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

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

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

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

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

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Gaza is the endpoint of liberal democracy

By Omer Bartov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The No-State Solution

By Rajan Menon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s odd sitting in a mansion listening to anti-Israel rhetoric, while inside they pretend they cannot hear. It is still, perhaps, the most British experience of my lifetime. Beyond the host offering to have me removed from the city — someone would take me for a drive, she said — no one had a thing to say about it. I made small talk about J.K. Rowling. That was my second mistake. I must have said something kind about her, because an amateur harpist chided me. They did have opinions.

This story is sequential, and divided into three stages: the first, from when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015 to the October massacre of 2023; the second, from the massacre in Israel to the attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur last week; the third, the five days since. For me, they have one common emotion. Rage. Not for myself, but for the murdered Jews of Europe, and Jewish children today, told to remove their blazers outside school because the badges identify them as Jews.

Where does it end? Zalmen Gradowski, the Sonderkommando who buried his testimony in the ashes of Birkenau, called the crematoria in Poland a mechanism to soothe an insatiable god, “who is hungry for their flesh and thirsty for their blood”. That feels right: Nazism was a religion, and antisemitism is a subconscious act, which comes from a place beneath thought. In The Zone of Interest, the best Holocaust novel, Martis Amis called Nazism a “Walpurgisnacht”.

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The cowardice of the far Left

By Tanya Gold

If this sounds morbid, this is my cultural inheritance. I’m a British Jew, fortunate and haunted, a member of one of the only intact Jewish communities in Europe. But the British love for Jews is heavily caveated. The blood libel was invented in Britain, in 1144, in Norwich. There were pogroms in London in 1189, and in Stamford, Bury St Edmunds and York in 1190. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England. Ancient history, you may say. There’s no such thing. But, since our return to England in the 17th century, we have called ourselves lucky, even if England locked the gates to European Jews in 1938, leaving them to die. As a young woman, I thought British Jews pallid and uninteresting. I understand us better now. Anything not to be noticed, anything to demonstrate loyalty — our prayers for the royal family are gaudy; Bevis Marks, our famous synagogue, looks like a Wren church — but that was then.

The pause ended with Corbyn, who has absorbed the antisemitism (the anti-Zionism) that emerged from Stalin’s Russia. Its creed is: Zionism is racism. As ever, Jew hate is absolution of a kind; for a faction of the Left, it is absolution from colonialism and smaller personal failures. The journalist Vasily Grossman wrote: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” In 2016, I covered The World Transformed, the Corbynite conclave in Liverpool, and attended a debate asking whether the Labour Party had a problem with Jews. It was the best attended event of the week, even with a world to transform, because the hard-Left thrive on aggrievement, not thought, and need an enemy — the Zionist Entity! — to explain their calamities to themselves. Afterwards, I found an organiser and told him, like a credulous child: you’ve got a problem. Can I help? Apparently not. They’ll take the Walpurgisnacht.

Those years were pre-shocks. I left the Labour Party, or, rather, it left me because it was understood that Jews had murdered the last hope of modern British Socialism in toppling Corbyn, who really toppled himself. It was a new charge — or variation on an old charge — on a long sheet.

Until October 7, 2023 was the time before; everything else was the time after. When there were celebrations on London streets, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. My non-Jewish friends exuded embarrassment, boredom and, above all, cowardice. Write about it, non-Jewish journalist friends told me. No, I thought, you write about it. It’s as much your story as mine: no, more so. Besides, Jewish testimony is suspect. Philip Roth wrote a novel about Anne Frank: The Ghost Writer. Anne survived the war, but pretends she is dead, so people will read her story. The death holds the magic, and the power. People listen harder when we’re dead.

“You’ve got their sympathy when you’re being shoved in the oven,” a Hungarian-born survivor told me. I’m not sure I’d call it sympathy. “A bit blunt,” he says, “but I’m afraid this is it. The only time I did not feel the world was antisemitic was when the gates of hell opened up in 1945 until Israel started winning the war [in 1967]. Back to the old fashioned.”

