As Gareth Roberts pointed out in his latest book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall had quite a temper tantrum over Israel. “Why is a television chef being consulted on these weighty matters?” Roberts writes. “We were never treated to Fanny Cradock’s thoughts on the Tet Offensive. Viewers would have been staggered if Dorothy Sleightholme had rested her whisk on the chopping block in the Farmhouse Kitchen to give us her two penneth on Soweto. Rustie Lee was not encouraged to volunteer her opinions on the Chernobyl disaster.”

Perhaps the most mainstream and surreal example of this is Carol Vorderman — who has gone from being Rear of the Year to Rosa Luxembourg. But you can see it everywhere: any moment now I expect to find out that Basil Brush has been canceled for inappropriate behavior towards Mr Derek, or vice versa — it was always hard to tell who was wagging whose tail.

The latest “casualty” of the culture wars — though to call it that is to lend it more dignity than it deserves; perhaps we should describe it as the brain-dead brouhaha of the Trash Telly Top Trumps — is the Eurovision Song Contest, from which a growing number of countries are withdrawing their “artistes”. (Though anyone who witnessed last year’s most vocal opponent of Israel, one “Bambi Thug”, might conclude that using the word “artiste” to describe her is about as accurate as calling the contents of a nappy an “artifact”.) The delegations of the unfriendly nations demanded a secret vote on Israel’s participation — for the inevitable reasons — which has sensibly been rejected, indicating that the Eurovision bigwigs are pleasingly determined to dig their heels in, perhaps in the light of how popular the Israeli entry proved with the public last year; ranked joint 14th by the national juries, but dominating the leaderboard due to the results of the online and phone votes. Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK were among the countries whose viewers awarded Israel the maximum 12 points. Once again, the voice of the people (don’t forget the mocked contest attracts a larger European television audience than anything apart from big sports matches) and the voice of the captured Establishment couldn’t have been more at odds.

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Nooky, nipples and The Forsytes

By Julie Burchill

Not content with creating the circumstances which led to a young woman, Eden Golan, being booed while singing a song about the Hamas pogrom, many of last year’s persecutors are back for a second go. Yuval Raphael, who will represent Israel next year, was actually a survivor of the 2023 attack, so one can imagine the usual self-righteous sadists having an especially fun time barracking her. So far, Spain, Ireland, Slovenia and the Netherlands have boycotted the contest; only Spain is one of the Eurovision’s Big Five countries along with France, Germany, Italy and the UK, so I can’t imagine the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) General Assembly getting their scanties in a bunch quite yet.

It’s interesting to examine the motivation of this decidedly un-fab four. Slovenia only has a few hundred Jews — but, regrettably, what with knowing what we know about the behavior of Eastern European countries during the Second World War, their joining in doesn’t exactly come as a shock. Since the war ended, the Netherlands have a record of stability and tolerance towards Jews, to the point that the Dutch Jewish population is growing as a result of migration, mainly from Israel; Jews born in Israel constitute about 20% of the Jews living in the Netherlands today. But the recent behavior in Amsterdam towards Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and the massive growth in Muslim immigration may well have changed the mood of the nation, as indeed it has in the UK, where having just under four million Muslims and only around 300,000 Jews residing here has very much made many politicians puppets of the larger demographic.

In the case of Spain and Ireland, though, it’s tempting to shrug, albeit sorrowfully. What did we expect? Spain, the home of the Inquisition, repeated Jewish expulsion and forced conversion, appears to be reverting to type. The same could be said of Ireland, which has taken to anti-Israel activity with a relish that won’t surprise anyone who remembers that Eamon de Valera’s Eire was “neutral” in the war between the Allies and the Axis.

Since the Gaza conflict, the phenomenon of “top-down” antisemitism — masquerading as anti-Zionism — has been noted as being more extreme in Ireland than in any other Western nation; far from being a “bottom-up” issue, this one is driven by the political and academic elite, who have far less excuse for behaving so. (The Irish public, don’t forget, awarded Israel 10 points in the public vote last year.) There are only between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews in the Republic of Ireland; one of them, the chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland said “I always thought of myself as an Irishman who happened to be Jewish. Now I know that I am just a Jew living in Ireland.”

When I was a girl, the politics of Eurovision were a bit of a chuckle, about ancient grudges; Turkey and Greece punishing each other over Cyprus, or us and the Germans being scrupulously polite to each other while awarding each other sod-all points — an act the French were always keen to get in on with their chicly clipped “Nul points!” Then it became about Brexit. The funniest thing about the Eurovision, for me, is that its whole purpose was to make us forget our petty differences and unite as one continent in The Joy of Song, but all it has ever really done is throw our differences into sharp relief and remind us of them — which I suppose could equally be said of the EU itself. But this was knockabout stuff compared with the real viciousness which, since the Hamas attack, has been aimed directly at the world’s only Jewish state. Where will the Light Entertainment Wars end? As the least switched-on people in media often work in this field, it seems likely that, like the Japanese soldier who refused to believe the war was over, they will keep on plugging away even though those at the top of the TV pyramid have realized that this parrot is dead and are seeking to ditch identity politics in favor of something more vote-catching. So I don’t know about you, but I’m on tenterhooks till I find out what Mr Blobby’s views on puberty blockers are.

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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Will Israel’s hardliners win?

By Omer Bartov

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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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.

One common denominator in all of these events was the impulse to explain or “contextualize” them in ways that minimize their horror. After 9/11, for instance, I heard a Muslim student say that the hijackers just wanted to “start a conversation” with the West. After 10/7, an expert on sexual violence excused her public silence about the rape and torture of Israeli women because, she told me, such atrocities are “happening every day” around the globe. The Charlotte mayor responded to the murder of Zarutska, an utterly innocent victim, by calling for “compassion” for homeless criminals like the man who stabbed her. Some people even started crowdfunds for Zarutska’s murderer, which GoFundMe quickly shut down. As for Charlie Kirk, plenty of people, makeshift scales of justice in hand, would have us weigh his death against his supposedly hateful opinions.

Whatever else all this might mean, these responses serve to distract us from addressing the real issue: the problem of Evil. To be fair, people will go to great lengths to avoid peering into the dark abysses of the human soul. That includes contemporary philosophers and theologians, few of whom, even after the mass murders committed by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, have had much to say about Evil. Perhaps this is because these atrocities directly challenged the presupposition that human social existence is characterized by intelligible and relatively stable moral structures.

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How Hamas became radical chic

By Jacob Howland

Precisely this assumption is called into question by the behavior not only of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, but of its bystanders, among whom one finds few exceptions to the twin principles articulated in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah by Polish farmers who lived near Treblinka: “One can get used to anything”, and “If you cut your finger, it doesn’t hurt me”. Morally speaking, in other words, human beings are highly flexible, so much so that dwelling alongside a death camp need not register as anything more troubling than an inconvenience. Those who would dismiss such callousness as evidence of the stupidity and ignorance of peasants would do well to watch the numerous videos of educated progressives tearing down posters of Israeli hostages abducted on October 7.

I insist on capitalizing Evil for several reasons. First, because it is a metaphysically fundamental reality. It won’t do to describe it, as many thinkers have, as the mere absence of Good. Evil, the demonic willfulness and primal instinct of death and destruction that Freud called Thanatos, is a substantial force in its own right. As such, it resists all ordinary explanation. Can the Holocaust really be explained, as scholars have tried to do, as the result of social discontent in Germany caused by hyperinflation and other contingent factors? The very idea is obscene, not least because it implicitly relieves people of ultimate responsibility for their choices. Second, because Evil is as inexplicable as Good. In Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, a German officer captured at Stalingrad, surrounded by irate Russians, is approached by a bereaved mother who carries a brick to bash his head in. Seeing his frightened face, she instead gives him the gift of a breadcrust, a spontaneous choice for which she immediately berates herself. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was himself a prisoner of the Nazis, was greatly impressed by this passage. For him, the fact that nothing in the totality of the woman’s strong emotions and urgent needs can explain her deed is one indication that it is Good. It is a pure act of kindness, from which she derives no benefit, and that she later regards as senseless.

Evil is similarly unsupportable by ordinary reckoning. Like Good, of which it is a kind of photographic negative, it is no longer on the moral continuum of everyday existence. It is a quantum leap to another system of human interaction, where violence reigns supreme and life is nasty, brutish, and short. The murder of Charlie Kirk — a young husband and father, slain on a university campus where he came to model the give and take of respectful argument for which universities were designed, and on which they used to pride themselves — was Evil. So was the celebration with which this despicable deed was greeted by an alarming number of people.

But there is something peculiar about the latest iterations of Evil. Here again, the Holocaust is instructive. The Nazis had an ambivalent relationship with their crimes. They recorded everything in ledgers, photographs, and films, making their war against the Jews one of the most extensively documented events in human history. Yet survivors of the camps report that their SS guards took solace in the idea that no inmates would live to see the day of liberation, and that even if they did, no one would believe their testimony. Osama bin Laden took a very different approach. 9/11 was mass murder as political theater, a tour-de-force performance for Islamists and radicalized Westerners. This tactic found its audience. At the university where I was teaching at the time, Saudi students cheered when the Twin Towers fell. A professor was happy to tell me that Americans would now understand the suffering they inflicted on other peoples. And my public endorsement of what would later become the policy of the Obama administration — hunting down bin Laden and killing him — made me an outcast among the faculty.

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Peter Thiel’s visions of Apocalypse

By Jacob Howland

The Hamas terrorists intuitively understood the effectiveness of al-Qaeda’s political theater, and doubled down on it. On October 7, they equipped themselves with GoPros, so that their spree of murder and torture could be broadcast far and wide. They publicized their acts, correctly betting that some would relish their death porn, and that the world in general would respond by blaming their victims. For those who’ve watched the 22 minutes of footage released by the Israelis, that response is unfathomable. We see images of a dozen older women at a bus stop, waiting to catch a ride to the stores. After the attack, they lie in heaps, blood pooling around their corpses. We see couples burnt to a crisp like the petrified victims at Pompeii, their cries at the moment of death frozen for all time. We hear a rescue worker describing what he saw in one kibbutz: the corpses of a father with his eye gouged out, a mother with her breast cut off, a daughter with her foot cut off, a son with his fingers cut off. What was the message sent by their torturers? To the father: what you see us do to your loved ones will pain you more than having your eye ripped out. To the mother: you gave these children life, fed them and gathered them to your bosom. Here, in the warm, severed breast we hold in our scarlet hands, is what we think of that.

That’s not all. The rescue worker explains that the murderers sat down for a meal in the presence of the slaughtered family. This is straight out of the Nazi playbook. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing units that executed millions of Jews across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — would sometimes set up a table alongside the pit into which their victims had fallen, and enjoy a hearty meal. (Not for nothing did Life and Fate include a scene in which Adolf Eichmann dines on ham in a gas chamber whose construction he is inspecting.) The message could hardly be clearer: your unfathomable suffering and grisly death is our sustenance and pleasure. This is ghoulish vampirism, and it is Evil.

Evil is not banal, but many people are doing their best to make it so. To characterize the Hamas pogrom or Kirk’s murder as understandable reactions to Palestinian suffering or Right-wing provocation is to normalize Evil — to pretend that it is something we can control, a problem that reasonable people can solve over coffee and talk. More honest, though hardly less blameworthy, is to avert one’s eyes, like the passengers who walked away from Zarutska as she bled to death on the train. Neither of these responses dare to confront Evil directly, and to call it out, nor to look into the faces of its victims and to say their names. Yet this is what all decent people must do if we hope to arrest our descent into limitless violence.

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.

Lying a mere six miles north of Jerusalem, Ramallah is a perennial strategic vulnerability for the State of Israel. It is also caught between two powers who dominate the lives of the people here. The Israelis occupy their land, and the Iranians seek any opportunity to enlist the Palestinians in their 40-year battle against the Jewish state.

Ramallah is the largest city in the West Bank, and it is ruled by Fatah, the largest faction in the multi-party Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO has a violent past, but is secular and more moderate than its rival, Hamas, which is trained and funded by Iran, and (despite its base being Gaza) also has a long history in Ramallah. Also operating the area, more clandestinely, are Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, as well the even more psychotic terror group Islamic Jihad.

And now, if the Iranians have their way, these groups will turn the West Bank into an active front in their decades-long proxy war against Israel. Already there are signs of a stepping-up of terror activity. On Sunday, Israel’s General Security Service (Shin Bet) announced that it had thwarted a large-scale Hamas operation in Hebron, a city on the other side of Jerusalem. It was one of the largest cells uncovered in recent years, said Shin Bet, and its members were planning to carry out shooting and bombing attacks against Israeli targets. “They conducted training, gathered intelligence, and assembled explosive devices to carry out attacks in the West Bank and inside Israel.”

It was startling news. After almost two weeks of tit-for-tat missile exchanges with Iran, Israelis are now having to worry about Iranian proxies once again.

Ramallah is unique. Superficially, it’s like so many other Arab cities: crowded streets, pungent wafts of gasoline and food, variegated shop fronts and dangling electricity cables, all amid a din of shrieks, roaring engines and incessant honking.

But it is no traditional Arab city. As I drive 10 or so miles east from King David Street, near Jerusalem’s old city, the wide, smooth boulevards narrow and the roads get rougher. For a while, Hebrew intermingles with Arabic on the signage and then it disappears altogether. This, though, is an area encased within Israeli control. The currency is the Israeli shekel, and thousands of Ramallah’s people — and far more before the atrocities of October 7th — work in Israel.

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Along with Israel’s Arabs, though, the people here have typically preferred to stay out of the Iran-Israel War. And it’s not like they aren’t provoked. With around 450,000 Israeli settlers (excluding East Jerusalem) and over 100 Israeli illegal outposts in the West Bank, tensions here are constant.

Worse, many of the more vicious settlers have used Gaza as a distraction to steal more land and get yet more violent. Here, in December 2023, I found a city that even Palestinian Authority figures told me was ripe for another Intifada (uprising). But a sullen peace has held.

Now, though, with Hamas and Hezbollah crippled, Assad mouldering in Moscow, and much of Iran’s command-and-control military and nuclear infrastructure no more, the Mullahs are battered and humiliated. They need a win — and, no longer flush with proxies to ululate and lob ordnance at Tel Aviv, they need alternatives. The West Bank, and its capital Ramallah, offers an almost ideal solution. Over the past six months Iran-backed terror groups in the West Bank, particularly Islamic Jihad, have become yet more active, with the IDF carrying out intense operations in response. These include drone strikes and ground missions, during which, in some cases, large swathes of people have been displaced which has caused yet more anger.

There is opportunity for the Iranians here. The only question is: will they take it?

I arrive as the city is on strike. Settlers have killed three Palestinians, and the people, understandably enraged, are refusing to work. If Iran wants to exploit discontent here, Israel’s settlers are doing its work for it. Streets are deserted; occasionally groups of young men stroll by smoking and talking on their phones.

I drive up through a series of winding roads. In Ramallah, class is delineated by height. The city sits on the Judaean Mountains and the higher up the slope you live, the richer and more powerful you are.

Major General Akram Rajoub’s apartment gazes down over the city. The space is a delineation of power; the style is Soho House meets Mukhabarat. We sit around a hexagonal glass table with gold-colored inlay. A long dark wood dining table

takes up half the room. Framed photographs of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas gaze down at us. Rajoub was 16 years old in 1980 when the IDF arrested him on charges of membership in the Fatah movement, possessing a weapon, and shooting at an Israeli police station in the West Bank. He served 14 years. After the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, he joined its intelligence unit and became a brigadier general, then the director of the Preventative Security Apparatus (essentially the FBI of Palestine). He cracked down on Hamas, liaised with Israel, and was responsible for training Palestinian commanders in cooperation with the US and UK. No one knows more about the threat of pro-Iranian terror groups in the West Bank than him. Not least because he then went on to become governor of Nablus and Jenin, which are the West Bank’s Hamas and Islamic Jihad strongholds. A major challenge for him was dealing with these violent Iran-backed militias who were loyal to Iran not Palestine. The result is of course chaos. “When militias are armed and funded by foreign backing, two parallel power structures emerge, and the security situation deteriorates,” he says wearily.

He’s not wrong. In Jenin, the Palestinian Authority is supposedly in charge. But when Hamas and Islamic Jihad militias launch attacks from there, Israel’s response is swift and unforgiving. All Palestinians in the area pay the price for Iran’s meddling.

I ask him directly: “Do you think Iran has Palestine’s best interests at heart?”

His response is equally direct. “Iran has never cared about Palestine’s liberation. They see Palestinian groups as a tool, not a cause. By supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they use Palestinian blood to keep Israel occupied and distracted from their nuclear program.”

Rajoub argues that to end the Iranian threat in the West Bank, Israel must end its occupation there. Without occupation, he argues, there’s no justification for armed resistance. Right now, the Palestinian people have lost hope of a state and stability. This makes them ripe for Iranian exploitation.

Looking at Ramallah’s deserted streets, it’s notable that people are willing to go on strike and forgo opening their businesses in already desperate times, and so I can’t help but agree.

Since 7 October, the Israelis have had the West Bank under even more onerous security measures, essentially dividing it into cantons. With its high unemployment, power shortages, and a general sense of despair, is is now fertile ground for Iranian-backed terror groups.

Be that as it may, polling suggests that West Bank residents, reluctant to see the conflict worsen, are gravitating toward Fatah rather than Hamas – but, according to a May 2025 poll conducted in the West Bank, the vote for Hamas stands at 38% and Fatah at 27%. Hamas’s vote has dropped over the past year and Fatah’s has risen, suggesting that the population doesn’t want more conflict. That said, Hamas is the popular choice in Fatah’s stronghold. It’s terrible news for the PLO, and great news for Iran.

