeping, or evidently upset. She wasn’t going to break down. But it wasn’t possible to see her without imagining her distress. People die all the time, and it may be an unforgettable moment in others’ lives.

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This was not what you’d call a disaster, though I don’t think Grandma ever got over it. It’s nothing like Gaza. Do you still look at that, or has it been going on so long now you almost take it for granted? I’m talking about the scenes of a city where so few buildings are intact. It is a collapsed place — it looks like rubble or kindling — and if the bodies have been taken away there’s no escaping how many have perished: from the blasts, the fire, the aftermath of illness, the hopelessness. How many? There’s no need to guess: Gaza’s Ministry of Health says 73,386 Palestinians have been killed there.

Those numbers are appalling, but we make them theoretical, as a handling device. Would Gaza be worse if there were 75,386 dead? Can we feel the difference in 2,000 lives? Is there a total at which point everyone will say, Enough. Stop It. Start Again? Are we so calculating, or so adept at managing outrage? Is there a death limit, like 55 m.p.h? Are there cops on that highway, their cars hiding behind bushes, with waiting tickets?

Do understand, I am not simply regretting the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. Nor am I forgetting the ruthless provocation in the mass murder of October 7. It’s not a matter of taking sides, or excusing anyone. Gaza is a devastation that only a terrible distortion of meaning or consequence can justify. (Unless we consider the chance of our own abdication — I mean stepping down from the principle or the hope that we matter.)

For several years now the television news has panned over the wreckage of Gaza, and waited for outrage to take effect. But that hasn’t quite worked, has it? We hardly saw what the Somme looked like in 1916. But we have grown up a lot since then: we have seen the overhead views of Dresden and Berlin ruined. We know the wasteland of Hiroshima. We are connoisseurs of damage. We keep on looking, depressed but hardly motivated by the experience. It’s almost as if our helplessness is groomed by the watching. After all, throughout our decades-long history of anti-war films (that is the wishful label on the genre), from All Quiet on the Western Front to Black Hawk Down, we have also been satisfied, or thrilled, by the scenes of attack. So afraid in life, so brave in watching? And somehow the anti-war plan hasn’t transpired.

But I’m interested in what looking at the pictures does. There was a day, 25 years ago this week, when at breakfast in San Francisco our life was broken in on by TV views of Manhattan (those towers reminded me of Metropolis, that’s 1927). When a toy plane — it must be that — struck a skyscraper. Our six-year-old son, Zachary (raised in a film-watching household), getting ready for school, asked, “Dad, what movie is that?” in the spirit of a child who enjoyed a bit of battle on the screen. This wasn’t just what a kid wondered. Walter Murch (the editor and sound designer) has told me how he came out of his hotel in New York, saw his colleague Anthony Minghella (the director) looking up, and they had said in unison, “What movie is this?” Of course, they “knew” it could not be a movie, but they could not subdue the feeling that it must be contrived, or a show.

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By Gaza standards, 9/11 (a slick title?) was hardly vast. The number of people who died that day (in New York, Virginia and in Pennsylvania) was 2,977 (not counting the 19 suicidal killers in the planes). In presenting that as shocking, I realize that the average total of daily deaths in New York is only 150. Of course, most of those losses go unnoticed by the current of News. They occur in gardens or apartments, with just a few onlookers trying to feel what it all means. But what happened at the World Trade Center really was a movie, not just an unmediated error or mischance that Murch, Minghella and my son had wandered into. The damage that day was designed, cast, budgeted, foreseen — it had a creative vision — like a “magnificent” or “stunning” frontal assault from Paths of Glory or We Were Soldiers. It was intended as a movie. And so these terrible occasions are more easily digested as something we are meant to witness. We tame them just a little by identifying as spectators or an audience. Or does that taming diminish us? Is the process of movie turning us into a crowd who are detached or not exactly there — as if we have been nullified?

The story of how we have reached this point is complicated — not least because of the “fun” we have been having. How else can we contemplate the extensive but sometimes rather jolly massacres in which computer-generated figures are deleted? And that is disturbing because we do not like to think ourselves so unworthy. But there are pivotal realizations along the way. The one that strikes me the most is what I’ll call the Great Ignoring. Let me try to explain.

In the early Forties — not so long ago, some of us were alive then — in Germany or nearby parts of Europe, the great crowd of refugees or prisoners trudged along and we did not know how to notice or respond. As if they were not there to be seen and felt. Even in the gloom of dark morning, there might be a stink in the air because the natural traces of cooking are stubborn or lasting. So “down the road” was a no go area, or not for thinking about. One of those places that we (it’s not just they) were determined not to be disturbed by. Oh yes, we might say, there were rumors about what was happening, about the trains that kept arriving, and the occasional faces seen staring out of their carriages. There were anecdotes about people who had been here a few days ago and were gone now, as if on a sudden holiday. Or there were even a few who said they had escaped from there. But they seemed so crazed, so out of their minds, they could hardly be relied on. One of the reasons for that odd term “concentration camp” is how hard you must work to ignore the inner meaning of what is being said. When people are murdered in “impossible” numbers, the function of the state is to insist on the impossibility of what is being asserted. So it was in 1945 that we could act surprised. We were ready to cry out, “Oh, how extraordinary — we never knew about that”. So sorry. And this is not just German. It is in our nature now as watchers. It could happen here. It does, every time we stroll past Gaza, talking to our friends.

There is a temptation in the apparent factual emphasis of movie to say, look, we are looking — we are paying attention. And the impact of that may produce nausea. But more unsettling still is the underlying worry that every time we see a death we see an actor lying still and holding his breath. Could it be that we too are not quite alive? How hard must we concentrate to see that our mattering was a masquerade or a hope?

Netanyahu hasn’t granted any interviews to Israeli media since the start of the war, but his statements in English, including this one, have left many of his compatriots confused. After all, at the end of last summer’s 12-Day War, Netanyahu proudly proclaimed that “we removed from ourselves two immediate existential threats: the threat of annihilation by nuclear bombs, and the threat of annihilation by ballistic missiles.” That bombastic statement now looks questionable, to say the least. If the two “existential threats” had already been removed less than a year ago, then why are we at war again, focusing on the same two objectives?

The confusion, and the resulting strategic overstretch, trace back to the notion of “existential” threats in Netanyahu’s discourse. To wit, Netanyahu exaggerated not just about the outcome of the June 2025 war, but also the severity of the threat posed by the Islamic Republic — to his own political benefit and the Jewish state’s detriment. 

It’s clear that the Tehran regime was — and remains — a threat to Israel: Its leaders vow publicly to destroy the Jewish state, fund terror organizations that have been murdering Israelis for decades, and have laid the groundwork for developing nuclear weapons. So yes, to state the obvious, Iran is a threat that Israel must take seriously. But not every threat is an existential threat, one that should be placed at the very top of a country’s list of national priorities, eclipsing other threats in terms of the resources and intelligence devoted to it.

Describing the Iranian threat as an existential one has been at the core of Netanyahu’s politics for decades. His pitch to Israeli voters has been simple: Iran threatens our very survival as a country, and I’m the only one who can stop the mullahs in Tehran from exterminating us. He campaigned on this issue time and again, and it helped him remain in power continuously since 2009, except for the brief 18 months in 2021 and 2022, during which Israel’s short-lived “Government of Change,” led by Naftali Bennett, temporarily replaced him.

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Israel’s opposition leaders during this period often upheld Netanyahu’s framing of Iran as the top threat, even if they criticized some of his tactical choices, such as his controversial speech before the US Congress denouncing Barack Obama’s nuclear deal in 2015. But for the most part, none of the opposition leaders has fundamentally challenged the idea that Iran should be placed atop the list of potential threats to the Jewish state.

A rare exception came in the summer of 2014. That’s when Tamir Pardo, the then-director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency said in a closed-door briefing that the conflict with the Palestinians, not Iran, is the biggest security threat to Israel. The quote was published by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where I work, and made Netanyahu furious.

Netanyahu had appointed Pardo, yet the latter’s comments directly contradicted Netanyahu’s worldview. Netanyahu, while constantly emphasizing the Iranian threat to Israel, had for years treated the Palestinian issue as a minor nuisance, a small problem that could be “managed” indefinitely and that shouldn’t distract from the Iran crisis.

Pardo, by contrast, suggested that the Iranian threat was one Israel could manage. To Pardo’s mind, it was the Palestinian problem — Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank and Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza — that could someday explode in ways that would truly endanger the country. “The Palestinian question is the top external threat [to Israel],” he said at the time.

Netanyahu wasn’t convinced, and the spy chief’s comments were soon forgotten. When Netanyahu delivered his speech to Congress in March 2015 — conveniently for him, just two weeks before that month’s general election — no one in the Israeli political system challenged his assertion that the Islamic Republic was the biggest threat endangering Israel.

After his 2015 victory, Netanyahu took two substantial policy decisions that showcased his view of Iran as Israel’s top threat, and his corresponding view of the Palestinian issue as a mere distraction. First, he convinced President Trump to blow up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That move set the stage for a sequence of events that eventually led to the current war, as the Tehran regime intensified its nuclear activity without the constraints of the JCPOA. Israel responded to this by increasing its own preparations for war with Iran, in order to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon.

Second, Netanyahu approved Qatar’s cash payments to Hamas in Gaza as a mechanism to keep the Gaza Strip from flaring up. The Qatari payments, which over the years amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, were a terrible idea: they directly strengthened Hamas and allowed the Islamist organization to turn itself from a militia into an army of terror. But Netanyahu and his supporters in the Israeli media justified it at the time as a brilliant ploy to keep the Palestinian front quiet, while Israel focused on Iran — the “existential” threat.

To be fair, Netanyahu wasn’t alone in adopting this “Iran first, Palestinians last” strategy. He had many willing partners in the top ranks of the Israeli military — a reality reflected in the diversion of ever-more resources over the years toward anything related to a future war with Iran: fighter jets, missile-defense systems, nuclear submarines, covert operations, and more. It seemed that for the more “glamorous” sectors of the armed forces — those responsible for overcoming the Iranian threat — budget was never an issue.

At the same time, Israel’s “regular” army — the ground forces responsible for protecting the borders and policing the occupied West Bank — was gradually hollowed out. There were older, retired generals who warned over the years about this dangerous trend, warning that the military wouldn’t be ready in case of a surprise attack from Hamas in the south or Hezbollah in the north. But their warnings were mostly ignored or dismissed. The Iran-as-existential doctrine became dogma.

In that sense, Israel’s stunning recent achievements against the Islamic Republic — the aerial domination of Iranian skies, the decapitation of the senior leadership, deep Mossad penetration of the regime — shouldn’t be viewed separately from the equally stunning failures of the Israeli military on Oct. 7. These are two sides of the same coin, two elements of a deliberate strategy to focus completely on the threat from Iran, while dismissing the Palestinian issue as a minor problem that can be kicked down the road with Qatari bribes in Gaza and the aid of the corrupt and increasingly unpopular Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

In retrospect, and in light of what we know today about Oct. 7, the Gaza War and the two Israel-Iran wars, it’s at least worth asking if Netanyahu’s set of priorities has been wrong all along. Hamas on Oct. 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 250 hostages. Tens of thousands of Israeli families had to be evacuated from their homes, and hundreds of Israeli soldiers died in the Gaza war that ensued.

That war, which also led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the destruction of large parts of the Gaza Strip, also harmed Israel’s international reputation in unprecedented ways, as evident in recent polls showing that for the first time ever, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with Israel. This by itself is a major strategic crisis for Israel, and it will only get worse in the future, since the levels of support for the Jewish state are significantly lower among younger respondents in virtually every poll on this subject.

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Israel’s two wars with Iran, by comparison, have so far resulted in the deaths of approximately 60 Israelis — this, despite Iran firing almost 1,000 ballistic missiles at Israel, including direct hits against a hospital, residential buildings, and energy infrastructure. The Iranian regime is currently fighting a war of survival, and it may indeed survive by shutting down the Straits of Hormuz and choking the global economy; but in terms of the direct damage to Israel, the Islamic Republic has been much less destructive than Hamas or Hezbollah.

All this doesn’t mean that Israel should have ignored the threat posed by Iran, nor that it was a mistake for Israel to take military action against Tehran in June 2025 and again in February 2026 (the question of whether Washington should have joined Israel in those two wars is a separate one). The ballistic missiles that did penetrate Israel’s air-defense system caused extensive damage in Israeli cities. And to be sure, the nuclear threat is one Israel can never treat lightly, not least from Iran, a country ideologically pledged to Israel’s elimination. But it’s still important to ask whether the singular, years-long focus on the Iranian threat, and the dismissal of the Palestinian issue as a sideshow, had turned out to be a strategic blunder.

This question isn’t just important for our understanding of the past; It should be treated with urgency today, as Hamas tightens its grip over postwar Gaza, and Israeli far-Right extremists are trying to set the West Bank on fire with nightly attacks on Palestinian communities. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority — which today controls approximately 40% of the West Bank, and works hand-in-hand with Israel to thwart terror plots there — is on the verge of collapse; the tens of thousands of men employed in its security forces could soon be left without paychecks, but with their weapons in hand, a potential nightmare scenario for the Jewish state.

Once the second Israel-Iran war ends, Netanyahu will probably boast once again that an “existential threat” has been removed, no matter what the actual results on the ground and regardless of whether or not a third war with Iran will be needed in the future. He will describe Israel as stronger than ever — “a regional superpower,” in his words, that can bomb targets thousands of miles away on a daily basis and suffer painful but tolerable losses at home thanks to its advanced air-defense systems.

Maybe some parts of this description will even be true. But Israelis and supporters of the Jewish state abroad will be wise to remember the lessons of Oct. 7. We must ask ourselves if the real existential threat to Israel is truly buried under the sand somewhere in Iran — or whether it is actually found in our own inclination to bury our heads in the sand and ignore much more dangerous things happening right next to us.

“I think you feel very, very strongly about peace in the Middle East,” suggested Trump, barely suppressing a giggle at the obviously outrageous understatement. “We desperately want it,” Mamdani replied earnestly. Not, “we desperately want a fair and equitable and safe and prosperous New York”. Not, “we desperately want justice and harmony and security in New York”. No. What New York City’s next mayor desperately wants is peace in the Middle East.

Mamdani then went on, fawningly, to praise Trump — whose termination of foreign aid programs is reckoned to have endangered millions of lives — as being the answer to voters who “wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we had funding the violations of human rights”. But he was at his giddiest when salivating over how “the President and I spoke about the importance of not only building more housing, but also making sure that regulation of housing is something that is manageable to actually get through and not the cause of yet another wait that we see in our city”.

Building housing and sweeping away regulatory protections against profligate construction are certainly causes close to Trump’s heart. He was sued in the Eighties for harassing tenants out of buildings he had bought, and in turn, he himself sued the city for tax abatements for his luxury housing, establishing a framework in which tax dollars supported unaffordable apartments. For both Mamdani and Trump, then, the answer to the housing crisis in New York is: build, build, build. To be sure, they have very different conceptions of building. But the two faux-populist demagogues agree on one thing: real estate is the defining issue of our time.

From the moment the first human grunted “mine”, the principal, and perhaps the only, cause of war has been a struggle over land. It is easy to see why. Moira is the ancient Greek word for your particular portion of fate. Land expands, establishes and concretizes your moira. It is a solid counterpoint to the evanescence of time. You own your life, the good and bad of it; there is no escaping that. When you own land, you are reproducing the basic freedom of your biological existence.

Yet for the first time in history, a powerful world leader sees the world in terms, not of land, but of real estate. The difference between the two is simple: land has an intrinsic value: the place where people, cultures, civilizations establish themselves and grow. Real estate’s value lies in the marketplace: it is determined by how much people will pay for it. People belong to land. Real estate belongs to people.

The idea that the inhabitants of Gaza and Ukraine are fighting for their humble moira, which binds them to their forebears and to a stretch of time that is not, as time essentially is, apathetic, but is part of their memory and senses, is meaningless to Trump. Money is all that matters to Trump, and money is fungible. For land to make money, it must also be fungible. You miss your grandfather’s olive grove, with its sharp heady scents, where your private memories formed and where soulless impersonal apathetic time became stamped with your essence? Don’t be so sentimental. Make room for beachfront towers, shopping malls and gyms. Let history slide, will you? When Trump felt nostalgia for Scotland, his mother’s birthplace, he simply bought it and planted a flag on the links he bulldozed there.

The same coarse vision is iterated in Trump’s new National Security Strategy just released by the Trump administration. America’s former allies, the liberal democracies of Nato, are portrayed, not as rich civilizations bound to the land they grew on, but as depreciated properties whose value has been diminished by undesirable people — immigrants — moving into the neighborhood. Russia and China, also rich civilizations built on land, but which yearn to appropriate more land they believe belongs to them, are now regarded by America as dazzling potential real estate developments. Toynbee is out. Sotheby’s is in.

Now, at first glance, Trump’s efforts to make real estate rather than land the driver of history might seem like a humane innovation. It makes everything so straightforward. Cash incentives replace nuclear deterrence. Immense profits provide an effective alternative to emotional power.

But that is the superficial perspective. If real estate replacing land ever came to be a universal condition, individuals would be reduced to derivatives — mere packages of mortgages and assets. They would lose the concrete embodiment of their biological existence that the ownership of land confers. Everyone would be on the verge of being exchangeable with everyone else.

It is almost poetic, then, that this conflict between land and real estate has now begun to play itself out in New York City, where our soi-disant “democratic socialist” mayor has stumbled into his first political fight.

It involves a privately owned “garden” in New York’s Nolita neighborhood, wedged in between Soho and the Lower East Side. The irony here is that, like Trump, Mamdani wants to turn this land into transferable real estate. Unlike Trump, though, he wants to make the real estate public, and not commercial. That is what socialism is, after all: the conversion of real estate back into land — where you can build the framework of a life for your own values — courtesy of the state.

Known as the Elizabeth Street Garden, the one-acre, lush and eccentric small park, with its wrought-iron chairs and benches, fanciful sculptures, shrubbery, trees, flowers and herbs, has existed since 1991. It was the property of Allan Reiver, who owned an art gallery nearby; now it belongs to his son. Back then it was a private operation; you had to enter the art gallery to gain access to the garden. In 2012, a City Council member proposed that the park be converted into affordable housing for seniors. Reiver promptly and cannily made the park a nonprofit entity and opened the replenishing space to the public, thus retaining ownership. It remained his own land, accompanied by a smile, and a deed, from the state.

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The fight to convert the garden into affordable apartments for seniors continued, however. For over a decade, lawsuits were filed and contested. The current mayor, Eric Adams, had been all set to turn the park over to some nonprofit developers. But when Mamdani promised to do just that the instant he was in office, Adams reversed and declared the garden a public park. It was not for sale. Outgoing mayors, especially in the hardscrabble politics of New York City, often make parting shots to vex their successors. The affordable-housing initiative is now dead. Mamdani’s intention of giving seniors a little piece of land in the cold, commodifying city went nowhere.

There’s a further irony surrounding Mamdani’s doomed push. Of course the park, in one of the most expensive urban neighborhoods in the world, is cherished by the people who live in the neighborhood — the sort of well-heeled millennials who overwhelmingly voted for Mamdani. And like it or not, they have dispossessed the people they claim to want to empower. They were supported by celebrated liberals such as Robert De Niro and Patti Smith who were also squarely on the side of the Garden — on the side of privilege and wealth, playing the role of reactionary landowners! Their attitude toward the garden is very much like Trump’s toward his Scottish golf course. Sentimental realtors all.

I am deeply skeptical of Mamdani, whose grand ambitions and vaunting rhetoric will never match the grimy reality of governing New York City. If he sticks to the divisive and opportunistic tactics and sentiments he used to get elected, he will run the city into the ground. But I did admire his valiant plans to convert the garden into desperately-needed affordable housing. They were the first fruit of his ambitions as a democratic socialist. Yet they foundered on the resistance of the wealthy, privileged millennials who supported his democratic socialist ambitions. When push came to shove, they could not sacrifice their individual self-interest to the common good. Perhaps they thought that the utopian Garden of Eden Mamdani spun out in his TikTok campaign would remain just there, on TikTok. The Garden before the fall, if you will. It’s not clear who bit the apple of rebellion — did Mamdani’s base defy his principles, or did he test their sincerity by trying to come through on the promises he made to them?

Either way, Mamdani and his crowd have tumbled out of the cynical fantasy of his campaign and into the real world. The clawing back of private land, even land held under the pretext of being a public park, into state-sponsored real estate for the people is no easy, or straightforward, task. Even less so is the dignified restoration, in a city and a country where just about everything is up for acquisitive grabs, of individual moira.

I know of many other, no less traumatizing, events. In 1987, I published a Hebrew-language novel called Border Patrol — based on a case I had heard at the time — about a soldier who accidentally kills a pregnant woman in Lebanon, and is haunted by the ghost of the unborn child. Then there were such cases as the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, carried out by Lebanese Christian militias supplied and supported by the IDF, with Israeli troops surrounding the camps and lighting up the area with flares. From wars to skirmishes to endless occupation, serving in the IDF has provided ample opportunities for violence, accidental or otherwise, against innocent civilians.

All the same, as I think back to my basic training, shortly before the hell of the Yom Kippur War, I must admit that we were taught to respect and fear the weapons we were given. The “purity of arms” of the IDF was always partly mythical — yet it was constantly drilled into us. To be victorious, we were told, we had to be just, and as soldiers we were issued clear instructions on when we were allowed to open fire: rules which were strictly enforced. The IDF could not be like those marauding, lawless, criminal armies that subjected Jews to wanton murder, rape, and humiliation during the long centuries of exile. As early as the Thirties, the prominent Zionist leader Berl Katznelson exhorted Jewish paramilitary troops in Palestine: “May our arms remain pure. We train to use weapons, we carry weapons and confront those who attack us. But we do not want our arms to be soiled by the blood of innocents.”

In reality, of course, since its formation in 1948, the IDF engaged in multiple war crimes, not least during the War of Independence itself. Most of these crimes were covered up or denied, from the now well-documented cases of executions in Palestinian villages in the Galilee, which were long denied, to the widely reported massacre of over 100 people, including women and children, in the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948, for which no one was eventually charged.

Even so, on occasion, a few have been prosecuted and held up as a warning about the potential of young armed men descending into savagery. This was the case of the massacre of over 40 civilians in Kafr Qasim in 1956, which resulted in an Israeli court ruling that a “black flag” flies over unlawful orders to kill innocents. But the occupation, which began following the Six Day War, brought with it growing dehumanization of the Palestinians and the ever-progressive loosening of rules on exercising violence against civilians, as can be seen now in the escalating attacks by Jewish settlers, often abetted by IDF troops, against Palestinians in the West Bank. The scandal that is currently roiling Israeli society — and the nature of the debate surrounding it — is the culmination of this process, with profound ramifications for the rule of law in Israel as a whole.

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In July 2024, the IDF military police opened an investigation into reports of abuse of Palestinian prisoners in the notorious detention center of Sde Teiman. An initial attempt to arrest some of the suspected soldiers was met with demonstrations, and some protesters and far-Right politicians broke into the camp to protect the culprits. Eventually, five soldiers were indicted for causing severe abuse and injury to a prisoner who had to undergo emergency surgery. As protests reached a frenzy, a clip allegedly showing soldiers brutalizing a prisoner was leaked to the media, exposing to the public the severity of the abuse. Initially, the office of the Military Advocate General, tasked with running the investigation, insisted that it could not determine the identity of the leaker. But, in October this year, Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned, conceding that she had authorized the leak to protect her office from false accusations that it was needlessly persecuting innocent soldiers merely carrying out their duty against Hamas operatives. She then disappeared, raising fears about her possible suicide. Fortunately, Tomer-Yerushalmi later resurfaced, only to be taken into custody herself. She is currently under investigation both for leaking the video and for lying to the Supreme Court about its provenance.

Israeli society is starkly divided over the scandal. Those who defend the arrested soldiers — notably Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir — claim that Tomer-Yerushalmi and her office are part of a “deep state” plot: one that is trying to undermine the Israeli government, “tie the hands” of the IDF in its war against terrorism, and prevent it from accomplishing a “final victory” against Hamas. Those who defend Tomer-Yerushalmi say that while she might have made mistakes in how she conducted herself, what matters much more is that she and her office stood up for the rule of law and exposed the abuse of Palestinian prisoners by rogue IDF soldiers.

The truth is far more sordid — and troubling. The office of the Military Advocate General is charged with investigating and charging illegal conduct by members of the IDF. Yet for the past two years, as the IDF killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, and as evidence mounted of attacks against aid workers — from a drone strike against the Aid Central Kitchen charity in April 2024, to the tank shells that killed 22 at a hospital in August 2025 — Tomer-Yerushalmi, the IDF’s top legal adviser, did virtually nothing.

