Yet if the demands for accountability are only growing shriller, Kneecap’s story is nothing new. Once an artist moves from cult status into the mainstream, all while continuing to challenge accepted narratives, a reaction is sure to follow. Amid the apologies and the caveats, then, Kneecap now faces the same question as any radical artist on the precipice of stardom. Do you soften your edges for access, or hold your ground, and risk the establishment’s wrath?

In many ways, Kneecap’s difficulties feel specific to our cultural moment. The band has been accused of glorifying violence, of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. These are charges they’ve denied. Either way, it comes as no surprise to me that this pro-Palestine, anti-government trio are in a bind. As a professional working in various capacities as a writer and performer, I can tell you right now that using your platform to either criticize Israel, or express solidarity with innocent Palestinians, comes with risks.

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Kneecap are the future of Northern Ireland

By Darran Anderson

I’ve been reported to the police for taking part in fundraisers for medics in the Gaza Strip. I’ve been accosted by a chief executive, and delegates at a conference, for using a keynote speech to urge a politically neutral organization to join calls for a ceasefire. Scheduled appearances were mysteriously canceled, and organizers have had to bulk up security in case protesters turn up.

The tensions Kneecap speak to arise not just from the strength of feeling around the war between Israel and Hamas, but the strong sense many of us have that our political class collaborates with major media players to stifle debate. It creates a culture whereby any criticism to the prevailing narrative — that anything Israel does is morally justified — becomes futile and where raising your voice against the systematic brutalization of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip starts to feel dangerous.

In this context, then, Kneecap become a case study in how thought and speech are regimented — and, in the generalities anyway, it’s nothing new. Transgressive artists have long been made examples of and punished for their politics. Sinead O’Connor’s career was derailed after she tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, in protest of the Catholic Church’s abuse cover-ups. She was right, but she was ruined. The Dixie Chicks were boycotted, threatened and driven off country radio after criticizing the Iraq War. NWA had the FBI on their backs.

And so the list goes on. In every case, craven politicians join a growing media chorus of condemnation, rendering the acts in question too toxic to book. It’s the same story with Kneecap, with the very journalists who defend edgy comedians like Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais — and their right to say incredibly offensive things we all know are part of an act — now expecting us to believe Kneecap are some kind of quasi-paramilitary group.

Beyond the media outrage, meanwhile, Kneecap’s predicament ironically speaks to the band’s success and their clear desire to cross into the mainstream. That’s why we’ve seen statements issued and apologies offered — public relations maneuvers aimed at minimizing the commercial impact of negative coverage. Though the group certainly wish to retain their radical credentials, it’s also clear they’ve been pushed into a far more defensive position than they’re comfortable with, or indeed than their fans are used to.

For example, while the band has emphasized that it stands in solidarity with Palestinian civilians, and oppose Israel’s bombardment and occupation, they do not support militant Islamist organizations. Yet, such distinctions rarely matter once the wheels of the media outrage machine begin turning. The point is not to understand or debate Kneecap’s actual views, but to frame them as toxic enough that venues, festivals and collaborators all feel pressured to abandon them.

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Labour's ruthless raid on the sick

By Darren McGarvey

And though I loathe the confected outrage of many a blowhard on this issue, the wicked dilemma Kneecap now faces is arguably one of their own making. They’ve sold themselves as countercultural and gained a loyal global following as a result. This boxes them into a specific set of responses — none of them free of risk. By being seen to back down, even slightly, in the face of a concerted political and media effort to paint them as terrorist sympathizers, they risk alienating their core support, thus weakening the very leverage they have in the music industry. Alternatively, doubling down will effectively mean being blacklisted from major festivals and media outlets for the foreseeable future, even if they do at least retain their integrity and links to the fanbase.

Despite the calm collectedness the band and their manager are keen to paint, then, there’ll now be panic behind the scenes. And no wonder: life-changing opportunities are now on the line. Of course, for the group’s hardcore fanbase, the answer is simple: fight the power. But it’s never quite as simple as “stand your ground” versus “sell out”.