Rajoub understandably sees danger. “There’s been a decrease in activity due to the crackdowns, but the ideology remains,” he tells me. “People still believe in Iran’s cause. It’s a dangerous seed that could sprout again when the time is right.”

If the seed remains, what about the practicalities?

For Iran to cause chaos for Israel here it needs a reliable weapons pipeline — and it used to have one, relying on Hezbollah’s smuggling network to move arms from Lebanon through Syria, across Jordan, and into the West Bank. According to Israeli expert Jonathan Spyer, weapons were first transported to Hezbollah’s base in Qusayr, Syria, then to farms in Homs and Damascus, before being smuggled into Jordan and the West Bank by local families like the al-Saeeds and al-Ramthans. In the past, it was small arms — pistols and AKs. By the summer of last year, it had become C-4 explosives, anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenades, and advanced missiles.

But Israel’s pager operation put Hezbollah, and then as a result Assad, out of the game — for now. There are already signs that the “Army of God” is starting to regroup. “Never count these bastards out,” a security source told me last week. “Sure, they’re weak right now. But they’ve been weak before and they came back.”

There is also danger closer to home for the Israelis. Outside a fried chicken shop in central Ramallah I speak to Mohammed, a local investigative journalist. “It’s odd,” he says. “While the Palestinian Authority uses AK-47s, Iranian-backed groups are armed with M16s, a weapon typical of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Some versions even resemble Israeli sniper rifles.”

These, Mohammed explains, come in via the Israeli black market. Here the journey is much easier — all you must do is cross the checkpoints from Israel into the West Bank.

And it’s striking how easy it could be. No one checked my vehicle as I entered or left the West Bank. Generally, there is a rigorous process on the way out. But that wouldn’t stop a smuggler entering with weapons, dispersing them and coming out clean. The Israelis are almost certainly aware of a lot of this. They know that a lot of pro-Iranian terrorists are probably walking around here with weapons.

Even if they don’t always use them. With a mischievous glint in his eye, Mohammed tells me that, with cash in the West Bank so tight, and the Iranians so rich, sometimes pro-Iran terrorists happily take Iranian cash with no intention of doing any actual terrorism. To satisfy their paymasters, they merely film themselves screaming “Allahu Akbar!” while firing a few rounds (often with weapons they already owned) close to Israeli observation towers. This grabs Israeli attention without any bloodshed. The would-be terrorists then send the videos to the Iranians (who are apparently happy with what they see) and pocket the cash. “These guys know the IDF will come after them,” says Mohammed, “but a lot less hard than if they’d killed anyone.”

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Will Israel’s Bibi bounce last?

By David Patrikarakos

Palestinians often gather to protest against Israel at Aladdin Cafe, close to the City Inn Square. Here, I meet Yusuf Paraka, who was a field officer in the Preventive Security Apparatus (one of the West Bank’s internal intelligence agencies) in Ramallah for 30 years until he asked for retirement three months ago. Pro-Iranian terror groups were a big part of his job. They were also its biggest frustration as he attempted to hunt them down only to see them escape from a Palestinian controlled area into another where he had no jurisdiction.

I ask him about the recent Iran-Israel conflict. Whose side are the Palestinians on? “When Iranian missiles flew over from Jordan, people were cheering from the rooftops,” he tells me. “They were happy about it. But does that mean they’re happy with Iran? No. We are not persuaded that Iran will not destroy Israel with its missiles. Once again, Iran is bringing chaos to the Palestinians, leaving them to deal with the destruction of Gaza.”

Following the combined Israeli and US strikes last month, Tehran is in trouble. But it’s wounded, not dead. While the Mullahs are in greater danger than ever since the 1979 revolution, they still hold a monopoly on violence inside Iran. Their war with Israel and the West remains a core ideological and strategic objective, and there has been no Waterloo. The war continues, and with their capabilities in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza diminished, the Mullahs need options more than ever.

“In the end, Iran is so dangerous not because of the money it gives. Palestinians can buy guns without Iranian money. But Iran changes the mentality,” says Mohammed. “They make this a religious war. And a religious war never ends.”

So while Israel refuses to improve life for Palestinians and continues to enable the worst impulses of the settlers, Iran will continue to find weakness and opportunity in the West Bank.

Israelis are famously disputatious, but not on one issue: Iran. A major regional power, whose government is openly sworn to, and invests immense efforts in, Israel’s literal destruction. Unlike the conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s conflict with Iran is between states — not between peoples, not over independence, and not over territory. Israelis do not see Iran’s people as enemies but rather as a society groaning under a theocratic police state. In fact, Israel’s good relations with Iran before the Revolution are still a living memory. (Israel’s Iranian expats have their own radio station, alongside Israel’s public radio’s daily programme in Farsi.) One of Israel’s most famous singers, Rita, is just one of any number of Iranian-Israeli artists who draw on the Iranian culture they grew up in.

Crucially, Israel and Iran are sovereign states, with all that that entails. Certainly, both see themselves as part of larger, more complicated projects beyond their own territories — Israel as a Jewish and democratic nation-state and Iran as regional successor to the Persian Empire, leader of global Shiism and, hopefully, of Islamism’s theocratic universalism too. But these adjectives jostle on top of a foundational basis that is the hallmark of sovereignty — they both are states which, by Max Weber’s celebrated definition, hold a territory’s monopoly of legitimate violence. It is this lowest common denominator that makes international law among states of wildly differing cultures, religions, world views, because they can justifiably hold one another to account.

Iran, then, is a state, large and powerful, with the avowed aim, and material and political resources, to wage a decades-long campaign for the elimination, pure and simple, of another state. Iran’s target is far away, and so it has for decades made use of skilful proxies — the Assad regime in Syria, and above all Hezbollah and Hamas, and now the Houthis, who, as non-state actors have worked to destabilise the region as a whole and were able in their struggle to adopt the language of resistance and liberation. October 7 made clear to everyone in Israel what this “liberation” means. Nobody can doubt anymore that the armed Islamist groups calling for death to Israel are saying exactly what they mean.

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By Yehudah Mirsky

This fundamental consensus on Iran runs through Israeli society. It also overwhelmingly shapes the approach of its long-running Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and goes a long way towards explaining how a man, so truly despised by so many proud and patriotic Israelis, has stayed in power for so long.

Netanyahu’s signature style is strategic caution and tactical audacity in the service of grim realism. His father Benzion, opponent of the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and historian of the Spanish Inquisition, imparted a stark and pessimistic worldview to his son: that Jews would never be accepted in non-Jewish society and that for Jews, optimism is suicidal.

A keen student of policy and history and astute observer of societal and economic trends, the younger Netanyahu, educated in the US, before and after his military service came to prominence in the Eighties as a government spokesman and UN Ambassador, mixing cosmopolitan eloquence with hardline militancy and ruthless ambition. His mix of caution and volubility has served him well, keeping generations of rivals off-balance and guessing. He has always been reluctant to make large decisions, wage full-fledged wars or pursue diplomatic gambits and their inevitable risks, preferring endlessly to tack between statesmanship and partisanship, making confederates, religious and secular, wealthy and poor, who all agree that he is their man, even if he is never to be trusted. This has been crucial to his remarkable political longevity as time and again he dances to the brink of outright extremism without ever quite stepping over, speaking the languages of diplomacy and rabble-rousing with equal fluency. Outlasting all his rivals and most of his proteges, he has come to see himself as Israel’s indispensable leader, the only one with the Churchillian vision, skill and world-class stature capable of confronting the uniquely existential threat of a nuclear Iran.

Netanyahu is not a religious man. His creed does not teach about redemption, whether religious or socialist, but about apocalypse, and his destiny in trying to forestall it. And that’s clear from his mission, which has an urgency to it: to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon at all costs, a theme of his for decades (as when, in 2009, he stood at the rostrum of the UN, holding up the blueprints for Auschwitz, and castigating Iran’s then-President and chief Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Ahmanadinejad, “have you no shame?” In 2015, he breathtakingly addressed a joint session of Congress urging opposition to the Obama Administration’s Iran Deal from which Trump, with Netanyahu’s support, unilaterally withdrew in 2018. His disenchantment with anyone’s vision of redemption has given him plenty of room to maneuver. The end has for him justified every means. He has made and broken conventions with the religious and the secular, with Left and Right, even flirting with bringing Arabs into a coalition. He has been willing to exploit and abandon supporters and friends, to court dictators from Russia to Qatar, and to tolerate Hamas’s hold on Gaza until October 7. He, alone among the leaders responsible for that day’s catastrophic failure and the decisions leading up to it, has consistently refused to take responsibility; his legendary pettiness, arrogance and grandiosity aside, his chief justification, one openly shared by his fervent followers and tacitly by many others, is that only he was capable of taking on Iran.

His dogged avoidance of big moves and hard decisions has, the truth be told, well-suited an Israeli polity, whose defining dilemmas as a Jewish and democratic state in a treacherous neighborhood, fated to share with Palestinians a tortured past and radically uncertain future, can seem insoluble. And a polity which has become used to being roundly condemned in international fora and opinion for almost anything it does.

Netanyahu was never an idealist, but his early public decades were nonetheless marked by genuine commitment to neo-conservative democratic principles and free market reforms. But these gave way as his legal troubles mounted. Facing multiple charges of corruption, self-dealing in arms purchases and illegally seeking to control the media, he resolved to control the judiciary to make sure he could stay in power unchallenged and unrestrained. He increasingly characterized reasonable debates over necessary judicial reforms as threats to Israeli democracy by fifth columnists, knowing that only the fear of Iran could give such accusations any public traction.

Embracing a turbocharged Israeli version of the populism sweeping the democratic world, stoking resentments while exploiting sentiments of patriotism and self-sacrifice he became a charter member of the post-liberal democratic club, helping Viktor Orbán as well as Donald Trump. Over the years, he built a TV network and army of internet trolls, prominently featuring his Miami-based son, Yair, to hurl accusations of treason and worse against the judiciary, civil service and academia — and the military, intelligence and security services too.

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The last vestiges of his earlier, genuinely held free market beliefs vanished when he aligned himself with the growing ultraorthodox bloc whose overwhelming issue is securing the military exemptions that keep their young men, along with the rest of their constituents in their own carefully insulated educational, social cultural institutions and out of the work-force as whole. Similarly, deeming it necessary for political survival, he gave senior cabinet ministries (International Security and Finance) to fire-breathing religious ultranationalists, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — the kinds he had avoided being seen or working with for years.

It all came to a head in 2023, well before October 7. His firebrand Justice Minister, Yuval Levin, put forward a stunning array of sweeping legal changes that would give the governing Coalition permanent control over the judiciary and media and much else.

The country was rocked for months by massive demonstrations against this perceived assault on the rule of law. They were attended by former generals, massive numbers of military reservists and even Netanyahu’s own former Likud Party colleagues, who saw him hijacking legal processes and institutions for partisan, personal, authoritarian ends and found themselves, too, denounced as traitors by Netanyahu’s spokesmen. In the days after October 7, Israelis rallied across partisan lines, broadly supporting the war aims of removing Hamas and returning the hostages and enabling civilians driven from the South by terror and the North by Hezbollah’s rockets, to return to their homes. The devil was, however, in the details: removing Hamas would require creating some sort of Palestinian governing authority in Gaza, and returning the hostages would prioritize the lives of individual hostages over a national collective interest which Ben-Gvir and Smotrich define as Judaising Gaza. What’s more, Netanyahu’s ultraorthodox coalition partners demanded legislation that would enshrine their collective draft exemption and state welfare once and for all. Not surprisingly, the prewar protests began to return, featuring exhausted reserve soldiers and the wretched families of hostages — for whom Netanyahu didn’t hide his annoyance and disdain.

In recent months, the country had been shaken even further by revelations that Qatar had been financing not only Hamas, but members of Netanyahu’s staff, including, one deeply knowledgeable observer told me, the same one responsible for creating his legion of trolls. In response, he fired the head of the General Security Services, for putting loyalty to state institutions above his loyalty to him.

What, then, after all this could lead nearly the entire Israeli political spectrum, lead people like me who week after week demonstrated against Netanyahu, who truly see him as a would-be authoritarian and a mortal threat to Israel’s future as Jewish and Democratic state, to support his military campaign in Iran? It is the sheer threat of a nuclear Iran. The measure of the distance how many of us have to travel to say that we support Netanyahu in this war is the measure of the undeniable threat of a nuclear Iran, to Israel, to the Jewish people, and to the world.

Over the past year, the military and intelligence services whose patriotism Netanyahu regularly questioned, effectively disarmed the Syrian Army and Hezbollah, making it possible to turn, in a brief, stunningly successful campaign to turn against their Iranian patron, as the nuclear clock was ticking down.

Netanyahu is perhaps Israel’s greatest living sociologist, and has, for decades, played its politics like a fiddle. Everything that he has done emerges from his utterly sincere conviction that his personal political interest and the Israeli national interest truly are one and the same. And so anything that keeps him in power is justified. His moral justification has been the very real threat of Iran. Whether others could have done the same, or whether he could have done this without tearing Israeli society apart, is something we and historians will be trying to figure out for years to come.

Now that there is a ceasefire, Israel and Iran are licking their wounds and thinking of what comes next. Netanyahu’s sagging poll ratings have been ticking up, though the public still hopes to replace the current government. During the pre-war protests over the judicial overhaul, Israel’s center-left parties and civil society, after years of drift, found their voice, and it was thunderous. If, indeed, the immediate threat of Iran has for now passed, one hopes they will assert themselves and offer a weary public a patriotic, principled alternative. But it won’t be easy.

Netanyahu was in some ways a harbinger and one of the progenitors of the new, post-liberal world taking shape before our eyes. This new dispensation has arisen on the ruins of a liberal order that in many ways lost touch with its own deepest commitments, and its nerve. The proven courage and fortitude of the Israel’s center-left is facing a historic opportunity, and a new test.

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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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?

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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By Rajan Menon

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.

Back then, war was obscured from public view. But now the entire world can watch the fighting, the killing and the destruction in color, up close and in real time — though we are mainly shown dead women and children, rarely the fighters. And as a result, wars are interrupted, by ceasefires, demanded by distant Presidents and Popes and applauded by the world’s watchers as they wait for the antagonists to renounce their fight. But rather than renounce their fight, they pause to recover their strength for the next round of fighting.

We’ve seen this over and again, since the obliteration of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: especially in the Middle East. Hamas is only the latest enemy of Israel to be constrained by a ceasefire, only to rearm and proclaim its intention of fighting again. And thus is the cycle of violence perpetuated for another generation.

Since the arrival of the UN Security Council on 24 October 1945, ceasefires, truces and armistices have interrupted wars across Africa and Asia before they could bring peace. Consider Korea, 72 years ago, when the war between North and the South was interrupted by an armistice signed by now long-dead generals. Since then, there have been deadly incidents now and then, but not one day of peace negotiations.

For Israel, the first of many UN-imposed ceasefires arrived on 11 June, 1948. Both the Foreign Office and the State Department had totally opposed Israel’s May 15 declaration of independence, but were sure that the Arab armies, with their artillery, armored vehicles and warplanes would soon solve their problem: by defeating the Jews who at first only had rifles. When, to their great surprise, the Jews began advancing, the UK and US quickly agreed to impose a UN truce. It did not last, and nor did a second truce, and the fighting only ended on March 10 a year later.

War would return with the start of the Sinai campaign on 29 October, 1956 that ended on 7 November, 1956, when Israel’s advance was suddenly halted by a US-Soviet agreement at the UN Security Council to impose one more ceasefire. Then came the Six-Day War, in 1967, which did not last for seven because of another ceasefire imposed by the UN Security Council.

Once again, that would not end the fighting. In October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched what became known as the Yom Kippur War, against an Israeli enemy totally unprepared for their assault. No Security Council ceasefire arrived to stop them, even if things soon changed once Israel counterattacked. On each occasion — in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 — Israel had much more combat strength than diplomatic leverage: the only thing that really matters on the world stage.

What of Israel’s most recent conflict? Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 was followed by Israel’s counteroffensive. The ceasefire calls duly arrived — from the UN General Assembly, assorted EU voices, and (of course) the Pope.

A ceasefire so early in the fighting would have left Hamas victorious. But unlike previous occasions in Israeli history, the US President remained silent, allowing Israel to keep fighting, month after month, for a full year and beyond.

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Yayha Al-Sinwar’s October massacre was made without any provisions to protect Gazan civilians from Israel’s counterattack, and came complete with planned and filmed atrocities to provoke a massive IDF response. From Sinwar’s perspective, the more Israel bombed Gaza the better. Because global public opinion would be aroused to support the Palestinians, he assumed politicians around the world would once again impose a ceasefire: long before Israel could seriously degrade Hamas’s infrastructure.

This time, though, the ceasefire did not come. Despite constant attacks from his domestic critics, Netanyahu mustered his very slim parliamentary majority to persevere in a war that continued to widen. First Hezbollah, with its 150,000 rockets and missiles, entered the fray. They were soon joined by the Houthis in Yemen, and by Iranian agents in the West Bank, and finally by Iran itself, which in two air attacks, bombarded Israel with some 320 ballistic missiles, each the size of a tanker truck, along with cruise missiles and drones.

Under continued criticism, not least from retired Israeli generals accusing him for waging a slow war of attrition while Israel was under worldwide attack (both literal and rhetorical) for killing “innocent civilians” — a term never used for Germans and Japanese burned in or out of their homes — the Israeli prime minister could offer no answer nor excuse. All Netanyahu could do was echo Churchill and keep buggering on.