This did not begin on October 7. For years, the office of the Military Advocate General has facilitated and obscured the crimes of Israeli soldiers. Created in 1948 to provide judicial advice, and to arrange military trials, the office is headed by an advocate general appointed by the Minister of Defense and is not directly subordinate to the army’s chief of staff. It also includes a department responsible for ensuring that the IDF operates in accordance with international law.

As a 2016 report by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem pointed out, however, this entire military judicial apparatus gradually transformed into a mechanism for covering up crimes, what it called a “fig leaf of the occupation”. Indeed, after years of failed appeals to the military justice system, B’Tselem concluded that the Advocate General’s very existence was intended not to deliver justice — but to offer its semblance.

This conclusion is supported elsewhere too. As far back as January 2009, for instance, Haaretz reported that the office adopted highly controversial interpretations of international law to justify the IDF’s actions in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. That included the bombing of a graduation ceremony of a police course on the first day of the operation that killed dozens of policemen, and the killing of 40 people by a mortar shell aimed at a target next to a United Nations Relief and Works Agency school, where Palestinians were sheltering. “Our goal is not to fetter the army,” Daniel Reisner, the officer who established the department was even quoted as saying, “but to give it the tools to win in a lawful manner.” More than that, Reisner explained that his department backed policies that were “on the edge” of the legal void: demolishing houses, carrying out deportation, and conducting targeted assassinations. “What we are seeing now is a revision of international law,” Reisner added, a decade and a half before October 7. “If you do something long enough, the world will accept it.”

According to B’Tselem, Operation Cast Lead caused the death of 762 innocent civilians, including 318 children and over 100 women. But officials in the legal department insisted that these deaths, along with a great deal of indiscriminate destruction of property, had no impact on the legality of the operation. “The law has actually been stood on its head,” concluded Professor Orna Ben-Naftali, an Israeli legal scholar, even back then. “It has ceased to fulfill its purpose, and we have to admit that it has gone into dissolution procedures ahead of bankruptcy.”

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By David Rose

The slippery slope of 2008 became even more pronounced during the IDF’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge, in which over 500 Palestinian children were killed. The plunge to the abyss, as is well known, came with Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre. Over the next two years, at least 68,000 Palestinians were killed, of whom up to 20,000 were children. As far as is known, no one has been brought to account. Indeed, the Advocate General’s office provided legal license for much of the killing. For one thing, it showed a high tolerance of civilian collateral damage in attacks on Hamas operatives — not only senior officers but low-ranking members too — by asserting that civilians who would or could not leave their homes as instructed could be considered enemy targets. For another, it refused to undertake all but the most superficial investigations of blatant crimes, adding to the sense of impunity among IDF troops.

Given all this, it is anyway difficult to feel sorry for Tomer-Yerushalmi, even if one must regret that she will pay a price for the wrong crime. What is more troubling, though, is that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his minions have pounced on the case as an opportunity to accelerate their campaign of dismantling what remains of Israeli law, installing their own people in positions of power and claiming that any accusations of wrongdoing are mere manifestations of “deep state” liberalism and foreign antisemitism. Most recently, the government has announced that it would launch its own inquiry into the fiasco of October 7 — which occurred under its watch — rather than establishing an independent state commission of inquiry.

All the while, one must wonder who now is left to stand in the breach? As I recall how all this began, with the progressive cheapening of Palestinian lives and the use of law to justify the unjustifiable, I can only conclude that, when some of us youngsters warned of the corrupting effects of the occupation in the years following the war of 1967, we had no idea how far Israeli democracy would finally be dismantled. Thanks to a military justice system that provides impunity to the IDF, the horror I described four decades ago in Border Patrol has now become the norm.

There are, believe it or not, people who actually hold the bizarre position that every viewpoint is true. If you happen to bump into one of them, all you have to do is to ask them whether they believe that the viewpoint that not all viewpoints are correct is also true. The logic of their own position, in short, should compel them to abandon that position. You can be pretty sure, however, that they won’t. They’re more likely to say, “Well, that’s true for you, but not true for me”. This might make sense if we’re talking about whether Schoenberg is a finer composer than Mahler, but not if we’re talking about whether there’s a country called Iraq, or whether eating certain kinds of mushroom is likely to poison you. You can be deeply, authentically convinced that William Hague is an alien and still be wrong. Truth isn’t about how you feel, which is another reason why it’s unpopular in a society which elevates sentiment and sensation over fact. (The last time this happened in British culture on a large scale was in the cult of sensibility of the 18th century.) The phrase “true for me but not for you” doesn’t make sense, at least if we’re speaking about what’s been established as fact. It can’t be true for you but not for me that there was once something called the slave trade, or that there are people who can hum and whistle different tunes simultaneously. There are truths about human subjects, but the truth itself isn’t subjective. It may be a truth about a human subject that I currently have a headache, but I know this only because I have the concept of headache, and know how to apply it to others and myself; and all this is because I participate in a public language in which the concept of headache has a function, and has that function whether I like it or not.

What counts as a fact, to be sure, is a deeply controversial affair, and sometimes impossible to establish. This is the kernel of truth in the postmodern shell. You might regard facts simply as those collective interpretations of the world which happen to have caught on — which are so embedded in what we say and do that it’s currently inconceivable to imagine our way beyond them. This leaves the door open for a future in which “drinking boiling water is a bad idea” is no longer a fact, possibly because we’ve found ingenious ways of insulating our throats from being scalded, or because evolution has taken us beyond such pain altogether. So what’s a fact now won’t be then. On the other hand, you can argue that if it was a fact in ancient Greece that the poetry of Horace was admired, this fact remains true today, even if we ourselves no longer admire it.

If facts are just versions of the world that have caught on, however, why has this happened? Is it just a matter of chance? One plausible answer is that they have caught on because they reflect the way the world is. But the way the world is is itself a matter of interpretation, so there are problems with this response as well. If we’re to establish the truth, we need evidence. We must also be prepared to renounce our version of reality if the evidence strongly suggests that it’s false. This, presumably, is what the BBC tries to do in order to arrive at an impartial assessment of an issue. But the BBC is quite plainly biased on all kinds of subjects. It isn’t impartial when it comes to rape or paedophilia; it detests terrorism and supports the monarchy; it’s opposed to racism and seems oddly to believe that accidentally releasing prisoners is a subject of momentous significance.

Some of these prejudices seem to me to be splendid, a phrase which some liberals might find discomforting. Isn’t prejudice wrong in itself? This surely can’t be true. To be prejudiced is to hold a negative or positive attitude toward something habitually, so that when you encounter it you already have a certain opinion of it. (The word “prejudice” literally means “pre-judge”.) And this is surely true of almost everyone. Hardly anybody comes to the question of terrorism or the monarchy with an entirely blank mind, completely free of assumptions and value-judgments. We bring the burden of our previous experience unconsciously to bear on these topics, as well as being affected by the moral climate in which we live. There’s no impartiality on matters of racism or pedophilia, and quite rightly so. The problem for the media lies in establishing the facts about such crimes — whether they’ve actually happened, who perpetrated them, how they came about and so on. To be biased in a pejorative sense of the term means not to be morally neutral about the crimes themselves but to distort the evidence concerning them.

We view the world at an angle, and judge it from a certain perspective. God’s-eye standpoints are not to be had, as the phrase itself (“standpoints”) unwittingly suggests. For postmodern theory, all we have is a clash of competing perspectives, like an intellectual version of the marketplace, and those viewpoints that win out become known as the truth. This, however, is to misunderstand the concept of perspective. When I look at a cathedral, I see it from a specific angle; but I’m well aware that there are other vantage points from which it could be viewed, and my own perception of it takes these into account. It’s as though they’re invisibly present within it. I don’t imagine that the Gothic façade I’m seeing is all there is to the building. The same applies to intellectual debate. To have an angle on something is to be aware that other angles are possible, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all of equal value.

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In fact, nobody actually believes that any viewpoint on a subject is as good as any other. Nobody holds the opinion that the best way of treating a broken leg is to tickle the patient until he’s squirming hysterically on the floor. Some liberals, however, imagine that every point of view, like every person, is to be respected — not because it’s necessarily true, but because taken together these different standpoints add up to the truth. The truth, as Hegel remarked, is the whole. If our view of the world is distorted, it’s because it’s lopsided. But this is surely nonsense. One doesn’t arrive at the truth about ghosts by adding the view that they exist to the view that they don’t exist. The liberal case overlooks the fact that different opinions can be in outright conflict. And this, in turn, is because liberals feel uneasy at the idea of conflict. Instead, they tend to insist that all convictions should be respected, a piety which is thoroughly unpleasant. It’s unpleasant because it invites us to respect the beliefs of Himmler and Tommy Robinson. Trying to be nice to everybody just gets you into trouble. You shouldn’t hand Donald Trump and the right-wing press a victory by meekly resigning.

“The fight for the truth is on,” runs a BBC slogan. But so is the fight against bias, and the question is whether the two can be reconciled. One is expected to report the world as it is, without bias or prejudice; but what if the world itself is biased? What if reality is one-sided? If you want to reflect the way things are both accurately and neutrally, then you have a problem when one partner in a struggle has justice on its side and the other doesn’t. If you portray the Israelis and the Palestinians as being equally at fault, you buy your neutrality at the expense of the truth. This, at least, is the case for people known as moral realists. Moral realists maintain that activities like torture and genocide, when they take place, are objective features of the world. They’re not just a matter of what we make of certain events; rather, they are (or can be) facts, as much part of the world’s furniture as Claudia Winkleman or the town of Ramsbottom. In case this sounds too dogmatic, let’s remember that establishing what counts as a fact can be a ferociously complex business. All that’s being asserted is that phenomena like oppression and injustice aren’t just ways of seeing what’s going on, but are as much part of what’s going on as tanks and drones.

To claim that Israel has long treated Palestinians with gross injustice is to state what one considers to be a fact. We aren’t speaking here of opinions. If the claim is mistaken, then one needs to be shown why this is not a fact — why one’s evidence is flawed and partial, one’s reasoning is in error and one’s judgment is biased in all the most negative ways. If this can be successfully argued by an adversary, then one is bound to abandon one’s claim. If the claim is just, however, it means that the truth itself in this particular matter is one-sided. And how then is one to report it accurately without bias?

In its own way, each of these events has served to unite the country’s disparate Jewish community. Yet they came, too, after months and years of division — focused on Israel’s conduct during its bloody war in Gaza. For some British Jews, this has triggered deep unease, even pushing some to fundamentally reconsider their relationship to the Jewish state. All the while, as the Manchester attack so vividly shows, the specter of antisemitism is rising back home too.

For now, says Dave Rich, author of Everyday Hate and the policy director of the Community Security Trust (CST), which provides physical protection for Jewish communities, the splits have started to heal. “The weather,” he says, “has definitely changed.” Even so, these divides are far from eradicated, and depending on what happens in the Middle East, they may re-emerge, with consequences not just for Britain’s beleaguered Jewish community, but for anyone interested in this country’s foreign policy. 

There has always been an anti-Zionist Jewish Left. Organizations such as Na’amod consider Israel to be an apartheid state while Jewish Voice for Labour stood by Jeremy Corbyn while he was party leader. But the tensions that have emerged since October 7 were within the large Jewish majority that would call itself broadly Zionist: between those who had hitherto seen Israel as both refuge and inspiration, a light unto nations. Yet two years on from the Hamas massacre that sparked the war in Gaza, leading British rabbis were claiming that Israel’s operations conflicted with fundamental Jewish principles — a claim met by angry, vehement denials from people they’d long considered friends.

Outside the Jewish community, the rift is underreported, but I observed it close to home. Like many Jews, I absorbed a belief in Israel as part of my upbringing, and joined a Zionist youth group in my teens. I vividly remember the collective shock the last time an attack took place on Yom Kippur — in 1973, when Israel was invaded simultaneously by Egypt and Syria with support from a further 10 states, and at first seemed destined for oblivion.

A year after the Yom Kippur War, in 1974, my father co-founded the New North London Synagogue, now a thriving, progressive Orthodox institution with over 3,700 members. Last year, it was wracked by internal dispute when one of its rabbis, Lara Haft Yom Tov, wrote an essay that described Israeli politicians as “war criminals”, prompting resignations and claims that such statements “inflame antisemitic hysteria”.

The synagogue decided not to sack Yom Tov, but another crisis emerged in July this year. Head Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg joined more than 1,000 religious leaders both in Israel and across the diaspora in signing a letter that was highly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. He too faced strong criticism — though also received , as a man who has led his synagogue for 37 years, warm support.

Amid these verbal battles over the future of the Middle East, tensions had long been rising elsewhere. As Rich says, Jews were facing antisemitism long before Manchester, especially on university campuses and in and around schools. There were over 100 antisemitic incidents against Jewish schoolchildren in the first six months of the year, compared to fewer than 75 over the same period in 2023. Along with the apparent tolerance of extreme anti-Israel discourse, Rich tells me that this explains why an increasing number of British Jews began to wonder whether they still had a future in the UK, even if they were unsure where else they might go. Others, however, experienced a different type of insecurity, affecting their inner relationship with the Jewish state.

In the aftermath of October 7, most British Jews reacted instinctively, offering whatever support they could to its victims, and backing what they saw as a righteous military response. The attack awakened collective memories of the Holocaust, while many are connected by bonds of family and friendship to the victims. Others have relatives in Israel’s citizen army, which has been repeatedly mobilized over the last two years.

At first, the almost-immediate protests by pro-Palestinian activists against Israeli military strikes appeared to cement this unity. According to Jonathan Boyd, executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), which carries out frequent surveys of Anglo-Jewish opinion, there was a “natural tendency to circle the wagons, to seek out solidarity”. Many Jews chose to spend far more time with others from their own community.

A recent paper by the American trauma therapists Miri Bar-Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman suggested this process was intensified by the long-recognized condition known as “traumatic invalidation”. Psychologically wounded by the Hamas attacks, British Jews discovered that instead of expressing care and compassion, their non-Jewish friends and colleagues were exhibiting “a stunning mix of silence, blaming, excluding and even outright denying the atrocities of October 7”. Struggling to cope with shock and bereavement, they were told their feelings were invalid or inappropriate, “often by influential figures or groups” on whom they thought they could rely.

Yet as the war dragged on, Boyd says, these same feelings began erupting within the Jewish community itself. “The divisions exist within families and friendship groups,” he explains to me, “and they raise difficult questions.”

Rich believes the breakdown in British Jewry’s pro-Israel consensus can be dated to the end of the last ceasefire in March, and Israel’s decisions to cut off aid from international bodies such as the UN. This corresponded with the fraying of unity in Israel itself. With no clear end to the killing in sight, Rich adds, it seemed the country was “no longer unified” behind the war, as demonstrators demanded an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages at all costs.

Polling data from the JPR supports Rich’s analysis. In a survey timed for the first anniversary of October 7 last year, only a minority of British Jews thought Israel’s prosecution of the war might conflict with Jewish values. This year, the figure was above 50%. Since 2022, meanwhile, the proportion of Jews who identify as anti-Zionists has increased from 8% to 12%. The biggest shift has taken place among the Jewish youth who, of course, weren’t alive for the 1973 war which posed an existential threat to Israel, instead witnessing Israel through numerous rounds of conflict between Israel and Hamas, which have seen high Palestinian casualties.

At the same time, says Rich, British Jews know that the IDF is “made up of their cousins and their friends’ kids, and they know they’re not baby killers”. Yet by late spring 2025, it was also “quite obvious that terrible things were happening in Gaza”. This imposed an unbearable dilemma: “How do you express this in Britain when there are so many people out there who think Israel is the new Nazi Germany, and that if you even care remotely about Israel, you’re some kind of fascist?”

Faced with such questions, in the months before the ceasefire, some Jews found they could no longer agree to differ, let alone compromise, even if disagreement and debate have defined Jewish culture for many centuries. First came the rabbis’ letter signed by Wittenberg and more than 40 of his British colleagues. It condemned the “nihilistic” brutality exhibited by Hamas and supported Israel’s need to battle these “evil forces”. But the rabbis also said they could not condone the scale of civilian casualties, or, most controversially of all, what they claimed was “the use of starvation as a weapon of war”. They said the limits Israel had placed on humanitarian relief “contradict essential values of Judaism as we understand it”, especially the sanctity of human life and the requirement to exercise “mercy and compassion”.

To Israel’s defenders, both there and in Britain, this statement was based on lies. According to Netanyahu’s government, the UN’s claim that it had caused a famine in Gaza was fabricated. Israel’s supporters said it amounted to a “blood libel” — a modern version of the ancient calumny that Jews use Christian children’s blood to make unleavened bread at Passover. I asked one rabbi who signed the letter what he made of this. He said he felt he had had no choice but to speak out, and that if he hadn’t, his silence might make gentiles imagine that Judaism is a “terrible religion”.

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On 10 August, these bubbling frustrations spilled out in public, at the end of what was supposed to be a “national march” in support of the hostages. Outside the gates of Downing Street, in front of hundreds of people, two senior rabbis were booed offstage. Charley Baginsky and Josh Levy, the joint leaders of Britain’s Progressive Judaism movement, had spoken of their horror at the October 7 atrocities. Their hecklers were fellow Jews, in whose eyes the pair’s sin was to call for an immediate end to the war, the resumption of unlimited aid into Gaza, and the creation of a Palestinian state. After the rabbis were hustled away, another speaker was loudly cheered when she praised the crowd for ejecting them. According to Baginsky, “there were moments when I thought we were literally going to get lynched”.

The incident triggered shockwaves. The Board of Deputies, British Jews’ main representative body, called the rabbis’ treatment “disgraceful”, and a statement by more than two dozen Jewish organizations warned it would “give strength to our enemies”. And if that implies there is a link between commenting on Israel and the safety of Jews here in Britain — without, for a moment, denying the agency of antisemitic attackers themselves — Baginsky says she has been warned that by criticizing Israel, she encourages hatred of Jews, as if “the only response to antisemitism is to support Israel unequivocally”.

If the rabbis’ letter represents one end of Jewish opinion, Jake Wallis Simons represents the other. The former editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of a new book on Western antisemitism is one of Britain’s more strident pro-Israelis, saying that even measured criticism of the Jewish state is liable to “become ammo for the other side”. (Full disclosure: I worked for Wallis Simons at the Jewish Chronicle.)

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Wallis Simons is unsusprisingly forthright in denying that Israel did cause a famine in Gaza. “So far as I’m aware,” he tells me, “all the pictures of people starving have turned out to be of those with congenital issues or health problems like cancer. Before the war, there was death or starvation in Gaza because it’s run by jihadis and there was no proper welfare program for poor people.”

In his view, the Trump-brokered ceasefire underlines something most of the West has forgotten — “the virtues of strength”. Now, he says, democracies “need to embark upon a soul-searching of their own. How can it be that almost every single leader allowed himself or herself to be brainwashed and gaslit by Hamas and its international sympathizers so that all the pressure and condemnation was directed at Israel?”

Nevertheless, Wallis Simons is willing to criticize broader Israeli policy, arguing that Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s two far-Right cabinet ministers, have done “huge damage” — because they have “given Israel’s haters exactly the words and so-called evidence that they need” to accuse it of genocide.

If all this is now, what of the future?

As far as UK antisemitism is concerned, Rich is optimistic that the universal condemnation by British political leaders not only of the Manchester atrocity but also the banning of Maccabi fans is a “pivotal moment”. The Government, he thinks, is very serious about combating antisemitic violence. To be sure, some Maccabi fans have expressed racist views and clashed with rivals, as seen in Amsterdam when their team played Ajax last year. But as he points out, most of the Israeli fans were victims, not instigators of violence. Moreover, there have been English clubs with aggressive supporters too. Somehow or other, the police have usually managed to deal with them.

In Rich’s view, then, “the ban is an absolute disgrace, but at least it’s being seen for what it is: extremists getting to say who can watch football. The police are either saying they can’t police the streets because they have lost control, or that they don’t want to for fear of upsetting them.”

That leaves the question of British Jews’ future relationship with Israel. If, under the terms of Trump’s peace plan, Hamas really does disarm and abandons its hopes of power, the dilemmas and divisions of recent months will likely vanish. But if, as many fear, the war restarts and Israel renews its onslaught, they are far more likely to sharpen.

In such circumstances, Israel’s progress towards international pariah status would probably continue, affecting everything from the country’s participation in the Eurovision song contest to the close cooperation in intelligence and security between Israel and allies such as Britain. Historically, the UK’s Jewish community has played a significant role in influencing British government policy, not only over the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but on issues such as Iran. Arguably, this influence has already weakened, as shown by Keir Starmer’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, although, for now, no such things exist — a move Starmer himself long resisted, and one condemned by many Jews as a “reward” for Hamas. If the community becomes seriously divided again, this influence would further diminish — even as the Government looks anxiously at the challenge of organized political Islam in Labour strongholds.

For many British Jews, the past two years have triggered a psychological readjustment, which has made something that once seemed unproblematic more challenging: balancing their British and Jewish identities. Then again, as Rich points out, “few Jews alive today know what it is to live in a world without Israel, and the Manchester attack is a reminder for everyone, whatever they think about the war in Gaza, of why Israel exists”.

Two years after the October 7 massacre, Britain’s Jews feel more vulnerable than they have for many decades, yet are united in wanting to give peace a chance. Their misfortune is that, over the short term, its prospects largely rests with others.

And though the last few weeks have shown hints of optimism — the hostages are home, and Gaza is free from the buzz of IDF drones — the Holy Land’s basic problems feel just as intractable. Whatever Donald Trump might claim, this truth can ultimately be encapsulated in his deal’s very last line. “The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians,” the document proclaims, “to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence.” This, after all, has been the promise of peace negotiations since I was in the army — and so far they’ve achieved pretty much nothing.

We know, of course, that the current Israeli government, the most Right-wing coalition ever assembled in the nation’s history, has no intention of facilitating the creation of a Palestinian state. Long before he formed this government, in late 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu spent his entire career preventing that very possibility. As far back as his incitement against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the negotiation over the Oslo Accords — which led to Rabin’s assassination in 1995 — Netanyahu has been a vehement and consistent enemy of Palestinian statehood.

As recently as 6 October 2023, indeed, Netanyahu thought he could “manage the occupation” rather than putting an end to it through a political compromise. Hamas’s massacre the following day smashed that idea. But even if it hadn’t, Netanyahu’s colleagues would still have remained, with Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich both eager to dispossess the Palestinians and annex certainly the West Bank if not Gaza too. Either way, the triumvirate aspires to a very different future from that envisioned in the Trump plan Netanyahu has reluctantly endorsed.

If, as some fear, the Prime Minister ultimately manages to derail the plan, the demolition of Gaza and the slaughter of its Palestinian population will continue, even as some Jews hope to resettle the territory themselves. Those Palestinians remaining in Gaza will be squeezed into less than a quarter of the territory and subjected to conditions resembling a cross between a ghetto and a prison camp. This is all part of the openly professed government target of “encouraging” them to leave.

As for the West Bank, once conditions in Gaza require fewer Israeli troops, the illegal and plausibly apartheid regime in place there already will accelerate the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the territory, whose initial phases include moving the rural population into the urban centers in the south; taking over and demolishing the refugee camps in the north; separating both regions from each other; and progressively turning Palestinian communities into isolated outposts. Whether or not Israel succeeds in annexing parts of the West Bank, it aims to perpetuate a sense of poverty, siege, intimidation and despair intended to similarly “encourage” Palestinians in the West Bank to quit the territory altogether.

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By Omer Bartov

Many decades have passed since the start of Israel’s occupation in 1967, and its transformation into a nation ruling more or less equal numbers of Palestinians and Israelis. One of developments since has been the growing dehumanization of Palestinians in the collective Jewish Israeli mind. The “social death” that Palestinians have undergone, insulated as they are behind the security barrier, means they’re encountered by Israelis only as a population to be controlled and oppressed. That becomes clear enough if you turn on the television, with one Channel 14 host claiming he doesn’t “sleep well” unless more of Gaza is flattened. Or else go on social media, with many comparing Palestinians to “Amalak”, a Biblical enemy that God commanded the Israelites to annihilate. As late as August, a Haaretz poll found that 82% of Israelis were untroubled by reports of famine in the Strip.

These societal attitudes are also reflected in law. Palestinian citizens of Israel still enjoy equal rights under Israeli law, with many pursuing successful careers from medicine to the law. Yet the Nation State Law, passed in 2018, defines Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people, and grants them the exclusive right to national self-determination in the country. At the core of this transformation is the gradual emergence of a thoroughgoing apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories, but increasingly in Israel proper as well. This is already manifested in the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel as an undesirable population that should similarly be “encouraged” to leave. As Haaretz again reports, over half of Israeli Jews now back expelling their Arab compatriots wholesale, up from 31% in 2003.