As creatives, we hope to have our cakes and eat them too. We want the visibility, the critical acclaim, and the big performance fees. But we also want to be seen as unwavering in our principles, and unscrupulous in pursuit of artistic integrity. Once a radical act begins to gain traction beyond pub open-mics — when a wider audience starts paying attention — everything changes. The decisions get heavier. The risks get real. And that visibility, often romanticized from the outside, can be extremely stressful. A lot of radical artists don’t plan for this moment. It comes as a shock. They’re propelled into a space they never expected to inhabit, and they arrive carrying principles that don’t always map neatly onto the pressures and expectations that follow.

Suddenly, the stakes aren’t just ideological. As Kneecap is doubtless now discovering, livelihoods are involved: your own, your partner’s, your kids’. You’ve got a label to deal with. You’ve got tour managers, stage crew, new fans, and media people around you, many of whom have very different values and priorities. The freedom to just steamroll your way through, to say “to hell with it all”— that becomes much harder to exercise when other people depend on your success to pay their bills. And despite their rebellious aesthetics, bands like Kneecap are professionals with aspirations of their own, not least a desire to be financially secure.

And, especially for a group from West Belfast, when someone from your community finally breaks through, there’s often a silent burden to carry: represent us, but don’t get it wrong or you’ll have hell to pay. Kneecap didn’t ask to be role models or political lightning rods. They came up from a place where art, humor, trauma, and resistance blur together. West Belfast isn’t a backdrop: it’s the very soil they grew out of. Their use of the Irish language isn’t decorative, it’s an act of cultural reclamation, an assertion of identity in a postcolonial context that still cuts deep. Their solidarity with Palestine comes from that same instinct: to back those being brutalized by a far more powerful force.

Ultimately, then, Kneecap will have to decide what matters more: global recognition in a fickle, spineless industry, or holding true to their principles. If you want to be mainstream, you have to make sacrifices, and few acts can have it both ways. Even Eminem went pop eventually. Unrelenting scrutiny comes with any public platform. Kneecap exercises their freedom of speech to say what they believe, but there are always consequences to raising your head above the parapet. Other people will exercise theirs to condemn, marginalize and punish. That’s the way free speech works.

Artists won’t always get it right, and when they do fuck up, it’s appropriate that they should acknowledge their mistakes. Integrity comes not just from staying true to our beliefs, but also from admitting when we’ve crossed a line. We’ve all said and done stupid and offensive things. In the end, though, that’s not the issue. The issue is that, as a result of expressing views about Israel regarded as controversial — but which are in fact entirely mainstream — Kneecap now has every editor in the country instructing hacks to trawl through every lyric, every interview and every act of public flatulence, looking for proof these guys are something they aren’t.

Who knows what Kneecap will do next. I don’t envy their plight. But I do know this: the system rewards outrage only when it can be commodified. It tolerates rebellion as long as it’s aesthetic. The moment your politics cut too close to the bone, you’ll find out just how tolerant the liberal cultural sphere really is, and who your friends really are.

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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Should America strike back at Iran?

By Reuel MarcGerecht

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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By Giles Fraser

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.

On October 7, 2023, savages murdered, raped, and kidnapped 1,200 Israeli citizens. American Jews reacted by voting for the Democrats.

This November, blacks, Hispanics, gay and straight Americans decided they’d had enough of Government corruption, incompetence, malversation, contempt, and crime and voted for a return to common sense and the protections of the Constitution. They forsook identity politics, save to identify themselves as Americans. Absent from the roll call of groups rebranding themselves as citizens were the Jews.

The Obama-Biden-Harris regime coddled Iran, the sponsor of World Terrorism; they admonished Netanyahu to exorcise “restraint”, not to go into Gaza, nor to bomb Iran. Not only did Harris “cut” him in his visit to Congress, she arguably cost herself the election, sucking up to supposed Muslim voters by bypassing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as a running mate. She chose instead a grotesque nonentity, who’d abandoned Minneapolis to rioters.