This perseverance, this refusal to accept a ceasefire until Donald Trump imposed one just before his inauguration, finally paid off. Over 18 months of fighting, Israel wrecked Hezbollah and incapacitated Iran, ultimately causing the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. That, in turn, cut Iran’s supply lines to both Hezbollah and Hamas, making it impossible to rearm them for another round.

No longer able to charge Netanyahu with pursuing a pointless war — he had undeniably won a major victory against Israel’s enemies in Lebanon and Syria — his critics have instead criticized his refusal to stop the war to recover the hostages.

Hamas, for its part, is claiming to have won a very great victory. And while Israel will no longer need to worry about renewed Iranian funding for Hamas, pointless now that Nasrallah is dead and Assad in exile, the arrival of a ceasefire has prevented the final destruction of the group as a threat to the Jewish State. Wars, after all, are tragic indeed, but only their interruption by well-meaning outsiders also makes them futile.

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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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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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.

I still live in Gaza, and I still see children playing after more than a year of war, usually in the large open areas that have been flattened by Israeli airstrikes, among the ruins of destroyed buildings.

But their game has been updated. Now, the children of Gaza call it “Hamas fighters and Jews” — and they’ve added other new elements too. They pretend they’re being chased by Israeli drones, whispering to each other, “there’s a drone coming! We must hide!” Sometimes, they pretend to blow up Israeli tanks with mines and IEDs. They play for hours, because they have no other entertainment, and nowhere else to go. But the chant when a fighter “dies” is the same as it always was, though there are far more real martyrs now than when I was a kid. Many of them are children too.

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My year of horror in Gaza

By Hasan Jber

Thousands of children under the age of 18 have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel last year. Many more have been injured and maimed and thousands are thought to be uncounted.

Every aspect of the lives of those who have survived has been upended. The schools and kindergartens have been closed since October 7, and untold thousands have lost their homes.

Palestinian society has always been characterised by close family relationships, and young children find it very hard to accept that a brother or sister is dead. I hear them all the time. Adults will tell them they’re in paradise, but they don’t really know what that means. “He went shopping, but soon he will come back,” they say instead. “She went for a picnic and had to stay away a few nights, but I’m sure she’ll be home quite soon.” 

I spoke to the mother of Abdeltaffah Montasir, who lost his father at the age of four. “He was no fighter,” she told me. “But like so many of us, he was killed. All the time the boy is asking about his father, demanding to know when he will return. He says he thinks he will be back when the war ends, and then asks me when that will be. How can I answer that? I have to deal with his grief, and I am grieving too.”

Some children try to compensate for the lack of anything resembling a normal, routine life. They badger their parents for school bags and uniforms, so that when the war ends, they’ll be ready to go back to class, and they want to be like other children when they do. It’s as if they think that by asking for something that will only have meaning when the war finally ends, they will bring that day closer.

“The children of the Gaza Strip naturally suffer from the effects of the trauma they have experienced, such as fear, introversion and loss,” explains Ola Kamal, a local child psychologist. “They relive violent events in their thoughts and in their play. Many suffer from nightmares and insomnia.

They suffer from an absence of positive emotions. Some act out their trauma with hyperactive excitement and tantrums, others display severe and persistent fear and sadness. Sometimes they deny what happened to them or their family, or try to avoid the places or people associated with a violent event.

“This war,” Ola says, “is creating a deeply troubled and hopeless generation.”

Palestinians have always placed a high value on education, and we are proud of our low illiteracy rate. Bothina Abdel Fattah, a mother of six aged 42, who lives in Deir Al Balah, tells me she fears that having gone without schooling for over a year, her kids have already forgotten much of what they knew. “Their level of achievement and knowledge have gone down significantly,” she says. “Yet most of the schools are not just closed, their buildings have been badly damaged or totally destroyed. When will they be able to start learning again? The longer this goes on, the more they will forget.”

“Because of the war, everything we valued has collapsed,” says Iyad Abdul Hakeem, for many years a teacher. “Instead of going to school, our students are in the streets or standing in lines for water, bread and other kinds of food. If the war were to stop tomorrow, it would take an enormous effort to make up for what has been lost.”

The schools may be closed, but there are voluntary initiatives trying to fill the gap. One is based in a small park in Al Bourej, where displaced people who lost their homes now live in tents.

Run by a teacher, Sabreen Fetiha, it provides basic tuition under canvas or in the open air in literacy and maths for over 200 children who would normally be in the first four grades of primary school. “We are trying to reconnect students to the educational process and compensate for part of their educational loss,” Fetiha explains, “and we hope this will prepare them to return to ordinary, full-time education when the war finally stops.” 

Fetiha has managed to recruit three colleagues, who each have different specialist subjects, while stationery and other equipment has been donated by residents of the Bourej camp.

But welcome as the voluntary school is, it can feel dangerous to gather in the park. People are afraid that it could become a target. 

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There is no solution to the Gaza War

By Rajan Menon

And still the war grinds on. There was hope for months it would finish on the anniversary of October 7, and then, for a short time, after Yahya Sinwar was killed. But things keep changing. People were astonished that Sinwar died the way he did. They thought he was spending all his time in the tunnels, yet there he was, fighting on the frontline. Now he is widely seen as a hero, as a symbol of resistance, and even intellectuals who never supported Hamas are comparing him to Che Guevara, saying he’ll be seen as a symbol of revolution and resistance for years to come — for Palestinians and others too.

So Sinwar’s death has made Hamas more determined, not less. They’ll fight on to the end, and like Sinwar they don’t care if they die, because they believe that then they’ll begin their new, pleasant, trouble-free life in paradise.

And so, with neither side letting up, the war will last for many more months unless the international community somehow finds a way to stop it. The children playing fighters and Jews have told me they don’t ever want to become fighters for real, but if the war does not end, my fear is that they will.

But, ethics aside, how effective was it as a military strategy? I was in Gaza City later that year. A new Hamas leader was in place. Militancy was undimmed. I played football with Palestinian children whose bitterness at “Jews” burnt like a fire within. I spoke to their primary school teacher who told me that they needed a period of throwing things against a wall before lessons in order to get all their anger out. This was the generation of children that would go on to launch the October 7 attack, nearly 20 years later. 

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The problem with the Palestinian Church

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Others argued that the assassination of Yassin was a mistake because he was a “moderate” — which, of course, is a relative term in Gazan politics. “It was Yassin the incarnation of evil in the eyes of Israelis who kept Hamas in line and ensured that its violent outbursts were measured, calibrated, and doled out strategically rather than haphazardly,” wrote Barak Barfi. “He understood the limits of violence. His successors recognise no such limits.” It seems to me ridiculous to talk of someone who supported and promoted suicide bombings as being a moderate. Yassin was a terrible man. But there were worse to come. And Yahya Sinwar proved it.

It was Yassin who first recruited Sinwar back in the Eighties. Yassin appreciated the fact that Sinwar was a Hafiz — that he had memorised the Quran word for word. When only 25, Sinwar became the Hamas enforcer, punishing local Gazans for morality offences such as selling pornographic videos. It is said he tortured a fellow Hamas commander for over a year before murdering him in 2016, on the grounds of “moral violations”, code for homosexuality. He was known to be especially brutal in seeking out Israeli collaborators. There is a story that he made one collaborator’s brother bury him alive — but with a spoon rather than a shovel. Sinwar was a monster. Ordinary Gazan people were terrified of him. And, of course, Sinwar was the mastermind of the October 7 massacre. Which may be why, 20 years after Yassin’s assassination, our Prime Minister has taken a very different line from his predecessor: “I, for one, will not mourn a terror leader like Sinwar”. 

But will his death change anything? Certainly, it has given Israelis something to cheer about. As his death was announced over the tannoy on the beach in Tel Aviv, bathers jumped up and down and shouted in triumph. More than anyone else, Sinwar bears responsibility for the suffering brought upon the people of Gaza and Israel. 

But what difference will it make? Is the Israeli strategy of targeted assassination just a brutal version of whack-a-mole, killing one leader only for another, perhaps even more brutal, to take his place? When I was at school, we used to tell the story of history through kings and queens and military leaders. By the time I got to university, we were being taught that underlying social movements were far more important, that history happened “from below” and that leaders were just a kind of epiphenomenon of deeper social forces. This matters: if Sinwar was the product of deep social bitterness, then new monsters will emerge; however, if Sinwar and his like were responsible for violently imposing his gruesome ideology on the people of Gaza, then his death brings a certain hope.

A video posted on X gave me some hope the latter might be true. A man, seemingly from Gaza, surrounded by half-a-dozen children in a field of tents, sent a message in heavily accented Hebrew to the “citizens of the state of Israel”. He compared his own people living in tents with the Jewish festival of Sukkot, during which Jews live in temporary dwellings to mark, among other things, the fragility of human life. He spoke of the need for shalom. Oh God, I hope this video isn’t a fake.

But if Hamas have had their foot on the throat of such people, terrorising them into submission, then the death of Sinwar makes it more possible for many more such expressions of reconciliation to take place — and that means that there is light at the end of the tunnels. As the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore put it: “The big question is: can the wounded, grieving, heartbroken, enraged two nations of Israelis and Palestinians find a way to create a path out of this hell?”

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There is one significant reason this assassination could be different. Symbolism matters. That the mastermind of October 7 is now dead could provide an off ramp for this horrendous war. The Americans will inevitably try to cast it as such. And perhaps even Netanyahu, now with increasing popularity back home, may feel he has just enough political authority to marginalise those ultra-hardliners in his cabinet for whom little short of the annihilation of Gaza will suffice as victory. He has described Sinwar’s death as “the beginning of the end” of the war. Certainly, a ceasefire in the Strip feels more possible now than it did a few days ago. But Hamas will still have to release the hostages for the war to end. And they may decide to murder more of them. In any case, the Israelis think that they are winning — so why stop now? 

Sinwar’s death may be satisfying emotionally — and the absence of a rocket attack from Gaza following his death indicates how depleted his army had become — but the basic drivers of the conflict nonetheless remain in place. Too many of Israel’s neighbours are committed to its eradication. Iran will continue to supply arms and money to terrorists who seek the death of Jews. They will continue to develop nuclear weapons. Things are a long way from over. 

Speculating about Sinwar’s motives became an analytical cottage industry after October 7. Observers of the resulting conflagration have been told that Sinwar ordered his invasion and kidnapping spree because he wanted to derail Israeli-Saudi normalisation; put “the Palestinian question” back on the table; bait Benjamin Netanyahu into a regional war; bleed his enemy through an insurgency; fracture Israeli society; or undermine Fatah’s rival claims to leadership of the Palestinian struggle. There’s a category error behind every one of these claims. If Sinwar had been a normal warlord in pursuit of mundane objectives, he could have pursued a less spectacular course that would have greatly improved his chances of remaining the uncontested theocratic dictator of a Mediterranean coastal enclave with two million subjects. More than that, he could have retained a local military-industrial complex, extensive foreign relations, and subsidies from friendly regional governments and the UN. But Sinwar operated beyond the limiting realm of normative politics. He is arguably the first Palestinian leader who ever thought to test the proposition that his people could decisively settle their conflict with the Jews of the Middle East solely through violent means. 

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How Netanyahu duped Nasrallah

By David Rose

A significant body of facts suggests that Sinwar believed he would succeed in destroying the state of Israel on or about October 7, 2023. A few years before the attacks, he co-sponsored a conference at a Gaza City hotel entitled “Promise of the Hereafter: Post-Liberation Palestine” — and in which participants discussed topics such as the enslavement of educated Jews and the mass execution of alleged Arab collaborators in the aftermath of Israel’s imminent violent destruction. “We are sponsoring this conference because it is in line with our assessment that victory is nigh,” read Sinwar’s contribution to the event, which was delivered by a senior colleague in the Hamas political bureau. Sinwar added that “the full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river” was “the heart of Hamas’s strategic vision”. 

He meant this all literally. Documents recovered by the IDF in Gaza showed that Hamas planners anticipated the October 7 attack would reach much further into Israel than it actually did. In recent weeks, IDF units in Lebanon have discovered extensive evidence that Hezbollah’s Radwan forces had pre-positioned weapons and attack teams for an invasion of the Galilee in the months before the October massacre. Sinwar, for his part, had a plausible theory of victory, especially in light of the disarray of Israel’s initial response. If Gaza’s Hamas fighters could make it 30 miles across the desert to their comrades in the West Bank, they could bisect Israel while their Hezbollah allies struck from the north. All the while, he envisaged Arab-Israelis rioting, in a repeat of the country’s 2021 unrest, while Iran lobbed ballistic missiles, and the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and maybe even Turkey joined in too — and the cherished dream of the Muslim conquest of Palestine became dazzlingly real. 

Sinwar was a committed ideologue, a man of unwavering and sinister integrity. We are not used to world events being driven by figures whose motives are as pure and uncomplicated as his. Sinwar was reportedly furious at the 2011 deal that freed him after more than 20 years in an Israeli prison: he thought Hamas should have accepted nothing less than the release of all of its prisoners in exchange for the kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. While in prison for the alleged strangling of Palestinian informants, Sinwar promised one of his Israeli interrogators that the tables would eventually turn — that one day he would be Sinwar’s prisoner, and that the now-jailed Hamas leader would be grilling him instead. 

To put it differently, Sinwar had the quasi-Napoleonic notion of a total social inversion, one he would personally bring into being. Yassir Arafat, who came to deploy a clever interplay of violence and diplomacy, and who turned the Palestine Liberation Organization into a patronage system that was entirely dependent on his leadership, was a corrupt gradualist compared to Sinwar, who represented the total rejection of all pragmatism. Human beings were abstractions to him, the raw material for the new world he would single-handedly forge.

The execution, though, was off. Sinwar turned out to have a poor understanding of both his friends and his enemies. We might never understand why Hezbollah didn’t launch its own ground offensive against Israel on October 7, despite being fully prepared and deployed. Hamas and Hezbollah’s Iranian sponsors clearly knew Sinwar’s war plans, but didn’t fully commit themselves to the fight when the moment came. Israel, meanwhile, proved it could sustain an unprecedentedly long and difficult urban war without losing all international support. Surely Sinwar wasn’t counting on the Israeli-developed Trophy system neutralising Hamas’s anti-tank weaponry, nor on his enemy’s remarkable willingness to send its soldiers and combat engineers into Hamas tunnels. Hamas, meanwhile, fought the IDF with a distinct lack of skill and courage. Its fighters fled from frontal confrontations with the IDF, and failed to protect its infrastructure or halt the Israeli advance through the Strip. All the while, it lost any ability to fire rockets at Israel, and suffered an estimated 19,000 combat deaths since October 7. That’s six times more than all the Palestinian fighters lost in the Second Intifada, and the previous four Gaza Wars combined. A year ago, Hamas had 40,000 combatants, and ran the longest-tenured Sunni Islamist governing project in modern history. Now, though, they’re a glorified protection racket, far more capable of terrorising displaced Gazans than they are of threatening Israelis.

Sinwar’s continued rejection of US-brokered ceasefire agreements, any one of which would have saved his life, only makes sense if he believed his recalcitrance could eventually force Hezbollah and Iran’s other proxies to escalate the war on his behalf. He believed a longer and bloodier conflict favoured him. This was wildly incorrect. A long war actually favoured Israel, which learned how to fight him. Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s limited participation in the conflict dragged on long enough for Jerusalem to lose patience and wipe out the group’s entire high command, along with a reported two-thirds of its missile arsenal.

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Sinwar’s loss will still be deeply felt. He killed more Israelis on Israeli territory than anyone else in history, and on October 7 he gave his people an exhilarating taste of what a divinely ordained final victory would look and feel like. Pragmatism may seem lame or even dishonourable in light of that righteous blood orgy, a proof of concept for some future, final cleansing of the land. And he’ll have a potential afterlife as a leading 21st-century theoretician of violent revolution, having pioneered the idea of war as mass protest and an expression of popular rage. The “Tufan Al-Aqsa System” — the Hamasnik phrase for the October 7 attacks — is people power focused towards militant ends, an unstoppable, raging human flood. Sinwar understood that he had the backing of a global and increasingly important institutional Left, an elite constituency in Western countries that rapidly embraced his cause after October 7. “The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] against the Palestinians,” Sinwar told Vice News in 2021, anticipating the thesis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2024 book The Message. 

But it wasn’t just Leftists who provided cover for Sinwar’s agenda. The surviving senior Hamas leadership is now based in Qatar, a US ally which is home to the largest American military base in the Middle East. Hamas leaders have been feted in Turkey, Russia, and South Africa over the past year. Hamas’s moral legitimacy and international standing arguably grew after October 7. Sinwar showed that raping and butchering Israelis did not automatically make you an enemy of civilisation — not even for the United States, which long opposed any Israeli operation in Rafah, where Sinwar was killed, and spent nearly a year pushing for a ceasefire that would have preserved Hamas’s rule in the Strip. Sinwar’s career may have shown that it is self-destructive in the near term for a Palestinian leader to provoke a full-on war with Israel. But he will have inspired a future generation of extremists to dream big. 

But what if not every dispute in this blood-stained neighbourhood had to be resolved by force? Just a day before the attack on Nasrallah, the Foreign Office, State Department and EU issued a communiqué calling for a three-week ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel. Joined by a range of other Asian and European states, it would have paved the way to a long-term settlement between the warring sides, and allow displaced civilians to return home. 