I was mesmerized by the protests: I thought I could read our future in them. On the first great march for Palestine, I saw a woman with a sign: “resistance by all means necessary”. Is this what Manchester was? I found a first draft on the back of a sign in Trafalgar Square, a failed attempt, abandoned, as its writer was: “Israel is like my ex [boyfriend].” I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Is this Sartre’s mirror?

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I stood with counter-protesters too: a group called Stop the Hate. As the marchers passed, they swelled towards us and gesticulated: the finger for “fuck you” most often; a cut-throat sometimes; the Hamas triangle, made with fingers, once. They come from all social classes, though young Muslims and bourgeois Leftists are overrepresented. This is an internal, and a proxy, war: partially a war on themselves, because their movement is anti-democratic, with a loathing of dissent.

I went to another Stop the Hate rally on a grim arterial road in inner London. Interview after interview was the same. “Just anger,” a woman told me. “Pure anger.” She works in a school, she said, and, playing football, Jewish children were told they should be gassed. A young Orthodox Jew told me antisemitism is now, “a trend. A cool trend.” That is, young people find it fashionable now. A man with a boombox played Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. Men laid tefillin — it’s a form of prayer — by the boombox, but only middle-aged women knew the words. Things have changed, but not that much.

Opposite us, a man stood on a traffic island holding a sign that says: “Israel kills more children than all other countries in the world combined.” He wore a suit and tie, and his expression was one of triumph amid fumes.

Again, on Yom Kippur five days ago, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. British Jews are a news story now, and we aren’t used to that. History has caught up with us. I went to Stamford Hill, where the Charedi live, and marveled at how odd their civilization — old Jewish Poland remade in London — felt that day. Some fear to wear the Star of David, or yellow hostage ribbon in public. Others do so, explicitly. Some of us go to synagogue more. Some of us go to synagogue less. Some of us have retreated into Jewish silos. Others have abandoned Jewish life. Some need Israel more. Some need it less.

The future security of Jews in Britain does not depend on Jewish denunciations of Israel. That is a feint and, when the Right has used us to attack Muslims — then what? It depends, rather, on the behavior of the impartial majority: what historians call the bystanders. I hope for solidarity. I expect silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Britain has learned nothing from Palestine

By Aris Roussinos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, no. That would go over about as well as calling for 35% tariffs on Canada. The year is 2014, remember? There’s a reason Pat Buchanan didn’t get an invite to the event, and the staunchly isolationist libertarian Ron Paul was mocked as a crank during the keynote. You’d probably already be in the parking lot — or a shouting match — by the time your tablemates tucked into their slices of mediocre cheesecake.

The quips you made at the table are real quotes, however. They come directly from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s X account this summer, as the Gaza war approaches its two-year mark and “food supplies in Gaza have dwindled,” per a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Greene, one of President Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress, shattered another GOP taboo last week by describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a “genocide.”

A similar trend is afoot on the Left, meaning that Israel now faces a bipartisan pincer movement of disapproval and alienation.

Greene is far from alone on the Right. Steve Bannon, the former Trump political consigliere and one of the most popular Right-wing podcast hosts in America, recently argued, “Netanyahu’s government is out of control.” On Bannon’s show, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince accused the Israeli military of intentionally targeting a Catholic church in Gaza and declared: “The time of subsidizing the IDF as the American taxpayer must end.”

After that church was hit, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles addressed the Israelis in lament: “You’re losing me. You’re losing me, when you strike churches, the only church in Gaza, even if accidentally, but especially if not accidentally, you’re losing me.” At Turning Point USA’s summer student conference, the group hosted a debate on the subject between comedian Dave Smith and columnist Josh Hammer that exposed the movement’s divide. Smith, who’s called Ron Paul “the greatest living American hero,” was greeted with cheers from many attendees for criticisms of the Jewish state that would have fallen on deaf ears — if not hostile ears — before Oct. 7. 

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Florida’s Rep. Randy Fine — perhaps Israel’s most vociferous defender in the House of Representatives, who even earned a rebuke from the American Jewish Committee over his enthusiasm for starving Gaza — has a GOP primary challenger in Aaron Baker. “I do NOT support starving children,” Baker posted recently, adding: “I do NOT support punishing [Gazan] citizens for having the worst government in existence.” 