Christian and Muslim citizens, across the country, rejected the Democrats and voted as Americans, for American power, and for peace.

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Only the Republicans can stop Jew hatred

By David Mamet

They saved the Jewish State.

A Democrat victory would have signalled Israeli isolation. Iran would have escalated, compelled Israel to strike, and brought about a World War. They had made it plain that the United States looked with disfavour on the right of the Jewish State to survive.

To my fellow American Jews: what in the world do you think you were looking at during the last four years? Jewish students were harassed and terrified on campuses receiving Government funds, antisemitic brutality was not given the status of “Hate Crimes”, our President and Vice President shunned their constitutionally mandated duties to greet the Prime Minister of not only a foreign power, but of our supposed ally. Congressionally voted funds for Israel defence were withheld by executive fiat. Our government issued continual calls for Israeli “restraint”, while withholding similar requests from Iran and her proxies.

And my fellow Jews voted for these people.

It is a mistake to suggest that he voted against his own best interests. But what is the American Jew’s benefit in voting Democratic?

The Democrats were the party of immigrants: my grandparents and parents, the first American Generation. Republicans, in my youth, were (fairly reliably) identified as Country Club Wasps — the party of Big Business, while the Dems were for the worker, the unions, and so on. Those were the party’s log-lines.

The Democrats were also the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and later “Affirmative Action”, and its bastard child, DEI.

But the new arrivals voted Democrat and have continued doing so until today. Are they just “passing”?

Other minority groups have not only abandoned the Big Stick of the Left, but identity politics toute entière. They voted as citizens. They stood up, not to promote “their party”, but to protect their home. Our country.

One cannot have a country without borders. One can have one where the government mandates sexual indoctrination of children, blacklisting, persecution of political opponents — but that country will not be that United States of which we are citizens.

It is said that the most convinced liberal will change his politics when the rock comes through the window. But the rock did so a year ago, and American Jews criticised the victims for preferring existence to annihilation.

For 2,000 years, we Jews didn’t have a country. We survived by accepting the various strictures of those governments which grudgingly allowed us (intermittently) to live; and when the strictures abated (to whatever extent) we called it a blessing. And voted, for example, for Franklin Roosevelt “A friend of the Working Man”, whose administration sent thousands of potential immigrant Jews back to their deaths in the ovens.

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A year of hatred

By Howard Jacobson

We grew up with the slander of “Jewish Guilt” — that the Jews were, somehow, children of Original Sin, which could only be expunged by good works, and a dedication to whatever identified itself as social justice.

But Jewish anxiety is not caused by insufficient compassion, it is caused by insufficient Judaism. We cannot escape “the hot thumbprint of God” on our hearts. If we could, we would have assimilated millennia ago.

“I am Jewish but not That Jewish,” or “but I’m not Observant,” or, “but I despise this man Netanyahu,” and so on, are the utterances of fugitives, willing to vote for their own annihilation, rather than face their Jewishness.

But in what does this Jewishness consist? Each person must, of course, answer it for him or herself. The Torah is a traditional guide; its advice, strictures and contradictions and their consideration, are certainly more productive and more rational than the absurd blather of legacy media.

The world is corrupt, and has always been so, as human nature is corrupt. The Bible teaches that is because we’ve fallen away from God; the media, because of Donald Trump and Republican deplorables.

And, yet, the Democratic Party and their chaos has been defeated by our fellow citizens.

The Gay Rights Movement’s slogan, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” is wisdom. Antisemitism is not the Jews’ problem, but that of our opponents.

To my fellows, you can be proud you are an American. Do so, and you will, subsequently, be proud you’re a Jew.