No less important, these hardening attitudes are now boomeranging back against Israeli Jews. The country’s beleaguered Attorney General and Supreme Court, seen before October 7 as the last bastions of the rule of law and civil rights for Jewish citizens, now remain silent in view of the widespread severe abuses of international law vis-à-vis Palestinians under occupation. More than that, they ignore or even condone the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions of the IDF in Gaza. Taken together, these institutions can no longer be expected to act in defense of Jewish citizens protesting their regime’s brutalities.

In other words, if Netanyahu scuttles Trump’s plan, using his own infamous bag of tricks, and relying on Trump’s notoriously short attention span, the future of Israel — quite apart from, but also related to, the catastrophic fate of Palestinians — is dire indeed. Even before the war, secular Israeli Jews feared that the growing demographic weight and political clout of their religious compatriots would change the nature of Israeli society. Since October 7, these fears, exacerbated by intensifying messianic rhetoric and the erosion of the rule of law, as well as the deteriorating economic situation, have led thousands of young professionals and their families to leave the country, with many more considering their own migration. Certainly, this exodus won’t be counterbalanced by the influx of Jews making Aliyah from the diaspora, notwithstanding the many examples of genuine antisemitism they face in Europe and elsewhere.

If this trajectory were to continue, in the coming decades Israeli society risks changing even in such strongholds of tolerance as Tel Aviv, with Israeli nationalism focused not only on its ethnic but also on its religious Jewish identity — one which rejects all other non-orthodox versions of Judaism. Religious coercion would greatly increase, and secular, progressive, and liberal Jewish life in Israel risk diminishing into ever-more isolated enclaves. Israel may not be the next Iran, but a mix of theocracy and authoritarianism may well be the destiny for a state largely founded by secular socialist Zionists who had rebelled against what they saw as the stranglehold of backward-looking religious leaders in the diaspora.

In foreign policy, too, Israel would suffer. If it were to become the apartheid state its critics have long accused it of being, it wouldn’t be able to maintain strong economic, political, and military ties with its main European allies and the United States. It would gradually lose the support of growing parts of the diaspora: even as things stand today, around two-in-three American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. None of this is helped, of course, by the claim of Israel itself — a claim disputed by many Jews living beyond its borders — that it represents the Jewish people as a collective.

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As an increasingly unstable and feeble pariah state, Israel could continue to exist for a couple of decades: mostly, perhaps, because it may still be perceived as a strategic asset by the United States. But the weaker it got, and the more extremist it became, the less of an asset Israel would be for any rational actor in the White House. All the while, keeping down millions of occupied Palestinians would only become harder, all of which would distract from Israel’s external security. In an unstable and violent region, that’ll only make it less attractive as a strategic ally to Europe or the US.

Taken together, this is not a country that I would want to live in, nor wish for my children and grandchildren to make a life in. It would also be the very opposite of what the visionaries of Zionism, the prophets of the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — or the Jewish religious sages throughout the generations, had hoped and prayed for.

In the long run, of course, the grim reality may lead Israelis to develop a more robust civil rights movement together with their Palestinian cousins, in a country which, combined with the occupied territories, now has a population of seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians. Optimists might even suggest that this will culminate in what was called for during the heyday of the Oslo negotiations: a “state of all its citizens”. But that is far from certain, considering how oppression and racism seems sure to generate ever more extremism: whether from Hamas or hill-top settlers. We may want to believe that, eventually, Israel will go through the same process as South Africa in the early Nineties. But there is no assurance that a Mandela or a de Klerk will emerge, and even if they do, current conditions in South Africa demonstrate that dismantling apartheid does not undo the long-term damage it inflicts on society.

This is why we must hope that the vague promises and hopes expressed in Trump’s plan do end up opening the path to another future. Despite the justified cynicism and skepticism expressed by its critics, and the obvious bad-faith of many of the politicians and advisers associated with it, the President’s plan broadly points in the right direction.

It’s clear, in the end, that the Gaza Strip must be ruled by its Palestinian population, and that it must be joined with the West Bank as a single political entity: the only way it can hope to be economically viable. Once the necessity of this process is recognized, it must also be acknowledged that the Jewish and Palestinian populations of this land have no choice but to find a way to share it with equality, justice, security, and dignity for all. The goal, then, is not to determine who has a greater right on the land, or who has committed worse atrocities, or who was there first — but to devise a plan that would allow both Jews and Palestinians to rule over themselves and to live side-by-side with members of the other group.

Such a blueprint actually exists, and the vague outlines of Trump’s plan do not in any way contradict it. That blueprint, known as “A Land for All”, and previously known as “Two States, One Homeland”, was founded under joint Israeli-Palestinian leadership in 2012. Now led by the Israeli Jew May Pundak, and the Palestinian citizen of Israel, Dr Rula Hardal, the movement has variously involved journalists, scholars and activists, both Israelis and Palestinians and on both sides of the Green Line.

Overall, the plan envisions a confederation between the States of Israel and Palestine, located more or less along the 1967 borders, and based on shared principles of equality, freedom and dignity. All the while, it would distinguish between citizenship and residence: so that Israeli citizens would be allowed to live in Palestine, and Palestinian citizens would be allowed to live in Israel, as long as they respected the laws of both states. Because the infrastructure of the land on both sides of the 1967 ceasefire Green Line is so inextricably linked — true from water, to electricity, to the “972” dialcode that unites Ramallan phones with their Haifan cousins — this confederation’s institutions would have to create mechanisms for sharing resources and institutions.

In this Israel-Palestine Confederation, people would have their own national identity, and each state would enjoy the right of return for its group to be implemented as it sees fit within its own borders. But in the more distant future, the confederation, having shown that Jews and Palestinians can live productively, creatively, and safely side-by-side, may decide to transform itself into a single state of all its citizens — not through a violent struggle, but through a process of reconciliation, mutual respect and trust, and a recognition of the benefits of diversity and the creative power of fusing cultures and traditions, rather than striving to eradicate them.

Implementing this plan would require a radical change in Israeli political thinking and leadership — but also among Palestinians. Hamas is clearly no longer a plausible partner, if it ever was, meaning the only viable alternative is the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah. But the PA is both deeply corrupt and discredited as a collaborator in the occupation. It hardly helps that, just like Hamas, the PA’s security forces have often been accused of torture, something which is incidentally also true of Israel itself.

But just as there are Jewish Israelis today who might yet be able to offer a different vision after decades of failure, so too can new Palestinian leaders emerge. Some potential leaders are currently in Israeli jails. Others are still unknown to us, or perhaps even to themselves. But once the political space for change is created, I believe that more pragmatic leaders will invariably emerge, as has happened more than once before when nations emerge from the darkness of colonialism and oppression.

If and when such a confederation is eventually created, it could become the very light to the Gentiles that some of the early and more humanistically inclined prophets of Zionism had hoped it would become. A city on a hill, not a pariah among the nations. And if you accuse me of utopianism, amid the slaughter in Gaza and the bubbling violence in the West Bank? Well, barely a century ago, the idea of a Jewish state in the Holy Land would have been dismissed as utopian too, and indeed was by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Yet as Theodor Herzl famously said, “if you will it, it will not remain a dream.” Besides, the status quo doesn’t need dreamers to condemn it: continue down this path and extremism will only grow. As for myself, I may not live long enough to see this different future, if it ever comes at all. But I pray that one day, my grandchildren, and the grandchildren of my Palestinian friends, will be able to experience the realization of that promise — and finally consign the region’s endless wars to history.

Contrary to the way this agreement has been sold by the White House and Benjamin Netanyahu, then, it offers Hamas an opportunity to assess, while not being bombed, the ways and means for it to continue its rule over Gaza. Given the carnage, the Islamist outfit will likely remain on a tightrope, playing Palestinian hatred of Israel off against the desolation it has provoked. Islamic history offers a long record of martyrdom losing its appeal when the unrighteous prove stronger and more fierce than expected. Hamas is calculating that with both Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners safely exchanged, fear of a long-lasting insurgency will keep it in power. It’s a decent bet.

With any luck, the 250 Palestinians in jail for life, and who are now being released, might also reenergize the resistance. Hamas’ stubborn fearsomeness, fortified by all those tunnels, has certainly guaranteed that outsiders will approach Trump’s indispensable idea of an “international stabilization force” for post-war Gaza as a worthy recommendation best staffed by others. Are American, Emirati, Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, European, or, least likely of all, Palestinian Authority (PA), forces really going to patrol the Strip if Hamas fighters remain there to ambush them?

If Trump can finally get a stabilization force into the Strip — and that’s a big if — a slow but bloody harassment would likely be enough to keep the force’s effectiveness similar to that of a typical UN peacekeeping mission: basically useless. If Qatar calls off Al Jazeera, and the Saudis tell their myriad press outlets to limit Gazan reporting, Hamas may find it hard to show the world that other Arabs are thumping on Palestinians. But that potential advantage is nonetheless unlikely to convince them from jumping into the Gaza morass, especially when everyone from the Gulfies to Egypt held their distance from the Palestinian imbroglio.

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Hamas is not invincible

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

The biggest beneficiary of such a force, at least in the short term, would be the Israelis. The burden of policing Gaza would be lightened. Lots of Arabs now deal with the Jewish state, those within the Abraham Accords pretty publicly. The Gaza conflict may not have changed those exchanges much: given the private distaste that many Arab leaders have for Palestinians. The recent leaked Pentagon documents about regional cooperation against Iran and other threats since October 2023 surely reflect what’s been true since at least the First Iraq War in 1991, when many Palestinians sided with Saddam Hussein. But no Arab ruler has ever asked their soldiers to bleed for the Israelis — or the Palestinians. Across each of their four wars with Israel, Arab rulers definitely weren’t vying to create a Palestinian state. So unless the Gazans bring down Hamas from the inside, the group will likely rule the Strip’s rubble since no one else is going to volunteer.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) obviously need a break from two years of constant combat. Even among the most hawkish of Israelis who believe the Palestinians — not just Hamas — share the guilt for what happened on October 7, war weariness is almost universal. In Gaza and on the West Bank, Israel hit the ceiling of how much manpower it can continuously deploy. It’s now crystal clear that most Israelis adamantly don’t want to reoccupy Gaza. Most Israelis would probably love to see an international stabilization force move in, even if such a deployment curtailed Israeli actions. Jerusalem obviously can’t trust Cairo to keep arms from crossing over the Egyptian-Gaza border. The Israelis might trust the Americans to stop arms from flowing through Hamas tunnels, but that would mean turning US troops, who would have to build a substantial security perimeter, into both an occupying force and a target for Hamas.

Limited Israeli occupation therefore still seems inevitable. Walling off the Palestinians in Gaza didn’t work brilliantly before. Rebuilding the Strip will offer ample opportunity to Hamas, or indeed other militants, to divert materials for underground bunkers. Unless the Israelis can check everything that comes into the Strip, Hamas or others could also begin to reconstitute crude but deadly missiles and mortars. The opportunities here for corruption and anti-Israeli sympathies, especially if Arab forces given policing duties, would surely be more than Israel could bear. Jerusalem might accept Americans, maybe Europeans, to verify Palestinian behavior. But if Hamas regains freedom of movement throughout all of Gaza — if Israel doesn’t have internal checkpoints from which to launch rapid operations — the IDF could once again find itself committing much larger forces later: with all the death and destruction that’ll inevitably entail. Without a Western-led stabilization force, willing to commit to years in Gaza, the Israelis will somehow need to fill the void.

All the while, Israelis hope the cessation of hostilities will make their country less of a pariah. They have traditionally had a close relationship with Europe, and would eagerly welcome less hostility. Images of Gaza in rubble likely won’t animate as much anger as those of active urban warfare. All Israelis would like to see the erosion of American support stopped; Netanyahu has no interest in bushwhacking the President’s peace-making. Trump’s current Gaza plans, as vague as they are, seem to be less delusional than his first-draft, “Las-Vegas-by-the-Sea” dreamscape. The harsh realities of postwar Gaza will tax Trump’s attention span, however, especially once it becomes obvious the stabilization force has zero chance of working without US troops entering harm’s way. Nor will a ceasefire resuscitate the lost affection on the American Left for Israel, especially worrying when their critiques increasingly cut to the very heart of the Zionist project. Pro-Israeli sympathies on the American Right may be somewhat safer — unless Trump actually sends US troops off on yet another Middle Eastern adventure.

For the moment, then, all Trump has actually achieved so far is the hostage-prisoner exchange. Netanyahu has agreed to the release of several stone-cold killers, though drew a red line at Marwan Barghouti, a significant player in the Second Intifada whom an Israeli court found guilty of the murder of five Israelis. Politically talented even behind bars, and fluent in Hebrew, Barghouti is undeniably charismatic. Since he’s been in jail for 23 years, he’s also untouched by the rampant malversation that defines the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Arafat’s successor.

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Gaza is the endpoint of liberal democracy

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

Were Barghouti freed, he might try to force new presidential and legislative elections. Palestinian democracy died in 2006, when Fatah, the most powerful member of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, refused to recognize Hamas’s victory in legislative elections: something Fatah achieved with the approval of both Israel and the United States. Today, though, Barghouti might well triumph in a similar vote.

With more access to the press, Barghouti could make a lot of noise in favor of a two-state solution; unlike a growing number of Palestinians, and just about all Israelis, he still seems to like the idea. Israelis surely fear his disruptive potential: even without an election victory, Barghouti might be able to engineer a third intifada on the West Bank, especially when violence by Jewish settlers only ever seems to worsen. The IDF and the internal security service, Shin Bet, have deployed a lot of manpower to the far side of the Jordan to ensure that another insurrection doesn’t happen.

Most Israelis and Palestinians, let alone all those in the West who’ve watched the Gaza war with horror, will surely cheer if the bloodletting truly ceases. It’s likely, however, that what’s left of the Hamas leadership and Netanyahu, the IDF, and Shin Bet are all looking down the road, trying to figure out how “peace” might reward the enemy. In his peacenik aspirations, President Trump appears well-intentioned. But good intentions really don’t matter, least of all in the Holy Land. Money doesn’t actually matter that much either, once the fighting actually starts. If it did, the Sunni Arab Gulf states would be powerhouses, easily a match for Iran and capable of suppressing Yemen’s ragtag Houthis.

As for Gaza and the West Bank, the preeminent question today is whether the Palestinians’ physical and emotional exhaustion leads them to recalculate the costs of their beliefs and actions. They have by far lost the most since October 7, 2023. If they have changed, and that finally depletes Hamas’s reserves of manpower, then Trump’s diplomacy might actually be the start of something positive, far-Right Israeli intransigence notwithstanding. Then again, optimism is usually a very bad bet in the Middle East.

The second was that they were utterly, totally wrong. This was only discovered by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, when he learned from his Arab friends — wealthy young men like himself, who were sons of princely potentates — that some Arab rulers would be interested in opening diplomatic relations with Israel if the US President were to ask them.

Trump handed the suggestion to his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon-Mobil, who had two decades of experience in negotiating with oil-country dictators and kings. (I once sat next to him in Astana in a small meeting with Kazakhstan’s then-dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, which should have been a clash because of a hugely costly production failure by Exxon’s Italian partner, but instead became a contest in amiability.)

Tillerson had already criticized Kushner’s intrusions in US diplomacy, but nevertheless passed on the idea to his Near East Bureau. Its response was prompt and categorical: no Arab state would follow Egypt and Jordan in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel — or even discuss that possibility — until a “process” was solidly underway to implement the “two-state solution” with the establishment of a Palestinian state.

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Why Israel had no choice

By Edward Luttwak

The experts further warned that any attempt to push this non-starter would greatly damage US prestige in the region. So Trump sent Tillerson on the path to his resignation by telling young Kushner to go ahead and try his best. He was met with striking success. The Saudis readily agreed to open their airspace to Israeli civilian overflights, and permitted business travel from Israel, though they delayed a response on diplomatic relations. So did Oman, which had already received Netanyahu in 2018, and which also allowed over-flights.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, for their part, swiftly agreed to normalize diplomatic relations, as did Morocco. Israeli embassies were quickly established in each of those countries, while travel and commerce surged.

Kushner’s success was quite enough to convince Trump that the government’s Middle East experts were best kept out of any serious US diplomacy in the Middle East. And so Trump promptly gave the Gaza negotiation to his son-in-law and Steve Witkoff, a successful property developer uncontaminated by any faux diplomatic expertise.

In their negotiation over Gaza, Kushner and Witkoff had a determined ally in Egypt’s dictator, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who had come to power in 2013 by removing the elected Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohamed Morsi. When Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Gaza offshoot, celebrated their victory on October 7 two years ago, el-Sisi was directly called upon to join the fight. But that threat vanished as soon as Israel started demolishing Gaza’s high-rises and fancy condominiums. Nobody in Egypt wanted to share that fate.

It was enough for Witkoff and Kushner to negotiate a prisoner/hostage swap accompanied by a final ceasefire, which Hamas’s surviving leaders had no choice but to accept when Qatar made it clear that it would not pay for more hopeless resistance. In endorsing Trump’s plan, as negotiated by Witkoff, Qatar promised to rebuild Gaza; Israel promised to release prisoners and to withdraw in stages; Hamas promised to release the hostages and hostage corpses; but nobody promised to send an army to protect the hapless people of Gaza from Hamas and clan gunmen.

As for that Palestinian state much in demand from Berkeley, California to Rome, Italy, neither Egypt, nor Israel, nor Qatar, is likely to put much effort into it, after the one so carefully planned in Oslo, in the Nineties, self-detonated.

Trump, Kushner and Witkoff have been vindicated, for now, by the currently holding and the return of the hostages. Can we assume, then, that all the governments which have recognized “Palestine” as a state will immediately drop any lesser priorities, such as helping Ukraine, to actually construct this Palestine, complete, of course, with a freely elected parliament?

While incidents of this kind — ramming followed by stabbing — are common in Israel, the Manchester attack targeted Jews and Judaism, not Israelis. In the coming days, critics of Israel will no doubt insist, yet again, that anti-Zionism in no way implies antisemitism. But it is no longer possible to ignore the link between the two. For there has been an unprecedented spike in antisemitism since October 7, 2023, and it has been fueled by the concerted efforts of what has been described as “the Israel delegitimization machine”. The machine is a device with many moving parts: international organizations, NGOs, news media, even teachers’ unions. It gathers data and produces reports, but its purpose is not to establish facts or determine truth. (That’s clear enough from the BBC’s decision to air the claim that IDF soldiers are deliberately shooting Gazan children in different body parts depending on the day of the week, or the U.N.’s dubious assertion that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within 48 hours without humanitarian aid.) It is to manufacture global consensus on a single, pressing point: that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is so morally abhorrent as to be intolerable to all civilized nations.

It won’t do just to blame all this on ancient and perennial hostility to Jews and the Jewish state, though that is part of the problem. At least as important is what the machine’s constituent parts learned in college, where progressive doctrines flow like milk to newborns. They took courses in critical race theory, intersectionality, postcolonialism, and other neo-Marxist ideas, all of which presuppose that the West’s signature combination of liberal democracy and capitalism is systemically unjust. Marx taught that the point of such ideas is not to interpret the world, but to change it. Having taken that lesson to heart, they now use their jobs as platforms to advance revolutionary action in the service of the latest cause — being sure, in this age of virtue-signaling, to be seen doing so.

Some, no doubt, serve the machine without fully understanding the violence that real revolution entails. But radical activists, to whom opinion-making elites have outsourced their political conscience, regard half measures as useless. Establishing universal freedom and equality requires using politics to help demolish existing social and political orders. This means, in the first instance, destroying foundations of national life that have been hallowed by time and tradition.

That was the goal of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, which argued that the US was founded not in 1776, but in the year when enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia. The 14 August 2019 issue of The New York Times, which launched the 1619 Project on the 400th anniversary of the slaves’ arrival, included essays attacking capitalism and advocating universal health care. Hannah-Jones dismissed weighty criticisms of the Project’s erroneous claims and scattergun scholarship because her critics — leading American historians like James McPherson, Allen Guelzo, and Sean Wilentz — were mostly white men. Officially blessed with a Pulitzer Prize, the Project was turned into a curriculum for primary and secondary school students; by 2020, it was being taught in 4,500 schools nationwide. But perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from the 1619 Project was that we’d entered a post-truth era, where strong emotions trump evidence and rational argument.

Six years later — after Covid, BLM and Antifa, the birth of the censorship-industrial complex, and 10/7 — the machine is applying that lesson beyond national borders, not just to the reinterpretation of the past, but to the construction of the present. And at the center of that construction, the one place, as a popular meme proclaims, where all the West’s ills intersect, is Palestine. This totalizing approach has something for everyone, from old boomer protesters in socks and sandals to young nihilists in keffiyehs, while simultaneously following Saul Alinsky’s advice in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” In other words, attack something concrete that is emblematic of the whole you wish to destroy: in this case, Israel.

Yet neither the machine nor the Western activists who seek to “globalize the Intifada” seem to have noticed that attempts to liberate ostensibly oppressed populations by attacking the foundations of their civilization have an unbroken record of horrific failure, from the Soviet Union and the Third Reich to North Korea. History repeats itself. And, so far, the tragedy and farce of current events has, yet again, followed the pattern established at the primal scene of all future revolutions: the French Revolution, in which the pursuit of lofty democratic ideals rapidly degenerated into civil war and terror, and ended with Napoleon’s coup.

Reading A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution — edited by the distinguished historians François Furet and Mona Ozouf, and published in 1989, the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille — one discovers that the Revolution’s radical ambition was unlimited. It held out, not just to France, but to everyone, the “boundless promise” of an escape from social corruptions and injustices. It was meant to be the final solution to the riddle of history: a “total event” in which “men sought to resolve all their problems at once — political, social, and moral — and to change themselves thoroughly and completely”. The first step in constructing this utopia of liberty, equality, and fraternity was to raze the old social and political order and jackhammer its foundations.

Revolutionary destruction proceeded in ways all too familiar today. Cultural and religious artifacts, including monuments, statues, paintings, books, icons, and altars, were smashed and burned with a fervor that justified the coining, in 1794, of a new word: “vandalism”. Drained of spiritual substance, religion was repurposed as a political force: a campaign of de-Christianization swept the land, even as Christ’s example was invoked in support of revolutionary ideas like the “universal fraternity” of men. Catholic priests were persecuted; churches were looted and closed; quasi-religious cults, including that of Reason and of the Supreme Being, were established. Much like George Floyd and Luigi Mangione, revolutionary leaders achieved secular sanctification in iconic paintings like Jacques-Louis David’s depiction of the murdered fanatic Jean-Paul Marat.

The Revolution moved quickly to gain control of historical time as well as political space. Because it was to replace Christ’s ministry as “the beginning of eternity”, the Christian calendar had to be scrapped, with Year I beginning on the day the Republic was proclaimed in 1792. The first version of the calendar comically presumed that nature itself would submit to the imperatives of the rational will. There were to be “ten months of equal length, divided into ‘weeks’ of ten ten-hour days”. These months would bear names — Bastille, People, Republic, Unity, Liberty — suited to molding the “new man”. But the plan required too many calendrical interpolations and adjustments to be workable. Nature ultimately triumphed over history: the final calendar included 12 months with seasonal names like Nivôse, Pluviôse, and Ventôse, which Thomas Carlyle characteristically translated as Snowous, Rainous, and Windous.

Ideological hubris has always been eminently mockable. But the Revolution’s guiding assumptions — that politics can do anything; that everything is political; and that revolution must be total — are no laughing matter, not least because the communist and fascist horrors of the 20th century have done little to diminish their popularity.

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Glastonbury’s hateful chorus of approval

By Howard Jacobson

Max Weber captured the intransigence of social and political reality when he described politics as “the slow boring of hard boards”. The Revolution supposed, on the contrary, that reality posed no serious obstacle to its aims. When the revolutionary spirit failed to achieve its objectives (a daily occurrence), “the perversity of adverse wills” was to blame. The fantasy that politics could do anything fueled paranoia — counterrevolutionaries were presumed to be around every corner — and furnished innumerable justifications for scapegoating violence. It also encouraged a psychotic rejection of the significance of observable phenomena, for in this atmosphere of universal suspicion, “what could be seen was not what really existed: reality was a lie”. Nor were there safe ways to steer clear of the total presence of politics: silence, hesitation, indifference, and fence-sitting on political questions suggested that one harbored counterrevolutionary tendencies and deserved, so to speak, to be canceled. And the assumption that revolution must comprehensively reject the established rules of society meant that its main motions were illegal. People grew used to committing what, until yesterday, were crimes — including, in the end, killing their fellow citizens.