Tucker Carlson, another of the country’s most popular broadcasters, released an episode of his podcast on Wednesday with University of Chicago scholar John Mearsheimer, titled “The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived Into Supporting It.” Carlson and his guests have been consistently critical of Netanyahu’s government for months. That isn’t even to address the outright anti-Semitism of other fringe voices with significant social-media followings. 

Of course, the horror in Gaza now is not an apples-to-apples comparison with the 2014 clash between Israel and Hamas. But that’s kind of the point. The war since Oct. 7 has claimed the lives of at least 18,500 children, according to a new Washington Post analysis of the Gaza Health Ministry figures. According to the Post, that means “Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one child per hour during the war.” The deaths included 953 babies who never made it to their first birthday; another 943 never made it to their second; 972 never made it to their third.

The sheer scale of the misery, as Israel now controls a wide swath of Gaza and starvation mounts, challenges modern definitions of proportionality — even as Americans are horrified by the evil tactics of Hamas and continue to sympathize deeply with hostage families. Recent attacks on Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank are further incensing many in the United States.

Speaking of 2014, the Obama administration veterans at Pod Save America are issuing their own mea culpas from the Left. “Barack Obama signed a 10-year [Memorandum of Understanding] for $3.3 billion a year. So we are part of the problem here. Let’s correct it,” said co-host Tommy Vietor this week. Vietor, who served under Obama as a spokesman for the National Security Council, added, “When the war ends, we are not going back to the pre-October 7 status quo.”

Challenged on X by a critic who accused him of exacting a grudge against Netanyahu from the Obama years, Vietor replied, “Or … stay with me here … the entire world is horrified by what we’re witnessing in Gaza, which is why this conversation is happening now and not back in 2015.”

There’s little insight about the Right to be gleaned from Pod Save America. But in this case, Vietor is correct that revulsion at the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is no longer limited to progressives. This nationwide movement is so sweeping that it’s dragging people on the Right away from Israel, even as some conservatives triple down on support for the war. 

What’s eroded on the Right, above all, is the stigma that used to surround criticism of Israel. Gallup has been tracking public opinion on the Gaza war since its earliest weeks. On Tuesday, the firm released stark new findings. “American approval of Israel’s military action in Gaza has fallen 10 percentage points since the prior measurement in September, and it is now at 32%, the lowest reading since Gallup first asked the question in November 2023,” read the report. “Disapproval of the military action has now reached 60%.”

To be sure, Gallup’s survey found a stunning gulf between Democrats and Independents on one side and Republicans on the other. 71% of Republicans still approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza, but that number is only 25% among Independents and 8% among Democrats. For what it’s worth, that same poll found Trump’s approval rating has declined 17 points among Independents since the start of his second term, and only 27% approve of his handling of the conflict.

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While that number means less to Republicans in red states and primary elections, in swing districts, battleground states, and nationwide races, it’s enormously significant. Independents split evenly between Trump and Kamala Harris last November, but that was itself a gain for Trump, because he erased Democrats’ nine-point advantage from the 2020 election. Back in 2022, before the war, Independents fell at 71% when it came to favorability for Israel, squarely between Republicans at 81% and Democrats at 63%.

It’s true that even in 2024, Israel ranked low among voters’ priorities when choosing between candidates, but it’s also true that Republicans counted for years on reflexive support for the Israeli government from moderates and the party faithful. Now the incentive structure has been transformed. 

And for the GOP, that fissure looks poised to get much worse. A Pew survey this spring found that “Republicans under 50 are now about as likely to have a negative view of Israel as a positive one (50% versus 48%). In 2022, they were much more likely to see Israel positively than negatively (63% and 35%, respectively).” That’s a shocking change, especially as younger generations begin to comprise more of the electorate. 

Bannon himself put it best when he told Politico this week, “It seems that for the under-30-year-old MAGA base, Israel has almost no support.” Bannon further believes it’s not just Young MAGA but that “Netanyahu’s attempt to save himself politically by dragging America in deeper to another Middle East war has turned off a large swath of older MAGA diehards.” It’s precisely the Israeli hard-liners’ awareness of this generational problem that impels them to act in a maximalist fashion in Gaza and beyond. Better to strike big now, the thinking goes, before the generational turnover empowers Israel-skeptics on both sides.