More to the point, there’s evidence that Israel, Hezbollah and Iran had all agreed to the deal. But amid the rubble of south Beirut, that was soon forgotten. 

By any measure, Nasrallah’s death was a shock. But according to Dan Diker, there might have been more to the assassination than meets the eye. As the president of the influential Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs explains, allowing the world to believe that Israel was willing to sign a truce might have been an act of deception. One that led Nasrallah to meet Nilforoushan at Hezbollah’s headquarters — a very un-secret location he believed was safe. 

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The Miliband files

By David Rose

Yet until late September, all attempts to broker a ceasefire in the north had foundered on Hezbollah’s insistence that Israel impose a simultaneous ceasefire in Gaza. While Hamas remained in control of the strip, and Israeli hostages remained in its tunnels, this was a precondition that Israel could never accept. 

But in the closing “high-level week” of the UN General Assembly, which began on 22 September, the impasse seemed to shift. A range of world leaders — including Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, alongside Lebanon’s Najib Mikati and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian  — were all on hand at different times. Netanyahu was in New York too, as was Anthony Blinken and other senior officials from the White House. Feverish talks aimed at securing a ceasefire ensued.

The key to the apparent breakthrough, diplomatic sources say, was a request by Western powers that Iran and Hezbollah agree to drop the Gaza precondition. The Iranians and the Lebanese then spoke, both directly and indirectly, to Nasrallah in Beirut. Long designated a terrorist organisation by most Western nations, including the United States, Hezbollah itself couldn’t join the meetings. 

Yet despite his non-attendance, Nasrallah had agreed to a deal by the morning of 26 September. Although Iran and Lebanon didn’t actually sign the communiqué, I understand that the final text had been drafted and circulated to the leadership of both nations. They were also told that key diplomatic players, including Britain and the US, were “on board” with the deal. For its part, Israeli sign-off was “pending” but expected soon. Indeed, sources tell me that the Iranians and Lebanese were then informed by the Americans that Netanyahu was ready to sign. 

The same day, Starmer quoted the communiqué almost verbatim in his UN speech, albeit without explicitly acknowledging it. It is fair to say that when Netanyahu himself spoke, on 27 September, he didn’t exactly sound dovish. Talking mere hours before the strike that killed Nasrallah, he warned that Israel would “continue degrading Hezbollah” until its objectives were met — peace on its northern border and the safe return of displaced Israelis to their homes.

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Nevertheless, the sources say, those who joined the New York talks believed these aspirations were compatible with a ceasefire, ultimately followed by a negotiated peace. Certainly, after the IDF strike finally happened, one European participant is said to have described it as a “slap in the face” to those who’d worked to stop the violence. Another claimed that Israel’s alleged duplicity had destroyed any sense of trust, noting that the commodity was already in short supply across the Middle East.

The following week, Abdallah Bou Habib, the Lebanese foreign minister, publicly claimed that Nasrallah had indeed agreed to a ceasefire just before he died. But amid the escalating conflict, with Israeli troops by now on the ground in Lebanon, his words didn’t resonate.

I asked the Israeli foreign affairs ministry whether it was true that Israel had encouraged its foreign interlocutors to think it was ready for a ceasefire. It declined to comment. I also spoke to Diker, whose thank tank has advised Israeli governments since 1976, and whose staff includes numerous senior figures from the country’s intelligence, security and diplomatic establishments.

“I think Israel outsmarted Iran and Hezbollah because it knew they were lying about their own desire for a ceasefire,” he says. “Israel beat Iran at its own game of psychological warfare, and made it seem it was ready to agree to a ceasefire while proceeding with a plan to eliminate Nasrallah and fighting on to win.” 

Certainly, the Israelis have aggressively pursued their interests elsewhere. That includes a massive cyberattack on key Iranian institutions on 12 October, including its nuclear facilities. According to Abolhassan Firouzabadi, a former secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cybersecurity, “almost every sector of the Iranian government, the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive, has been affected by these cyber-attacks”.

This does not, however, make Iran any less dangerous. When analysts consider worst-case scenarios for expanding conflict across the region, they sometimes cite the potential closure of shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. That would immediately cut off oil supplies to Europe, and trigger rampant inflation.

Yet the sources I spoke to, who also took part in the New York talks, suggested things could escalate even further. One possibility is that Yemen’s Houthi terrorist group, armed and directed by Iran, might launch a drone or missile against a landmark in the United Arab Emirates. An obvious target is the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, thereby smashing the “Dubai dream” in an instant. 

Earlier this week, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi went to Oman to meet Mohammed Abdelsalam, a key Houthi leader. Their meeting was held expressly to discuss a possible Houthi response once Israel has retaliated to Iran’s recent missile strikes. Further down the road, the Islamic Republic could also try to foment an uprising in Jordan by its Palestinian majority, overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy that’s enjoyed peace with Israel since 1994.

The abortive diplomacy in New York, in short, stands in stark contrast to the Israeli vision of a victor’s peace. Yet given Iran’s ability to respond, even in its weakened state, it remains to be seen if Netanyahu’s gambit wasn’t a huge miscalculation.

What’s new about the recent Israeli method, however, is that it doesn’t stop at one or two important figures. Rather, they’ve gone after leaders, planners, strategists, figureheads and key implementers, with the obvious goal of not merely slowing down the adversary but actually crippling them, ideally beyond repair, and turning the population against them by demonstrating just how damaging these leaders are to their quality of life. 

It’s too soon to say if this will become a key tactic in Israel’s arsenal, whether it will prove effective in the long run, and what responses it might draw from their enemies. Yet what we can speculate on is this: might a strategy that emphasises the enemy’s decision makers turn out to be good news for civilians? 

The goal of bombing across many previous conflicts, notably the Second World War, was to demoralise the citizenry through starvation and destruction. As late as 2003, meanwhile, the goal of the US bombing blitz in Baghdad was to cow the Iraqi population into a state of “shock and awe”. The current Israeli goal, at least in theory, is to eliminate the people and infrastructure of their sworn enemies. This is a significant difference, and is potentially epoch-making. 

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The Taliban must purge itself

By Cheryl Benard

The unjust distribution of the costs of war have been one of its eternal features. Wars are declared by leaders, planned by generals, fought by often-reluctant footsoldiers — and endured in misery by the population at large. To put it differently, it’s always been ordinary people, the conscripts on the frontlines and the mass of civilians behind, who bore the brunt of any war, and this hasn’t changed. According to the Red Cross, a full 90% of war-time casualties remain civilians.

In theory, these civilian losses are “collateral” damage, unintentional and regrettable consequences of fights between armed combatants. But the evidence shows that most lethal action against civilians is either deliberate, or else represents a consequence that was known in advance and judged to be acceptable. You don’t bomb a city like Dresden without realising that you’ll be burying women, children and the elderly in the rubble, with an estimated 30,000 perishing in February 1945. 7,500 civilians died during America’s initial bombardment of Baghdad, and thousands more were traumatised and maimed. 

What if 2003 had gone differently? What if, instead of invading the country, the Americans had simply killed Saddam and his inner circles in a focused strike? There might have been no insurgency, no sectarian slaughter, no eventual Iranian triumph. Or, to return to the Second World War, what if the Allies had tasked Oppenheimer with focusing his scientific genius on developing missiles instead of atomic bombs, with the goal of destroying Hitler and his advisors in the Eagle’s Nest? What, to put it bluntly, if they’d targeted Hirohito not Hiroshima? Would that not have sacrificed one life for thousands? 

It’s hardly a new question. I grew up with it. My grandmother, cynical over a lifetime of catastrophic military ventures that saw her survive the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the loss of two world wars, and the Soviet occupation of her country, perennially greeted global conflict with the comment that “the big shots with their big ideas should fight it out directly” and leave the civilians out of it. But, to reluctantly quote Steve Bannon, this was a pipe dream, because “the aristos never fight”. 

And in fact, over more recent decades, psychopathic dictators not only sidestepped punishment, but were allowed comfortable exiles overseas. That’s what happened with Baby Doc Duvalier, the erstwhile Haitian despot, or Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, who both found themselves living the high life in France. Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, protector of Josef Mengele and killer of political opponents, was hosted by Brazil. The theory behind this genteel approach was that a cornered dictator would fight to the death, thereby prolonging the bloodshed. Offer him an attractive way out, and more slaughter could be avoided. 

Over time, though, this solution became less acceptable to global public opinion, ushering in our current era of sanctions and International Criminal Court arrest warrants. The approach sounded salient on paper, but in truth the ICC lacks any real muscle and has rarely proved effective either as a deterrent or as an instrument of justice. Just ask Vladimir Putin. 

The Israeli approach, then, represents a far more impressive reframing of the question of accountability. As we’ve discovered, war always assumes collective guilt. But are civilians truly more deserving of punishment for the decisions of their leaders than those rulers themselves? “They went along with it,” we may say. And that’s true. Too often, indeed, fanatical leaders can count on the hysterical enthusiasm of the masses. “They elected them,” we point out, and that sometimes applies too. 

Yet civilian populations are usually motivated by little more than the chance to prosper. Most people, moreover, are not heroes of the resistance. American voters did not choose a president in the knowledge that he would become obsessed with non-existent WMDs in Iraq. The fateful decisions, in short, are made at the top. What does a corporation do when it’s in trouble? Does it fire the entire staff, or replace the CEO? Isn’t it then both more just, and arguably more efficient, to go after the leaders?

A stronger objection comes from political scientists. While they generally agree that “decapitating” an enemy by taking out its leader is psychologically effective, they argue that the impact only lasts until a successor emerges, and all you may have achieved in the end is having created a martyr. What’s different now is that Israel seems to be aiming well beyond mere psychology, and is instead working to disable the broader command structures of its foes. It has focused on disrupting the enemy’s communication channels, as well as preventing new leaders from taking over. Just a day after killing Hassan Nasrallah, the IDF also targeted his Hezbollah successor. 

From there, the list continues. Ali Karaki (Nasrallah’s longtime adviser); Eid Hassan Nashar (the commander of Hezbollah’s medium-range rocket force); Samir Tawfiq Dib (the commander of its southern front); Nabil Kaouk (deputy head of its central council); all these, and many more, have been killed in Israeli strikes. Nor has the IDF neglected its main ideological enemy: Iran. The assassination of top Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh, while he was staying at an official military guesthouse in Tehran, is an excellent example. The suspicious death of Iran’s former president Raisi in a helicopter crash may or may not have been an accident — but anyway bears striking similarities to Israeli actions elsewhere.

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The first lesson of diplomacy: karma's a bitch

By Cheryl Benard

To be clear, I’m not ignoring the appalling number of civilian casualties in Gaza, nor the impact on Lebanon. Nor do we yet know how other players may respond to this emerging new style of warfare. Mossad’s recent pager attack is a remarkable piece of spycraft, untangling adversaries from their surroundings. It plucked the Hezbollah members from the crowd, albeit imperfectly. But the similar weaponisation of daily items could plausibly yet be deployed by the West’s enemies too, with obviously unpredictable consequences. 

So far, though, our assessment must be: tactical advantage Israel. Even after taking some time to think it over, Iran hasn’t been able to react innovatively to Israel’s attacks, instead launching its usual knee-jerk show of missiles into established Israeli defences. 

If, then, we want to be optimistic: there’s a chance that Israel’s focus on going after the “brains behind the operations” might make leaders think twice before sending their lackeys off to die. And if not, it may at least drive a salutary wedge between violent-minded ideologues and the population at large, as the latter recognises that they’re better off without them. In fact, this may already be happening in Lebanon, where criticism of Hezbollah is beginning to be voiced by politicians and the public at large. Netanyahu’s message that the Lebanese people aren’t the enemy will need, in light of the damage they’re suffering, to be amplified with concrete offers of cooperation and support.

Laughing for the camera. An unintentionally pointed preposition. I think I meant only to say at, but what if it was performative, either in response to a cameraman urging the women to vandalise a photograph of an unknown and possibly already slaughtered Jew, or an act of bravado on the women’s own parts? You never know for sure what you are looking at on film or how it came to be there. But the brief scene was unforgettably hateful in its callous insolence, however one interprets it. Scrawling with a marker — a marker bought for the occasion? — over the face of someone you don’t know. Someone in desperate trouble. A small act of terror in itself, I thought. And then, in tearing it off the wall, as though to say “may you never be found’, a smiling act of collusion in the abduction, the disappearance and, perhaps ultimately, the murder. A message to the family who invested hope in that poster: may you be eternally disappointed!

I have wondered — sitting this past year in the cowardly sanctuary of my London apartment, listening to the warlike whirr of the helicopters and the scarcely less warlike yells of the weekly peace protest — whether the women have ever seen that footage of themselves. And, whether they have or they haven’t, if they’ve regretted it. They did what they did very soon after the massacre, while the smell of blood and rumour lingered still in the air, when every charge was met by denial, and it was all too easy to read events according to the rigidities of one’s politics. Even the evidence of our eyes became handmaidens to falsehood. Rape? What rape? Rape didn’t suit the prepossessions of the hour. But is it not possible, now that time has passed and certainties have been shaken, that the women recall what they did with shame and maybe even reproach each other with it? “It was your idea.” “No it was yours.”

What if — while we are wondering — they wondered, when they saw pictures of released hostages, whether one of them was their hostage? Would that have made them feel better? Or what if, when they saw pictures of murdered hostages, they wondered if one of those was theirs? Would that have pierced their carapace of mirth? Or was the original defacement an expression of inexpugnable loathing?

Which brings us back to what is for me the greatest mystery of all: how the slaughter and, in some cases, dismemberment of innocent Israelis, men, women and children can have delighted educated people around the world to the point where there was no further violence against them — not even genocide “in context” if we read Harvard’s President correctly — that they couldn’t countenance with joy?

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Is this the end of Israel?

By Howard Jacobson

Yes, it was hysteria and many of the more publicly hysterical have since rowed back a little on their frenzy. But why, at any stage of the massacre, was there irrationality on this scale? We were back in the Middle Ages, some said, when the Jew was in league with the devil and hatred of him was unquestioned and contagious. But wasn’t that hatred begat from ignorance? Can we regress half a millennium just like that? And if we can, what value the education we prize so highly?

To the two grinning women I ask this question: what did you hate so much about that hostage? That he or she was a Jew? That he or she was a Zionist? I am going to assume you will say that towards Jews, as Jews, you entertain no animosity. You are not racists. What is it about Zionists, then, that you will tear at their faces and call for their obliteration? Their colonialist endeavours? You look educated; you will know, in that case, of Zionism’s origins in 19th-century thought (the novelist George Eliot was an early advocate), that it was a movement to help a beleaguered refugee people achieve self-determination not unlike that sought by Palestinians today and supported by you, and who, to begin with, had no colonial or exploitative ambitions. Yes, there were exceptions. Pioneers might not be colonists but that doesn’t make them saints. Nor are refugees above fighting dirty to grab a better life. But a minority of overweening, hard-hearted Jews does not a Zionist Empire make, any more than Hamas makes a Palestinian People.

I harbour no ill will towards Palestinians, so when I say that they made life hard for the first Zionists, I am not blaming them. I understand why they feared for the future of their land when largely European Jews, however weakened and peaceable, began their return to a country they — not without the justification of history — considered theirs too. In answer to Palestinian fears and resistance grew Zionist fears and resistance. Why apportion blame? We wouldn’t have the word “intractable” if we didn’t need it to describe conflicts with no simple solutions. And this is one of them.

There are bad Zionists. There are bad Palestinians. I am a Jew and on the side of Zionism, which doesn’t make me an enemy of people who aren’t. I understand Zionism’s original necessity. Any student of history should. But I do not seek the obliteration of Palestinians because they opposed Zionism almost from the start, waged continuous war on it, and butchered every Zionist they could lay their hands on one year ago.

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Why I'm sticking with Joe

By Howard Jacobson

All right, October 7 was Hamas’s doing. You didn’t look like Hamas to me. And you might or might not have been Palestinian. But you too revelled in the destruction of a Zionist who was unknown to you and of whose political beliefs you were ignorant. He might, for all you knew, have been a passionate advocate of peace. There are many such Israelis. But every Israeli was a Zionist to you and every Zionist a devil. Explain that to me. What does it feel like to hate so irrationally, to so relinquish your independence of judgement that you will hate on someone else’s say so and make an enemy of a poster?

See if you can find that clip. It might have originated as a selfie, so you could just have it on your phone still, along with your holiday snaps. Or you could have confused it, after the event, for a fashion shot. Voguish outfits, voguish opinions. If you do find it, take a long look. I can’t recall whether the incident took place in the course of a peace march, but if it did, ask yourself how it might have contributed to the peace, how it might have saved a single life, not of a Zionist (since you hate Zionists and so don’t care), but a Palestinian.

You may choose to accuse me of Jewsplaining. Fine. Better that than having my face scratched off. Understand, however, that it is not only as a Jew but as everything else I am that I ask you to acknowledge the barbarism of what you did. To hate without knowing who you hate, to de-person a stranger, is to let ignorance be your tutor. And once ignorance rules, darkness descends on everybody.

That isn’t the only parallel between the massacre last year and its precursors in New York and Paris. As with 9/11, the horrors of 7/10 were initially marked by shock, then calls for huge retaliation. As after 9/11, a backlash swiftly followed. Over the past 12 months, campuses and city streets have been swept by anti-Zionism, just as anti-Americanism became the rage on the Left in the early 2000s. Two decades ago, moreover, there were massive protests decrying America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and calls for the troops to stay home, much like today’s demands for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. And as after 9/11, the backlash proved impotent. The US hung on in Afghanistan until 2021. Today, Israel is busy expanding its war to Lebanon — and perhaps soon to Iran as well.