In brief, the Revolution was unthinkable without a near-universal unmooring of thought from logic, reason, and the actual conditions of human life. It’s easy to imagine something like this happening today (many would say that it already is), especially because this unmooring was accelerated by the discovery that even “democratic” revolutions cannot tolerate the free flow of information and opinion. The Revolution initially embraced freedom of the press; but unfiltered public opinion, which reflected the actual life of the people, turned out to be inconveniently diverse. What was needed was the top-down formation of a unified “public spirit”. But stage-managing consensus proved impossible, and the September Law of Suspects, passed in 1793, allowed the Revolutionary Tribunal to arrest and execute journalists and publicly burn their writings.

Thankfully, no new Robespierre has as yet emerged to guide the revolutionary energies of groups united by little more than their antipathy to the West. But the machine’s cartoonish shadow-plays of good and evil are produced by people just as sanctimonious and anti-democratic as the Jacobins. In the US, they are currently at the astroturfing-and-censoring stage of manufacturing public spirit, including issuing strong warnings about the threat populism poses to its increasingly detested political brand: “Our Democracy.” (Of course, the Trump administration’s heavy-handed approach to free speech hasn’t helped.) The Europeans have gone further still, canceling elections in Romania, banning a leading candidate in France, and preparing to outlaw the most popular political party in Germany.

The machine nevertheless promotes insane allegiances and feeds fantasies like those of “Queers for Palestine”, or of prime ministers whose pledges to recognize a Palestinian state assume that Israel can continue to live alongside an enemy dedicated to its annihilation. Most important, it targets the people of Israel for the same reason the Revolution attacked the Catholic Church in France: because they founded, along with the ancient Greeks, the ancien régime it seeks to overthrow — the Western civilizational order that emerged in the creative tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The Jews’ survival for more than three millennia, to say nothing of their present flourishing in the Land of Israel, constitutes an intolerable rebuke to the revolutionary consciousness.

Taking its cue from the 1619 Project, the delegitimization of Israel imputes to it the sin of systemic racism. By invoking the memory of white-ruled South Africa, the widespread accusation that Israel is an apartheid state adds the stench of fascism to its target. (Wikipedia, a reliable arm of the machine, provides 25,000 words on “Israeli apartheid”; 16,000 on “Racism in Israel”; and 10,000 on “Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany”.) Convincing people that the world’s only Jewish state is as genocidally racist as the Third Reich doesn’t just give comfort to antisemites. It helps make the case that the West, built on foundations rotten with chauvinism and hypocrisy, is well and truly irredeemable.

Ignored and suppressed for too long, however, reality always has the last laugh. Run mostly by intellectually lazy people, for whom radicalism is a fashion, not a cause worth dying for, the Israel delegitimization machine may nevertheless hasten the collapse of the brittle civilizational order on which it rests, and which it so thoughtlessly despises. The French diplomat Talleyrand is said to have remarked to Napoleon, “One can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.” Have the mandarins who run the machine considered that they, too, need a place to sit, and maybe even think?

I can say safely that nobody understands the economic and political consequences of Donald Trump. I am not likening his policies to one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. But what the two have in common is radical unpredictability. In quantum mechanics, unpredictability arises at the time of measurement. Economists have the same problem with Trump. We cannot look at the current slew of economic data to see where this is going. If you are an anti-Trump economic evangelist, you are very likely to get things wrong, just as economists did with Brexit or Trump’s first term.

I expect that the US economy will probably be fine. Before you jump to the conclusion that I am a Trump supporter, I can assure you that I am not. Nor was I a Brexit supporter, though I was critical of the self-defeating arguments of the Remain campaign. I see similar dynamics at work in the US right now. Trump’s critics, both in the US and Europe, keep on underestimating him with predictions of imminent gloom.

They predicted that his tariffs would raise inflation. So far that has not happened. I don’t think it will. Some also predicted that the US stock market would soon crash. In fact, Europeans celebrated the collapse in the S&P 500 that followed the Liberation Day tariffs. They erroneously relied on the markets as a corrective mechanism to frustrate Trump’s tariffs. That did not happen. The markets recovered and never looked back. The overall level of tariffs today is at least as high as those announced by Trump on 2 April. They are bound to get higher still, now that he has slapped a 100% tariff on branded pharmaceutical products and a 50% tariff on Ikea furniture.

It does not look like the stock market will do us the favor of crashing during the Trump presidency. It is quite possible that the S&P 500 will rise from its current level of around 6,400 to 10,000. Market valuations could rise from the stratospheric to the mesospheric to the exospheric. Prices will crash eventually. But that might not happen until the next Democratic president.

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Trump’s monumentalist aesthetic

By Adam Ellwanger and John J. Waters

The economic success I expect to see is that of a last hurrah of a declining power. It will be a hell of a party, with the fake glitter of a Mar-a-Lago ballroom: lights, music and attention-deflecting smoke and mirrors.

John Maynard Keynes once said all politicians were under the influence of long-defunct economists. We can safely say that Trump is not. The Left hates him, of course. But so does the old Right. Monetarists would have been aghast at his assault on the independence of the Federal Reserve. Virtually every school of conservative economic thought, from the ancient to modern, would have rejected his tariffs. Or his unfunded tax cuts. Or the stablecoins through which he wants to attract investment in the US debt markets. You can’t even caricature his policies as “businessman economics” either. Businesspeople tend to be fiscally conservative.

The reason I chose not to underestimate him is that his big tax cuts, extreme deregulation and tariffs will turn the US into a super-competitive economy at the expense of other Western countries. We Europeans still live in the technological Stone Age, but at least we used to have competitive industries. We are now being squeezed by the US and China both in innovation and competitiveness.

China’s economic policies could not more different than Trump’s, but they share one important trait: they both ignore the advice of mainstream macroeconomics. President Xi Jinping is an old-fashioned mercantilist. He maximizes exports and minimizes imports. He does not care what this does to the rest of the world. China has not freed up its capital markets. The Chinese renminbi is locked in a semi-fixed exchange rate against the dollar. China unashamedly picks winners. Were we not told that government should never, ever do this? China’s central planners picked the electric car, the entire battery supply chain behind it, and solar panels. The problem with picking winners is not the act of picking. It is about what you pick. We Westerners should perhaps not pick winners. China did better.

Trump is picking fossil fuels. If your time horizon is four years, this is going to be fine. Cheap oil and gas fuel the fire of American entrepreneurialism. But China’s energy policy is much more sophisticated. They still burn coal, but they invest into renewable energies like nobody else. One of the water dams being planned will have a capacity as large as the entire energy consumption of countries such as Greece.

To use Trump’s own words: China has all the cards. It has more people; it has a work ethic that has been lost in the West; it has industrial supply chains; and it is willing to shift resources from one part to another in our economy with a ruthlessness that our democracies cannot replicate. I would rather live in Europe or the US than in China. But I am not optimistic about the long-term prospects of the West.

I have no doubt that Trump’s economics will fail in the end. It will not become the foundation of a new economic era; he will not match Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in influencing economic policy in the West for decades after they left the stage. They both failed before they succeeded. With Trump, it is more likely to be the other way round.

What I am sure of, however, that he will fail in his foreign policies even in the short run. The reason is a complete lack of interest in strategic alliances, and in strategic action in general. The only chance the democratic West has against the rise of China and its global partners-in-crime is as a well-managed team.

I am not just talking about his delusional announcements: that it would take him 24 hours to cut a peace in deal in Ukraine. Or his claim at the end of last week that we are about to have a peace deal in Gaza. He claims to have ended seven wars. He has not. Nor has he saved millions of lives. His “America First” agenda is by definition not one of foreign policy. His only foreign policy objective is to get the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump’s delusions are easy to dismiss, but they have will have serious effects. The first casualty of Trump’s foreign policy is Europe. Europe must be very careful about Trump’s latest policy u-turn on Ukraine. This looks like a setup to me. Don’t fall for the “Ukraine is winning” narrative that has recently popped up out of nowhere. Nothing substantive has changed on the ground. I think Trump is setting Europe up for failure by insisting that Ukraine can win the war, and that Europe should pay for it. If it fails, as I believe it will, he can blame Europe.

There is no way that Europe can make itself independent of Russian oil with the speed that Trump demands. He knows that, of course. Europe is financially too weak and politically too divided to be able to fund the Ukraine war on its own. This is still true if the EU commission ends up sequestering €200 billion in Russian reserve assets currently frozen in EU bank accounts. I concluded a long time ago that, because they all think in national terms, European political elites are incapable of strategic geopolitical thought. A Franco-German fighter project is on the rocks right now, because the two countries cannot agree on the work share. Pettiness has a habit of intruding all the time in European politics, even during emergencies.

Japan is as weak as Europe. It too has an outdated industrial base and a declining population. Under Trump, the West will fragment into a disparate collection of failed states. An inward-looking US will remain its most formidable power, but not a leader. The US will look like the Norma Desmond character from Sunset Boulevard, who thought that she was still big, and that it was the movies that got smaller.

Movie directors know about turning points — the peripeteia in classical Greek drama — where events shift, either in the positive or the negative direction. To his supporters, Trump may well the person who arrests the decline of civilization. They will end up disappointed. So may his detractors who see his presidency as a phase of comic relief, a moment that will eventually pass before the final happy ending sets in.

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Europe’s reckless warmongering

By Wolfgang Münchau

My guess is that America will not be great at the end of the MAGA episode. But America will be OK, if not great, whereas Europe will be neither. What we would really need is a reboot, but we are afraid. There was a tradition in European intellectual thought that started with the acknowledgment that you don’t know. Scio nescio, Plato wrote. Feynman’s comment about quantum mechanics is in that spirit too. That state of mind is a precondition for success. You start at zero. It is where the Age of Enlightenment began. It is where China started too.

Trump is the very opposite of this. The real tragedy is that his detractors, are too.

In and of itself, this is extraordinary. For decades, the recognition of formal Palestinian statehood was held out as a reward for a final treaty between the two sides. Now, though, the message to Israel (and indeed the United States) is unmistakable: the old orthodoxy has failed, and recognition is now not the prize for peace, but a tool to obtain it.

Complicating it all — as always in the most mediated and fraught conflict since 1945 — is emotion: on both sides. On the one hand, everyone from Hamas to the Green Party is delighted. On the other, the Israeli government, Jewish diaspora communities, and those rightly fearful of Islamist terror, are enraged, arguing that the move rewards Hamas for its barbarism on October 7.

For his part, Keir Starmer was at fastidious pains to deny this was the case. “Hamas is a brutal terror organization,” he said. “This solution is not a reward for Hamas… Because it means Hamas can have no future. No role in government. No role in security.” Either way, his move was inevitable. The cumulative toll of Israel’s campaign — tens of thousands of dead, alongside the absence of any realistic plan to end the war and indeed Benjamin Netanyahu’s explicit opposition to Palestinian statehood — has had its effect.

In this sense, it’s clear that recognition is a rebuke of Israel more than an expression of unqualified support for Palestine. Though other Western countries from Sweden (in 2014) to Ireland (in 2024) had already gone down this path, London, Ottawa and Canberra all held out. This was partly due to strong relations with Jerusalem, especially on security coordination, as well as a desire not to upset the United States.

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But with the US still against recognition, and Israel intransigent, the three middle powers decided this was the time to move. Sources tell me that the Government feels that recognition may be the only leverage they have left to try and change Israeli behavior on the ground.

Then, of course, is the question of domestic politics. For Labour voters, Palestine is not just a cause célèbre: it is a hugely effective mobilizing tool. They want action. And with sectarian issues now front and center for parts of the Muslim vote, and indeed costing Labour parliamentary seats, it’s no surprise that the party has moved to shore up its Left flank.

That said, it’s important to understand what recognition does and doesn’t — do. In the end, there is no escaping the fact that the state of Palestine is simply not a reality on the ground. Gaza is a war zone; the West Bank is ruthlessly contested. For now, recognition is solely a legal and political act. It won’t create mutually agreed borders, kick out settlers, and rid both the Israelis and the Palestinians of Hamas. Nor does it end the war or solve Israel’s legitimate security concerns.

Recognition does, however, do three concrete things. First, it formalizes Palestine’s diplomatic relationships with the rest of the world. Embassies replace missions; ambassadors present credentials. That matters for everyday statecraft: aid, trade, consular issues, and the slow, tedious work of institution-building.

Second, it reframes the conflict politically. By declaring Palestine a state, these three governments must now judge Israeli actions not merely through the lens of counterterrorism and occupation, but also inter-state norms. More robust pressure around the recognition of borders based on 1967 lines will follow — as will intensified scrutiny of settlement expansion, and more explicit linkage between Israeli policy and Western support.

Third, recognition pressures the Palestinians. Officials from London and Canberra alike know that recognition without reform will go nowhere. But by recognizing Palestine now, there is a political (and moral) imperative on its officials to ensure that it begins to function like one.

This will require two changes above all else. First, a decisive break with the tactics of October 7. Many Palestinians — and millions of their supporters globally — are desperate to relativize a massacre that was undoubtedly a crime against humanity. A leadership that cannot take an unequivocal stance against such violence must forfeit the support of the very states now recognizing it.

Second, Palestine needs serious governance reform: both in the West Bank and Gaza. The antisemitic school curricula; the Palestinian Authority’s “pay to slay” policy of making payments to the families of those killed or wounded during terror attacks; not to mention the widespread Islamist and jihadist presence across both territories — all this must go. A technocratic interim leadership, with a mandate to unify the security services and hold proper elections, is the minimum diplomats must demand in exchange for recognition.

That is currently impossible, what with a murderous Hamas and a corrupt and sclerotic Palestinian Authority. Britain, Australia and Canada will therefore now need to pour cash and various other forms of support, designed to both build and increase institutional capacity into the nascent state.

Israel’s response to all this has been predictably furious. Netanyahu and those around him feel that Hamas is being rewarded for October 7. According to a Netanyahu spokesperson, the Israeli prime minister’s message to nations recognizing Palestine is that “the people of Israel aren’t going to commit suicide because of the political needs of European politics.”

While Netanyahu lashes out, Israeli opposition figures blame him for what has happened. In a tweet, Yair Golan, leader of The Democrats Party, said that recognition was a “direct result of Netanyahu’s political abandonment: refusal to end the war and the dangerous choice of occupation and annexation.”

But Israel’s problems run deeper than internal dissension. I have seen, first hand from on the ground, how the country’s choices since October 7 have been driven by trauma. From the very beginning, the operational logic to destroy Hamas collided with humanitarian catastrophe, the absence of a plan and a nation’s collective anguish.

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The longer Israel fights without a credible political solution, the more it loses the goodwill of those it needs most: the Arab states who signed normalization to better contain Iran; the Europeans who defended its right to self-defense; and even parts of the Pentagon security establishment that have stuck with it for so long.

UK government sources have repeatedly made one thing clear to me in recent weeks. Recognition, they explain, is a warning from friends: security without politics produces only perpetual war and international isolation.

Israel also has another problem. Recognition happened despite US objections. Traditionally, the Anglosphere follows Washington on Israel-Palestine. But yesterday, it didn’t, a divergence that says two things. First: the Gaza war has disordered not just Middle Eastern but Western politics. Western leaders are recalibrating their positions in light of domestic opinion and international law. Second: the US monopoly over the Israel-Palestine “peace process” is gone. If Washington cannot or will not propose a credible pathway, others will try to improvise one, and publicly too.

Critics question why, if the UK, Australia and Canada were really so determined to put recognition on the table, they couldn’t at least dangle it as a prize for releasing the hostages. They also argue that recognition rewards intransigence: that it will embolden maximalists on both sides. Some of this will prove true. Israeli far-Right ministers are already spouting annexationist rhetoric; hardline Palestinian factions will claim the world has moved their way without the need for genuine concessions. And, of course, a Donald Trump who feels snubbed may offer yet more support to Netanyahu out of pure spite.

But those who support recognition will feel justified in arguing that the status quo led only in one direction: further West Bank annexation, more Gaza bloodshed, and decades more conflict. In the end, then, recognition is not a peace plan: but a stratagem to force one. The gamble, and it is a big one, is that it’ll finally force the Palestinians to accept serious, political and ideological reform — and Israelis to accept that perpetual war and endless occupation are not strategies worth pursuing. Whether or not it is realistic, this is now the policy. And, for the sake of both sides, we must hope it works.

There’s plenty of food just beyond Gaza’s borders, just as in the Irish famine of the 1840s there was plenty of food in Great Britain. Almost 50 years before, Britain and Ireland had entered into a political union, so one might think that a famine in County Cork would have been treated in much the same way as one in Kent or Sussex. The British state, however, wouldn’t have allowed a million people to die of starvation in the Home Counties, but seemed rather more relaxed about the prospect of children in Galway or Donegal stumbling around with permanently green mouths because of the grass they stuffed into them.

When the British finally got their act together and provided soup kitchens in Ireland, it was far too late. Before then, ideological dogma prevented them from giving anything free to the poor. So famished men and women had to take up picks and shovels they scarcely had the energy to hold in order to build pointless roads, futile towers and other edifices for a nominal wage. You can still see these famine works in Ireland today: roads to nowhere, pathways laid down and then dug up again and rebuilt, all to preserve the principle that giving charity to the dying undermines their moral independence. A good many morally independent men and women lie buried throughout the country. Those who couldn’t stand on their own two feet with empty bellies were sent to the dreaded workhouse.

It’s clear that starvation in Gaza is being used as a political weapon, and this was also the case in Ireland. There was indeed a disaster — the failure of the potato crop across almost the whole country for several successive years; but it wasn’t natural at all, since one has to ask why at least a third of the Irish population was forced to rely on potatoes alone for their daily nourishment. The fact is, there was food in Ireland — it’s just that much of it took the form of crops, which the small tenant farmers had to sell in order to pay the landlord’s rent, while they themselves subsisted, for the most part, on potatoes. No Anglo-Irish landowners were stripped to skeletons.

Like some in the Israeli Cabinet, many in Westminster saw hunger as a political instrument. Some politicians saw in the famine a God-given chance to shake up this pathologically indolent nation and reorganise its ramshackle agriculture along the lines of the thriving British farm. Providentially, the potato blight killed off or drove into emigration a great many cottiers, rural laborers and small tenant farmers, whose pathetic patches of land could then be consolidated into more economically viable units.

Some Irish nationalists at the time denounced the whole project as genocidal, a view which modern Irish historians, anxious not to give comfort to the IRA, have generally derided. A number of them, however, have now come round to exactly that claim, just as the most unlikely people are beginning to believe that genocide may not be an excessively lurid term for the situation in Gaza. Some bien-pensant middle-class liberals are having to adjust their views in this respect. They might even come to admit that their past support for Israel has helped to embolden its predatory activities.

Hunger can be used by the people against their rulers as well as the other way round. Margaret Thatcher’s government was confronted with a hunger strike by Irish Republican convicts demanding the status of political prisoners, and responded to it without the faintest understanding of the history and significance of hunger-striking in Ireland. In fact, almost the entire treatment of the country by the British state during the Troubles overlooked that sagacious maxim, “Know Your Enemy”. In medieval times, a “mere Irishman” who felt that his lord had denied him justice might starve himself to death on his doorstep. The point of hunger striking isn’t to refuse food, but to refuse food from a certain source, and thus to deny that source any power over you. It may drive you to death, but it can’t rob you of your autonomy, an autonomy achieved by doing precisely nothing. By discarding your body, you also discard those who would seek to use it for their own ends. You can turn your utter powerlessness into a kind of victory. (Though whether killing yourself in the name of a united nation is a morally permissible act is another question. There’s a thin line between the genuine martyr, one who dies so that others may live, and the suicidal.)

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It’s ironic that the Irish Republican prisoners’ demand was so moderate. Whatever atrocities they may have perpetrated, and there were certainly a number of truly vicious types among them, it was obvious that they were political prisoners, and should therefore have been granted the rights usually associated with that status. Refusing to do so was simply vindictive. Would they have gone around torturing and murdering for any reason other than to secure a united Ireland? Not even the apartheid government of South Africa pretended that Nelson Mandela was in the same category as a serial rapist. If you insist on viewing your political adversaries, however violent, as nothing but common thugs, it becomes harder to beat them. You have to try and see the world as they see it, if only to challenge their power.

The opposite of the hunger striker today is the people of Gaza, whose shrunken bodies reveal their political impotence. In his book Homo Sacer, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes of the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps as exhibiting what he calls “bare life”, existing in some liminal state between life and death. Such men and women are images of Nazi power at its extreme; but they are also in a sense independent of that power, since they are no longer responsive to it and appear not to care whether they live or die. You can’t conquer an enemy who doesn’t even acknowledge you. The bodies of these inmates are dehumanized, but it’s in this way that they are also most human, since to be deprived of one’s humanity is a fundamental possibility of being human. Being human is more than a biological affair, since it involves that surplus or excess over bare humanity which we call culture or civilization. Excess — having more than we strictly need — is part of our nature, so that having only what is strictly necessary, like having less than it, disfigures what we are.

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Some on the Israeli far-Right deny that there’s any hunger in Gaza, which casts some interesting light on the nature of ideology. What I mean by ideology is not doctrines or systems of ideas, but those values and beliefs which are so close to us that they are hard to objectify. It is the invisible color of everyday life — a matter of what Donald Rumsfeld might have called “unknown knowns” (though he missed that one out of his classifications). Certain convictions are vital to our identity, and those who hold them will sometimes swear that black is white if the alternative is to abandon their whole sense of selfhood.

There’s no end to the rationalizations by which men and women might evade a truth which involves having to transform their identities. You start by insisting that Hamas is hijacking all the food in Gaza, or that TV images of starving children have been lifted from elsewhere, and end up claiming that Palestinians tend to be rather scrawny in build and are allergic to flour, while those who aren’t are on hunger strike. Whenever there’s a sudden drop in the intellectual temperature, one can usually be sure that one is in the presence of ideology, which means that there are certain things that must, at all costs, not be said.

Both will press their claims to mastery of the land, citing historical precedents both real and fictive, both will rely on demography to strengthen their sword-hand, and the stronger of the two will either subjugate, expel or destroy the weaker. After just over a century, from the emergence of the modern Palestine conflict during the British Mandate, this process is drawing towards its conclusion, with the total reduction of the Palestinian population of Gaza through bombing, starvation, military occupation and forced exile.

Against the public opposition of the IDF’s chief of staff, General Eyal Zamir, Netanyahu’s cabinet has now settled on the full occupation of Gaza. As Western states now slowly turn against Israel’s ever-expanding war aims, and conservative outlets, previously supportive of Israel’s war, belatedly discover the horrors the war has wrought on Gaza’s civilian population, the only wonder is how long it took them to perceive what was always inevitable. Writing in UnHerd at the beginning of the war, two years ago, I observed that “when Israel eventually conquers the ruins of Gaza, it has no exit plan for how to extract itself.” Therefore, I suggested, the “logic of the war” would ultimately ensure the final expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza.

And now we are here. For all the domestic drama over “hate marches”, radicalised students and media bias, nothing has changed. What was always going to happen, and what those protesting always said would happen, is now happening. The IDF itself does not think that its new-found mission of ruling Gaza is possible. Nor does the current Israeli government, eager to expand Israel’s borders in every direction, see the presence, or even existence, of the territory’s population as desirable. The war is ending as it was always going to end, in the ruin of Gaza’s population, even if Netanyahu continues to insist that Israel’s occupation will only be temporary.

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Britain has learned nothing from Palestine

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Yet for no benefit at all, Western conservatives squandered domestic political capital on a foreign war that was always going to result in their shocked protestations of horror, too late, at the results of the actions they for years supported. After two years of discussing Palestinians as something akin to the marauding bugs in Starship Troopers, some have lately discovered they are humans after all. Others are yet to reach this conclusion, and perhaps never will. Clouded by a combination of domestic anxieties and tribal loyalties, the magic spell cast by Israel over the Western center-right has scrambled both its sense of morality and of self-interest.

Instead of fleeing to the West, the Palestinians, in the most brutal circumstances imaginable, are making every effort to stay in their ancestral homeland. They are doing precisely what critics of mass immigration demand of refugee populations, in a situation far worse than that faced by most who reach Britain’s shores. Western Leftists, mocked by conservative commentators for their reworking of the Palestine catastrophe into the “omnicause”, have throughout this period shown clearer moral and political judgment than our own tribe. Of what value was it hitching ourselves to this slow-motion atrocity? Unable, due to our place in America’s imperial system, to prevent the carnage, it would have been better to have washed our hands of its blood entirely.

Simply, Gaza displays the vast gulf between the self-aggrandizing myths underlying our current political regime, and the harder, eternal truths of human nature. The founding myth of what adherents of the post-1991 liberal order like to call the “1945 order” is that the dynamics of ethnic rivalry, taken to their very extremes in Gaza, are not, in fact, inherent to human societies: that tribal passions are whipped up in otherwise sensible populations by cynical politicians acting as provocateurs, and that rival populations, in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere, can be compelled by muscular liberal governance to live together when they would prefer not to.