The problem for Jerusalem is that the harder they go, the more they intensify the sense of alienation in America, the one country whose public sentiments are downright existential for the Jewish state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Israelis, this war is about two things: destroying Hamas and returning the hostages. They won’t fully achieve the first objective because this most brutal of wars is only fueling the kind of burning resentment against Israel that recruits for terrorism, for Hamas or its eventual successors. But until the hostages are released, Israel will continue to fight to get them back, and rightly so. Peace cannot come without the hostages being freed. And nothing Keir Starmer can do will change this logic. He can make things worse, though — and he just has.

Like Starmer, I support a two-state solution. And by the way, if you do too, that makes you a Zionist, because to be a Zionist is simply to believe in a state for the Jewish people in their historic homeland. But Hamas has never believed in a two-state solution. It wants to destroy Israel and eradicate it “from the river to the sea”. These are not just cheap words on a protest poster. In 2017, Hamas revised its original charter (though it did not revoke it) to take away references to the fight against Jews. Instead, it re-described the policy as a national liberation struggle to establish a state of Palestine “which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naquarah in the north to Umm al-Rashrash in the south”. That is: the entirety of Israel. This is a blueprint for the total annihilation of a country. And the reason Hamas may seek the temporary advantage of what we in the West think of as a two-state solution is simply because it serves as a bridgehead for the eventual destruction of Israel.

Into this mix, and following President Macron, comes Keir Starmer. The two men, safe behind their pontificating lecterns, are reminiscent of Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, those English and French diplomats who back in 1915/6 drew lines on the map of the Middle East with little concern for the reality of what was happening over there. If their moralizing didn’t create such perverse incentives for Hamas, it would be laughably pompous — two former colonial powers pretending they still had the Imperial clout to impose their will on a part of the world that long since gave up caring about what the British and the French thought.

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Except… in choosing this particular moment to announce the British commitment to recognizing a Palestinian state, Starmer is willingly giving encouragement to Hamas, and to the very strategy that led to this desperate war. Trump says that Starmer is rewarding Hamas — and he’s right. Hamas is getting exactly what it wants. Why, now, would it give up hostages? What reason does it have to agree to a ceasefire? It only needs Israel to keep on fighting for a few more months to achieve its ultimate goal. The paradox is, if Hamas refuses peace, then the UK will recognize Palestine. This is batshit crazy: Starmer’s announcement will only prolong the agony of the Palestinian people. Whether the West wants to hear it or not, since October 7, Hamas has used the agony of its own people as a way of manipulating the rest of the world into supporting it. Whereas Israel is doing everything it can to bring its people home, Hamas uses the grotesque suffering of the people of Gaza as a means to its own end. And it will be done with renewed confidence now that this wicked strategy is so obviously working.

What is particularly shabby about Starmer’s announcement is that he is playing with people’s lives — with Palestinian and Israeli ones — not because he believes recognizing a state of Palestine is the right thing to do at this moment, but because of his own troubled domestic political situation. With Corbyn’s new party on his shoulder and a few hundred of his own MP’s lobbying him, Starmer has caved.

What is happening in Gaza is unbearable, no one disputes that. The place has become hell on earth, a sulfurous dead-land of corpses and starvation. And I have little doubt that war crimes have been conducted on both sides. Personally, I wouldn’t use the word genocide to describe it because in law genocide requires genocidal intention and that is almost impossible clearly to establish. As Philippe Sands KC explains it: “the case law requires you to show pretty much that it is the only intent, if it is coupled with another intent, for example, the intent to act in self-defense… it’s going to be very hard, if not impossible, to prove genocide.” In a sense, that word has become a distraction. You don’t need a narrowly defined legal term to understand the depths of depravity and inhumanity of the situation.

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Of course, there are some on the hard Right in Israel who really do want to ethnically cleanse Arabs from the Gaza strip. Some are even in government. But most ordinary Israelis want to be left alone and to have their hostages back. They, too, are sick of war and the killing. But thinking this war grotesque, and knowing the right way to end it are two different things — as Starmer has just ably demonstrated.