Israeli leaders have long claimed that they cannot negotiate with Hamas, which regards the Jewish state as the culmination of a colonial-settler project produced by Zionism. Yet this insurmountable barrier to a political settlement does not exist in the West Bank — or, more precisely, has not since the Palestinian Liberation Organisation forsook terrorism in 1988, recognised Israel’s right to live in peace, and agreed to negotiate with Israel to create a Palestinian state encompassing the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO’s historic decision paved the way for its leadership’s return, first to Gaza and later to the West Bank, the formation of a governing body, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the quest for a political settlement that would yield a Palestinian state.

Negotiations that started in 1991 led to two agreements, Oslo I (1993) and Oslo II (1995), with the United States acting as a mediator. The latter accord provided for a tripartite division of the West Bank that gave the PA (qualified) governing rights in Areas A and B and Israel exclusive control over Area C, which made up 61% of the territory. Even now, the PA exercises unshared civil and military authority solely in Area A (18 % of the West Bank). Plus, in both of its zones, the PA’s rights are defined narrowly: Israel controls the West Bank’s airspace, border crossings, telecommunications, water resources and other natural resources.

Moreover, in Areas A and B, the Palestinian population is scattered across “165 disconnected islands”, in contrast to Area C, a sprawling continuous expanse that contains all the Jewish settlements, as well as 200,000 or more Palestinians. Hagai El-Ad, an Israeli and former executive director of the human rights organisation B’Tselem, aptly likens the West Bank’s political geography to Swiss cheese. Israel has never been willing to make the hard choices required to change this patchwork into a territorially continuous sovereign Palestinian state — not even in 2000 at Camp David, despite the mythology that Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat, the PA’s leader at the time, a state covering almost all of the West Bank, only to be spurned. In reality, Israel did not present documents or maps, let alone agree to a fully sovereign Palestinian state with a unified territory.

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There is no solution to the Gaza War

By Rajan Menon

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan, proposed in September 2008 following a series of meetings with PA president Mahmoud Abbas, went much further; but by then, Olmert was on his last legs politically, and Abbas refused to accept in haste a plan whose future was uncertain. Since then, the two-state concept has withered on the vine, and that has revived the idea of a single state that would provide equal rights to Jews and Palestinians alike.

The resulting frustration revived the idea of a single state that would guarantee equal rights to Jews and Palestinians alike, proposed in Zionism’s early decades by Jewish intellectuals, including Gershom Scholem, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber. Its more recent Israeli proponents have included Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem’s former deputy mayor, and Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. Among Palestinians, this formula has been advocated by the late Columbia University literary scholar Edward Said, Sari Nusseibeh, a philosophy professor and former president of Al-Quds University (1995-2014) in Jerusalem, and Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi. Their conceptions of a single and inclusive state’s architecture, while not necessarily identical, rested on the premise that the proliferation of Jewish settlements had made the creation of two separate national states infeasible.

By definition, this solution contradicted the animating principle of the Zionist movement articulated by Theodor Herzl, and later picked up by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben Gurion: the essentiality of a nation in which Jews have special rights. The vision of one state in which Jews and Palestinians have equal rights appeals, particularly to people on the political Left but is fated to remain on the drawing board. It will never be accepted by the religious parties of the far-Right, represented in the current Israeli coalition government by Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the Otzma Yehudit party and Minister of National Security since 2022, and Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionist Party and Finance Minister, also since 2022; or the secular Right-wing parties, such as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud or Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu.

Nor does the one-state model have much public support. A December 2022 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and Tel Aviv University’s International Program for Conflict Resolution and Mediation found that only 20% of the wider Israeli population approved of a single democratic state. It didn’t fare much better among Palestinians: 23% favoured it. The Rightward trajectory of Israel’s politics during the past several years and the deep mistrust produced by Hamas’s October 7 attacks will, if anything, reduce its appeal in both communities.

If the one-state solution stands no chance, might it be possible to resuscitate the two-state version? No — and for several reasons.