This can be termed the governing ideology of the Western world between the rise of American hegemony and the Right-wing populist revolt across the West in the 2010s. Indeed, in its counterintuitive and unevidenced belief that cultural diversity would dampen rather than provoke such conflicts, this quasi-religious dogma, often under American tutelage, is responsible for much of the dysfunction and political volatility of present-day Europe, which had already answered these questions, through bloody experience, time and time again over the preceding centuries — before then exporting them to Palestine.

Yet what is most galling, perhaps, is that the advocates of this dogma routinely cite the horrors of the Second World War as justification for their millenarian scheme, in which every Right-wing adversary is a second Hitler barring the road to the cosmopolitan paradise. When it comes to Gaza, however, where a civilian population has been herded into ghettos, bombed and shelled to oblivion, starved as a matter of policy, and now await a military occupation, administered by local puppets, geared at their expulsion — only now have the champions of the liberal order deigned to notice wrongdoing. While the politics of ethnic self-interest is forbidden in the West, Israel is permitted to carry it to its murderous extremes: this is the incoherence at the heart of the liberal order, and it is not only Leftists who notice it.

Adherents of the liberal order, which is to say the American empire, must now own the catastrophe in Gaza as their own, just as the bloody conquests, massacres and expulsions of Nazi Germany have been laid for decades at the door of the political Right by liberals in defense of their millenarian visions. Without Israel’s unequivocal backing over decades by the liberal hegemon, none of what has transpired in Gaza over the past two years could have occurred. It does not matter which party sits on Washington’s throne: the alliance with Israel is a more foundational pillar of American politics than its ring of NATO client states, to the chagrin of America’s European satraps, torn between their professed values and the realities of their subordinate imperial position.

Equally, Netanyahu may be a self-interested demagogue, but the war in Gaza has taken place with the firm backing of the majority of the population of what is undeniably a democracy, and which loudly flaunts this status, wrapped in rainbow flags and all the other accoutrements of the liberal West, in advance of its own ends. It is Israel’s security elites currently appealing to Trump’s conscience, urging the emperor towards mercy on the conquered, and not its voters. If Gaza is a genocide, it is a firmly democratic one, for which liberal democracy must shoulder the blame.

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As even the august journal of Washington diplomacy, Foreign Affairs notes, “What is truly shocking about events in Gaza is both the scale of the devastation and that the government of Israel can genuinely say that its policies reflect the will of most Israelis.” How can America condemn Russia for its drone and missile strikes on Ukraine, compared to the far vaster destruction wrought by American armaments and diplomatic cover in Gaza? How can Washington condemn the revision of borders by force and the expulsion of whole populations, when at its terminus its own empire has abandoned the moral rationale it chose, for some decades, to justify its existence?

For a quarter-century, and with much moral grandstanding, advocates of America’s right to global domination, from DC thinktanks down to Washington’s global constellation of proxy NGOs, cited the Holocaust as its justification for global empire. “Never Again” would be written across the global skies in the contrails of Washington’s F16s. What evolved into the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, through which the United States declared the right and duty to intervene in foreign wars — though only when the governments committing atrocities were foes of its imperial system — has now been shown for what it always was.

The war in Gaza is not an affront to liberal democracy: it is the logical outcome of its actually-existing power structures, directly affected by the donated weapons and munitions of the liberal hegemon. The end-state of all this moralizing rhetoric is the destruction of an entire people in their own land: the moral grandstanding of the liberal hawks now lies buried, rotting with them, in the rubble of Gaza. The rest of the world will hear no more of America’s guiding moral purpose. In a world guided by naked self-interest, and the malign workings of our imperial overlord, us Europeans would do well to follow our own path too.

That said, recognition by Britain and France, which last week announced a similar if unconditional plan, means more than recognition by Brazil or even China. Come September’s UN General Assembly, and assuming that Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t execute an implausible U-turn and embrace the two-state solution that he has rejected for years, two G7 members, among them the US’s closest ally, will have shoved Israel further towards pariah status. America is the only outside party able to influence Israeli policy in any meaningful way, and of US pressure there is little sign.

If Britain’s faltering journey towards recognition seems unlikely to alleviate the agony of Gaza’s civilians, Starmer’s announcement at least acknowledges the deeper, broader forces that have been unleashed by Israel’s actions since the October 7 attacks. Indeed, the agony of Gaza today may one day seem trivial compared to the slower but incomparably more destructive disorder that threatens the Middle East in years to come.

Few scholars have greater awareness of these forces than Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the LSE and a renowned expert on the Middle East. The Lebanese-American is usually a jovial, ebullient person but when we met shortly before the British announcement his smile was full of pain.

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“I can see no obvious way out of the disaster that is heading for the Middle East,” he told me. “Egypt is waiting to implode and Jordan faces severe challenges.” The reason is the wave of popular hatred that has built up against Israel and threatens to overwhelm Arab regimes that are linked to the Jewish state through peace treaties or, in the case of Jordan, because they harbor millions of displaced Palestinians. “Of course, the ultimate casualty will be Israel itself,” Gerges concluded. “Living by the sword, Israel has turned itself into a fortress and history tells us that fortresses fall.”

Gerges isn’t alone. I also spoke to a senior Saudi official and confidant of Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and effective ruler. Before October 7, Saudi Arabia had been expected to join the Abraham Accords, under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalized relations with Israel in 2020. The prospect of Saudi adherence is distant now.

“Middle Eastern stability depends on the Gulf economies,” the official told me, “and we cannot prosper without peace. Sure, we can cope with a war in Yemen and a not-so-stable Iraq, but if Jordan and Egypt explode, the danger for us will be acute. Different groups will vie for control of our holy places, Mecca and Medina. And it won’t be like the Mamluk Empire in medieval times, with a single regime exercising hegemony over the whole region, but chaos and a free-for-all.”

A doomsday scenario may be sketched out as follows: recognition of a Palestinian state being dead on arrival, the Palestinians continue to be persecuted not only in Gaza but also the West Bank and Israel proper, while Israel engorges itself on militarism and nationalism that drive out the last vestiges of compassion and good sense. The Arab states, for their part, captured by groups that apply themselves to Israel’s destruction, in cahoots with a rejuvenated Islamic Republic of Iran and cheered on by antisemites in the West, are unable to provide basic services to their people. More and more brown people come out of the region and into the lands of white people who don’t want them. Pretty, isn’t it?

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Nor does any part of this scenario require the various parties to do anything but continue down the path they are already on. Earlier this year, for instance, Donald Trump floated a plan to “clean out” Gaza and “resettle” its population of some two million people in neighboring Arab countries. According to a recent poll commissioned by Pennsylvania State University, 82% of Israelis support the expulsion of Gaza’s residents, while 56% favor expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. (Back in 2003 the figures were 45% and 31% respectively.) On Tuesday, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, referred to Gaza as “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel”, also predicting that the West Bank, currently partly governed by the Palestinian Authority, would come under Israeli sovereignty.

The problem for Israeli supremacists is that the Palestinians won’t disappear. They are too numerous to exterminate, and their Arab neighbors have said they won’t take them in, ostensibly for reasons of solidarity but in reality for fear of destabilizing their own fragile societies. The last thing Egypt’s current strongman, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, wants is an influx of Gazans clamoring for jobs, houses and a political voice — Jordan, whose indigenous population complains of being swamped by their Palestinian guests, being the example to avoid. Finally, the Palestinians possess a keen appreciation of the deadly intentions of their adversary and something approaching a relish for the fight to thwart them.

This is crucial; as a historian I have come across numerous communities that have lacked such attributes and disappeared as a result. The Jews of Lisbon, for instance, having converted to Catholicism, in most cases expediently, suffered a hideous massacre in 1506 before being driven into exile by the Inquisition. Or take the Armenians of what is now eastern Turkey, denigrated as fifth columnists by the Ottoman government during the First World War. In their villages of mud and straw in the valleys of the Anatolian plateau, they waited docilely to be sent on death marches that killed over a million. And, of course, there is the Holocaust itself, that supreme example of a nation unprepared for the fate in store for it — and for which unpreparedness Israel is the living, breathing refutation.

To cite a contemporary case, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which took up arms against the mighty Turkish state in 1984, avoided extirpation for all of 41 years in part by refusing to lay them down again. The PKK’s recent pledge to disarm, in return for integration into Turkish political life, would put the destiny of the Kurds in the hands of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He is one of the world’s least trustworthy politicians and the PKK’s decision may prove unwise.

A movement of national liberation, rather than the bunch of jihadis Netanyahu depicts it as, Hamas has said that it will disarm once Israel retreats to its pre-1967 borders — which, given the political impossibility of that happening, means never. Besides, why would Hamas give up the main weapon it has against a much more powerful enemy: the ability to strike asymmetrically, causing maximum horror and distress?

Hamas has lost support among ordinary Gazans: not because of popular revulsion at the October 7 attacks, widely regarded as nothing less than the Zionists deserved, but because of its callousness towards its own people’s suffering and its intransigence in negotiations with Israel. Yet, Hamas is wildly popular in the West Bank, and indeed elsewhere in the Arab world. Israel itself believes that terrorist networks are replacing dead Hamas fighters at a rate of five to one. “60% of Hamas fighters are the sons of martyrs,” I was told by Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor at Oxford and a prominent Israeli critic of his homeland. “The easiest thing for Hamas is to recruit more fighters to replace the ones it has lost.”

As the saying goes, victory is survival for a guerrilla army. Anyone with a smartphone can watch films showing plucky Hamas warriors clambering onto Israeli armored vehicles and taking them out using explosive devices recycled from captured ordinance and finessed on the kitchen table, before, presumably, the inevitable retaliatory execution by an Israeli drone. You don’t need to kill many Israeli soldiers to show your staying power, or to convince Israeli reservists of the advisability of dodging the draft — not that Netanyahu’s government is releasing figures on those who fail to present themselves.

No wonder the other Arab nations are so jittery. In Jordan the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Hamas, trounced pro-government parties in elections last September. In Egypt, the authorities announced earlier this month that they had thwarted terrorist attacks targeting prominent figures, apparently planned by the armed wing of the Brotherhood. Recall, too, that it was a Brotherhood government that al-Sisi toppled to seize power in 2013, and whose former cadres smolder in the prison cells of Egypt’s police state. Not that the effects of Gaza will be confined to the Middle East or the Muslim world. According to a British security source, quoted by Reuters, the Gaza war is “likely to become the biggest recruiter for Islamist militants since [the Iraq invasion of] 2003”.

In the words of the Saudi official I spoke to, the Trump administration needs to take a long view that considers the law of cause and effect. Trump’s promise to settle the Gazans “in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region” proclaims his ignorance of this law. The want of long-term, morally coherent thinking among the political class is marginally less glaring in Britain than it is in Israel and the US. And, if the belated and conditional recognition of Palestine remains strategically open to doubt, Starmer’s government has at least won Trump’s trust. It must now team up with the Arab nations and focus America’s attention on preventing today’s Gazan catastrophe from becoming something worse.

But normal is a distant memory now. As I’m writing this, I can hear the whine of an Israeli drone hovering over my neighborhood in central Gaza. We lost two relatives earlier this month: teenage boys sheltering in the basement of a UN school. All of our old open markets and food shops are gone. And the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, set up by Israel and America to distribute food aid, has quickly become a death trap.

Our days now begin with the only food we’ve got: lentil soup. We’ve had no bread for six days, and no meat for five months. At some point most mornings, one of us will head out to investigate what food we can buy, searching not for what we want, but just whatever is available.

In place of the old food shops, a handful of makeshift street stalls have cropped up, run by people we don’t know who control the prices, and who have raised them to extortionate levels. But these can disappear at any moment — because of bombing, or because there’s nothing left to sell. Before the war, one kilo of onions was less than £3. Now it costs £50. A kilo of sugar is £100.

Despite the prices at these stalls, I, like many others, have stopped going to aid centers and won’t let my family go either. My nearest Foundation distribution center is four kilometers away at Netzarim. Getting there means walking through unsafe, open areas; we have heard about many who went there and never came back. Others did return, but with life-changing wounds. The safety of my sons, nephews, and other relatives is more important than food, and I will not gamble their lives for help we might not even receive. That’s why we rely on the stalls.

On a good day, if our trip to the stalls hasn’t been in vain, we will have one more meal: soup again, with maybe a few vegetables.

Not everyone can afford the stalls though. My neighbor Ahed lost his job at a sweet shop, so now he’s completely dependent on humanitarian aid. As the head of a family with five children, including twins who were born during the war, he is at the mercy of aid centers for his children’s basic needs, like infant formula, which is not available from the market stalls.

The first time Ahed went to the distribution center, he managed to get a box of supplies and made it home safely. But on the second occasion, he was stabbed and robbed by another Palestinian civilian. Security in Gaza is now non-existent and there are no police, so such events are commonplace. The third time, he was hit in the eye by an Israeli tear gas canister, which caused permanent damage to his vision. After these injuries, he stopped going to the aid centers out of fear for his life. Even though he urgently needs help, he now has to scramble to find other ways to get what his children need. In practice, this means asking the families of his wife and brother to share what little they have. They do their best, but there is never enough.

After the hunt for food comes the day’s second major task: waiting in a queue for hours on end to fill a few bottles from relief trucks or wells. It’s over 30°C every single day at this time of year, and the humidity is always high. Much of our water and sewage network has been destroyed, many municipal workers have been killed, and there is very little fuel for generators and pumping stations. All of this means that, if we’re lucky, we’ll get running water for a few precious hours every 10 days or two weeks at my still-standing, though badly damaged, house in central Gaza. When the water finally does come, it’s brackish and unpurified. We store it in barrels and ration every drop.

Hygiene has become non-existent. There is not enough water for bathing or washing clothes. Without water, it is impossible to use soap or shampoo, so allergies, rashes and skin diseases have become widespread.

I feel listless, dehydrated, and my voice is cracked and dry when I speak. We have no way to make the heat more bearable. Fans, air conditioning and refrigerators are useless, because there is usually no electricity — and this is especially tough for children and the elderly.

Many Gazans blame Hamas for our ongoing ordeal, not just Israel and the US. When food aid trucks have managed to enter Gaza, members of Hamas have taken the food and distributed it only to their own people, leaving everyone else to go hungry. They believe Hamas could have agreed to a new ceasefire weeks ago, and that they are blocking it for no good reason, imposing unnecessary conditions for the further release of hostages that they know Israel will not accept.

Support for Hamas in Gaza has collapsed, in my estimation, to 25% or less — a core vote consisting of fighters, their families, and those who work for government ministries. Hamas has made it seem that they do not care about human suffering, and this has eroded their popularity.

Despite the killing of some who protested in public against Hamas earlier this year, many Gazans now feel they have nothing to lose by openly speaking out against them. It will be when the war ends, many fear, that Hamas will exact its revenge, if they’re still in power.

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Gaza's children have no future

By Hasan Jber

But it’s difficult to envision the future. Even if, thanks to the international pressure, we are at last inching towards another ceasefire of a few weeks, it is not nearly enough. Welcome as a ceasefire would be, we need a much longer truce designed to produce a lasting peace. But I don’t believe the plans advanced by President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have any chance of success, because they rely on the expulsion or voluntary departure of most or all of Gaza’s population via Egypt.

When the war does end, some of us will want to leave Gaza permanently for a new life outside, especially the young. Yet most do not want to abandon this land, but rebuild it. In any case, Egypt will not accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees. Like European countries, they fear a huge influx of migrants would cause internal problems. As for us Palestinians, we fear forced displacement more than anything else, and any plan that involves it will prolong, not end the violence.

Netanyahu’s plan to move hundreds of thousands of people into a small supposedly humanitarian enclave near Rafah, a scheme which even the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has described as a concentration camp, would also only lead to more killing and destruction. Besides, though Israel may be talking about this, I do not believe they will take this step, because the international pressure and the scheme’s opponents in Israel would simply be too strong.

Somehow, we have to work towards the creation of a professional, non-extremist government in Gaza, and a better future here and in the West Bank. I am certain this is what the majority of Gazans want: Palestinians and Israelis to co-exist and cooperate, away from the extremists on both sides who benefit from the war. Unfortunately, there is as yet no sign as to how this might be achieved.

Meanwhile, through this terrible summer, the people of Gaza wait — and make sure to sit away from the walls. In the past few weeks, my house has been hit by live rounds five times: all of the windows are gone. We spend our days calculating how much soup we can eat for breakfast, and how much water we can afford to drink.

We were a mile away from the place where, a few days earlier, some Jewish kids had been attacked by older teenagers at a subway station because of their religion — one of them had been kept overnight in the hospital. It was a couple of weeks since the murder of two people outside a Jewish event for young diplomats in Washington, and a few days before eight Jewish people were hospitalized after being set on fire at a hostage vigil in Colorado — in both cases the assailants were “pro Palestinians”.

Sitting with us, unspoken, at the dinner table that night were the quieter, less violent stories of contemporary antisemitism we were all too aware of: in schools, universities and in the NHS, the Israel-obsession of the unions and the arts organizations where Zionists are increasingly being told we are Nazis. And Nazis deserve to be hurt, don’t they?

As Greta dusts off her keffiyeh hoping to land in Gaza (I hope they give her the same welcome they’d give me), pro-Palestinians are burning synagogues in Australia, shooting at Jewish schools in Canada. In Poland, a community event with Holocaust survivors was attacked, while in Berlin the police chief admits the city is not safe for Jewish people. Even America — once the golden medina for diaspora Jews — holds no promise of succor. And so, there is Israel. Despite the terrorists, the almost daily Houthi missile attacks and Iran threatening nuclear annihilation: antisemitic anti-Zionism only makes us more Zionist. Will we all have to move to the Jewish homeland because we are so unwelcome elsewhere?

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Lessons in antisemitism from the NEU

By Nicole Lampert

Debate is what Jews are best at. Our earliest texts are filled with Abraham, Moses, Jeremian and Job arguing furiously with God. As former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: “In the Mishnah the rabbis argue about Jewish law and in the Gemara they argue about the arguments of the Mishnah. In the 12th century, Moses Maimonides did the most daring thing of all; he wrote a code of law with all the arguments removed. This generated more arguments than any other text for the next 800 years. Other people have conversations. Jews have arguments.”

But our arguments have become increasingly shrill and painful. There are those who want to denounce Israel and those who want to protect it, and those who want to protect it by denouncing it. They are, like the ongoing divide in the Middle East, intractable. Rows have broken up families and friendships, divided synagogue congregations, and even shattered the unanimity of the normally staid Board of Deputies of British Jews.

And in the background, increasingly the foreground, drowning out our pain and fanning the flames of anger, a chorus of anti-Zionism gets louder and louder. Things have hardly been easy since the October 7 massacre, but Jew hatred seems to be reaching terminal velocity — the likelihood of more violence only a matter of time. There has been an avalanche of public letters since war broke out, three only last week by lawyers, writers and actors, each aimed at outdoing the previous one in its ramped-up rhetoric. The most self-important people of the lot, the actors, stated dramatically that “290,000 children are on the brink of death — starved by the Israeli government for more than 70 days. They cry until they can’t cry anymore — until hunger takes even their voices.” This is a dangerous new libel, exceeding even the lie of UN’s Tom Fletcher that 14,000 babies would die in 48 hours if humanitarian aid wasn’t let in. But the new normal is lies.

The rhetoric is being fanned by a compliant media who willingly parrot Hamas propaganda and only ask questions of Israel — which wants to ensure all the right checks and balances are in place before it gives a confirmed reply — later. As President Trump’s press secretary pointed out this week, the BBC started Sunday telling one story and ended with another. The headline, “At least 15 killed in Israeli fire near aid center, says medics” was changed to “26 killed in Israeli taken fire near aid center, medics say” then “medics” were changed to “health ministry” and then to “Hamas-run health authorities” until, at the end of the day, you had the Israeli denial of the attack. While live reporting often involves changes, this is the first war where the word of a proscribed terrorist organization is taken as gospel.

It doesn’t help that the Israeli government is remorselessly providing the haters and the casual bystanders with ammunition. The Zionist dream echoes the biblical demand of Jews to be “the light among nations”, yet our nation is feeding the fire. Innocents are being killed. Yes, because there is a war and, yes too, because Hamas hides behind and below civilians, but also — it is still killing children. It may be the only democracy in the Middle East, but it is also one that is led by a coalition involving genuine and unashamed racists. Israelis have long boasted that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, but the IDF is still made up of humans, some of whom are criminals. Should I feel shame (just as I would if this was the British army)? Sometimes I do. I am also scared.

We all are. So backwards and forwards we go, like a tennis match, with these debates in our siloed WhatsApp groups where we can drive each other to distraction, posting stories of antisemitism, all while tears and the rows get ever fiercer. You can both want Israel to let Western journalists in and also see why the excuses not to — it is dangerous urban warfare and journalists could also unwittingly help out the enemy — also make sense. You can both see why the Netanyahu government, after letting in extra aid during the ceasefire, had attempted to force Hamas to a better ceasefire deal by forcing a siege and also see it both as morally unconscionable and a terrible PR move. You can feel the horror of the dreadful images coming out of Gaza, while also reminding yourself that all war is awful and that this one could be stopped by Hamas. You can feel for the hostages and the people of Gaza. You can hate the extremistsSettler movement and the free reign they are given, you can hate the venality of Netanyahu in his determination to keep power — but also understand that until Hamas is deposed from power in Gaza, Israel will never have peace. On and on, round and round. It sends us mad, and leads to sleepless nights. And, still, there is no right answer.

As diaspora Jews, we feel uneasy, queasy, untethered from our moorings — feeling despised in the countries we call home. But Israel, devastated not only by the 1,200 killed on October 7 and the 58 hostages still being held in Gaza, but also the 420 soldiers killed since the ground invasion of Gaza, is torn too. It is split by those who hate Netanyahu and believe he is prioritizing his coalition over the hostages and ending the war, and those who believe the war has to continue until Hamas is fully removed from power. All seem to agree that there is no viable plan for what Gaza might look like in the future. And meanwhile the problem of Iran — which has threatened to annihilate Israel once it can get its hands on nuclear weapons — is a real and present threat.

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Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma

By David Samuels

In Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, where I stood at a rally a few weeks ago, the sharp anger towards the government was palpable. At one point all the names of the hostages were shouted out with the crowd screaming “bring them home NOW”. While posters of the hostages are still all over Israel, some, on the Right, have crossed out the word “now” as beating Hamas is seen as the first priority.

And amid all of this, Hamas just rejected a new ceasefire deal. The terrorist group is the ghostly spirit of Gaza, not once mentioned in a single one of those letters denouncing Israel. Their “resistance” might be celebrated on weekly marches in cities across the world, but what happened on October 7 is, they say, “a false flag”. In this world of fantasy terrorists and conspiracy, they believe that Israel chose to kill its own. The Palestinians are never given their own agency in this war. That they fight and kill, and are still fighting and killing Israelis: this is never mentioned. That Hamas is also killing its own people who dare to rebel against these fascist Islamists goes unreported by most Western media.

For neither the people of Gaza nor the world’s 14 million Jews, now living in a new age of violent antisemitism, there is no end in sight. Just debate, death and hatred. It is exhausting. One day the war will end — I hope it is one day soon — but for diaspora Jews in this new age of antisemitism it may be too late. The genie is out of the bottle. Conspiracies merging medieval antisemitism of “bloodlust” with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion descriptions of Jewish power and Soviet era libels of the enemy within have merged with today’s obsessions so that the Jew, maligned for millennia and murdered in our millions within living memory, have become the ultimate white supremacists and the most evil colonialists. And, once again, as we have throughout our long history, we are wondering: is there anywhere in the world that is safe for us?

It seems monstrous, as we watch children in Gaza wasting before our eyes. But in truth, the weaponization of food in counter-insurgency is nothing new.

The British counter-insurgency in Malaya in the Fifties is often cited as a textbook “hearts and minds” program. Less mentioned is that the army also targeted Malayan stomachs. In 1951, Sir Harold Briggs, director of Britain’s “anti-bandit activities” in the colony, launched “Operation Starvation”. He ordered “food denial operations” to shut down farming and trade in the countryside where the Communist guerrillas roamed. Instead, rural people were relocated to “protected villages” where all food supplies were rigorously monitored. To prevent food falling into the hands of the rebels, Britain at times ran central kitchens to feed those in the camps. As a metric of success, they counted the number of Communist guerrillas who surrendered, citing hunger as a reason.

It was a brutal campaign, but it worked. Setting aside whether food weaponization is legal or not, it is effective when two conditions are met. Firstly, it’s important to prevent reports of famine — which are politically embarrassing. And secondly, there must be a big enough political carrot alongside the stick of hunger. Key to the success of the British campaign in Malaya was that Britain promised that when the Communist threat receded, Malaysia would become independent.