Apart from emboldening Hamas, and buying himself a little time with his backbenchers, what can Starmer possibly hope to achieve by this announcement? A state requires a legitimate government, it requires settled borders. Palestine has neither. Starmer insists that Hamas can have no role in the future governance of a Palestinian state, but if that is what many Palestinians want, and that is what they vote for — as they did back in 2006 — what possible leverage can he have over any of this? What difference would calling Palestine a state have if Hamas were still in charge and the Israelis were still bombing. This is not a peace plan, it’s a more war plan. Hamas needs to surrender before peace is even a possibility. And Starmer has nothing to say about how he thinks that might be achieved.

It is, of course, not just Hamas standing in the way of a two-state solution. Unfortunately, this war has been convenient for Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral fortunes. Before the war, he was in court for corruption, and it was on his watch that Israel was so ill prepared for the October 7 attack. He should be toast. But no one wants to change a leader during wartime, and the longer this conflict continues, the more he gets to cast himself as a shield against harm — rather than one of its catalysts.

And Netanyahu hates the idea of a two-state solution, having done his utmost to fill the West Bank with over half a million ideological settlers who won’t be moved. Is it really credible that a future prime minister of Israel would send in the army to tear down the settlements and forcibly remove their occupants? That would be the beginnings of civil war. For despite the fact that it was a Right-wing leader, Ariel Sharon, who pushed through the Israeli settler withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, that was a doddle compared with what a withdrawal from the West Bank would look like today.

The baffling thing is that Starmer knows all this. He knows he is committing himself to something that cannot be done, at least not now. This is surely a grotesque form of showboating. For the future stability of Palestine, Israel and the Middle East, there’s only one way forward. Hamas must release the hostages. Hamas must surrender. What remains of Hamas must commit itself to a genuine peace process. Once this happens, and only then, should the West lean on Israel to make plans for a future Palestinian state.

Starmer has always said that he would recognize a Palestinian state when the time was right. That was a good policy. What he has just announced is the very opposite. In the end, the Palestinians won’t thank him.

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.

In embarking on open conflict with Iran, Israel has effectively aligned itself with the Sunni monarchies of the Arabian Gulf, foremost among them Saudi Arabia. These are countries that have long been engaged in schismatic conflict with both republican and revolutionary Iran, for the fear among the Sunnis has been that Shia Iran would spread its revolutionary creed to the oil-rich and Shia-dominated Arab littoral of the Arabian Gulf.

Thus the 20th-century cycle of wars between Jewish and Arab nationalism has finally been replaced by the 21st-century conflict between an increasingly religiously-infused Zionism on the one side and Shia Islamism on the other. In this conflict Israel is de facto allied with conservative Sunni Muslim states. Over all these convolutions of regional geopolitics looms a larger strategic question: whether Netanyahu has also succeeded in torpedoing Trump’s foreign policy doctrine of “America First”.

The America First doctrine posed a more significant strategic challenge to Israel’s geopolitical position than did any military effort from bungling Islamist militias, decayed Arab nationalist regimes or Iranian clerics. For as long as the US was committed to globalist doctrines of policing international order and defending human rights everywhere, Israel could exercise a powerful grip on US foreign policy on both the ideological and strategic levels.

To put this in ideological terms: as long as the US was committed to defending the victims of human rights abuses against genocide, it had to commit to defending Israel as the state founded by the survivors of genocide. Ever since it held the trial of the Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Israel has based its political legitimacy on the claim that its national existence is Jews’ self-defense against existential threat. This claim is buttressed by the ultimate human rights crime of the past century, the Holocaust. On the strategic level, as long as the US was committed to global policing, Israel could also act as a loyal regional deputy. In this role, Israel punishes terrorists and rogue states on behalf of Washington, thereby ensuring itself a steady supply of US arms and diplomatic support against its regional rivals.

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The Netanyahu paradox

By Yehudah Mirsky

The US has tired of fighting the forever wars, an outcome that is the natural consequence of policing global order. Both the Israeli roles, that of victim-state and regional deputy, are now of less importance to the White House. One of the few consistent themes of Trumpian politics has been its efforts to extricate the US from the Middle East in order to focus on the confrontation with the much greater geopolitical rival of China. But Israel needed the so-called US bunker-busters to reach the deeply-buried Iranian nuclear site at Fordow, and Netanyahu therefore succeeded in luring Trump back into the Middle East with the promise of a quick military raid that would not risk ground troops.