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The Mannheim attacks reveal Europe's impotence

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Yet surely the strongest parallel between those earlier atrocities and October 7 isn’t the bursts of violence, or the reaction, or the escalation. It’s that term I started with. It’s Islamism, and the way the West consistently refuses to name its true enemy. I mean the Muslim Brotherhood, which created Hamas, along with those other barbarians at the gates. On September 12, 2001, after all, we declared a war on “terror”. But terror is a tactic, not an ideology. In later years, as the enemy started to strike us at home in Western towns and cities, we called it “violent extremism” and lumped it together with fascism and other forms of homegrown zealotry.

This happened first, and most importantly, because the enemy told us it was fighting in the name of Islam, and we refused and still refuse, categorically, to wage war on one of the world’s great faiths. Second, we thought we could use our vast military and intelligence resources to weaken and destroy the enemy without being trapped into starting a war with a fifth of humanity. We failed to understand the difference between Islam and Islamism — between Muslims and the Muslim Brotherhood.

By failing to name Islamism as our enemy, we allowed it to prosper. Consider, for instance, what happened in Afghanistan. After 20 years of fighting that enemy without a name, spending trillions of dollars and wasting thousands of lives, we abandoned the country to the Islamist thugs of the Taliban. It was one of the most disgraceful retreats in American history, cloaked by shabby political expediency. We looked away as the Islamists catapulted Afghan women and minorities back to another Dark Age.

There have been other consequences too, often much closer to home. As we remained silent, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots quietly entrenched themselves across Western cities, from Australian universities to Manchester suburbs. Enabling them to build mosques and take over schools, moreover, our silence has allowed them to proclaim themselves as spokespeople for every Muslim in the West.

This continued reluctance to see the enemy before us allows it to burrow into more and more hearts. As increasing numbers of desperate people arrive upon our shores from war-torn lands, many are finding solace in a new community in those same mosques and schools, as well as online. And for those of us unwilling to turn a blind eye, our Islamist enemies are ready with their tried-and-tested accusations of Islamophobia, carefully deployed to shut down discussion of the true nature of their threat. Any critics of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots are defamed as racist and intolerant — as purveyors of “hate”.

In this effort to freeze discussion the Islamists are aided and abetted by the ideological Left. In Europe, they proclaim their faith in multiculturalism. In America, social justice warriors do the work on campuses and adjacent institutions.

And so, for the moment at least, we find ourselves at an impasse. More than 20 years after 9/11, and only one year after October 7, we are still refusing to name our enemy. The irony is that not everyone struggles as we do in the West. Consider Saudi Arabia, Islam’s foundational home, the protector of Mecca and Medina, yet which has nonetheless banned the Muslim Brotherhood. A host of other Muslim countries have managed something similar: Syria, Jordan, the UAE, Egypt. This has been a startling transformation. Back in the last century, the Saudis welcomed the Brotherhood, put them in charge of schools and mosques — and funded the Islamists to spread their ideology right across the region and beyond. I witnessed this firsthand, in Kenya. They came to my home when I was only 15, and seized control of our local mosque. One reason I understand the Muslim Brotherhood is that, as a teenager, I was recruited to it.

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At first, the Saudis thought they and the Brotherhood were ideologically aligned. But the Brotherhood eventually turned around and tried to overthrow them. At that point, the Saudi princes, capable of ruthlessness as well as generosity, rounded them up and expelled them from their schools, their mosques, their newspapers — and their soil.

Today, a year on from Hamas’ heinous attack on Israel, we should welcome Israel’s war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and most importantly, against Iran. Yet Israel must also learn from America’s mistakes. Remember that the war isn’t over until the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is destroyed. And for that to happen, we must first recognise our enemy in our midst, and that begins by naming it.

Immediately, I felt afraid. This was the first time that a Palestinian force had invaded our neighbour to kidnap and kill, and I expected Israel would respond very strongly. Ever since, I have known I could die at any time: walking on the street, sitting in my house, visiting my relatives. You can be talking to someone in the morning, and then you hear in the evening they are dead. Every day we pay the price for October 7, and this has a terrible psychological impact.

At first, many people here were happy about the attack: because of Israel’s siege of Gaza and its control of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, as well as previous conflicts. However, many have changed their minds. Even those who once voted for Hamas have turned against them, because they blame them for the disaster we have experienced.

I believe Hamas thought the war would end after one or two months, and that after that, the international community would intervene and stop it: they never imagined it would still be going on after a year. At the same time, Israel has not won the war. It has not destroyed Hamas or killed all its members. Its fighters are still here, refusing to run up the white flag, still making statements saying they intend to resist. 

Hamas members aren’t seen very much in the streets, because there they risk being spotted from the air and targeted. But they appear, sometimes at night, and then they disappear: some are living in the tunnels, some in houses, others in tents. They come out to beat people they say are thieves with sticks and iron bars, and they punish their enemies, sometimes by killing them. They are still killing Israelis.

They conceal every piece of information. They never confirm the names of those who have been martyred, and they don’t say whether any of their leaders have been killed. 

As for myself, I was a Leftist before I became a journalist. I have never supported Hamas, nor any kind of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. I have said all my life we should go for coexistence: I believe this land can absorb all its people, and that we can live with each other, side by side. Unfortunately, believing we need peace does not make it happen.

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Two days after the attack began, my wife, our three children and I left our house because the neighbourhood was being shelled. We went to stay with one of my brothers, but after another two days it became too dangerous there, so at 2am one morning we took shelter in a UN school. It was extremely overcrowded and random shells were falling into the yard. When it got light we moved again, to a relative’s house in the Nuseirat refugee camp, where we stayed for 47 days, until the truce began in November and we returned home.

After the ceasefire, the war restarted even more violently than before. We always monitor the website of Israel’s civilian coordinators, and on 23 December, they issued a map of the areas they said people had to leave. Our house was on it, and we were told we had to evacuate immediately. We stayed four days with some relatives before the Israelis issued a revised map, forcing us to flee yet again.

This time, along with countless thousands of other displaced persons, we went to Rafah, in the south. It’s not very far, but the journey took four hours, and all that time we were scared of possible airstrikes. My brother and I rented two small rooms for ourselves and our families — 12 people in all, with no bathroom or kitchen. Rafah was supposed to be safe, but the area we were in was bombed several times. The weather was wet and cold and the roof dilapidated. It did not block the rain, and the walls were cracked and damp. But we had no choice, and it was better than living in tents. We found wood to make a fire and that became our kitchen.

We had been there nearly two months when we heard the Israelis were withdrawing from Al-Bureij, so we felt safe enough to go home. But it wasn’t long before the Israelis again declared it a “red zone” — so once more we fled, this time back to Nuseirat. There we heard violent explosions nearby and Israeli tanks on the move. We were very afraid, but there was nothing we could do. Everywhere had become unsafe. It seemed as if we were fleeing from one death to another. In July, we returned to our house one final time and stayed there. Somewhat miraculously, it had not been damaged. I would guess that by now, fewer than 30% of Gaza’s buildings remain standing.

The life we lead now is inhuman. I suppose we are lucky: in some areas, there is only running water for a short time every 10 days, whereas we usually get it one day in three. But we have to delay everything until it comes. Having enough water to be able to wash or take a shower is bliss. There are things you don’t realise how much you need until they are unavailable: like shampoo. We have no electricity, so after dark we depend on battery lights, and to charge our phones I have to pay a neighbour who has a solar panel. It is very hard to get gas in order to cook.

Hamas may not have been eliminated, but it is dangerous for their police to be on the streets, so there is anarchy. The distribution of most kinds of food is controlled by criminal gangs. They have guns, and steal imported food from those who receive it, mostly from charitable donors in places such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Because there are no police to stop them, they hijack trucks and steal their contents, and two or three days later it appears in the markets at inflated prices. The price of many items, such as vegetables and eggs, has roughly tripled.

Meanwhile, there are no working banks or ATMs. I am still a journalist, working for a newspaper based in the West Bank, although I cannot travel anywhere to report. I am still receiving a salary, but the only way I can get cash is from money changers, profiteers who take more than 20% as their commission.

Yet set beside the fate of others, these are merely inconveniences. We lost my nephew, Muntezar, in Rafah: when we left he stayed on because of his job with the electricity company, which had promised him an increased salary if he remained. He wasn’t a fighter but an ordinary worker who had two little boys. I was close to him, and he had no interest in politics, but his house was hit and he was killed, alongside two of his wife’s brothers. My wife’s sister was killed with four of her children and her grandson, in a strike on an apartment building that killed more than 30 people in Nuseirat near the beginning of the war.

One of my wife’s brothers perished from an airstrike along with his two sons; another with his wife, two sons and three grandsons. You expect you may lose someone all the time: any time your phone rings you rush to answer it, in case it is someone telling you another relative has been killed.

One afternoon three weeks ago, there was an airstrike on the building opposite our house, which is just eight metres away. We were sitting in our downstairs living room when there was an enormous blast. All our windows were destroyed, and we were covered in smoke, broken glass, and thick, black dust. I couldn’t see, I could only hear, and my family were screaming and crying. At last, some neighbours came and took us outside and we sat in the open air in order to breathe.

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We’ve been trying to fix the damage ever since, but we have no glass to replace the windows. We don’t know what will happen during the winter, when the nights begin to get cold. We had to throw away lots of food because it had been polluted by dust and chemicals from the rockets.

Like most people in Gaza, we long for the war to stop, and try to return to normality. But no one seems to be applying any pressure to make this happen. Israel doesn’t want to finish this war, because that would mean its Prime Minister would have to go to court to face charges of corruption, and his government would collapse. The fanatical Right-wing politicians in his cabinet would also lose power. 

But Hamas will not surrender. Their religion means they believe that if they are killed, they will go to paradise, and all the time they say they will not stop. They are waiting, hoping that something will change. For a long time they waited for Hezbollah to enter the war, and now they have; they were waiting for Nasrallah, though now he is dead. They are waiting for help from Iran and from Yemen, though no one has any idea what will happen when it comes. 

All I know is that while Hamas waits, we continue to pay the price.

I don’t say this lightly: Israelis, in their seventies like me, have been through the food rations and the Sinai battles of the Fifties; the Six Day War in the Sixties; the near fatal Yom Kippur War of the Seventies; the Lebanon War and the First Intifada of the Eighties; the bus bombings and the Rabin assassination of the Nineties; the Millennium decade of suicide bombings and the second Lebanon War; and the second decade’s rise of Hamas and Hezbollah with their terrifying rocket barrages. It was more of the same in the third decade until the same morphed into the unimaginable on October 7.

A pogrom on our land, the lone sanctuary for an ancient people. And thus the painful cycle of Jewish history returned and our illusion of security was shattered. But Israel will survive. Not merely because we have a powerful military, a system that rewards innovation and creativity, a highly adaptable citizenry, or a deeply interconnected populace that can act like a dysfunctional family at nine in the morning and a band of brothers by noon. We have something else in addition.

Necessity has taught us to be the masters of uncertainty. Our Jewish faith has inscribed not knowing into our collective unconscious. We’ve made a religion out of it.

Today and tomorrow we’ll recite these well-known, solemn verses from the Rosh Hashanah liturgy:

Who shall live and who shall die,
Who by water and who by fire,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued…
And who will maintain the mundane when you don’t know what will be next?  

Yes, who maintains the mundane when you don’t know what will be next? My son and three sons-in-law are in the army, so their wives defend the home front. In a time of insanity, they are the sacred guardians of The Routine. The kids make it to school on time in clean clothes. At the end of the day, the toys and games return to their bins and boxes. Meals materialise at the appropriate times and the homes appear remarkably suburban. When the sirens screech, they hurry the children into the bomb shelters. Bags of treats greet them in their protected rooms.

So we maintain the mundane, but vulnerability is still inevitable. You can compartmentalise fear, just not hermetically. It leaks out when you least expect it. I learned that lesson at a family gathering two weeks ago.

It was a pre-bar mitzvah ceremony for one of our grandsons, a picnic on a grassy knoll facing the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. An hour into a meal filled with joyfulness and love, my stoic daughter-in-law, Tal, reads a speech. She raises her eyes to glance at the 50 or so family members and friends. The children laugh and shout as they run through rows of sprinklers. She refers to the war and the hostages. Her voice remains steady until she speaks about Aaron — her husband, my son, the father of the bar mitzvah boy, the soldier about to return to his unit — and then she bursts into tears.

Tal is the master of self-control — the antithesis of gloom and despair. But it’s moments like this when we all cry, including her husband, the warrior, the man who four months ago spoke before a group of Americans and said, “I hate war but it’s what we must do.” 

It’s what we must do. When you face an enemy who wants to obliterate you, you have a simple choice: either act like prey, frozen in terror, or become a warrior on the battlefield, in the bomb shelter, or in the living room. This is the mentality of a people under siege. For much of the West, war is merely an abstraction. Afghanistan doesn’t border on the United Kingdom. You don’t hear the booming of rockets fired from Gaza or Lebanon or Yemen or Iran. You don’t run to your bomb shelters. You don’t have to live with the certainty of not knowing what’s next.

Each of us is a heartache away from trauma and grief, but life goes on — even when you know someone who’s been murdered, taken hostage, wounded, and fallen in battle; even when you’re terrified that the next knock on the door might be from an IDF officer informing you that your son was killed in battle.

Black humour helps. I recently saw a video clip about a workshop for war widows. Two widows of tank commanders are seen chatting together. One says to the other: “It’s amazing how considerate and kind the unit is to us wives.” The second widow responds: “Hey, if your husband’s going to die in battle, then there’s no better unit in the IDF than the tank corps.”

It reminded me of a Holocaust joke about a prisoner who dies in Auschwitz and goes to heaven and tells God an “Auschwitz joke”. God says to him: “That’s not funny.” The prisoner responds: “Well, I guess you had to be there to understand.” That’s the thing. You’ve got to be there to understand how healing it is to laugh with tears in your eyes.

That’s why you don’t often see long faces, whispered tones, or solemn voices. Three weeks ago, on my son’s day off from the Army, we were in a lively restaurant. The beautiful kids carrying trays of food scurried around with smiles on their faces. Our curly-haired waiter took our order with a grin and a question.

“Where are you?” he asks my son, whose M-16 leans against the wall:

“Jenin,” he answers.

His wife, Tal, instinctively lowers her eyes. It’s a Hamas hotspot like Gaza. She keeps her fear and tears to herself.

“You’re busy?” asks the waiter who a moment earlier had told us he served in Gaza for four months. It’s a question without a question mark. No one has any illusions about what busy means.

“Yes,” my son answers. “A drop in the ocean.”

When you belong to the same club, you speak in shorthand. The web of words that separate us disintegrate when we’re fighting for our survival. We share the same pain.  It’s the pain of knowing you’re one click away from bad news but you click, nevertheless. You promised yourself you wouldn’t, but how can you stick your head in the sand when the bad news, which is yours and everyone else’s, is all around you?

So, you click, and you see a picture of six dead hostages shot multiple times by the same Hamas butchers the students at my Alma Mater, NYU, praise like they’re the Second Coming of Che Guevara. And then, because we Israelis have this deep need for self-flagellation, we turn toward one another with fiery dragon fingers and accuse. The Right curses the Left. The Left rages against the Right. And everyone blames Bibi. After all, we have a prime minister who’s like a beacon running on a 25-watt bulb, but let’s not forget who pulled the trigger.

And we’re left bereft, orphans in need of our Churchill, not a man who serves power and politics above integrity and responsibility. Actually — no, not Churchill. Our greatest leader spoke with a lisp, broke tablets and burned gold. He was a reluctant leader. Principles not power guided him. He faced God and argued on our behalf when God threatened to destroy the Israelites.

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Life on Israel's home front

By Michael Tobin

Yet here we are, 4,000 years later, acting like ungovernable kids straight out of The Lord of the Flies. The absence of leadership creates desperation and fear. Desperation and fear lead to polarisation and amnesia. Amnesia creates confusion.

One year later, we act like adolescents fighting over an either-or solution. Some of us say: “We can’t let the hostages stop us from destroying Hamas. The road to victory ends at the Philadelphi Corridor with Yahya Sinwar’s head hanging by a noose.” Very few Israelis will celebrate victory knowing that the hostages were murdered. Others fight back: “No, we must do everything possible to get the hostages back even if it means Hamas remains in power.” 

I know that story well. In 1992, my son-in-law’s brother, Elchonon, was stabbed to death close to his home by a Palestinian terrorist. The Israeli government traded Elchonon’s murderer — along with a thousand other Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar — in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. That kind of deal most Israelis pray will never be repeated.

So, in the meantime, what can we do?

Well, we can send a message to their pagers and walkie talkies. We can watch when they brush their teeth. We can once again stand tall and pray that our government has found its sense of purpose.

But there’s something else we can do. We can make babies. Yes, Israelis, whether secular or religious, continue to make children.

You might ask: “What does that have to do with anything? You’re living in a state of existential dread. 100,000 Hezbollah rockets are like stallions at the starting gate ready for the gun to go off and Iran’s a few grams of uranium from a nuclear weapon.”

Well, it has to do with everything. Because babies mean we believe in a future. And if we believe in a future, we have hope, even when despair and helplessness appear to dominate. Because making babies means we’ll safeguard them like bears protect their cubs. Because it means we will survive and thrive. We have been here for thousands of years facing obliteration in every generation.

Yet here we are, agents of living history creating another iteration of the Jewish story.