Most obviously, there’s the formidable task of transforming the West Bank’s current geographical and political configuration into a Palestinian state worth the name. The territory is speckled with 146 settlements containing 700,000 people (229,000 of whom live in East Jerusalem) as well as 191 “outposts” populated by another 20,000. Added to this, there is the security barrier built east of the Green Line, the Israelis-only roads, the expanded borders of East Jerusalem, and the IDF’s “firing zones” that encompass more than half of the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea littoral. None of these obstacles will be easily swept away, especially since the far-Right religious parties in Israel’s current ruling coalition have made settlement expansion a priority. So far this year, 5,852 acres in the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, have been declared state land, far more than in any previous year, making them sites for future settlements and other construction projects. And in 2023 alone, the number of settlers increased by 15% during the last five years and by almost 3% last year alone.

Partly as a result, the already deep distrust between Israelis and Palestinians has become deeper because of both the Gaza war and events in the West Bank: the expulsions, destruction and seizures of homes and farmland, persistent torture of Palestinian prisoners (many held without being charged or tried) and, as the Army looks on, attacks by armed settlers against Palestinians. During the past decade, the U.N. recorded 3,372 acts of violence by West Bank settlers; and frequency has increased: between October 7 and early May there were nearly 800 incidents.

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A recent example was the rampage by settlers through the town of Huwara to avenge the shooting of two Jewish brothers by a Palestinian. The mob set homes, businesses and vehicles alight, leaving one person dead and hundreds more injured. Israeli security forces accompanied the attackers but did nothing to stop the violence, which Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, head of the IDF’s Central Command (which covers the West Bank), condemned as a “pogrom” that desecrated Judaism’s values. By contrast, Finance Minister Smotrich called for Huwara to be “wiped out.” But this lawlessness cannot be blamed solely on individuals such as Ben Gvir; it reflects something deeper — the changing make-up of the Israeli military. According to Yehuda Shaul, who served in the IDF and co-founded the research organization Ofek (The Israel Center for Public Affairs) as well as Breaking the Silence, an association of IDF veterans that exposes the mistreatment of Palestinians, settler violence has increased in recent years because the proportion of nationalist-religious individuals in the infantry’s “cadet officer corps” tied to the settlements jumped from less than 3% in 1995 to 40% by 2015 — a far greater than their share of Israel’s total population.

An optimist might retort that the two-state solution can nevertheless be salvaged and buttress the claim with an array of facts. The largest settlements, such as Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim, Modi’in Illit and Beitar Illit are near the Green Line and could be folded into pre-1967 Israel, with the Palestinian state compensated with land swaps involving Israeli territory. An optimist could also add that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismantled the settlements in Gaza in 2005, so a future Israeli leader could do the same, even in the West Bank’s interior and far reaches.

But the fact remains that the settlement enterprise has continued since 1967 regardless of the political bent of Israeli governments and the settler population nearly doubled even between 1994 and 2000, the hope-laden years of the peace process. Plus, the current Right-wing government is determined to expand construction and settlements on the West Bank, which, as Smotrich has stated openly, it sees as essential to block a Palestinian state, the very idea of which was rejected in a declaration adopted by the Knesset in July. Unless Israel’s politics undergo a dramatic transformation, what Sharon did in Gaza in 2005 cannot be replicated in the West Bank. Especially since, compared to the settlements in Gaza, those in the West Bank are not only far more numerous and populous — they have infinitely more historical and religious significance. What is Gaza’s equivalent of the Tomb of the Patriarchs or Rachel’s Tomb?

Israel cannot of course accept Hamas’s objective in Palestine: that would amount to self-liquidation. But by failing to do what’s needed for a meaningful two-state solution, it has made the PA appear feckless in the eyes of Palestinians. Hamas’s electoral victory in the 2006 legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza owed in no small measure to the fact that the Palestinian Liberation Organization, having rejected terrorism in 1988 and committed itself to negotiations with Israel, failed to deliver. In short, Israel’s policy of “mowing the lawn” — a euphemism for the intermittent quelling of Palestinian revolts — has helped Hamas.