Unsurprisingly, the prospect of return to the Middle East provoked consternation in the ranks of the MAGA coalition. Since the declaration of the US-Iranian cease-fire, Trump has sternly warned Israel — with full caps and profanity in a post on his Truth media platform — not to retaliate against alleged Iranian violation of the cease-fire. Given how much blood and treasure the US has squandered in the Middle East over the last thirty years — to say nothing of the terrifying costs of the forever wars to the peoples of the region itself — it is clear that embroiling itself in another regime-change operation in Iran would be terrible for the US. Less obvious but no less true is the fact that such an outcome would expose Netanyahu’s weakness.

All this effort to keep the US embroiled in the Middle East begs the question of why Israel, with its spectacular feats of arms and almost unbroken string of military victories, needs US protection at all. The Fordow situation was an unusual one. Israel, in general, holds the regional aces. It is widely believed to already possess the ultimate guarantee of security — a nuclear second-strike capability — meaning that the country could threaten any enemy with total destruction were its survival actually in question. In a world of nuclear weapons, there is no greater guarantee of political independence than second-strike capability — the capacity to mount a second nuclear strike against an enemy, even if that enemy were to launch a successful surprise attack against you first. Nuclear deterrence held the peace between the Soviet Communists and capitalist Americans during the first Cold War, and now between mortal strategic enemies India and Pakistan as well as between capitalist China and capitalist America. Why should it now be an insufficient guarantor of Israeli security in the face of an Iranian nuclear bomb?

One might argue that the ayatollahs that rule Iran are too irrational to be successfully deterred by the threat of nuclear annihilation, so consumed are they with their religious fanaticism and millenarian anti-imperialism. Similar arguments were made about Russian and Chinese communists, also assumed, by dint of the ideological contortions of Marxism, to be beyond reason. Are the ayatollahs less rational, less interested in preserving their own power, than are Maoists and Stalinists? Nor are the theocrats all-powerful. The Iranian state also encompasses its bureaucracy and security apparatus. If the wider Iranian state could not be entrusted to restrain the use of nuclear weapons by mad clerics, what hope is there for nation-building in Iran once the clerics are gone? In any case Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is yet further proof of the necessity of having nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding Tehran’s alliance with Russia, Iranians will have noted that any country without nuclear weapons cannot ultimately guarantee its independence or defend itself against rolling air attacks.

It is for that reason that the Iranian emperor Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979, was himself keen on securing nuclear weapons. We can be confident that even if a secular regime were to emerge from the rubble of the Islamic Republic it, too, would see its ultimate security guarantee in having nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, then, Israel’s campaign to supposedly destroy the risk of an Iranian bomb will hasten the spread of nuclear weapons — both in the region and further afield. We can be assured that nuclear proliferation will be one outcome of this new war. This means in turn that all of us, including the Israelis, must learn to live with nuclear deterrence across a variety of states and political regimes.

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Britain could thrive in splendid isolation

By Philip Cunliffe

The greatest paradox of all this is that, in seeking to draw the US back into the region, Israel is undercutting the rationale for its own existence. Before the Holocaust became central to Israel’s political identity, the original purpose of Zionism, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was to secure self-determination and security for the Jews. Netanyahu’s forever wars are clearly failing to create that security: one war simply runs into another. The effort to break up Trump’s America First doctrine suggests that Netanyahu is also fumbling the cause of Jewish self-determination. For if Israel cannot find security in nuclear deterrence and overwhelming military might — the means that suffice for other states — but only in being permanently protected by the US, what hope is there for Jewish independence and self-determination? Israel’s effort to recreate its strategic dependence on the US suggests a state that cannot stand alone — the opposite of the original aspirations of Zionism.

Israel must now confront a new geopolitical reality in which it will ultimately matter less to the US. If the country cannot carve out a new political role independent of the US, then no amount of crushing military victories and spectacular bombing raids will ever be enough to guarantee its independence.