One year on, Netanyahu is determined to continue his war in Gaza at all costs — not just to Gazans, of whom more than 40,000 have been killed and another 1.9 million (90% of the population) displaced, but to the Israeli hostages as well. His future and the outcome of the war are now inseparable.

Even before October 7, Netanyahu was highly polarising. Liberal Israelis turned up in vast numbers to protest his policies, denouncing him as a threat to democracy and the rule of law, while those on the Right saw him as a peerless leader, even a saviour. Attitudes towards him have only hardened. The families of the remaining hostages believe that only a ceasefire will bring their loved ones home and that Netanyahu refuses to agree to one because he is obsessed with destroying Hamas entirely. Other Israelis are convinced that Netanyahu is bent on prolonging the Gaza war to remain in power so as to avoid facing the pending corruption charges against him. More still see him as a threat to rule of law in Israel. Many Israelis hold all three of these opinions. In a late July interview, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert went to far as to warn that the country could descend into civil war — a view shared by nearly half the respondents in an August poll.

Yet despite this, Netanyahu’s vow to destroy Hamas has proven chimerical. And his refusal to abandon it has created a rift between him and the most hawkish members of his cabinet — National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who lead far-Right religious parties — and senior Israeli military officers and intelligence officials who insist that Hamas cannot be vanquished.

But what does it actually mean in practice, to destroy Hamas? The IDF’s overwhelming superiority in soldiers, military technology and firepower may well demolish its fighting force, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and eliminate its senior commanders. (The Brigades’ leader, Mohammed Deif, has most likely already been killed.) And even if the Brigades don’t disappear, they will have been battered badly. But destroying Hamas entirely is all but impossible. It is a political movement with a distinctive ideology, which includes ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control of Gaza through a draconian blockade. So long as both continue it will have a cause to which it can rally support. Thousands of vengeful young men whose mothers, fathers and siblings have been killed by Israel’s war machine will continue to join up, the suffocating Israeli blockade fuelling their resentment.

Regardless of Hamas’s future, when the war eventually ends, Israel will have to arrange for Gaza’s governance. But none of the available choices is workable. Netanyahu has ruled out a coalition government containing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas or even one run solely by the PA. As for a government staffed by Gaza’s notables, that would be almost impossible. Anyone who steps forward will be condemned as a Quisling: the more acceptable they are to Israel, the less they will be trusted by Gazans. Alternatively, Israel could run Gaza through a military occupation but that, sooner or later, would restart the familiar cycle of repression and resistance.

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The No-State Solution

By Rajan Menon

To complicate matters, Israel is waging a war of sorts on a second front, the West Bank, where tension and violence are increasing. State-sanctioned seizures of land there have accelerated, with the largest single authorisation in three decades taking place in July. The number of housing units has nearly doubled over the past five years, according to the European Union which doesn’t include the nearly 200 “outposts”, many of which eventually gain legal status despite being illegal under Israeli law. Meanwhile, settlers’ attacks on Palestinians have surged along with their destruction of Palestinians’ olive groves, gardens and orchards; the killing and stealing of sheep and cattle; the demolition and defacement of schools; and the takeover of water sources, sometimes assisted by the IDF.

Worse, as +972 Magazine reports, the security forces and settlers have killed nearly 700 West Bank Palestinians since October 7. Israel’s far-Right parties have praised these attacks, denouncing foreign criticism as smears. Ben Gvir has even relaxed gun ownership laws for the settlers: within the first two months of Hamas’s attack, 250,000 firearm applications were filed, more than in the past 25 years. In fact, the Government’s relentless, accelerated approval of West Bank settlements has all but destroyed the already-dim prospects of a two-state solution.

Unsurprisingly, support for armed resistance among Palestinians has increased. Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and to a lesser extent Hamas have sunk deep roots in the territory. Overall violence in the region — by the IDF, settlers, and militant Palestinian groups — had increased by 50% even in the 12 months preceding the Gaza war. Current trends suggest the very real possibility of a third Intifada. David Shulman, a scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, warned recently in the New York Review of Books that, if left unchecked, the actions of Israeli settlers “will lead to Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking control of the West Bank”.

Further inflaming the situation, Israel has now launched a ground invasion in southern Lebanon, opening a third front against the Lebanese Shiite political party and paramilitary force, Hezbollah. It’s the culmination of almost a year of hostilities: since October 7, Hezbollah has been aiming missiles and drones at northern Israel, while Israel has been retaliating with air strikes on Hezbollah redoubts in southern Lebanon. While Hezbollah has vowed to continue its attacks so long as the Gaza war persists, Netanyahu is bent on enabling the return of people displaced from their homes, and it appears he will take great risks to do so.

But by invading Lebanon, Netanyahu is taking on a foe far more formidable than Hamas. As retired Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brik wrote in Haaretz: “The IDF, which failed to destroy Hamas, certainly won’t be able to destroy Hezbollah, which is hundreds of times more powerful than Hamas.” Israel’s ground forces have been cut by 66% in the past 20 years, Brik explains, which means that Israel “doesn’t have enough troops to remain for a long period of time in any territory it conquers, nor does it have troops to relieve those who are fighting”.

Then there’s the question of how Israel will respond to Iran’s barrage of missiles fired yesterday evening. And whether the United States will limit itself to helping Israel shoot down Iran’s missiles, as it did in April, or decide to strike Iran directly. In response, Iran could go so far as to close the Straits of Hormuz, a step whose ripple effects could course through the networks of the global economy.

One year on from October 7, the combination of increasing violence in the West Bank, an Israeli war in Gaza and ground invasion of southern Lebanon, and an Iran that feels pressure to shore up its credibility given Israel’s attacks against its allies — Hamas and Hezbollah but also the Houthis of Yemen — amounts to a tinderbox. The consequences of an explosion are impossible to predict with precision. But this much is clear: we will only see more death, destruction and suffering. Wars are easy to start but hard to end — and quickly spiral out of the control of those who initiate them.

Before that act of appalling barbarism, the world was strangely optimistic about the future of the Middle East — despite the catastrophic scale of human suffering, millenarian fanaticism and economic collapse that was already evident across the region. The root of the hopefulness could be found in the Abraham Accords, that potentially transformative set of Trump initiatives, the aim of which was — somewhat euphemistically — to “normalise” relations between Israel and some of its Arab enemies. Last September, the great glittering prize of Middle East peace seemed to be in touching distance: Saudi rapprochement with Israel.

The radical idea at the heart of Trump’s plan was that regional peace did not need to wait for “the Palestinian question” to be solved. Instead, that could be put to one side while other grand strategic moves played out. As Mohammed bin Salman “modernised” Saudi with his combination of political repression and social liberalisation, the two great anti-Iranian powers in the region could finally be brought together. A similar assessment was made about Lebanon, a country without a functioning state or economy and at the mercy of Iran’s colonial army, Hezbollah. This, also, was a situation that was thought to be containable — even as Iran exploited the anarchic chaos of Iraq and Syria to supply its proxy with enough weapons to devastate Israel.

The central conceit of the Abraham Accords was that, irrespective of Hamas, Hezbollah and the occupation of the West Bank, once the Israel-Saudi axis was formed, Iran could be pushed back and contained without direct American involvement. But, then, the depth of Hamas’s murderous brutality on 7 October shattered that assumption, leaving not only a traumatised and vulnerable Israel, but also a traumatised and vulnerable Western order forced to confront the stark realities of the Middle East.

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David Cameron's vanity trip

By Tom McTague

Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel. 

By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.

With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.

Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map — even from history itself. The pretence that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered. 

Israel, of course, has not let Hezbollah’s missile attacks go unpunished, replying with raids on Southern Lebanon which have forced 100,000 to flee their homes for the apparent safety of Beirut and its surroundings. But as Israel escalates the war, the Lebanese population — already impoverished and abandoned — are having to flee again. This fight to the death leaves the 5 million people of Lebanon with nowhere to go, trapped on all sides by anarchy and war. The only escape is by sea — which is controlled by the West.

Any worries that Western forces are once again being “drawn in” are moot — we are already involved. In the days following 7 October, Washington redeployed an aircraft carrier into the Mediterranean to cover Israel’s northern flank which would allow Netenyahu to wage his war in Gaza. Since then, Iran itself has launched a direct rocket attack at Israel, prompting an armada of Western forces to intervene. And in the event of a humanitarian disaster, prompted by an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon, it would fall to Britain, France and the United States to organise the mass evacuation of Lebanese civilians that would be required to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe.

Such is the scale of that impending catastrophe that I am told that David Lammy, our new Foreign Secretary, has spent around a third of his time dealing with an operation so complex that it resembles a full-scale war plan. Because Lebanon borders Syria to its north and east and Israel to its south, the only option for a mass evacuation would be by sea. And the only powers capable of delivering such a mission are the United States, France and Britain — each of whom is currently distracted by its own domestic political dramas. And in each case, the rise of the nationalist Right makes any mass refugee scheme a political nightmare. 

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Starmer has revealed his weakness over Israel

By Tom McTague

The French government is locked in a particularly acute fiscal crisis; the Biden administration is limping towards its end; and our Starmer government is only just coming to terms with the anti-refugee riots which gripped the country over the summer. No country could easily cope with a mass influx from another war-torn country in the Middle East.

Hence the extraordinary diplomatic push now underway to avert a full scale war. Yesterday, a joint declaration from Britain, France, the United States and Saudi Arabia called for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel, though, quickly rejected its terms: a ceasefire would only leave Hezbollah in place, free to continue growing in strength, armed by Iran, capable of making much of northern Israel uninhabitable. With Gaza lying in ruins and Hamas devastated but not defeated, Israel has concluded that it is now strong enough to wage war on Hezbollah, and that any delay only serves the interests of its enemies, principally Iran. 

The stakes today are far higher for Israel than the war it has been waging in Gaza for the past 12 months. This war against Hezbollah is one that must reestablish the ability of Israel to be able to shelter its citizens within its own borders. It is, then, a battle for the very purpose Israel was founded.

In its ignorance and arrogance, the West believed it could contain the appalling disorder of the Middle East. But it has simply allowed Iran to grow in strength. Not only did 7 October shatter the failing assumptions of Benjamin Netenyahu’s grand strategy, it also revealed the Western world’s myopic passivity too. Today, the world is reaping the whirlwind.

While the maligned figure of the Jew has historically been an all-purpose scapegoat, one thing seems clear enough. Western antisemitism is now primarily fuelled by identity politics, a cultural version of Marxism that analyses injustice not in terms of class, but of race, sex, ethnicity and religion. For the radical avant-garde of 2024, the revolutionary agent of global justice is not the proletariat — the united workers of the world that Marx expected to overthrow capitalism and birth the Communist utopia — but Hamas. And yet, today’s cultural Marxists nevertheless recapitulate the moral and intellectual deficiencies of the master’s philosophy. They, too, reject the central teachings of the Bible, twist and debase its narrative of salvation, and embody the fratricidal spitefulness against which it repeatedly inveighs.

Start with the perverse elevation of brutal terrorists with roots in Nazism. Most people recognise evil when they see it. Marx muddies the waters by locating evil not in individuals, but in society. While he disdains capitalists and Jews (two groups he regards as virtually identical), he rejects the pre-modern consensus of Hebrews and Christians that man is by nature a depraved animal. In this, he follows Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Comparing miserable 18th-century Europeans with the “noble savage” of his imagination, a happy and compassionate being whose existence he inferred from reading anthropological accounts of native Americans and Africans, Rousseau concluded that men and women are by nature as good as Adam and Eve on the day of creation. But institutions like the division of labour and private property, cornerstones of Western civilisation, have made them servile and vicious.

In suggesting that civilisation is a source of withering illness, Rousseau sowed the seeds of late-modern revolutionary nihilism. For if civilisation makes us sick, why not just tear it down? More immediately, his gauzy idealisation of human nature greatly encouraged the French revolutionaries, who struck directly at what they took to be the roots of the sickness. Seeking to wipe away the old ways so that they might reconstruct society according to abstract principles, they slaughtered priests, peasants, nobles, and royalty, watering the soil of liberté, égalité, and fraternité with rivers of blood. It was DEI with guillotines.

Marx framed Rousseau’s seminal ideas in economic terms, producing a sweeping material history to rival the Bible’s sacred one. He argued that evolving modes of production determine nothing less than the systemic organisation of societies and the form and content of their predominant opinions. His apocalyptic vision of salvation through revolutionary liberation from injustice is a secular adaptation of the book of Revelation. Here, too, the faithful are saved, but fundamental values are transposed. While the heroes of old — Macauley’s “brave Horatius, / the Captain of the gate”; Beowulf, slayer of Grendel, a monster of “Cain’s clan” — defended civilisation, Marx cemented in the popular consciousness the romantic idea of the anti-hero, who tears it down. The seeds of radical chic, epitomised in Che Guevara T-shirts,  were planted in the Communist Manifesto.

Observing the Dickensian wretchedness of English factory workers in the first half of the 19th century, Marx argued that capitalism oppresses workers by alienating them from their labour, its products, their historically malleable “species being”, and, through class antagonisms, their fellow human beings. These injustices corrupt and debase all social classes, from the high and powerful — the owners of capital — to the Lumpenproletariat, the lowest of the low: a “social scum” of criminals and vagrants who function as “bribed tool[s] of reactionary intrigue”. Only one class, the proletariat, is an exception to this rule. Mind-deadening labour and grinding poverty strips these workers of health, education, security, sobriety — everything but the delusion of religion, the “opiate of the masses”. Yet, Marx insists, they differ from all other social classes under capitalism in one decisive respect: because capitalist society has given them nothing but misery, they have zero interest in its preservation.

The proletariat, Marx maintains, is the only class capable of acting not in its own particular interest, but that of humanity itself. This “universal class” offers salvation for mankind — but only if it remains faithful to Marx’s radical catechism, which calls for the global revolution of the united workers of the world. This bloody Armageddon will birth the Communist society, the earthly paradise that is the “solution to the riddle of history”. That would be the riddle of injustice, whose permanent and final “solution” (a mathematical term later echoed by fascist revolutionaries in regard to what they called the Jewish Question) was believed by our more patient and moderate ancestors to be known only to God.

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Safetyism doesn't belong on campus

By Kathleen Stock

Marxism turns the Bible on its head. The proletariat are the oppressed who will end oppression, the downtrodden who will inherit the earth — not by meekness, but by self-assertion. Jesus overturned the tables of the Temple’s moneylenders. Marx takes more pointed and vicious aim, not at the corruption of a sacred space, but at the Jews themselves. He repeatedly associates the people of Israel with hucksterism and capitalist oppression. “Money is the jealous god of Israel,” he wrote in On The Jewish Question, “in face of which no other god may exist.” After the revolution, he predicts, Jewish particularity will have disappeared, to be replaced by universal humanity. The earthly paradise will not be merely classless: it will be Judenrein.

Marx, whose grandfather was a rabbi and whose father converted to Lutheranism, also drew on the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophet Isaiah calls the Jews a people chosen by God to be “a light unto the nations”. But Marx’s Chosen People are neither Jews nor Christians, younger siblings who claimed to be the new bearers of the light. They are the proletariat: ignorant, destitute, atomised labourers who nevertheless, Marx supposes, feel no envy or vengefulness. So good and pure are they, he predicts, that they will give up their revolutionary dictatorship after a time and let the state “wither away”.

In romanticising the proletariat, Marx ignores the fratricidal enmity elicited, since the days of Cain and Abel, by those whose sacrifices God has favoured. With demonic frenzy, Hamas raped, tortured, murdered and dismembered Israelis on October 7. These berserkers seem to bear in their bones the outcast’s envy of civilised order and happiness, and in particular the rancour of their ancestor, Ishmael. Cast out by Abraham and passed over by God in favour of Isaac, progenitor of the Israelites, Ishmael grew to be “a wild ass of a man— / his hand against all, the hand of all against him”. Yet he never hated Abraham or Isaac the way Palestinian Islamists hate the Jews, with a hatred that is surely increased by the fact that they are doubly exiled, inasmuch as no other Arab and Muslim lands will have them.

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Why the Left failed on October 7

By Hadley Freeman

But competition for the exalted status of Chosenness has been a source of antisemitism among Christians as well. Late in life, Dostoevsky embraced a messianic vision of the end of days, when a great battle would unfold between the spirit of the Russian people, destined to save mankind with “self-denying unselfishness”, and that of the tyrannical and self-serving Jews. God, he wrote, promised the Jews: “thou art the only one before God; destroy the others or enslave and exploit them.” This interpretation paves the way for contemporary antisemitism and anti-Zionism by perversely making the people of Israel the first among nations in moral darkness.

Dostoevsky maintained that the suffering of Russian peasants before the elimination of serfdom exceeded any misery the Jews had ever experienced. His elevation of the Russians and demotion of the Jews reflects the zero-sum logic of the victimisation sweepstakes, in which every winner entails a loser, every plus a minus. Identity politics involves a similar logic. The theory of intersectionality recycles Marx’s idea that all forms of injustice are systemically interconnected. This means that no single category of oppression can be eliminated unless all are. And as with capitalists and the proletariat, opposed groups epitomise both injustice and its antithesis, sacrificial suffering in the cause of human liberation. A popular diagram explaining intersectionality contrasts categories of “Privilege” with those of “Oppression/Resistance” — a phrase that suggests noble opposition to tyrannical injustice. The diagram lists among the privileged those who are “white”, “European”, “credentialed”, “upper and upper-middle class”, “anglophones”, and “light, pale”. Most Jews in the West, where intersectionality originated, are all of these things, while almost all Palestinians are none of them.