Today, most Palestinians see the PA as a corrupt entity and the local gendarme Israel needs to perpetuate the occupation. The PA hasn’t held an election since 2006 and would be roundly rejected if it did. In a poll conducted soon after the Gaza War began, 90% of West Bank Palestinians said that PA president Mahmoud Abbas should resign. Conversely, a US intelligence assessment concluded that the war had substantially increased the popularity of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the West Bank. Palestinian politics, in other words, are not moving in a direction conducive to a two-state solution.

On the other side of the ledger, the occupation has led to Israel’s increasing global isolation. The most recent example is the International Court of Justice’s July ruling that the occupation violates international law, including parts of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations. Elsewhere, a May General Assembly resolution on admitting Palestine as a full member of the UN was approved by 143 countries, with 25 abstaining, and nine opposing the resolution. To attain that status, Palestine needs the Security Council’s approval, with a minimum of nine positive votes and no vetoes by permanent members. Still, it’s notable that an April Security Council resolution proposing full membership for Palestine received 12 positive votes; two countries (the UK and Switzerland) abstained and the US cast its veto.

Since then, Israel has seemed determined to turn itself into an international pariah. It has continued to expand its settlements; there are reports of the torture and sexual humiliation of Palestinian prisoners; its bombing campaign in Gaza, enabled by American backing, continues to claim the lives of children and civilians.

Sadly, absent a fundamental change in Israeli politics and an end to unqualified US support, political and material, what lies ahead is the continuation of the deadly and dead-end “mowing the lawn” reflex. The consequences, the past tells us, are all too predictable. To invert the quip of the muckraking American journalist Lincoln Steffens on a trip to the Soviet Union, we have seen the future, and it does not work — for the Palestinians and Israelis alike.

The delusional part stemmed from the mistaken belief that the US could persuade the Tehran regime to abandon its “death to America” hostility. Perhaps because he relied on his law-school buddy Robert Malley (whose extreme hostility to Israel did not make him an Iran expert), Obama failed to see that, by the time he set out to win it over, the regime’s blend of oppression and institutional corruption had lost it the support of most Iranians. Unmoored from popular opinion, it had instead become entirely dependent on the professional extremists of the Revolutionary Guards, the much larger Basij militia, and the most politicised clerics.

This is why all attempts at mutual reconciliation under Obama were doomed to fail, in spite of two successive nuclear accords and the wholesale lifting of sanctions. Even if Iran’s leaders had wanted to reciprocate they could not abandon their performative hostility to the US, because Iranians at large are so hostile to the theocratic regime that many even tell pollsters that they have renounced Shi’a Islam altogether: visitors report empty mosques in all but the poorest neighbourhoods.

Partly because Obama compelled Biden to take on Malley as his own Iran coordinator (until he lost his security clearance), the Biden Administration moved very fast to repudiate Trump’s hostility to the Ayatollah’s regime, going overboard in its own attempt at reconciliation. One example is sufficient: the Houthi militia that is Iran’s proxy in Yemen, which the US Navy is now battling in the Red Sea, was unilaterally removed from the terrorist list in exchange for nothing at all, merely to signal to Tehran that the Obama courtship of the regime was being renewed after the Trump interval.

The reasonable, even wise, part of Obama’s policy was to disabuse Washington of the illusion that Iran could be knocked off the board as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been, with a quick march to Tehran by a couple of US divisions. Of course it is a much bigger country (almost four times as large, with twice the population), but the real difference lies in the fact that Iran’s statecraft is derived from the country’s pre-Islamic and imperial past, not from its extremist religion. Those principles are so deeply ingrained in the country’s political culture that even the ruling religious fanatics are high-functioning imperial operatives when it comes to diplomacy and war.