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

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

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

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Lessons in antisemitism from the NEU

By Nicole Lampert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma

By David Samuels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Reuel Marc Gerecht

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, with nearly half a million of the nation’s teachers in its ranks, the NEU (capitals allowed) is the biggest education union in Europe. It is also the most powerful. During the pandemic, it was sufficiently influential to close Britain’s schools. For such services, Mary Bousted, its leader at the time, was made a Dame in this year’s New Year honours.

Under her replacement as general secretary, Daniel Kebede, the NEU has remained a campaigning organisation, lobbying on gender equality, racism and LGBT rights. But in recent years, it has dedicated itself to one cause in particular: Palestine.

One might wonder what a British teaching union has to do with a geopolitical conflict 3,000 miles away, but the question would be moot. Every year — excepting wars and pandemics — the NEU subsidises two propaganda trips to the Palestinian Territories, while its magazine Educate frequently denounces Israel. In one recent editorial, Kebede wrote: “As educators whose instincts are humanitarian, members are appalled by the willingness of political leaders to let this situation go on. Why do arms sales continue? Why has the verdict of the International Court of Justice not restrained their behaviour?”

To understand this obsession, one need only attend the NEU’s annual conference. Even before the conference, different branches were thinking up novel ways to attack Israel. Natasha Brandon, a Jewish secondary school teacher based in North London, was surprised to find it top of the agenda for the LBGT+ division when they got together ahead of conference.

“One motion attacked Israel for its LGBT+ positive policies which it called ‘pinkwashing’,” she tells me. The motion said: “Pinkwashing is used by many countries, including Israel, to detract from their human rights abuses and deflect attention away from other discriminatory practices.” It insisted: “Conference instructs the executives to publish a statement condemning countries who target the LGBT+ tourist market through pinkwashing whilst violating human rights of other oppressed groups.”

Natasha wrote to the organisers to express her discomfort with the motion. “The idea that queer people in Israel are somehow a ploy to distract from other things is both antisemitic and homophobic,” she said in her letter. Her complaints were ignored.

At the conference itself, held just before Easter in Bournemouth, there wasn’t just a fringe meeting on Palestine — there’s one every year — but also a standing ovation for its star speaker: the Palestinian “Ambassador” Husam Zomlot. He told the audience that his presence was indeed “a statement of support and solidarity” as “you have been the strongest supporters of Palestine historically”. He gave a special thanks to Louise Regan, who doubles as both the chair of the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) and the NEU’s Executive Member and Chair of International.

Incredibly, Louise is one of four of the PSC’s 14 directors — the group which organises London’s almost weekly anti-Israel demonstrations — who also have roles within the NEU. The others are NEU trustee Bernard Regan, NEU Bolton’s International Solidarity Officer Julia Simpkins, and Northumberland NEU district secretary Alex Snowdon.

After Zomlot’s warm welcome came the motions about Palestine. One claimed that “Israel’s hard-right, racist government is the main driver of conflict, violence and war in Palestine and Israel”. Having reaffirmed “support” for the PSC it also chillingly agreed to circulate educational resources to “increase understanding” of Palestine and Israel.

All of this was achieved with a confidence normally reserved for student union politics. During an amendment debate which committed the NEU to campaign for the abolition of the government’s Prevent anti-extremism programme, one delegate, Mat Milovanovic, proudly insisted: “Are we not allowed to show our students what is right and just?” He told the audience that he and his colleagues in Ealing had been expressing solidarity with Palestinians by “wearing lanyards, badges and taking group photos calling for an immediate ceasefire” — even though they were aware the school could face possible investigation “on the grounds that we do not meet our obligation of political impartiality”.

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During another debate attacking the UK and other countries for withdrawing funding from UNRWA after it was discovered some of their workers had joined in on October 7, Peter Block, 75, a retired Jewish primary school teacher from London, asked to speak. He’d already learned that a younger Jewish teacher who was due to debate one of the motions had pulled out. “He was so intimidated that he was afraid for his own safety,” recalls Peter. “The whole of the executive group were wearing Palestinian keffiyehs and it was intimidating. But I felt I had no choice but to speak because of all the half-truths and downright lies that were being spouted.”

Peter started his speech with a message of peace — “Shalom” — but the mood swiftly soured. “It was a febrile atmosphere and the noise and the cat-calling started almost immediately. I couldn’t even finish my speech.”