Israel has taken a page from the colonial war handbooks. But it is doing something that has never been done before. It is bringing the weaponization of food into the digital age — hoping that precisely targeted food rations will be a way of selectively starving Hamas operatives, and also, we can assume, providing Israel with a public rationale for the policy.

The Israeli strategy has evolved. It began, in a crude manner, the day after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on 7 October 2023, with the imposition of a total blockade on the Gaza Strip. As Israel controls all the entry points, and local farm production is very small, the blockade quickly caused widespread hunger. The situation was made swiftly worse by an intense bombing campaign, which destroyed essential infrastructure, and the forced relocation of the Palestinian population to what were euphemistically called “humanitarian zones”. By the time of the short-lived ceasefire seven weeks later, when Hamas released a first batch of hostages and humanitarian aid was allowed in, most of the population were hungry. Since then, the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system — that measures the distress of an afflicted population on a five-point scale with “catastrophe” and “famine” as its worst categories — has made assessments every few months, five in total. Encouraged by the United States, Israel has tried to keep the Gazans from descending into “famine” by turning the aid tap on whenever the data indicate it is about to cross that threshold. When it does this, and the IPC reports that the deterioration has been arrested, Israeli advocates claim that the famine story was made-up all along. That’s wrong.

Three times Gaza has teetered on the brink of the IPC’s “famine” threshold, and Israel has opened the aid tap. The IPC experts protest that even when the situation is an “emergency” (level four) or “catastrophe” (level five for food insecurity) the level of distress is unacceptable. But for international policymakers it seems that what counts is the “F-word”. They won’t say it out loud, but the implication is that hunger that doesn’t reach the famine threshold is somehow tolerable.

Some humanitarians say privately that Israel is gaming the IPC system, others that the “famine” benchmark no longer makes sense. What’s certain is that Israel wants to deprive Hamas of all possible resources. It’s also likely that Israel wants desperate Gazans to blame Hamas for their plight and turn against them. And indeed, formerly quiet criticism of Hamas leaders’ crimes and blunders is turning to public protest.

Gazans had a brief respite with the ceasefire in January this year. The situation sharply deteriorated after Israel imposed a total blockade on 2 March and resumed its military actions on 19 March. Food stocks are running out. The small amounts of food on sale in markets are so expensive that few can afford it. There’s no clean water and scarcely any fuel for cooking.

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By Reuel Marc Gerecht

The statistics published by the UN’s IPC earlier this month showed a population once again on the brink of famine. Fully 93% of the population were in “crisis” levels of food insecurity, with 244,000 of the 2.1 million people of the Gaza Strip classified as suffering “catastrophic” lack of food. This means that people have literally nothing — they’re scavenging for scraps and living off crumbs provided by relatives and neighbors. Child malnutrition rates were poor but not yet disastrous — probably because adults are going hungry to provide what little food they have for children. The IPC have no data for the numbers who have perished from hunger, disease, exposure and exhaustion — possibly because mass death from starvation hasn’t yet arrived, but perhaps because Gaza’s deeply conservative society doesn’t report hunger deaths to the authorities and simply buries the dead quietly with only private grief.

But this time Israel hasn’t responded by opening the regular, UN-based aid tap. This week’s relief supplies, according to the head of the UN’s humanitarian affairs office, Tom Fletcher, are “a drop in the ocean“. Israel argues that relief supplies provided by the United Nations and international organizations will fall into the hands of Hamas. To some degree this is surely true — it happens in every conflict of this kind and there are videos that show Hamas men commandeering aid trucks — even if senior officials in the Biden administration were never convinced that diversion was happening at scale.

So now Israel is setting up an aid system of its own design — one that will prevent even the smallest amount of food aid feeding any Hamas operative. The technology to achieve something close uses individual surveillance and ration minimization. A planned US-Israeli aid mechanism, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, appears to be based on this. The details for how the GHF will work are unclear, because it is new and untried, and the information it puts out is changing day-to-day. But there are signs of how it intends to operate.

The GHF aims to use a small number of aid distribution sites, strictly controlling access. They will be run by private military contractors. In phase one it will have just four. (The UN and voluntary agencies had 400). Pre-identified Gazans will be notified that they can go to one of these centers to collect a week’s worth of rations (including food, sanitary kits, and medical supplies) for their families at a specified time. Biometric screening will ensure that the correct person gets the ration. The target is 300 meals over 90 days (an average of 1.6 meals per person per day) with a ration of 1,700 kilocalories per day. This is less than the 2,100 Kcal/day recommended humanitarian ration used by the UN but more than the 1,560 Kcal/day fed in the Forties to the volunteers of the “Minnesota Experiment”, which examined the effects of starvation on the human body.

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We can conjecture on how the recipients will be selected. The IDF uses an algorithm known as Lavender for selecting Hamas suspects, based on individual profiles and electronically tracked behavioral traits. It’s a method for targeting assassination. That system can also generate a list of people who are not affiliated with Hamas — who can be targeted with food. If the ration is just enough to feed a family for a week, it’s fair to assume that the chances of food falling into Hamas’s hands are very low. Hamas operatives will go hungry; innocent civilians will be fed. It is a hybrid of Operation Starvation and surveillance humanitarianism.

The UN and liberal humanitarians are horrified by the way that this trounces various principles that they hold dear. They have condemned it as “a dangerous, politicized sham”. But let’s set aside the legality and consider whether it might prevent the descent into famine and achieve the victory that Israel seeks.

The recent IPC report outlines two scenarios. One is a continued blockade and ongoing war. The arithmetic of food availability is simple: mass starvation within weeks. The second scenario requires the GHF. Taking an untested emergency aid operation to scale in a few weeks is a huge and risky undertaking. And in the unlikely event that it works it will slow starvation but won’t stop it.

First, the quantities just aren’t sufficient and not in enough places. Second, there’s no provision for specialized feeding for malnourished young children, which requires skilled staff and special foodstuffs. Third, there’s no plan for clean water and electricity. A family member might be able to carry enough food to feed a family for a week, but no one can carry enough water even for a single day. The GHF isn’t designed by a relief professional.

The last and biggest problem is that counter-insurgency only works if there’s a political endgame. Israel is offering the Palestinians a choice between starvation or capitulation — with unknowable long-term implications. Hamas may be destroyed, but there’s no sign that the Palestinians of Gaza will abandon their land or submit quietly to Israeli occupation. They may turn on Hamas, accusing it of crimes and blunders, but that doesn’t exonerate Israel. And if protracted, intimate humiliation of surveillance humanitarianism in the ruins of their homes becomes the future, not only will Palestinian society in Gaza become dismembered, but Israel itself will forever be tarred by the inhumanity it is inflicting.

Having jettisoned the ceasefire accord on March 18 and resumed its war, Israel hopes to reoccupy the Strip, and perhaps even

While few in the West rejected Israel’s right to retaliate following the October 7 atrocities, the ferocity and duration of its war of retribution have turned public opinion in the West against Israel as never before. The protests on American college campuses have been all but shut down following pressure from the Trump administration, Congress, powerful pro-Israel organizations, and wealthy donors. Even so, they illustrated the outrage produced by the relentless killing in Gaza.

It’s common to hear that the demonstrations — on and off campuses — sprang from antisemitism or “pro-Hamas” ideology. This claim ignores the reality that it was the humanitarian catastrophe created by Israel’s war that ignited the protests and that Jews have been the most statistically overrepresented community in the antiwar demonstrations. And on 8 May, 38 leaders from some of the most prominent American Jewish organizations, which have been Israel’s most stalwart supporters, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to warn the Jewish community against permitting Trump to undermine universities, civil liberties, the freedom of speech, and the rule of law, all in the name of stamping out antisemitism.

Referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide is routinely painted as antisemitic. But this indictment, which has been echoed by the Trump administration, has begun to ring hollow given that the genocide charge comes from people like Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-born historian of genocide. Bartov, who did not rush to judgement, concluded recently that “it has been impossible to describe the Israeli operation as anything but genocidal”. He is not alone. Numerous other scholars of the Holocaust, and Jewish history more generally, have reached a similar conclusion—including more than 20 from Israel itself. The Oxford professor Avi Shlaim — who, like Bartov, grew up in Israel — who has rendered this same verdict in a recent book. And if criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza and occupation of the West Bank stem from antisemitism, Bernie Sanders, a Jew, would qualify as the Senate’s most antisemitic member.

American Jews between the ages of 18 and 34 remain strongly supportive of Israel. Still, the Gaza war has created a noticeable divide between them and their parents, and more so their grandparents. For the latter two generations, October 7 rekindled traumatic memories of the Shoah, strengthening their conviction that Israel is a haven for Jews that needs to be defended unconditionally. The younger cohort tends to be more critical of the war and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians more broadly. As for the wider American population, public opinion polls show that goodwill toward Israel has decreased substantially as Gaza’s catastrophe has worsened and become more widely known. The drop-off in Americans’ support for Israel isn’t new. As Mitchell Bard, an expert on US-Israel relations, noted in late March, referencing Gallup polls: “Sympathy for Israel peaked at 62% between 2010 and 2019 but has dropped every year since, falling to just 46% in 2025 — the lowest since 2001. Meanwhile, sympathy for the Palestinians hit a record high of 33%.”

The Gaza war has contributed to these shifts. As Gallup observed in late March, “the 46% expressing support [for Israel] is the lowest in 25 years of Gallup’s tracking of this measure.” These findings are replicated in other polls: a 2025 Pew Research Center survey showed that 53% of Americans viewed Israel unfavorably, compared to 42% in a 2022 poll. Since 2000, meanwhile, over half of all Americans have supported the creation of a Palestinian state, something that Netanyahu, and more so the members of his cabinet who lead far-Right religious parties, state publicly and repeatedly that they will never permit.

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By Edward Luttwak

More to the point, Israeli plans could make the relationship with the US even more fraught. If Israel’s current government follows through on its vision of resettling Gaza (Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismantled the settlements there in 2005), and expelling some or all its Palestinian population, Israel’s reputation will take a much bigger hit. The reintroduction of settlements in Gaza and the expulsion of its Palestinian population isn’t, by the way, a fanciful scenario. Netanyahu has endorsed, more than once, Trump’s idea of relocating Gazans and turning their homeland into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. In March, Defense Minister Israel Katz created a “Voluntary Emigration Bureau” for the Strip, while Israel and the US have reportedly approached officials in Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland about resettling Palestinians. If Gazans refuse the offer, what then?

Then there’s the West Bank, where settlement-building, land confiscations, and evictions have increased sharply since 2000 — and especially in recent years. The settlement project, to which the Israeli far-Right is deeply committed, has turned the West Bank into Swiss cheese, making it all but impossible to transform the disconnected areas ruled, with varying degrees of authority, by the Palestinian Authority into a territorially-continuous, sovereign Palestinian state, especially since Israel claims exclusive jurisdiction over Area C, which comprises 60% of the West Bank and contains more than 400,000 settlers living in 125 settlements and 100-plus impromptu “outposts”. The prospects for a Palestinian state would diminish further were Netanyahu to deliver on his 2019 pledge to annex the Jordan Valley, which encompasses nearly 30% of the West Bank.

Israel has long enjoyed unconditional support from the United States. But the Gaza war and the continued settlement of the West Bank, could make that less reliable. Yes, Donald Trump’s professed devotion to Israel has been celebrated by many of its diehard American supporters, including Jews. But as Eric Alterman recently warned, trusting in Trump is a terrible idea because the President himself has a history of antisemitism — and anyway threatens the rule of law and the civil liberties that have protected them for so long. Trump has denied the details concerning antisemitism, but whatever one’s view of Alterman’s thesis, this much seems clear: Trump has shown that his moves won’t necessarily align with those of an Israeli government and may actually undercut them.

Netanyahu dreams of destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities, with American military assistance; Trump is pursuing a deal with Iran to end its nuclear enrichment program. The US reached a truce with the Houthis of Yemen (who, in solidarity with Gazans, have fired rockets at Israel); the terms didn’t, however, extend to Israel. American officials recently conducted direct negotiations with Hamas, to secure the release of Edan Alexander, the sole surviving American hostage, apparently bypassing Israel. Israel has been encroaching on Syrian territory and carrying hundreds of airstrikes against military targets in that country; Trump has now raised the possibility of lifting sanctions so that the new government can have a “fresh start.

Putting aside the famously capricious Trump, what might a loosening of US-Israeli ties mean for the Jewish state? The short answer is that it would make a very big difference for the country—and not in a good way. Between Israel’s founding in 1948 and 2024, American economic and military aid, adjusted for inflation, totaled $300 billion. To put this figure in perspective, the second-largest recipient, Egypt, received only a little more than half as much. Netanyahu said this week that “we will have to detox from US security assistance”. Perhaps Israel should, and can, become militarily self-sufficient, but for now the reality is that it could never have waged war in Gaza on the scale that it has without the steady supply of American weaponry. Nor would it be anywhere near as secure as it has been in the tumultuous Middle East.

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By Armin Rosen

Beyond its foreign alliances, Israeli plans could produce problems for its future on other fronts. If its leaders continue to annex the West Bank, settle Gaza, and expel its people, the two-state solution, already on life support, will die. Israel will then be left with only one solution, if that’s the appropriate word: the continued occupation and policing of Palestinians, who won’t abandon their dream of self-determination, let alone disappear. The mix of occupation and repression will ensure the continuation of a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and accelerate a trend that’s been increasingly apparent since 2000: the increasing power of the country’s religious Right, already a major force in its politics. According to one 2016 survey, 48% of Israelis, and a much higher proportion among those who identify with the religious Right, favored the forcible expulsion of Arabs.

Taken, the erosion of democracy, greater political polarization, the increasing influence of groups and parties wedded to religious messianism, and continual violence created by the occupation may induce Israel’s best and brightest to emigrate. This is not a far-fetched scenario. In December, Israel’s Census Bureau reported that the sharp increase in departures from the country last year — half of those who left were between 20 and 45 years of age, more than a quarter were teenagers or younger — produced “net negative migration” and contributed to slower population growth.

Israel’s internal transformation toward illiberalism, a metamorphosis produced partly by its repression and occupation of Palestinians and the violence it begets, is hardly foreordained. But if the country continues to move in that direction, its international isolation will increase, and goodwill toward it will diminish, even in the United States, which if not irreplaceable as a patron and protector, comes pretty close. Hamas cannot, of course destroy Israel, but if the country undermines itself, its archenemy will have scored a victory.

Why is the commander wrong? Partly because, morally speaking, he is a consequentialist. He believes that the way to judge human actions is to calculate their probable effects, then assess whether they are largely positive or negative. What counts as positive or negative is clearly a problem. Different people are likely to return different, sometimes conflicting, answers to this question. Perhaps the most familiar kind of consequentialism is utilitarianism, which weighs the sum-total of happiness which will result from your action against the sum-total of unhappiness it may cause. (You will, of course, need to define what counts as happiness, since what it meant for Plato isn’t what it meant for Marx or Jacob Rees-Mogg). What matters isn’t so much your intention, or the nature of the action itself, as the impact it will have on the world, which is to say whether it will increase overall human happiness or not. Actions are as actions do.

But how do we know what impact it will have? Any ethics based on consequences is bound to be retrospective. Only when you look back can you evaluate the fruits of your actions, since only then will they have come into existence. Trying to calculate them in advance is a tricky business. It would take a sizable team of investigators to trace the results of even the most trivial act. Perhaps I see an advertisement from the top of a bus, the colors of which remind me of another advertisement some years ago, which first turned me on to smoking. I take up smoking again — then die of lung cancer a few years later. As a result, one of my children drops out of college, becomes delinquent and hits you over the head with a whisky bottle one dark night in Hackney. After the assault, you develop blurred vision and drive your car into a butcher’s shop in Greenwich, gravely injuring an elderly customer. Their partner sinks into depression, and jumps off a bridge.

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Are all terrorists monsters?

By Terry Eagleton

It’s impossible, then, to say how many people are involved in a single action — and I haven’t even mentioned the agency which designed the advertisement, the workers who built the bus, or those who extracted the rubber which went into its tires. Who owns an action is a question which much concerned the ancient Greeks. For them, humans move precariously, in a tangled net of cause and effect which can never be grasped as a whole. Only God, or an omniscient narrator in a novel, can do that. What we do can spin out of our control, breed multiple effects, merge with the acts of others and confront us as an alien force. In this sense, we are all, like Oedipus, “guilty innocents”, caught up in potentially lethal situations which we never got to choose and might not even be aware of. The Christian doctrine of original sin, for which we’re all implicated in a condition for which none of us is actually guilty, is an equivalent of this tragic way of seeing.

There’s also the question of what doesn’t happen as a result of what you do, or don’t do. Maybe one of the schoolchildren you blow up would have grown up to discover a cure for cancer. We’re speaking here of what one might call the subjunctive realm — the spectral world of what might have come about had you acted differently. Here, however, one needs to tread carefully. It sounds reasonable to say, “If I hadn’t been delayed in getting to the airport, I would have been on the aircraft that crashed into the Atlantic with no survivors”. But it could be argued that if you’d been on time for the flight, history would have been different, and this alternative history might not have included the air crash. Perhaps you can’t alter one bit of history without changing the lot.

So judging solely from consequences has its problems. And there’s another reason, too, why it isn’t the soundest form of ethics. It’s strongly counterintuitive to claim that we think things are good or bad only according to the difference they make in the world. It’s not only that a bad action can have positive effects, or vice versa. It’s that we sometimes feel like saying that a way of acting is good in itself, regardless of the results it might produce. It’s good that someone is willing to go to their death to defend the cause of the innocent, even if the whole project backfires and leaves the innocent worse off than they were before. Similarly, it’s good that you don’t slaughter thousands of Gazan civilians, even if it means that you don’t get your hands on the militants of Hamas.

In Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons, the 16th century martyr Thomas More refuses to take an oath denying the authority of the Pope even though this means his beheading. He takes his stand, regardless of the consequences, because to do otherwise would be to betray his own identity. The real-life Thomas More was more of a consequentialist: he refused to deny the sovereignty of the Pope because he feared burning in hell if he did.

Actions which contain their value wholly in themselves are rather like works of art. Like art, they resist being treated in a merely functional or utilitarian way. We don’t ask what the “Mona Lisa” is for. Even actions of this kind, however, may have consequences which they don’t intend, or which are surreptitiously intended. Take, for instance, Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove, in which Kate Croy and Merton Densher are a young couple in love but without the means to marry. They befriend Milly Theale, a fabulously rich young American woman, who Kate discovers to be terminally ill. Kate persuades Densher to pay court to Milly, who has fallen in love with him, so that he and Milly may marry and Densher will inherit her fortune when she dies. Milly learns of the plot against her, but bequeaths her wealth to Densher on her deathbed anyway. Like a martyr, she uses death creatively, placing it at someone else’s service. The effect of this astonishing act of forgiveness and generosity causes Densher to fall passionately in love with Milly’s memory.

Remorseful for his and Kate’s plotting, he refuses to accept the heiress’s bequest. He is willing to marry Kate — but without Milly’s fortune. If Kate chooses not to marry him, he will make the legacy over to her. For her part, Kate insists that she will marry Densher only if he accepts Milly’s money, thus testifying that he has put his devotion to the dead woman behind him. Unable to resolve this deadlock, the couple part forever and the novel closes.

Milly’s dying act is meant to transcend the tangled web of cause and effect in its supreme disregard for consequence and calculation. It belongs to the category of action which James often calls “beautiful”, meaning those ways of behaving which have nothing in them for oneself and are performed purely for their own sake. There is a recklessness about living in this self-squandering way, a kind of extravagant pointlessness, but it is more than outweighed by its sheer grace and radiance. Milly’s is an aristocratic ethic, so to speak, as opposed to the mean-minded bookkeeping mentality of Kate and Densher.

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Milly’s final act seems like a riposte to consequentialism. It will certainly have no consequences for her, since she will very soon be dead. Yet her action has momentous effects for Kate and Densher. The question is whether Milly herself has foreseen those effects. Is she a saint or a schemer? Has she acted to demonstrate her moral fineness, win Densher’s heart forever or break up his relationship with Kate? Is her splendid disinterestedness a devious act of aggression? As usual with James, the answer is unknowable. The novel carefully allows us no access to Milly’s motives. It’s hard to say whether her graciousness is a form of egoism or altruism, a humbling of the self or a final assertion of it.

The commander who orders the school to be blown up, then, seems to believe that, morally speaking, the end justifies the means. This can certainly be the case. Hardly anyone thinks that it’s wrong to lie to the Gestapo about the whereabouts of your Jewish grandmother. The greatest of all theologians, Thomas Aquinas, wouldn’t have agreed. But though he thought lying was absolutely wrong, he didn’t think that “absolute” meant “very wicked”. He just meant it as a synonym for “should never be done”. Almost everyone, however, maintains that if you see a 10-year-old kid sneaking out of your front door with a five dollar bill of yours, it’s not permissible to shoot him in the back. (A lot more Americans are likely to do this than the British are — not because the British are morally superior to Americans, but because they don’t have guns.)

So there can be no general rule here. Some people probably believe that it doesn’t matter if you kill a million Palestinians, so long as you eliminate Hamas in the process. It’s worth asking how this makes such people different from Hamas. There are also those of us who hold that massacring the innocent — non-combatants — is never morally permissible whatever gains it might bring you, and that to see such mass slaughter as mere collateral damage is a moral obscenity. Dresden, Coventry and Hiroshima were cases of mass murder. If you’re allowed to do that, then you’re allowed to do more or less anything, and all talk of morality becomes superfluous.

Investing as the head of the Witkoff Group, he has been updating classic Manhattan office buildings like the Woolworth tower and creating luxury condominium high-rises like 111 Murray Street. Even today, his son Alex is rescuing One High Line — the pair of angular Bjarke Ingels-designed waterfront towers in West Chelsea — from an ignominious fate as the misbegotten condo development of a collapsed investing group.

Along the way, Witkoff has built a reputation for a high risk tolerance that suits Trump as the two of them seek to settle the ultimate real-estate dispute: namely, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The prize is unquestionably attractive. Yet given the stakes and the sensitivity of the region, Gotham-style real-estate wrangling could also prove disastrous.

Witkoff’s journey to the world of high diplomacy began, of course, in his friendship with fellow developer Trump. Indeed, so close are the two men that Witkoff was on the golf course at Mar-a-Lago last year when a second failed assassination attempt was made on Trump. According to a New York real-estate source, who declined to be identified because he didn’t want to get involved in Trumpian affairs, Witkoff’s grandson was named Donald after his grandfather’s friend, the president. And Trump attended Alex’s bar mitzvah reception, the person said.

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Trump rewarded Witkoff’s personal loyalty by naming the latter his envoy to the Middle East. When it comes to the bedeviling region, Trump has from the beginning thought outside the box. Witkoff’s position is roughly the same as that of Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law, also a major figure in New York real estate — in the first term. Despite just about no previous experience as a mediator, Jared, son of real-estate mogul Charles Kushner, produced the Abraham Accords that opened diplomatic relations between the Jewish state and four Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

Kushner sees the Middle East as a real-estate opportunity — albeit, one in which the main hazards aren’t so much New York regulators withholding construction permits as Islamist groups and states that periodically go boom. Kushner parlayed his position in the first Trump administration into the leadership of Miami-based Affinity Partners, an investment firm which he founded and which has been raising investment capital largely from Middle Eastern companies — $3.1 billion as of October, to be exact, according to a Wall Street Journal story.

Witkoff brings a similar mentality to the region. Although Witkoff, like Kushner, lacks previous diplomatic experience, he does have an international cast of friends and contacts, in the Middle East and around the world. A longtime associate in New York’s real-estate industry calls him an “excellent negotiator”.

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Despite nominally serving as the president’s ears and mouth in the Middle East, Witkoff was also dispatched to Moscow to negotiate the release of Marc Fogel, a teacher who had been held in prison for three years on marijuana charges. Witkoff is also part of the negotiating team seeking to end the Russia-Ukraine war, over and against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s objections and others who warn that the Trumpians are ignoring Kyiv. Witkoff is unperturbed by such talk. In a news conference shortly after Fogel’s release, he described his role this way: “He [Trump] asks, and we say yes.”

Witkoff, in his light brown overcoat and perfectly starched collar, has become a fixture of television news as he represents the Trump administration globally. It’s a long way from the days in the early Nineties, when he used to personally collect rent, while carrying a gun, from his tenants in The Bronx, and where he got his start in the business.

Born in 1957 in The Bronx, he graduated from Hofstra Law School on Long Island in 1983. Afterwards, he landed a job with the real-estate law firm Dreyer & Traub, where one of his clients was none other than … Donald Trump. He then formed a partnership with the late Laurence Gluck that was known as Stellar Management (the “Ste” in Stellar stood for Steve, and the “Lar” part stood for Larry).