This analytical framework binds the people of Israel with the Palestinians in a fateful struggle. Other Western groups (e.g. Episcopalians) are by the measures of intersectionality also highly privileged. But none threaten the Palestinians’ attempt to be seen by Westerners as the new proletariat — the Chosen People of cultural Marxism — as do the Jews, whose ancient claim to divine election has subjected them to endless persecution. This is why Hamas finds it necessary to deny both the Holocaust and the Jews’ historical connection to the land of Israel — a denial echoed in the charge of “settler-colonialism” that is falsely and uniquely level against the Israelis.

With calls to “globalise the intifada” echoing on the campuses of the West, it’s become clear that today’s cultural Marxists are playacting in the only drama they’ve been taught by their radicalised professors. Unburdened by knowledge of the past, unfamiliar with the sacrifices laid by so many on the altar of freedom and ordered liberty, unacquainted with any but anti-heroes, these anarchists, schooled in the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, have learned to regard civilisation as little more than a set of unreasonable constraints on their appetites. Their feverish imaginations transform perpetrators of unspeakable evil, washed not in the blood of the lamb but that of slaughtered Jews, into innocent martyrs in the cause of human liberation.

And it’s not just Hamas that benefits from this demonic alchemy. Marx’s knowledge that he belonged to the “small section of the ruling class [that] cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class”, and that he effectively called the proletariat into being as a revolutionary agent by endowing it with class consciousness, must have considerably assuaged his bourgeois guilt. Hamas’s supporters, including many students and faculty at expensive, elite universities, are buoyed by a similar knowledge as they attempt to launch the “intifada revolution”. (Perhaps some of them, having embraced antisemitic conspiracy theories, figure that if any cabal controls society, it should be them.) Glamping undergraduates who complain that “finger painting for Palestine is cancelled; these people are animals!” — a remark recently overheard at the University of Texas, as police broke up a demonstration — have taken the torch from jihadis and are trying to set the world aflame with it. In doing so, they confirm the truth of Marx’s observation that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”.

When Rwanda’s Tutsis were being slaughtered 30 years ago this month, it was anything but obvious that, just two years later, they’d be leading a semi-successful multinational campaign of conquest in neighbouring Zaire, then the second-largest country in Africa. The Syrian Civil War looked far different in July 2012, when a suicide bomber assassinated the country’s defence minister and Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law, than it did in September 2015, when Russian forces arrived to rescue Assad’s crumbling regime. And when the most recent Israeli campaign in Gaza concluded in May 2021, the country’s leading strategists, along with many in the US, believed Hamas wanted nothing more than a long stretch of quiet in order to consolidate its rule over the coastal strip. Operation Guardian of the Walls was the Israeli success that would finally allow the country to address bigger and more dangerous threats than those irritating Islamist militants in the south.

For both the Israelis and Palestinians, this proved to be a grave misunderstanding of reality. The Israelis believed they had reduced Hamas to strategic insignificance. Meanwhile, the people who turned out to be the most meaningful Palestinian decision-makers, namely Gaza-based Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his inner circle, were caught in the climax of what the political scientist Shany Mor has described as the “ecstasy-amnesia cycle”, convinced against all prior experience that the violent destruction of the Zionist entity was close at hand.

After six months of war, it makes less sense to assess who’s currently winning than it does to ask which current premises are in greatest danger of being exposed. Even identifying the next shattered certainty is difficult, as shown by the Iranian attack on Israel last weekend and Israel’s muted reply five days later.

Prior to last Sunday morning, any declared inter-state barrage of scores of armed drones and 130 ballistic missiles with a combined explosive payload of over 60 tons — the largest drone attack in history — enough to shut down much of the Middle East’s airspace and to mobilise a half-dozen militaries, would have been considered a reckless escalation, or even a history-making assault on global peace. Instead, by the logic of the current hostilities, the strike and its far limper Israeli sequel appear more like an American-managed climb-down, or a semiotic act of mutual face-saving after repeated Israeli successes against senior Iranian personnel in Syria. Or perhaps the episode was Tehran’s test of how much it can do without provoking a significant US-approved Israeli response, something more than a pro-forma, low-firepower strike on non-strategic targets. In any case, we can now retire the worn-out idea that an assault of scores of ballistic missiles can automatically be classed as a serious act of war.

Identifying the next assumption to crumble will require facing the often-ignored reality that much of what’s happened since October 7 is without any real precedent in this conflict. We are deep into the unknown, and were there long before this past week. The sides have notched accomplishments that are both novel and gruesome enough to demand real analytic humility, even and especially from those who, like myself, have covered the crisis on the ground.

Let’s begin with the Israelis, who pulled all but a single combat division out of the Gaza Strip just days after the IDF’s accidental bombing of a World Central Kitchen convoy earlier this month, a blunder that clinched the Biden administration’s growing opposition to the anti-Hamas campaign. On paper, and by the standards of nearly any other conflict, Israel’s war with Hamas looks like one of the most lopsided military engagements in modern history.

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Is this the end of Israel?

By Howard Jacobson

Israel has lost 665 security personnel since October 7, including a number of relatively senior combat officers. Still, most of Gaza City fell within two months of Israel’s invasion of Gaza; by contrast, the US-supported siege of Mosul, the Islamic State’s Iraqi redoubt, took well over a year. Within six months, Israel claimed to have killed 14,000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives in Gaza and Israel, along with 420 terrorists in the West Bank and 330 in Lebanon. These numbers don’t have to be anywhere near accurate to be of historic proportions: By comparison, Palestinian militants groups lost a little under 2,000 fighters in the 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021 Gaza wars combined, and around 1,200 fighters during the five-year period of the Second Intifada.

This time around, the Hamas dead include Saleh al-Arouri, the founding commander of the al-Qassam Brigades and deputy head of the Hamas political bureau; Marwan Issa, Hamas’s third-ranking Gaza-based military leader; Faik Mabhouh, the head of Hamas internal security in the Strip; and Murad abu Murad, the group’s aerial operations chief. Israel claims it has killed five Hamas brigade commanders, 20 battalion commanders, and roughly 100 company commanders. As of late January, between 20% and 40% of Hamas’s estimated 500 kilometres of tunnels had been destroyed or rendered inoperable. In the central Gaza stronghold of Khan Younis, the number might be as high as 85%.

It is conceivable that the sheer scope and seniority of the losses, along with the IDF’s ongoing destruction of tunnels, arms stocks and rocket facilities will have no long-term impact on Palestinian militancy, but it is just as possible that the armed resistance will spend years struggling to recover its prior capabilities. They will operate with far less freedom, and under a far more active Israeli threat, than before October 7, the former era of delusion in which most Israelis failed to view Hamas as an existential danger.

Hamas, meanwhile, have notched no battlefield victories against Israel in Gaza. Instead, they have lost nearly all of their ability to strike inside Israel and have also shown no real capacity to fight the IDF inside Gaza itself. Of the 260 Israeli soldiers killed in the Strip, 41 were killed in friendly fire incidents, while dozens of others fell outside of direct fighting, from tunnel bombs, booby-trapped structures, and other pre-set explosives. Actual frontal combat ended in overwhelming Israeli victories: IDF losses tallied in the low single-digits during a two-week operation at Shifa Hospital in March, an effort in which the Hamas commander in charge of recruitment and procurement, a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad political bureau, and 700 other alleged terrorists were captured or killed. Meanwhile the newly deployed Trophy system, an Israeli-developed countermeasure for anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, has vied with Hamas’s tunnels as the major battlefield innovation of the war.

Just as Israel wagered that the horrors of October 7 gave them the legitimacy to finally go after Hamas positions inside of hospitals, mosques, and other sensitive civilian infrastructure, it has leapt over former guard-rails in Lebanon and Syria with equally significant results: the IDF killed 16 Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel in a single March 26th attack in Syria. A week later, It eliminated Mohamed Reza Zehedi, the long-time Iranian commander in Syria and Lebanon, as well as two other IRGC generals in a strike on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Damascus. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has admitted more than 260 losses in its ranks since October 7 — which exceeds the acknowledged death toll during its 2006 war with Israel, an event that militia leader Hassan Nasrallah publicly regretted. This time around, the Hezbollah dead include several senior officers of its Radwan special operations unit, as well as the deputy commander of its rocket and missile forces. The attacks haven’t stopped Hezbollah from bombing northern Israel every day for months on end, but they haven’t triggered a regional war either, hinting that Tehran’s deterrence has frayed.

With Israel emboldened by its battlefield gains and newly aware of its true security needs, a Haaretz analysis in late March found that the IDF was attempting to establish buffer zones and long-term military corridors that amount to as much as 16% of Gaza’s territory. An extended Israeli presence anywhere inside the Strip would reverse decades of precedent: Since the early Nineties, Israel has unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza and southern Lebanon, ceded civil control over major cities in the West Bank to the previously Tunis-based Palestine Liberation Organisation, given up farmland on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, and conceded on many of Hezbollah’s demands in the demarcation of the Israel-Lebanon maritime border in 2022.

For over 30 years, Israeli policy has gone entirely in one direction, guided by a strategic concept in which the security benefits stemming from the actual control of territory isn’t worth the attendant costs in blood, treasure and international status. The creation of a buffer zone in Gaza, however small or narrow, would thus push against the current of the conflict. Much like the destruction of south Beirut, about which defence minister Yoav Gallant hypothesised in January, the Israeli reoccupation of some part of south Lebanon is far less unthinkable now than it was six months ago.

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What Thatcher can teach the pro-Israel Right

By Aris Roussinos

And yet, the near-term neutralisation of Hamas as a security threat, the massive numbers of enemy dead, and, crucially, Israel’s ability to sustain high-tempo military operations in several theaters without a crippling economic, political or social crisis, have not amounted to anything like victory. These developments do not mean Israeli policy since October 7 has been more effective than other alternatives. But their novelty will set the future parameters of the conflict, for better and worse.

Here, the Iranian attack presages other unknowable changes. For decades, a direct Islamic Republic strike on Israel was a regional doomsday scenario. But thanks to a multi-layered aerial defence system — whose performance so far may turn out to be another one of the war’s major developments — the help of allied militaries, and the dismal state of Iranian hardware, the Israelis, along with everyone else, have now discovered that even a barrage of hundreds of drones and missiles is perfectly manageable, or at least not an automatic spark for a wider war. At the same time, Iran now knows that if it lobs dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel, its adversary will still meekly obey American demands not to meaninfully respond. This knowledge could prove dangerous to the entire region: everything that’s happened since October 7 and after has stemmed from the mistaken belief that raising the threshold for acceptable chaos is a sign of strategic wisdom, or keeps anyone safe in the long run.

In the north of Israel, it’s clear the Iranians and their proxies have already dictated a major shift in what Israeli leaders — and their allies in Washington — have shown themselves willing to live with. Israel ordered the evacuation of all civilians within five kilometres of the Lebanese border shortly after October 7, out of fear Hezbollah would join the war at their full capability and duplicate Hamas’s slaughter. Prior Israeli planning had allowed for the short-term mass evacuation of civilians in order to free up infrastructure during a possible invasion of Lebanon. Ordering tens of thousands of people from their homes for months on end, creating an exclusion zone in which the state either can’t or won’t protect its citizens, was never a part of the country’s defence strategy. Wars have a momentum of their own, though: Hezbollah has fired over 3,100 rockets and missiles into northern Israel since October 7. Dozens of communities remain uninhabited.

This depopulation of the Israeli borderlands is the Iran-led resistance bloc’s major battlefield achievement over the past half year. Washington’s answer to the impasse has been special envoy Amos Hochstein’s shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Beirut, relaying American demands that the parties refrain from expanding the scope of the war — something they’ve largely obeyed even after the Iranian strike. Israel must now choose between a costly invasion that will likely trigger a long and unknowably destructive barrage from Hezbollah and create a fresh set of crises with Washington, or accept that the Iran-led bloc now holds the power of life and death within the Jewish state’s own territory.

The latter scenario has proven remarkably durable, and it is not the only area where the Islamic Republic has inflicted a new status quo. Tehran has given its Yemeni proxy the arms and training needed to shut down shipping in the Red Sea, while, in yet another first, Iranian drones launched by Iraqi militants and missiles fired from Yemen have both made it into Israeli airspace. The Iranian attack last weekend resulted in a nationwide lockdown in Israel, a total airspace closure, and the resource-intensive use of scores of interceptors and fighter jets, something Tehran had never inflicted on the Jewish state before. (The Israeli reprisal was significantly less disruptive to life in Iran, but it did show that Israel could hit specific targets, some of them adjacent to the regime’s nuclear sites, without crossing into Iranian airspace or encountering any serious operational difficulties.)

Though Hamas has lost a generation of fighters in Gaza, their sacrifice was hardly in vain: in staving off a total collapse of their statelet, the Hamas dead bought their comrades enough time to shift diplomatic conditions in the terrorists’ favour. Negotiations over the fate of the 230 people Palestinian militants kidnapped on October 7 always advantaged Hamas: it put the US in the position of forcing additional concessions out of their Israeli allies in order to keep the Palestinians talking at all.

When Hamas is simply too rejectionist for talks to take place, the Americans and the Israelis have instead negotiated with one another, with the US demanding a gradually more limited scope of Israeli operations against Hamas in exchange for continued support. In time, American conditions on an Israeli invasion of Rafah, the final Hamas stronghold in the Strip, have become so onerous and nonsensical that the US has emerged, intentionally or not, as Israel’s single greatest obstacle to the group’s destruction. Looming potential crises stemming from Iran’s new willingness to directly attack Israel have likely made a Rafah operation an even lower priority, and thus an even fainter prospect.

In late January, Axios reported that the US was “reviewing options” for the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, an entity that would almost certainly include Hamas members in its leadership, given the organisation’s popularity and the fecklessness of the Fatah apparatchiks who run the Palestinian Authority. Whether the US actually extends such recognition is less important than the introduction of a new source of leverage into the US-Israel relationship. In future moments of tension, an American administration merely has to raise the spectre of a Washington-approved State of Palestine to enforce more manageable Israeli behaviour.

Those cynics who claimed that an act of spectacular violence had vaulted Hamas to respectability and reframed the conflict around their hard-line grievances seem unfortunately vindicated. Hamas raped, murdered, and kidnapped its way to new heights, and it has now survived the largest military mobilisation in Israel’s history. They have proven that no amount of depravity can jeopardise their long-term existence, and with Iran’s help they have wheedled their way under the US protective umbrella despite having taken five American citizens hostage on October 7 — or maybe because of it. Their broader network of Iranian-supported allies have successfully battled the US military in the Red Sea, ejected tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes, and launched a major state-declared aerial assault without any immediate consequences. The Iranian navy’s capture of a Portuguese cargo ship last weekend is an act of brigandage now so routine, and so tolerated by all applicable international actors, that it barely registered.

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The realist case for Israel

By Philip Cunliffe

Taken in their entirety, the post-October 7 catalogue of novelties raises unsettling questions about the very nature of war. In recent years, the prior, supposedly discredited concept of war as a struggle over resources, territory and human lives appeared to be making a comeback. Azerbaijan settled the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by creating conditions under which all Armenians fled the besieged territory; Russia is gradually pushing its way forward in Ukraine due to old-fashioned advantages in manpower and ammunition.

Yet events since October 7 suggest that other conflicts are not won on the ground, but in the murkier realm of perception. A war in which one side has lost 670 fighters and the other has lost as many as 15,000, along with much of their pre-conflict safe haven and military infrastructure, should not invite abstract discussions about the nature and meaning of victory. That such debates are possible, and even necessary, marks another achievement for the resistance bloc.

In the absence of any real clarity, we are left facing an alarming new frontier, where both sides have discovered what they are capable of. Israel has shown that it can sustain a very long war, and pursue its enemies in places that were once considered off-limits. These enemies have shown that they can impose potentially ruinous strategic choices on the Jewish state even as their fighters and commanders suffer steep losses in the field, while also demonstrating that they enjoy near-limitless reserves of goodwill, moral legitimacy and diplomatic protection, including from Israel’s putative allies.

Perhaps the grim innovations of the past six months will threaten the full collapse of one or more of the conflict’s various parties, leading to a strategic stasis which will seed the conditions for a surprisingly durable period of calm. It is just as possible that everyone is gaining a new understanding of what they can achieve by force. Years of targeted strikes met with a predictable volume of rocket-fire, or the occasional drone and missile wave, are just as possible as a punctuated, world-changing regional war. Perhaps the most important reality of the post-October 7 conflict is that we may never know.

What are we seeing? Are the terrible scenes from Gaza the projections on a bloody screen of one brutal and clumsy man’s baffled obstinacy — the last days of a demented Roman Emperor — or do they show, as anti-Zionists would have it, indeed as anti-Zionists have had it ever since the Jewish longing to return to Zion gave itself a name and the anti-Zionists called it colonialism, that something is rotten in the soul of Israel?

It’s hard right now, if you are a Jew who has always believed the founding of Israel to have been necessary and in many ways miraculous, to hold your nerve. Jews are a contradictory people, at once certain of themselves and faint-hearted. “The Jewish ability to internalise any critical and condemnatory remark and castigate themselves”, said the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in an interview with Philip Roth, “is one of the marvels of human nature”. We can outface so much criticism and then no more. Will the gathering storm of rage be too much for us this time? Or will we feel obliged to go on salvaging the truth from the noise and cacophony of war, even as those who don’t want to hear us — the libellous, the malevolent, the misinformed and now the usually friendly who are running out of patience — grow in number and in volume?