They know how to manipulate foreign perceptions of Iran to suit their aims; for example, they successfully simulated a very warm conviviality with the US negotiators they privately resented, while in confrontations they know how to go right to the edge, without falling into the abyss. Consider how Iran Air still operates out of London several times a week, despite the route being used by Tehran’s goons to fly in, attack dissidents, and return home with a quick taxi-ride to Heathrow. Knowing that the UK Foreign Office is desperate to keep its embassy and its diplomats in Tehran (to have something the US lacks), the regime perpetrates all manner of abuses secure in the knowledge there will be no retaliation.

Most significantly, Iran’s leaders were given the time and the oil revenues to recruit the Shi’a militias from Lebanon to Yemen now holding the Middle East to ransom. Ever since the fall of the Shah in 1979 — for which Khomeini successfully obtained support in the West by pretending that he was a persecuted humanist— Iran’s campaign to dominate the region has been vigorously pursued. To succeed, the regime had to somehow overcome the deepest schism in the Islamic world by persuading Sunni Arabs that the Sunni-Shia divide was less important than their collective hatred for the Jews, and that the ancestral hostility between Arabs and Persians was less important than their shared hostility to Israel. In the meantime, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards revealed true imperial skills in turning Arabic-speaking recruits in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen into obedient soldiers ready to fight for Iran’s aggrandisement — much as the British Army did in India with native troops. In fact, the power of the Revolutionary Guards within the regime steadily increased because of the military strength it generated with its abundant, cheap and, above all, expendable molokh khor “lizard-eater” Arab manpower (Ever since the huge losses of the Iraq war, Iran has been very casualty-sensitive).

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Israel's victory will be Netanyahu's downfall

By Edward Luttwak

But the Revolutionary Guards finally failed strategically because their Arab recruitment policy was so successful that it overshot the culminating point of success: seeing the historic Sunni capital of Damascus under Shia domination, and Baghdad the very seat of the Sunni Arab Caliphate ruled by Iran’s agents, Sunni Arab states from Morocco to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which had repeatedly fought Israel from 1948, moved to abandon their hostility, openly or discreetly. And while the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7 gained no goodwill for Israel or the Jews, Israel’s overall response proved that it has the strength to resist Iran’s imperial ambitions. When an Israeli air strike decapitated the Revolutionary Guard expeditionary high command gathered in  Damascus on April 1, by killing its chief and his entire staff, not a word of criticism was heard in the Sunni Arab world.

Iran’s response was an all-out air offensive with hundreds of ballistic missiles, drones, and cruise missiles. But this very expensive attack failed most miserably, wounding just one Israeli, a seven-year-old Bedouin, and inflicting only trivial damage to the non-functional edge of a runway.

Israel’s response was on the smallest possible scale but calculated to terrify the regime: an aircraft penetrated all the way to Isfahan, much further from Israel than Tehran, to drop a token UAV next to the Uranium Hexafluoride plant — the country’s major nuclear installation, most incautiously placed in the centre of the city whose population would suffer huge casualties from the highly corrosive poisonous gas if the plant were bombed.

With the exception of Algeria that is absorbed in its own traumas and Libya that has never recovered from its civil war, every Arab Sunni state in the Middle East welcomed the outcome of the aerial war — in which the Jordanian air force actually took part shooting down Iran’s drones — because all of them can and do coexist with Israel, while they abhor the threat of Shia and Persian domination.

As for Iran’s military chiefs, their standard of success is so low that, in the immediate aftermath of the failed aerial offensive, Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, declared that Iran “has achieved all of its goals”. He then unwisely added a vainglorious threat: “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate reckless behaviour, they will receive a decisive and much stronger response.” It was the sort of comment that gives effrontery a bad name. Iran’s strategists know perfectly well that if they ever come close to assembling a nuclear weapon, Israel will not hesitate to strike first with its manned and unmanned airpower. That too is a reason for the Sunni alliance, perhaps best symbolised by the uninterrupted flights of Air Dubai and Ittihad to Tel Aviv that persisted even as both US and European airlines repeatedly cancelled their own.