Although their business and political paths have long overlapped and even converged, Witkoff’s approach to real estate differs from Trump’s. While Trump built his brand around showy towers, resorts, and golf courses, Witkoff followed a more tried-and-true path through commercial and residential real estate, keeping a low profile and letting his bank accounts do the talking.

Even so, Witkoff would gain a measure of notoriety that few real-estate investors achieve. He moved fast in the business, blowing his way past the stodgy families headed by scions three or four generations removed from the enterprising paterfamilias. He was a scrappy hustler determined to build on his early successes. It helped that this was the Nineties, when commercial real estate had been beaten down by the savings-and-loan scandal, which led to the bankruptcy of several small banks that had a large number of failing new properties on their books. Those who bought low were richly rewarded. Witkoff was one of them.

He was fortunate, too, to have in his corner a financier named Andrew Stone of Credit Suisse First Boston. Stone — who viewed himself as the “Star Trek lender”, boldly lending where others on Wall Street wouldn’t — made bets on up-and-coming real-estate entrepreneurs who showed the ability to spot properties with the potential to bring in enough money to achieve well over their debt service. Besides Witkoff, Stone backed Trump, the developer Harry Macklowe, hotelier Ian Schrager, and the post-Soviet fertilizer king-turned-development mogul Tamir Sapir, among others.

What set Stone apart from most financiers in his position was his willingness to underwrite as much as 97% of a commercial real-estate purchase. That can be deadly if the property doesn’t lease up — if it fails to find enough tenants willing to pay a premium for the quality and location. But if it does lease up, the owner can amass untold riches. Hence, Witkoff’s reputation for high-risk, high-reward deals.

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Besides the famed Woolworth Building, designed by celebrated architect Cass Gilbert, Witkoff’s portfolio at one time included the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street, which the tabloid long ago abandoned, and 33 Maiden Lane downtown.

“He can be tough when he needs to be tough, and he can be charming when he needs to be charming,” said Jonathan Mechanic, chairman of the real-estate department at the law firm Fried Frank and a key figure in New York commercial real estate. “Although I’m not sure I would have seen this coming 20 years ago. I have no doubt that he can feel comfortable talking to anybody at any time.”

Mechanic recalled joining Witkoff at a meeting with Goldman Sachs on the financing of the Daily News building. Witkoff “had been up in The Bronx, and he had his gun attached to his ankle. When he leaned forward, and the gun could be seen”. Aware of the impression he’d made, Witkoff vowed to “come a little lighter afoot” next time.

Whether this combination of gun-toting gumption and charm can bring peace to the Middle East’s warring factions is a different question. As it is, America’s Arab allies have been left unnerved by Trump’s brainstorm for removing Gaza’s population to develop the territory into a sort of Middle East riviera. At stake is nothing less than the expansion of the Abraham Accords to include what once was unthinkable: formal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

High risk, high reward, indeed.

For one thing, Netanyahu rejects his generals’ assessment that Hamas cannot be defeated. And in order to keep the hardline finance minister Bezalel Smotrich in his cabinet, he has assured him that a ceasefire wouldn’t end the war permanently. If Netanyahu does restart the war, he can count on even more political and material support from Trump than he received from Biden — which, in both spheres, was enormous and virtually unqualified.

Last week, the ceasefire seemed done for. Hamas and Israel accused each other of violating its terms. And, true to form, Trump sprung a surprise, declaring that Israel should resume the war if Hamas failed to free all of the remaining hostages — at that point 76 remained, including those presumed dead — by Saturday 15 February. He seemed not to know, or care, that the deal stipulates a staggered handover during its first two phases.

Netanyahu increased the confusion by initially intimating that he agreed with Trump and might return to war now that the American president had given him political cover. Hamas, for its part, listed 270 Israeli violations of the ceasefire, some verified by independent sources, and threatened to withhold the three hostages scheduled to be freed on Saturday — though it eventually relented. Netanyahu forwent the opportunity Trump gave him, confirming his commitment to the agreement, providing Hamas released the next batch of hostages, which it did.

Of course, Hamas could also defenestrate the deal, and recently nearly did. But, leaving brinksmanship aside, Hamas lacks a self-evident motive to tear it up. The terms meet all of its longstanding demands, and the end of the war allowed it to demonstrate that it remained unvanquished and had won. With Trump back in the White House, Hamas could end up with a much worse result if turned back to fighting. Though Hamas’s current standing among Gazans remains unclear, exposing them to even more death and destitution certainly won’t improve its popularity.

Yet dwelling on the ceasefire’s fate can obscure a larger question: what will happen in and to Gaza even if the agreement survives? Trump’s answer is to expel Gazans en masse to Egypt and Jordan forever, claim American ownership of the Strip, and build a second Riviera on its coast. This scheme is unworkable, and an attempt to implement it would be a flagrant violation of international law, not to mention elemental ethical principles. No Arab government has endorsed it — nor would any dare for fear that “the street” would erupt, especially now that Netanyahu, in his Sunday meeting with Secretary Marco Rubio, praised it once again, this time as “a bold vision”.

Still, the question of Gaza’s postwar governance must be resolved by negotiation, most likely during the ceasefire agreement’s third phase. That will create new complications. Hamas remains standing, but Netanyahu has ruled out its return to power. And yet he also doesn’t want the Palestinian Authority in charge. Israeli rule will be rejected by Palestinians and the Arab states, who will see it as a pretext for expelling Gazans — something that has significant support in Israel, not just on the far-Right but also among Jewish Israelis generally. A government comprised of Gaza’s notables, perhaps? Possibly, but only if Israel can be convinced that they won’t be stalking horses for Hamas.

Then there’s the fact that Israel’s war hasn’t ended. It has shifted to the West Bank, targeting armed Palestinian groups, whose presence there increased following the Gaza War. Since 21 January, the IDF’s “Operation Iron Wall” has killed dozens of Palestinians, displaced 40,000 more — mainly in the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas — and bulldozed or blown up numerous buildings. Add to that the increase in armed Jewish settlers’ long-running attacks on Palestinian communities, and the Israeli government continuing evictions of Palestinians from their homes and greenlighting of new settlements and housing blocks.

The West Bank consists of three areas: areas A and B, small islands run by the Palestinian Authority, are separated by area C, which comprises 60% of the territory and is ruled solely by Israel. This political geography has eviscerated the two-state solution, which, in any event, has lost even more support in Israel following October 7. And the one-state solution, favored by many supporters of Palestinians’ rights on the Left outside Israel, has very little purchase among Israelis. In December 2022, only one-fifth of Israelis favored it. Even those on the Left want Israel to remain a Jewish state.

What the future holds, then, is continued upheaval and violence. Israel will revert to its standard “mowing the lawn” strategy: quelling intermittent Palestinian uprisings but leaving their underlying source, the occupation, intact. That strategy will empower extremists on both sides.

In Israel, far-Right groups and parties, whose members believe that the West Bank is among the lands divinely bequeathed to Jews, have become increasingly influential, reflecting a trend that long predates October 7. A 2015 Pew poll found that nearly half of Israeli Jews backed the expulsion of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza; the proportion was substantially higher among Jews who are Orthodox or strongly religious. Support for expulsion has increased even further since the war began. In a January poll, 43% of Jewish Israelis said that Trump’s Gaza plan was practical and should be pursued. Another 30% liked it but doubted its feasibility. In all, then, nearly three-fourths of them backed Trump’s population transfer proposal, which some in Israel have labelled “Trumpsfer”.

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Extremism will increase among Palestinians as well, especially if Israel continues to rely on repression, thereby decreasing Palestinians’ hope — which by now barely exists — in a political settlement that gives them a full-fledged state. In 1993, the Palestinian Liberation Organization recognized Israel as a Jewish state, renounced violence and pledged to pursue the two-state solution. Not only does today’s Palestinian Authority (PA) have nothing much to show for its efforts, but it has become Israel’s enforcer (note, for example, its active role in Iron Wall, the IDF’s West Bank military offensive). Most Palestinians consider it feckless and corrupt. That, too, benefits the proponents of armed resistance. Israeli leaders often complain that they lack good-faith interlocutors, but that, in part, owes to the conditions they have created in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel’s continued reliance on force will increase its already considerable international isolation, including in Europe. That will make it even more dependent on the United States — a safe situation to be in but only as long as American attitudes toward Israel stay unchanged. They may not. Opinion polls show that the Gaza war has cost Israel considerable goodwill in the US — though the decline in support precedes it. The extent varies considerably by age group, and is most apparent among Millennials, including American Jews. Less than half of Jewish Americans under 30 expressed a strong attachment to Israel in 2020.

Palestinians will face a different, albeit familiar, form of isolation. The major Arab states will continue to voice support for them while accepting their domination by Israel. Their focus will remain on preventing the ripple effects of upheaval and bloodshed in Gaza and the West Bank from breaching their borders. Iran will provide rhetorical support but lacks the wherewithal to alter the overwhelming imbalance of power between the Palestinians and Israel — the more so after the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. And with Trump’s return, Netanyahu, who has long wanted to attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, may, as recent US intelligence reports concluded, be emboldened to give it a go.

When it comes to Israeli-Palestinian matters, then, there is little hope that the dark clouds will dissipate. On this much, Israel Jews and Palestinians do agree.

“We’re going to develop it, we’re going to create thousands and thousands of jobs,” he gushed while discussing Gaza’s potential to become the Middle East’s “Riviera”. This followed comments he made immediately after his inauguration about its “phenomenal location on the sea — best weather”.

The Palestinians who live in Gaza would, he continued, be taken in by Egypt and Jordan. Both countries, he was certain, would “open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done and people can live in harmony and peace”.

Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to him, was clearly taken by surprise, though clearly also not entirely unpleasantly. These words were, he said, “worth paying attention to”. Trump, he added, “sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism… I think it’s something that could change history”.

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In contrast, allies and adversaries across the world mainly reacted with the same horror that was written across White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ face as Trump outlined his vision. Hamas called the plan “racist” and vowed to prevent its implementation, while the Palestinian Authority described it — not incorrectly — as a severe breach of international law.

Jordan and Egypt were similarly outraged. Both receive huge amounts of US aid (third and fourth largest recipients respectively in 2023), which means that Washington does have considerable leverage. But when you consider what is being asked, and of whom, then even those colossal sums are likely to be inadequate.

Let’s start with Jordan. When it became an independent state, in 1946, it did so as a largely Palestinian one — led by a British-installed Hashemite monarchy. Today, one in five Jordanians is of Palestinian descent, while more than two million Palestinian refugees already live there. For Amman to absorb more would threaten its very viability as a Hashemite state.

There’s also a deeper anxiety here. Back in 1970, during the Black September conflict, Jordanian forces and Palestinian groups clashed after a failed assassination attempt on King Hussein and the hijacking of four planes by a Palestinian terror group. A massacre ensued, and only ended with the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan. The Hashemite monarchy internalized a lesson: give the Palestinians any room in the country and they will try to take control. Import a million or so now, and the result might not be so favorable. King Abdullah may not want to go against Washington, but if it’s a choice between that or the end of his monarchy then there is no choice.

Egypt is, arguably, even more vulnerable if there were a Palestinian influx. The idea that President el-Sisi, who overthrew the Brotherhood in a coup, will now import its offshoot, Hamas, is hardly serious. Nor can he afford to be seen as complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Polling by the Washington Institute a year ago found that 97% of Egyptians agreed Arab states should “immediately sever all diplomatic, political, economic, and any other contacts with Israel, in protest against its military action in Gaza”. El-Sisi has maintained relations with Israel. But imagine his people’s reaction if he helped Jerusalem empty Gaza.

An angry population is a destabilizing one. And Egypt is already an economic basket case, suffering from inflation, a nosediving currency and substantial debt. If it collapses, the region and the world will suffer the consequences. And if there is one state in the world that has a particular interest in Egypt holding together, it is Israel. To have 16 million desperate Egyptians on its border would probably be a threat greater than any it has yet faced.

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The anger at Trump’s Riviera has reverberated beyond Palestine’s immediate neighbors. Normalization with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been a longstanding goal of both the Trump and Netanyahu administrations, but after Trump’s words Riyadh was unequivocal that there would be no diplomatic relations with Israel without a Palestinian state. I know from multiple sources that the Saudis don’t actually care about the Palestinians; and that their crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is desperate for normalization with Jerusalem. But Trump’s real estate plan has left Riyadh with no alternative but to publicly support a two-state solution (which was not necessary for the signing of the Saudi-supported Abraham Accords). Since this is out of the question for Netanyahu, Trump has inadvertently pushed normalization further out of reach.

That the “plan” would be a gross violation of international law is probably irrelevant to Trump. But if he were to succeed in turning Gaza into a riviera, what does he think the millions of displaced Gazans would do? They would consider it a second Nakba. Gaza city would become a seafront paradise where residents sipped Negronis under rocket fire from Egypt and took cold plunges as Hamas terrorists emerged bellowing from tunnels across the border. US troops would be stuck there for decades. Surely a less-than-ideal scenario for a man who has repeatedly stated his desire to end US involvement in foreign wars.

Netanyahu understands all this. He is a sociopath with a messiah complex; he genuinely believes his destiny is to save Western civilization from the scourge of radical Islam. He is also the man who, before October 7, brought Israel to the brink of civil unrest. But he is also incredibly smart and probably the most able state leader in the world right now. His assessment that Trump’s proposal was “worth paying attention to” was pointedly mealy-mouthed — in contrast to his fascistic former coalition partner Itamar Ben-Gvir’s enthusiastic assessment that Trump’s plan represents “the only solution”.

But if this idea is dangerous, impetuous and unlikely to see the light of day, the impulse behind it (even though borne from instinct rather than design) — to think about a seemingly unsolvable problem in a new light, however crazed, is perhaps worthwhile. As policy, Trump’s Gaza plan is a disaster; as a thought experiment, it’s absurd. But such an unthinkable suggestion might actually kickstart the sort of unorthodox, disruptive thinking that has eluded more measured, knowledgeable and sharper minds for almost 60 years — and which has helped to keep peace so tortuously at bay for so long.

The match that night at the Groupama Aréna ended well — Keane’s side beat their Dutch rivals 4-3 — but the shift into management hasn’t always been so straightforward for Ferencváros’s boss. Ireland’s all-time leading goalscorer is a pariah back home, and is unlikely to find success in his native land again. The former Tottenham striker’s crime? Managing Maccabi Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest club, a job that saw him assailed as a “Zionist rat” and “blood money Robbie”.

Ugly language, and a vivid testament to the attitudes of many in Ireland to the conflict in the Middle East. Yet more than that, Keane’s story hints at a broader lesson, of how politics and football are inevitably linked, and how trying to steer clear of geopolitical controversy is doomed always to fail.

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In the summer of 2023, when Keane was offered the Maccabi Tel Aviv gig, he was keen to see the positives. He has always been keen, as he puts it, to experience “other countries and cultures” — and is dismissive of those who have refused to leave their “comfort zones”. Until recently, it’s a philosophy that served him well. Leaving Ireland at 17, and playing everywhere from Italy to India, the striker has enjoyed a far more varied career than many of his contemporaries, struggling with drab managerial jobs at second- and third-flight English clubs.

This time, though, things would be different. Even before the October 7 massacre, Ireland was firmly pro-Palestinian. That stems largely from a general anti-colonial feeling, but it’s also true the IRA long enjoyed close links with the PLO. Stadiums have often been the stage for protest and demonstration, but this issue has a particular prominence because those who follow the Ireland national team are disproportionately drawn from that Left-wing, anti-colonial constituency.

More recently, Ireland supported South Africa’s legal action against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a move that in December saw the Jewish state shutter its embassy in Dublin. Worse was to follow: Gideon Sarr, the Israeli foreign minister, last week accused Ireland’s president of “a cheap despicable provocation” when he referenced the war in Gaza during a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. These global tensions have often played out on home turf. When Ireland played Greece in Dublin six days after Hamas’s attack, the stand behind one goal was dotted with Palestinian flags.

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Keane has, perhaps naively, tried to stay neutral. As manager at one of Israel’s most popular sides, the Irishman was widely expected to support his hosts — especially after their retaliatory assault on Gaza. Yet Keane was quiet, doggedly refusing to engage in anything beyond football. But merely by remaining in Israel, many in Ireland felt he was tacitly supporting Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.

When he presented caps to players at an Ireland national team get-together last November, Keane was duly subjected to a barrage of online abuse. Israelis, for their part, have criticised him for his reluctance to speak out from the other direction. Nor is he the only one to have suffered. His wife Claudine, who still lives in Ireland with their two sons, has spoken publicly of feeling unsafe. Involved in a series of social media flare-ups, she even requested a meeting with Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, after a former TD accused Robbie of “sportswashing apartheid and genocidal Israel”.

In a sense, none of this is surprising. The October 7 slaughter, and the bombing of Gaza that followed, has turned football into a battleground. Quite aside from Palestinian flags in the Dublin stands, that was clear last November, when Maccabi Tel Aviv played Ajax in Amsterdam. Maccabi fans targeted Palestinians and other Arabs, while the visitors and local Jews faced antisemitic violence, leading to 71 arrests. Keane himself had resigned five months earlier, walking away from the final two years of a lucrative contract, saying it would have been unfair on the staff he had taken with him to leave sooner.

“Was it tough?” Keane asked last week during a press conference in Budapest. “Unfortunately I can’t control what people say. It is what it is. I’m sensitive to the situation and hopefully, please God, everybody can move on peacefully and I can get on with what I do best and that’s being involved in football. I get it’s a complicated situation.”

Not that Keane’s departure for Hungary is likely to restore his reputation. If he were to set foot on the Dublin pitch now, he’d almost certainly be booed. For the first Irish manager to win a foreign league title since 1935, that’s remarkable — even if it speaks, once more, to the impossibility of keeping football and politics apart. That’s just as true in Hungary as it was in Israel. Ferencváros’s president is Gábor Kubatov, a vice-president of the ruling Fidesz party. Even the Groupama Aréna, the site of Keane’s maiden home win, is a result of the Orbán government’s generous investments in sporting infrastructure.

More to the point, Keane’s tenure in Tel Aviv influenced where he ended up next. Orbán is a close ally of Netanyahu, and at the very least Hungary is one of the few places in Europe where Keane’s last job wouldn’t be an issue. Before the match last week, Hungarian fans were baffled by questions about Israel and Palestine, far more interested in whether Keane had won the Israeli league because Maccabi were good: or because Hapoel Haifa, their main rivals, collapsed.

All the while, Keane seems as anxious as ever to focus on the sport. As the players performed a lap of honor following their victory against Alkmaar, taking a salute from the ultras behind the goal, Keane stood by, watching on beaming. He had been relaxed and uncharacteristically chatty even before the match. When a packed stadium is celebrating his victory, he may wonder if he really needs Ireland. Listening to Keane talk warmly about his new apartment, and the local restaurant scene, he seemed to be reveling in his new Hungarian future.

In footballing terms, Keane’s next task is to win a seventh league title in a row, although Sunday’s 0-0 draw with MTK represented a slightly flat start. Yet here, once more, politics threatens to encroach onto the pitch. At the moment, Ferencváros are second in the standings. Ahead of them are Puskás Akadémia — an Orbán brainchild based in his home village of Felcsút. Given every top-flight club has some relationship with Fidesz, and it becomes very hard to look at the Hungarian league and argue that politics and football can truly be separated.

Keane last week compared himself with Roy Hodgson, who pursued an itinerant career before coming back to manage England. Although he implied he would ultimately like a job in the Premier League, he also spoke of a 20-year managerial career and being in no rush. Politics, though, might already have scuppered any dream of going home to manage Ireland.

More importantly, the agreement has made a huge difference to people’s lives, above all to Gazans. Those still living — at least 48,000 have been killed, even as The Lancet suggests that figure could be much higher — have been stalked daily by death, seen their homeland reduced to 42 million tons of rubble, and been deprived of life’s most basic necessities. That fear has been lifted, and hundreds of trucks laden with humanitarian aid have begun to enter the Strip. As for the family and friends of the hostages snatched by Hamas on October 7, they have waited in agony for the return of their loved ones, even as some know that all they can expect is their loved one’s corpse. Of the 33 hostages who are to be freed by the end of Phase 1 of the agreement, only seven have come home so far. The joy of the families, and of Israelis more generally, has been palpable. If everything goes according to plan, the remaining 61 hostages will be freed in Phase 2 of the agreement.

There’s more. Under the terms of Phase 1, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will redeploy to a narrow buffer-zone within Gaza’s border, before withdrawing completely by the end of Phase 2. Hamas is happy about this provision, but so are Gazans generally — it decreases the odds of the war’s resumption. Phase 3 calls for a detailed plan to rebuild Gaza, with satellite imagery showing 60% of buildings damaged or destroyed. Reconstruction, it goes without saying, is crucial if Gazans are to anything resembling normal lives.

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Now that we’ve got the “in fairness” bit out of the way, let’s turn to the ways that the agreement could collapse, even before the 42 days of Phase 1 elapse, but more likely at the end of Phase 2 — an additional 42-day period when Hamas is required to release the remaining 65 hostages.

Could Hamas violate the deal? Of course. Recall that immediately after the ceasefire began, thousands of Hamas fighters and police appeared on the streets. Having endured punishing blows from one of the world’s most powerful armies and survived, and apparently recruiting enough fighters to replace those killed, Hamas has claimed victory. Such hubris could ultimately convince its leaders that Israel can be humiliated even further, via a renewed bout of fighting. Or, by reneging on its promise to release the hostages, Hamas may try to wring more concessions from Israel. It could, for instance, demand the freeing of even more Palestinian prisoners. That includes Marwan Barghouti of Fatah, the most famous (and popular) of all Palestinian prisoners. Since 2002, he’s been locked in an Israeli prison, serving five life sentences for murder. If Hamas ever demanded his release, or made additional demands, Israel would almost certainly say no — and the war would resume.

Yet, it’s hard to see why Hamas would wreck the agreement. The January 15 deal gives it just about everything it has long sought (and received, in a May 2024 accord, which Israel rejected). One important gain here is the IDF’s redeployment away from Gaza’s major population centers, as a prelude to a complete withdrawal. Another is Israel’s release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, based on an overwhelmingly favorable hostage-for-prisoner ratio, and that’s before you recall the comprehensive plan for rebuilding Gaza.

Why would Hamas abandon these gains — especially when there’s not much more it can realistically squeeze from Israel, and when reigniting the war would inflict far more pain on Hamas than the IDF? The point here is not that Hamas is fastidious about honoring the terms of deals it signs, merely that, like other states and groups jousting in the pitiless arena of international politics, it’s a self-interested actor.

Israel, on the other hand, does have reasons — again based on self-interest — to breach the terms of the peace. Netanyahu vowed that he would continue the war until Hamas was destroyed: not just diminished but totally wiped out. He has failed to achieve that goal, something the IDF has itself acknowledged. Worse, Hamas has replenished its ranks and rebuilt much of the labyrinthine tunnel network, the very same infrastructure that made freeing the hostages so challenging for Israeli troops.

Netanyahu, in short, has unfinished business, and has openly stated he reserves the right to restart the war. No less striking, the prime minister is under pressure from his own coalition. One of his hardline cabinet members, Itamar Ben-Gvir, national security minister and head of the Otzma Yehudit party, resigned in protest after Netanyahu agreed to sign the ceasefire deal. Ben-Gvir urged Bezalel Smotrich, another hardliner, to follow suit. Netanyahu persuaded Smotrich to stay by promising (among other things) that the ceasefire wouldn’t mean a permanent end to the war. Smotrich, for his part, has publicly highlighted this assurance.

For good measure, the finance minister added that there would be “a gradual takeover of the entire Gaza Strip” to ensure that “humanitarian aid will not reach Gaza as it has until now.” To summarize, then, Netanyahu has consistently sought to ensure that he has the support of the far-Right religious parties. But if he delivers on his deal with Smotrich, defenestrates the ceasefire, and restricts aid flows once more, the whole arrangement will collapse.

And what of Donald Trump? He paraded the ceasefire, which he clearly wanted signed before Inauguration Day, as something he alone made happen. Wouldn’t its implosion make his boast seem hollow, and make his coveted Nobel Peace Prize even less likely? None of this is likely to be as big a problem as it might seem. Trump makes lots of promises — remember his vow to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of being sworn in? — and takes credit for all manner of things. But his base expects this, so he won’t pay any political price if the Gaza war restarts. If the bloodshed resumes, he’ll blame Hamas, or Netanyahu, or perhaps even Biden.