Some truths aren’t hard to save from the moral fog that fell on southern Israel six months ago, a six months that have been like no other, collapsing a half year into a seeming sleepless day and night, not simply because shock unravels time, but because along with the horror of the massacre itself came the horror of its delighted reception. King Duncan’s horses were said to have eaten one another the night Macbeth had their master murdered. It was nature’s way of telling us that something unfathomably horrible had happened. The cries of “Kill Jews!” that were heard around the world in the aftermath of the murder of more than 1,000 Jews on October 7 exceeded in unfathomable horror the cannibalism of Duncan’s horses. Did we know that humans could openly rejoice in the rape and murder of people they did not know? Isn’t dancing in the blood of others itself a species of cannibalism?

To borrow from Macbeth again, tears were meant to drown the wind. But all we heard was cheering. The Hamas massacre inverted the norms of pity.

And here is another of the truths we save from that most terrible event. That we do our humanity a great wrong when we let theories of power rule our politics and politics rule our hearts. Nothing that Zionism had done or ever could do would justify this glorying in the torture of individual Israelis. That so many of those doing the glorying were, on the face of it, highly educated put paid to our sentimental faith in education as our final and most reliable bulwark against the hysteria of race-hatred. Voice for voice, the educated out-sang the ignorant in bigotry and bloodlust. As did the highly principled out-sing the more ideologically easy-going when it came to such causes as the inviolability of a woman’s body.

Hadn’t the teaching of the past half-century warned against even tentative intrusion into a woman’s space? Yet here, confronted by the grossest intrusion of them all, rape — brutal rape — the same preachers against the most micro of microaggressions refused to voice even the faintest disapprobation. Some, high up in the world’s great universities, wanted to “contextualise” what had happened. Others, wary of falling into that absurdity, asked for more proof, though had any woman other than an Israeli Jew so much as cried foul, they would have been believed because the prevailing ideology holds that to doubt a rape is to violate a woman a second time.

Let’s not beat about the bush — Israeli-Jew hate trumped all other academic considerations. When all was said and done, the great absolutes of the gender-playbook turned out to be contingent and crawled under the desks of the committed like dormice.

In the long sleepless day and night following the massacre, in which Jews of different nationalities and political persuasions, orthodox and unorthodox, tried to make sense of what had happened, the terrible realisation, that “Never Again” meant nothing, dawned. There would never be a “Never Again”. Those we imagined would be our allies — the informed, the progressive, the liberal — were not progressive when it came to us.

Ironically, it was Israel — our bolthole, the country that gave us the stability of self-worth, our old, all-embracing home — that now felt insecure. With uncanny prescience, Hamas understood that to make Jews feel unsafe in Israel was to weaken them in their own and in others’ eyes. More than ever now, it seemed to me, was it imperative to reaffirm the founding necessity of Zionism. The more empowered the lettered illiterate felt to trash Zionism, the more important was it to wrest the story back from them. A great lie had been allowed to prevail for too long. The lie that Israel had no legitimate rights or ties to the Holy Land. The lie that Zionists had stolen it from defenceless Palestinians. The lie that Zionists had turned up not as refugees from the pogroms of eastern Europe but as colonist-settlers hell-bent on getting every Palestinian out.

Is that to say I understand nothing of Palestinian forebodings in those early years as Jews continued to arrive? No. And while I think history bears out good and even utopian intentions on the part of the first Zionists, pioneers who wanted only peace and safety, without doubt there were also those who dealt less than even-handedly with their neighbours. Whether in sufficient quantity to justify Palestinian fears that a takeover was imminent, and that their Holy Places were soon to be over-run, history cannot decide. But, with whatever justification, Palestinians could not let the new arrivals live in peace. There were raids and counter-raids, running battles and massacres. The 1929 massacre by Palestinians of pre-Zionist, scholarly Jews, long resident in Hebron, was not a blueprint for the massacre of nearly 100 years later, but it was, by all official accounts, brutal.

I don’t want to be sentimental about Israel, but it’s enjoyed no peace from the beginning. It is a country that has lived under arms since before its declaration of independence. And on the very day independence was granted it was attacked once more. No, no, and no again. No to Jews. Not here. Not ever. No, no, no.

For Israel to have thrived in the face of a hostility with no end is remarkable. But there can be no denying that the fighting, the conscription of almost all its citizens, the having to live cheek by jowl with a people who cannot and will not accept its presence anywhere “between the river and the sea” has been a toughening, not to say desensitising, experience.

In defence of last year’s massacre, it was argued that it could not be understood independently of the circumstances that led to it. Hamas’s attack, its apologists insisted, was the child of the Israeli occupation. I have always resisted the word “occupation” because it suggests a pre-planned policy, rather than — as I see it — the consequence of all the wars between the two people, most of them instigated by the Palestinians, after which Israel found itself with territory it needed to demilitarise for its own safety. But alright — an occupation it became. After which, what were Palestinians expected to do?

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Jerusalem is Israel's future

By Ben Judah

The elusive two-state solution was presented to them several times. Not equitable enough, they said, even when it was the United Nations that had done the divvying up. “Don’t accept,” the cosmopolitan Palestinian writer Edward Said urged from the comfort of his home in North America. “Demand more.” Was he right? Wouldn’t an inequitable divvying up have given Palestinians better if not perfect lives? Well, it’s not for one person to tell another what’s fair. But right or wrong, there was to be no deal.

And so the bloody impasse — a tragedy, as Amos Oz saw it, of two rights. Later, a tragedy of two wrongs. For calling it a tragedy, Oz’s erstwhile Palestinian supporters deserted him. Tragedy meant there was no villain. And the Palestinians needed a villain.

Netanyahu fitted the bill. Netanyahu put his hand out and took. In retaliation for which — though nothing in the history of the two people would ever justify its extreme and twisted violence — the massacre of October 7. But if Israel must take some blame for the massacre, the Palestinians must, by the same token, take some blame for Netanyahu, the lumbering, unsubtle child of unrelenting war, a man hardened in suspicion and fear who does not know the difference between justice and revenge.

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By David Mamet

To hold out against the Palestinian narrative of dispossession, while allowing that not all of it is fantasy or self-pity, has necessitated, these last few years, more flexibility of mind than dedicated anti-Zionists are willing to try. That’s how we know they are wrong: they do not attempt to understand their enemy and do not cry for him. Did Gazans — educated in their schoolbooks to loathe Jews — dance in the streets on October 7? Whatever the truth, may Israelis never dance the dance of blood.

The heart breaks, seeing the destruction of Gaza. But seeing the destruction of Tel Aviv will hurt no less. Do I fear that? Yes. I sense a change of mood. The constant chanting on the streets of London and elsewhere has, to a degree, contributed to that change. One lie, endlessly retold, can weaken the cause of truth eventually.

But, all on his own, Netanyahu is enough to try the patience of the West whose leaders have little appetite for sticking to a mission. There is a flaw in our natures that leads to our growing bored with even the noblest causes, let alone those grown stale in their own complacency. Oh, what the hell. Enough of them. So those are swastikas. So what? It’s all just a matter of context.

I fear they — papers and commentators and politicians — are losing interest and sympathy at the same rate. They’ve heard it all before. We Jews need to find other ways to make our harrowing history compelling. We’ve tried losing. We’ve tried winning. I’m not sure what’s left.

As someone who researches and writes about terrorism for a living, I could say that I had a professional interest in watching this type of murder porn, but that would be only half-true; I wanted to watch. I had no good reason to, unless writing this article justifies watching a terrorist repeatedly slash a man’s throat with a knife, as was shown in a minute-and-a-half video released on Saturday by Isis’s Amaq News Agency and further amplified on X by a Right-wing British activist called Tommy Robinson. I’m not so sure about the soundness of that justification.

These videos are defiling. No one has the right to watch a video of someone getting murdered or their stricken body mutilated by a group of killers. To do so is to violate their privacy and dignity. And it’s nothing less than an abomination that someone like Cheong, who is handsomely paid via Twitter ad revenue, should receive a financial reward for circulating these videos to his nearly one million followers. Cheong later tweeted on Friday that he would not be posting any more videos or images of the Crocus City Hall attack, “as it does not serve anyone’s interest to see the lifeless, and bloody bodies of so many innocent people”. However, this thought didn’t seem to have crossed his mind a few hours earlier that very evening.

When the American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded on camera in 2002, the Islamist militants behind it set a grim precedent, launching an era of the terrorist snuff film that continues unabated to this day. Terrorism, as Brian Jenkins pointed out some 50 years ago, is a form of theatre, “aimed at the people watching”. But Pearl’s beheading signalled something new in the history of political violence: the use of the camera as a weapon of terror and radicalisation.

Prior to this, terrorists parasitically used the international media to disseminate the news of their atrocities, just as that media was in turn parasitic on them for news stories. But now with access to cheaper and better cameras, they could become auteurs of terror, with total creative control over their own spectacles of violence. This development reached its apogee with the rise of Isis in 2014 when, within the space of four chaotic years of expansion and contraction, the group presided over the murder of over 2,400 people on camera. Many of these murders were carefully staged, but others were recorded on GoPro cameras from the POV of the killer-assassins.

Just as Isis was about to lose its last sliver of territory in Syria in March 2019, Brenton Tarrant launched a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 Muslims. He had livestreamed part of the attack on Facebook. Tarrant, a far-Right terrorist, had assiduously followed the Isis playbook, using maximum savagery to generate maximum exposure. But not even Isis had livestreamed their atrocities, a further innovation that has since been copied: in May 2022, another far-Right terrorist called Payton Gendron murdered 10 African-Americans at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, broadcasting his shooting spree on Twitch, an online gaming platform.

At the same time, the victims of terrorism have become auteurs of their own terror: thanks to the ubiquity of the smartphone, we can now see terrorism from the point of view of the victims and in real time. This, too, is a new and significant development in the history of terrorist communication and, as with any new technological innovation, the ethics around watching and disseminating these videos have yet to be fully worked out.

Many of the videos of last week’s attack in Moscow were recorded by those who were on the receiving end, desperately fleeing or hiding from the gunmen. These videos are not as shocking as the footage produced by the killers, but they are nonetheless horribly visceral, taking the viewer into the foreground of the horror as it’s unfolding. Should you watch?

There are two contrasting ways of thinking about this. One is that, by recording their “lived” death or near-death experiences, the victims of terrorism want us to watch and to witness their private trauma and suffering as a form of recognising some public truth: This happened to us. The implicit assumption is that the viewer should witness both the horror of their experience and the inhumanity of those who are inflicting it on them: that we should not feel complacent or indifferent to their suffering. As Susan Sontag put it in Regarding the Pain of Others: “Let the atrocious images haunt us”; let us not shy away from “what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously”.

Perhaps this is why so many of the partygoers who were attacked by Hamas at the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7 filmed it on their smartphones: they wanted to document and certify the unthinkable horror that was happening to them, just as they had filmed every other significant event in their all-too-short lives. The Israeli government, for its part, publicly released attack footage from both Hamas fighters, who filmed some of their atrocities on GoPro cameras, and terrified Israeli victims as they hid and sought refuge moments before their death. In one tweet, the Israeli government posted footage of Hamas fighters shooting a dog, explaining: “We wish we didn’t have to share these videos, but we can’t stop. We need you all to know.”

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The opposing viewpoint is that watching spectacles of terror is fraught with moral risk and should be avoided. This is for two reasons: first, watching directly colludes with the terrorists who want people to watch their acts of terror, regardless of whose perspective the horrifying footage is recorded from. Second, there is the possibility that, in repeatedly watching images of terror, we become desensitised to them, leading to passivity or even a perverse kind of voyeurism that, like pornography, creates an insatiable desire for ever more extreme content. This was Sontag’s original concern in On Photography, published in 1977, before changing her mind in Regarding the Pain of Others, which appeared in 2003. Atrocity images, she then worried, can “transfix” and “anesthetise” after repeated exposure.

Given the rise of the smartphone and a social media driven by outrage and excess, Sontag’s later position looks less and less convincing by the day. We should, of course, know about the suffering of others, but the sheer volume of haunting images that now assail us, bidden or otherwise, fundamentally changes the calculus. We have surely now gone beyond a saturation point, and although it’s hard to completely avoid gratuitous online atrocity footage, one quick and easy way of seeing markedly less of it is to unfollow or block those shameless content-curators who make a career out of exploiting our most base impulses.

Yet this is easier said than done. “There is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” former President Barack Obama said in April 2002. And I am just as susceptible to that demand as everyone else hooked on social media. Perhaps this explains why I so loathe the curators of online atrocity porn: they show you disgusting things and arouse your curiosity, and then you feel no small measure of self-disgust for watching. This is, of course, less than ideal — but it’s at least better than feeling nothing at all.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

But Krauthammer went further: he reckoned that this double standard makes us feel good. A society must feel that it is policing its norms by combatting deviancy. And once we have given up fighting it in one section of society, we move to concentrate on another.

This sociological pathology is now pervasive, contributing to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that forms part of modern identity politics. And, as foreign policy becomes increasingly entangled with the culture war, this pathology has now extended to a new terrain. The result is that the application of progressive moral double-standards is now seen at the level of geopolitics, most specifically over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. We have produced a discourse in which deviancy is defined up for Jews and Israel, and down for Arabs and Muslims.

Immediately, for instance, it was forgotten that the greatest display of deviancy in this conflict came from Hamas. More than anything, October 7 illustrated in a single day how swift the descent from civilisation to barbarism can be. On that day, the heinous acts themselves were manifested in the massacre of innocent, unarmed and totally unprepared civilians. These were young people at a music festival, many of them peaceniks. Family members were shot, stabbed and mutilated in front of one another. Women were raped, homes were burned, and the perpetrators revelled in their acts. Their GoPro cameras were set to record, for they knew large audiences at home awaited that footage.

Celebrations ensued, not only by Palestinians but also by many Arabs, Muslims, and fellow travellers on Western university campuses. Top university administrators displayed a shocking level of moral confusion in response. The three Women of the Ivies could not even take courage before Congress simply to say: “This is not who we are. We condemn this.”

The ensuing demonisation of Israel for waging what is historically a standard siege, and the relentless calls for a ceasefire, have followed. And these calls have been so effective that now Israel’s great allies in the UK and the US are twisting Israel’s arm to concede. But even without the appeasement of a complete ceasefire, we know full well that it is only a matter of time before Hamas and her helpers reorganise and repeat the atrocities of October 7. We know it because this has been Hamas’s pattern. Attack, provoke a retaliation, complain of disproportionality. Then acquire the world’s sympathy, and negotiate ceasefire, aid, and the time to plan the next attack.

This is only possible due to several common false assumptions about the conduct of this conflict, all of which define deviancy up for Israel and down for Hamas. Chief among these is that Islamic terror is only a monstrous creation of the Israeli Frankenstein. We are frequently told that if Israel continues to pursue her mission to destroy Hamas, then Israel will create the next generation of Islamists and terrorists, not just in the Middle East but across the globe. As a result, Israel should agree to a ceasefire and hold to it even if, as would certainly be the case, the other side does not. But this assumption is plainly false. The overwhelming evidence of the last 75 years is that Islamist extremism is unaffected by what Israel does or fails to do. The extremists are created in the classrooms, sitting rooms, and neighbourhoods of Muslim and Arabs countries, in madrasas and mosques — many of which are half a world away from Israel.

Nevertheless, we are still enjoined to blame Israel for Islamism, with the crimes of the former often personified by its prime minister. A standard refrain has developed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions and failures were the cause of Hamas’s savage attacks. But whatever the truth behind the portrait of Netanyahu as the belligerent, uncompromising, democracy-undermining monster, the trope shifts attention away from the core issue, which is the belligerent uncompromising Palestinian intransigence backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since 1947, the Arabs have remained fixed in their determination to eliminate the state of Israel, in part by preventing peace from ever coming about. Were the failed peace attempts in 1973, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2008 all the fault of Netanyahu? Was no Arab agency involved? Take the Oslo Accords and their follow-on at Camp David in 2000. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin offered “a separate Palestinian entity short of a state”, and an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, PLO leader Yasser Arafat left the negotiating table.

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Islamism is exploiting Britain's political vacuum

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In a similar vein, we are often told that the classic human dynamic of war and peace does not apply to this conflict. The standard dynamic is that the winner takes all so that a lasting peace can occur. But this logic has never been applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Up until 1967, a conflict was waged called the Arab-Israeli war. And Israel won that war, defeating the Arab countries in 1967, and then again six years later. Only at that point was its name changed to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the territories Israel had acquired in defending itself against aggression were declared to be “occupied” and therefore illegitimate. In war, if there is no winner, and no truce holds, then peace can never prevail.

Amid this moral confusion, though, there are rays of hope. Within a few hours of the October 7 massacre, the Moroccan regime condemned the violence against civilians. The UAE called the event “barbaric and heinous” and demanded that Hamas immediately release the hostages. This is not nothing and it shows that one source of the rot — Gulf funds for indoctrination of Palestinian children — may one day dry up. The United States should help this along by applying the same standards of conduct to Muslims and Jews, the same standards of statecraft to Arab nations, Iran, and Israel. Regimes like the UAE’s need to be helped and rewarded. Conversely, when Arab states promote the death cult of political Islam, they must be condemned and shunned.

Everything eventually ends, but not all things must end in failure. In the West we have a choice to uphold our moral vantage point, or let it crumble away. But in doing so we should recognise that every lowering of standards to appease extremist Arabs and Muslims is racism dressed up as compassion and disdain masquerading as kindness. It is moral confusion and it is dangerous — suicidally so.

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Adapted from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s 2024 Russell Kirk Lecture delivered at the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., and co-sponsored by Alliance Defending Freedom, on March 12, 2024.