The American domestic context matters here too. Trump has long relied on the support of groups and individuals, both Jewish and Evangelical, unconditionally supportive of Israel. The President, who always fancies himself a maverick, could break faith with these supporters. Yet nothing he has done with respect to Israel suggests he’s so inclined. During his first presidential term, after all, he moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Accepting Israel’s claim that the unified city is its eternal capital, that’s something only five other countries have done.

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Trump also recognized the Golan Heights — Syrian sovereign territory that Israel occupied after the Six-Day War in 1967 — as legally part of Israel. In 2023, meanwhile, he declared that Israel has “no better friend or ally” than him. No sooner did his current term start than he lifted the sanctions Joe Biden had imposed on far-Right settlers building illegal settlements in the West Bank. Soon after that, he nixed Biden’s ban on supplying 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. Plus, Trump has apparently assured Netanyahu that Israel would enjoy his full backing to restart the fight if Hamas violates the deal. In fact, the prime minister has already accused the militants of doing just that, and responded by temporarily blocking displaced Gazans from returning to the territory’s north.

None of this means that Israel, confident of US backing, is sure to breach the ceasefire. Nor is it necessarily planning to, especially since the hostages won’t all be released until the end of Phase 2. Though he’ll have more flexibility thereafter, Netanyahu may yet decide to stick with the agreement. For one thing, he may be deterred by the surprisingly high casualty rates among the IDF, with nearly 900 battle deaths in Gaza alongside 38 suicides. For another, Netanyahu may be unsure whether Hamas can truly be destroyed. Still, of the two parties that have signed the deal, Israel has stronger motives to breach it than Hamas — something to bear in mind if violence really does return.

If, moreover, the agreement proceeds to its anticipated second phase, the IDF will leave the Gaza-Egypt frontier, abandoning the Strip’s invaluable smuggling routes to Hamas, at the same time that hundreds of Hamas terrorists will be freed from Israeli jails. In return, Israel will receive an unknown number of living hostages. Thirty-three of the roughly 100 remaining hostages are set to be freed in the deal’s first phase, including women, the elderly, and very young children, but Hamas hasn’t told Israel which of the captives are still alive.

There was no military need for a ceasefire. The frontlines in Gaza are stable. Though it has lost roughly 400 soldiers in Gaza, Israel has made casualties of perhaps half of Hamas’s army, estimated at 30,000 to 40,000 strong, and was under no battlefield pressure to withdraw.

The specifics of the deal are only where the problems begin for Israel. By the end of phase one, 50 days into the ceasefire, the IDF will have abandoned every critical point inside heavily populated areas of the Strip without having recovered the bodies of the remaining dead hostages, a matter which is reserved for phase three. If, during the negotiations planned between the deal’s phases, Israel cannot convince Hamas to cede control of the Strip, it will have to re-invade Gaza, likely at great diplomatic and reputational cost. It must otherwise accept the stinging reality that the war will have ended with Hamas’s terrorists, rapists and kidnappers gazing into Israel from more or less the same positions they occupied on 6 October 2023.

The return of Donald Trump adds to the agreement’s downsides. The President-elect apparently deputized Steve Witkoff, his incoming Middle East peace envoy, to cajole Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting the Biden Administration’s ceasefire framework. By creating the illusion of a foreign policy win, Witkoff has validated a key Biden policy and undermined a popular US ally for what might be inevitably petty reasons. After all, in early 2021, Netanyahu drew Trump’s ire for stating that Biden had won the 2020 election.

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Yahya Sinwar was a monstrous ideologue

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The ceasefire heralds short-term domestic problems for Netanyahu, with the seven-seat Religious Zionist party threatening to leave the government if fighting doesn’t resume after phase one, an eventuality which would leave the Prime Minister with a slim one-seat majority in the Knesset. Other divisions loom too. Overall, some 800 security personnel have been killed since October 7, meaning there is now a considerable number of Israelis who see decisive victory as the only acceptable return for the sacrifice of hundreds of young men. There have already been small protests against the ceasefire, including near West Bank settlements that have contributed a disproportionate number of war dead.

But accepting this deal is hardly an act of insanity. Aside from freeing the hostages from a living hell, the goal of this agreement, as with many of Netanyahu’s decisions over the past year, has been to create the freedom of action needed to keep fighting. Since October 7, Netanyahu has correctly gambled that a long war would ultimately advantage Israel, a socially cohesive modern state with a strong military and a robust belief in its own survival. The costs of a long war have proven more than bearable. Over a year of fighting, the Israeli economy surpassed $10 billion in foreign technological investment and set records for defense exports. Births increased by 10%, a sign that the society is far from demoralized. Relations with countries like Ireland and South Africa have foundered, but these aren’t exactly major powers. As for the International Criminal Court indictments of Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant: they now seem likelier to hurt the ICC than Israel. Italy, France and Poland have all said they won’t comply with the court’s arrest warrants, while sanctioning the court is one of the top legislative priorities of the incoming Republican-led Congress.

Netanyahu perhaps anticipated that an extended conflict, punctuated by timely concessions, might create its own unpredictable logic, leaving opportunities for the IDF to seize when the time was right.

If that really was Netanyahu’s intention, it seems to have worked. Israel didn’t invade Gaza until late October 2023, waiting until senior US advisers arrived to help plan the operation. The next month, a ceasefire agreement freed roughly half the Hamas hostages and bought Netanyahu enough credit with both Biden and liberal critics at home to keep the war going deep into the following year. By mid-2024, Netanyahu’s constant threats to invade the Gazan border city of Rafah had the effect of creating leverage over the US, which opposed the move. The US spent months bargaining with the Prime Minister in the hope of delaying him — and while waiting to invade Rafah, the IDF built up the Netzarim Corridor and escalated its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

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When Israel did finally take Gaza’s border with Egypt, in the spring of 2024, it secured a strategic asset for future negotiations and completed the total encirclement of Hamas forces, creating opportunities to fight other, more threatening enemies. Israel teased a ground operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon for much of the summer, seizing the strategic initiative and creating another long and inevitably fruitful series of negotiations with Israel’s allies in Washington. When an invasion finally came, Hezbollah lost almost all its senior commanders, most of its elite Radwan force, and many of its missiles, alongside a plethora of subterranean fortresses and almost as many fighters as died during 13 years of civil war in Syria. Nor was Syria itself immune to this approach. The fall of the Assad regime, and Israel’s subsequent destruction of the country’s air defenses and most of its conventional military capacity, was a downstream consequence of Netanyahu’s success at keeping the fighting going.

In other words, Netanyahu has gained much by biding his time, even as he proved that both Israelis and their army can sustain a once-unimaginable blend of high-tempo operations across seven different fronts. That, indeed, is ultimately why the ceasefire might help his country: buying time both domestically and in Washington, it gives the premier space to plan and execute his next move.

In the first place, the ceasefire agreement helps resolve discontent among Israelis. Many blame Netanyahu for the suffering of the hostages, out of a misguided but understandable belief that he could have responsibly agreed to a prisoner swap much earlier. At the same time, the social strain caused by the repeated mobilization of IDF reserve units has stoked an increasingly bitter debate over the forced conscription of ultra-orthodox Israelis, largely exempt from military service. Six weeks of ceasefire will mark the first time in 14 months that Israel hasn’t been waging any large-scale ground operations, giving both army and society a much-needed rest.

The deal also fosters good will with the Trump Administration, whose Middle East policies are increasingly difficult to peg. Witkoff is a real estate developer and unknown diplomatic quantity whose company sold the Park Lane Hotel to the Qatar Investment Authority for some $623 million in 2023. Pro-Trump ideologue Tucker Carlson is no fan of the Jewish State, and for the first time in decades an influential current of grassroots Right-wingers are skeptical of the US alliance with Israel. Then there’s Elon Musk. The billionaire reportedly intervened to free Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist imprisoned in Iran. Certainly, the world’s richest man, ever unpredictable, could shake up the global order if he advises Trump to reach his own nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. As for Trump himself, the ceasefire came about in a way that suggests he prioritizes his own deal-making prowess above supporting Israel. That’s hardly ideal, but a pause does give Netanyahu crucial time to assess the confusing new terrain in Washington.

To understand why this matters, we must again return to Iran. Given that a near-nuclear Iran has been hurling ballistic missiles at his country for over a year, it seems possible that Netanyahu sees placating the Americans as an unpleasant yet necessary step on the way towards a strike on Iran’s nuclear program.

Hamas’s reaction to the ceasefire agreement, with its leaders celebrating amid devastation, raises fundamental questions about the meaning of victory. Are wars still won by the usual measures of blood and territory, or is victory now more notional and slippery, a condition existing in the mind above all? Given the sheer scale of destruction over the past year, it seems crass for either side to claim victory. And as one Israeli official told me in early 2024: “You have won when no one has to ask whether you have won or not.” At this point, the event that would do most to turn Israel into an unambiguous winner is the destruction of Iran’s key assets, and the further devastation of the regime that theorized, planned, armed, and financed the slaughter on October 7 and everything that’s come after it.

Though Tehran’s proxies and allies have been whipped on the battlefield, this is a temporary accomplishment as long as the regime can continue to arm and finance them, and Israel’s gains are especially reversible so long as Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remains intact. It is possible that Netanyahu just signed away all of Israel’s achievements in Gaza. Or it could also be that, in freeing the hostages, mollifying his internal critics, and keeping Trump on his side, he’s lengthening the war enough to gain the support, the capacity, and the strategic initiative to finally pull off something truly history-changing.

But this year, like last year, there are no decorations, and almost nothing to buy in the shops. Meat is difficult to find and extremely expensive. After more than 14 months of this seemingly endless war, there is very little to celebrate: for Muslims and Christians alike. I am Muslim, but we are all “people of the book” — and relations between our communities have always been characterised by warmth and respect. And now, especially, we are united, by hunger and hardship and death, without a future whatever our faiths.

A few years ago, a farmer’s spade struck something hard as he tilled his land west of the Nuseirat refugee camp. It was the start of an amazing discovery: beneath the sand lay the monastery of St Hilarion, which dates back to 340 AD and has become a major archaeological site. Hilarion was born and spent much of his life in what is now the Gaza Strip. He began the process of converting its inhabitants from paganism, the dawn of a local Christian community that remains among the oldest on earth.

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Gaza's children have no future

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In 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza at the end of the Six Day War, there were still some 7,000 Christians here. Their numbers have since fallen to barely 1,000, and now represent a blend of Catholics and Orthodox. Some have emigrated to the West, others to the West Bank or other Arab countries. But small as the community has become, it continues to enjoy an outsized cultural presence. Christians have tended to be better educated than the Palestinian average, partly because of excellent religious schools.

When Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority in 2007, there were fears that the relationship between Muslims and Christians would deteriorate, and that they might be persecuted. Fortunately, these worries proved baseless. Hamas understood that Christians shared the same challenges as their Muslim peers, united by the same enemy.

Nowhere was this clearer than at Christmas. Whether Catholic or Orthodox, each Gazan Christian treated the birth of Christ as a great celebration. Many times, I saw Muslims joining in, dressed in their smartest clothes, inside churches brilliantly lit by candles. All the while, choirs sang “Silent Night” between readings from the Gospels. Just as in the West, meanwhile, children’s events and parties would feature appearances from Father Christmas, with Santa’s usual red suit and white beard.

When Hamas launched the October 7 attacks, none of Gaza’s Christians took part. Yet the subsequent experiences of Emad Sayegh would surely be familiar to any Gazan. A week after the assault, Israel told the 61-year-old businessman that he had to leave his home. The area, he was told, was about to be targeted by airstrikes. “There were 11 of us,” Sayegh remembers, “so we hurried to the St Porphyrios church in the Old City. We were afraid, but we found a lot of people there — about 400, most of them Christians, but also 19 Muslim families.”

They may have been among friends, but the situation was desperate. Without enough beds, people slept wherever they could: in rooms, alcoves in the walls and corridors. “I spent four nights trying to sleep upright in a chair,” Sayegh says, “so I was exhausted.” Food was in short supply too. Each day, families had to share a single loaf of bread, alongside a small portion of cooked food. And though water was available from a nearby well, it could only be pumped with a generator — a machine that required expensive fuel to run.

Worse was to follow. On 19 October, 12 days into the war, the church was hit. “The Israelis killed 18 people and injured dozens,” Sayegh says. “We were afraid the killing would continue.”

A few days later, the Israelis told everyone still taking refuge at St Porphyrios to evacuate and move south, where they would have to live in tents. Sayegh says at first they refused, but then a tank shell struck the wall of the church, wrecking a room where four of his sons had been sitting two minutes earlier. At the same time, Sayegh discovered that his nearby metalwork factory had also been destroyed. Like others sheltering in the church, he finally decided to leave.

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Also staying at St Porphyrios was a man called George, who asked me not to publish his surname. “The bombing was violent and intense, like an earthquake,” he says. For the moment, he and his family are back there, trying to survive inside its Latin Patriarchate school. That isn’t easy: there are no bedrooms, bathrooms or blankets.

“In earlier years,” he says, “we used to light the church candles and hold prayers on Christmas Eve, visit family and friends and go out to celebrate. Now sadness dominates the atmosphere inside the church, as it does outside. There is no room for joy.”

Other Christian sites have also been destroyed. They include both the ancient Caeserea market, and the Orthodox cultural centre, site of all those workshops and lectures. “Christmas will be just another sad day,” says Elias el-Jelda, who used to help run the centre as a member of the Arab Orthodox church council. “I believe Christ is grieving with us.”

Muslims like me feel much the same. Earlier this month, my brother’s house was badly damaged when the Israelis bombed a nearby mosque — the fifth time it’s been struck since the war began. My brother’s daughters were also injured, and earlier this year his son was killed in Rafah.

Like Gaza’s Christians, none of us has ever belonged to a militant faction. None of us are combatants. For many years, my brother happily commuted from Gaza to Israel, where he worked in construction. But then Hamas took over, and Israel built the separation barrier. Since then, he has been unemployed.

Elias el-Jelda tells me that, this Christmas, he and other Christians will concentrate on personal prayers, “asking God to stop our suffering, and to bring peace and justice to Gaza and the world.” I will offer the same prayers.

For the Biden Administration, the death of the Hamas warlord and October 7 mastermind, Yahya Sinwar, offered Israel both an emotional release and a temporary advantage that it should seize. In this view, Jerusalem must accept a ceasefire and begin working on a day-after plan which acknowledges that Hamas — an Islamist movement committed to annihilating the Jewish state — will remain a political and military presence in Gaza and the West Bank.

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Such conventional thinking might, however, be wrong. Islamic history is littered with failed insurgencies and vanquished militants. It is certainly possible that with the killing of Sinwar and other senior commanders, the obliteration of most of Hamas’s combat brigades, and the vast destruction wreaked on Gaza, Israel will succeed in annihilating Hamas. Something unpleasant may rise in its place. Yet for Israel, any future enemy will surely be less menacing than Hamas, which benefitted from a militant ideology never severely tested in battle and a strip of land where Hamas’s opposition had no place to hide.

The group’s strength lies in its transcendent promise: that a holy war could drive the Jews from Palestine, sooner rather than later. Its plans for a “Big Project”, which the Israeli military captured, show that Sinwar envisioned an imminent triumph over Israel. This is the kind of delusional hope that once powered al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which both thought that they could rapidly transform the Middle East through violence.

Hamas has fared better than either of these groups because it has successfully intertwined Palestinian nationalism with Islamic radicalism. Such a feat would have been impossible in the pre-modern Islamic world, but Westernisation has allowed nationalism to cohabit with a religion averse to such divisive loyalties. Still, Hamas’s blending of the two is hardly new. Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, the muscle and mind behind the Palestine Liberation Organisation, successfully pioneered this ideological fusion long before Hamas, allowing even ardent secularists to feel Islamic pride in Fatah’s fight against Israel.

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Their success wouldn’t last for long. As Fatah reluctantly began to accept Israel’s existence, Hamas emerged and turned Islam against Fatah. Hamas’s appeal swelled as Fatah’s dependency on the Jewish state grew, and its corruption became blatant. The Islamist victory in the legislative elections of 2006 — which was rejected by Fatah, Israel, and the United States — followed by Hamas’s forceful ejection of Fatah’s security forces from Gaza a year later, gave the movement an opportunity to create its own Islamic community based on its interpretation of the Holy Law.

For most Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas’s rule has been hell. Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, didn’t moderate in power. Its extremism stayed vibrant because the infidel enemy remained near, and Hamas’s creed promised young men not just martyrdom but victory. By contrast, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who envisions a struggle with Israel in which the Zionists slowly bleed out, appears restrained. Hamas believes in salvation through war, an idea that dates to the days of the Arab conquests. But as the Islamic State can attest, when Islamists start to lose wars, the faithful soon lose heart.

If Hamas falls, Gaza could come to resemble Syria and Iraq, where there has been a flourishing of various Islamic groups and local warlords. Palestinians aren’t particularly tribal, which has probably kept them so far from splintering into a myriad of causes and groups. Living cheek by jowl with the Jews, they have gained a remarkable level of unity and purpose.

Yet Palestine solidarity could still shatter. Though it may condemn the rise of Western individualism, Hamas still plays on desires for personal glory. After all, asking young men to kill themselves for the cause can be alluring. But such fanaticism always fades when the death toll gets too high, and the promised conquest fails to materialise.

The West tends to overlook this fact, instead viewing militant Islamist struggles against the infidel as perdurable. This is a dubious proposition given all the defeats Muslim holy warriors have suffered in the last 300 years. Yasser Arafat’s numerous losses led to the rise of Hamas. In the end, even the occasional successful act of PLO terrorism couldn’t overcome Fatah’s humiliations in Jordan in 1970, in Lebanon in 1982, and in the West Bank with the failure of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. What happened to Fatah can happen to Hamas. It could easily become a spent force.

Hamas’s future now depends on whether young men who have been in the organisation — and, more importantly, the far larger number who have not — want to support a movement that has done its part to make most Gazans homeless. Do Hamas’s foot-soldiers, and the new recruits that are now desperately needed, still have the guns, faith, and will power to coerce their Palestinian neighbours’ submission? At this point, it will be hard to find a leader as magnetic as Sinwar. Holy-war charisma, which Sinwar had in spades, isn’t built in comfortable exile.

It’s hard to imagine that Hamas, as an effective jihadist organisation, can continue to withstand the wrath of Israel, which now controls all of Gaza’s borders. Weapons can no longer arrive through tunnels from Egypt, while Qatar’s financial subventions to Hamas have been reduced to a trickle. The Israeli army may not reoccupy the whole Gaza Strip, but Israel will continue to slice it up, making it challenging for a single Palestinian group to exist in open, armed opposition to their rule. Meanwhile, Palestinians who loathe Hamas may now be able to take up arms against what’s left of the group.

Eventually, Hamas could be replaced by another Islamist organisation that recalibrates the mix between fundamentalism and nationalism. Fighting to survive in Gaza’s ruins, some Palestinian Islamists may become more radicalised; others may withdraw into a more communitarian, de-politicised fundamentalism. Others may see greater secularism as the answer. Yet whatever comes next likely won’t have the spiritual allure — the promise that comes with past or expected success — that made Hamas a redoubtable insurgent movement. Hamas’s promise of victory inside a Gazan wasteland will have to become more dreamlike — a hard task for an outfit that once envisioned so much more.

For supporters of Hamas, October 7 was not a day of infamy, but an eruption of vengeance, a modern re-enactment of the Prophet Muhammad’s slaughter of the Jewish tribe of Khaybar, which ended Jewish resistance to the Prophet’s call. Yet the vile “glory” of October 7 is unlikely to sustain Hamas’s young men — and the Palestinian population more broadly — through the years of misery that lie ahead for all of Gaza. Even more than before, Palestinians may yearn for vengeance against their Jewish foes. But Hamas may not benefit from this anger. In the past, Islamic insurgencies that triumphed all offered a mixture of hope, salvation, and battlefield success. In Arabia the Jews never defeated the Muslims — let alone over and over again.

Netanyahu, accused of starvation and directing attacks against civilians, has described the warrants as “antisemitic” and a “dark day in the history of humanity”. Keir Starmer has nonetheless effectively endorsed them.

It’s hard, though, to see how the warrants stand up as law. Israel is not a member of the ICC and Palestine, which along with human rights luminaries South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, and Djibouti petitioned for the warrants, is not recognised as a state by many. Meanwhile, the Rome Statute that governs the ICC states that any member cannot affect “the rights and privileges” of a third party that is not a signatory.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the Israelis are enraged. The particularly egregious crime of starvation, according to the Statute, relates to “depriving [civilians] of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions”. To prove this, the court must show that Israel acted with the deliberate intent of starving civilians. It’s hard to see how it can given Israel permits aid into Gaza daily. Food insecurity is not an indication of deliberate starvation; nor can Israel do anything to mitigate the hijacking of aid supplies by Hamas.

Yet more enraging, as far as the Israelis are concerned, the ICC is only supposed to intervene as a court of last resort when a nation is “unwilling or unable” to investigate alleged crimes itself. As Dr Yuan Yi Zhu, a fellow at Policy Exchange, points out: Israel’s “fiercely independent” prosecutors weren’t allowed the opportunity to investigate themselves before the ICC issued the warrants.

And the warrants aren’t only legally disreputable, they’re politically cretinous. They’re a gift to Netanyahu — who was reviled by many Israelis even before the negligence that allowed October 7 to happen. Now though, in the face of this type of external attack, the country is rallying behind him. The result? He will almost certainly feel emboldened. More military operations, not fewer, are likely in Gaza and Lebanon. And you can forget any idea of a negotiated peace — at least for the moment. If Palestine is putting out arrest warrants on Netanyahu, he’s hardly going to be making deals with them. It’s a colossal own goal.

All the more so given that America is not a member of the ICC and has an already antagonistic relationship with the organisation. Remember that back in September 2020, following the ICC’s decision to open an investigation into war crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan, Trump used an executive order to sanction the prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and another senior official, Phakiso Mochochoko. Bensouda eventually put the investigation on hold, and under Joe Biden, the US quietly withdrew the sanctions.

While Biden has dismissed the latest warrants as “outrageous”, American Senator Lindsey Graham has made clear that the incoming administration’s thoughts on them are even more robust. “If you are going to help the ICC, as a nation, enforce the arrest warrant against Bibi and Gallant… I will put sanctions on you as a nation,” he warned. “You’re gonna have to pick the rogue ICC versus America…We should crush your economy because we’re next,” Graham said. “Why can’t they go after Trump or any other American president under this theory?”

Certainly, the ICC’s choice of targets might be considered erratic. It never tried Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, for example, despite his use of chemical weapons against his own people. It claims (with levels of chutzpah usually associated with Israelis) that it has no jurisdiction because Syria is not in the ICC. And yet the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates the death toll from that war to have been 613,000 with an additional 55,000 civilians believed to have died of torture in government-run prisons.

So if it’s all legally suspect and politically obtuse: why did the ICC do it? To say it is antisemitism alone is too simplistic. More credible is the idea that, as one international law expert told me, the ICC must have a diversity of judges, so it has a lot of mediocre people from countries across the world where legal standards are poor. “They just aren’t very good lawyers. Many of its judges are from the global south so from countries not favourable to Israel. Plus, if you are a human rights lawyer it’s taken for granted that you are anti-Israel.”

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The intellectual dishonesty of Shlomo Sand

By David Patrikarakos

There are many, especially on the Right, who claim that this proves that international law is an ass — or worse that it’s a “fiction”. But this is wrong: we need it to govern maritime rights and arbitrate on cross-border trade disputes. But on fundamental questions of national self-defence, and the defence of civilisation undertaken by people answerable to electorates, the idea that an institution such as the ICC has the essential competence or legitimacy to be the ultimate arbiter is massively stretching the power that international law should have.

A couple of days after the warrants were issued, I watched a clip from Channel 4 News in which human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, was pronouncing on the warrants. No one ever expected Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to turn up in the dock in the Hague, but in the end his own people handed him over, he observed. Might not the same happen to Netanyahu when he “fell from power”?

His rhetoric only served to highlight the disconnect that pervades this world. For all the problems Israelis have with Netanyahu, it is fundamentally unserious to believe that they will ever throw him under the bus for fighting the terrorists who killed over a thousand of their fellow citizens and dragged hundreds more off to Gaza, no matter how much his actions have annoyed Djibouti.

The clash here is not just of political tribe or legal debate; it is of a fundamental understanding of reality. On the one hand, we have Robertson, the ICC and Keir Starmer (who privately refers to IHL as his “north star”) who believe that the bloody and chaotic practice of war can be ordered and adjudicated upon by bureaucrats in Holland.

On the other, we have Vladimir Putin and his war of conquest with its razed towns and cities, and Hamas’s psychopathic — and mediatised — barbarities. If the ICC’s vision ever had any basis in fact, it died in Gaza and eastern Ukraine, as I have seen first hand. This is the world we are now living in, and it will not yield to delusion, or legal sophistry.