The NEU told me that it has “condemned without equivocation, the actions of Hamas on October 7”, adding: “The call for a ceasefire is now imperative in the face of the destruction and loss of life in Gaza,” and insisting: “it is legitimate for the NEU to speak out, alongside bodies such as the TUC and the UN, to stand up for the urgent protection of children and teachers in Palestine.” But is there something darker at play?

Last July, the NEU hosted an event in London called “How to talk about Palestine in our schools”. “There was a whole bookshop of pro-Palestinian literature,” says Peter, who attended. “The conference had speaker after speaker going on about the evil of Israel. After lunch they broke up into groups and I went into a smaller room where they were meant to be discussing antisemitism. Except they weren’t. It was all about Israel. So I stood up and pointed out that we were supposed to be discussing antisemitism. But I was told I needed to sit down — because the other people were ‘threatened’ by me”.

Kate (not her real name), another Jewish teacher from London, attended the same event, only to discover one of her colleagues from school discussing how he used “every opportunity I can to share my views” on Palestine, including bringing the topic up when covering war poetry. He also boasted that he had set up an after-school “human rights group”, which he was using to tell children how evil Israel was. Although she wrote to her headteacher to complain, nothing was done. He still runs his after-school club.

The union is also a linchpin of the anti-Israel demonstrations taking place in our cities. Data taken from 41 major PSC protests between October 2023 and the end of November last year shows that NEU had 23 official speakers — nearly twice as many as the next union, the RMT. Other times they sponsor the demonstrations; for a February one in Leicester, the NEU’s symbol was next to extremist Islamist groups 5 Pillars and CAGE International.

Following the motion to circulate “educational material” on the conflict, Natasha says she is aware that one proposal is to “paint Israel as a colonialist endeavour” while Peter has been shown discussions about material which “seeks to say Jews have no history in the region”.

Last month, the NEU joined the call for Palestine Day of Action. In November 2023 this led to a series of school walkouts with children singing pro-Palestine songs. This year, the NEU told teachers in its North London branch: “Our plan is to wear red and green or keffiyehs, a fundraiser for Medical Aid for Palestine and a vigil in the park with floating lanterns.” Only a last-minute Government intervention — reminding teachers of the policy of the neutrality — scuppered some of the plans. Only a few teachers openly broke the rules. Never mind, the NEU is likely to figure at the heart of the next demonstration for Palestine later this month.

Faced with this sort of behaviour, a group of Jewish teachers met with Kebede last year to ask for a more balanced approach to the conflict. They are not holding out much hope; Kebede is a long-time admirer of Jeremy Corbyn who once claimed the former Labour leader’s critics were being offered “30 pieces of silver” — an ancient antisemitic trope. While he later apologised, the following year, at an anti-Israel rally, he issued a call to “globalise the intifada”. An NEU spokesperson later claimed that it was merely “an expression of solidarity and support for civic protests”.

How such “solidarity” manifests in the classroom is often anecdotal, but it certainly isn’t making schools safer. One parent at the Norwood School in South London told me about two incidents in which she felt children at the school were being subtly educated against Israel. Her 14-year-old son brought home teaching material which had been passed out in a “citizenship class” about refugees, which had an incorrect map of Israel and erroneously claimed that “since 1948 more than five million Palestinians have been displaced” — when the 1948 war displaced 700,000 Palestinians (the five million figure comes from the number of their descendants). At another school, in West London, a substitute teacher asked her eight-year-old primary school pupils to put their hands up if they were Jewish. When a couple put their hands up, the teacher told them: “I’m Free Palestine.”

For Jewish parents this is a difficult time. According to the CST, which monitors anti-Jewish hate crimes, instances of antisemitism affecting schools continue to rise, with 162 incidents in just the first half of last year. Sometimes anti-Jewish bullying has been so bad in schools that parents have felt forced to remove their children.

Meanwhile, as the NEU continues to focus on a war on the other side of the world, problems the union should be looking at barely get a look in. “I know I am not the only one who wonders what all of this obsession with Israel has got to do with a teaching union when we have plenty of problems at home,” says Peter. “We have a huge problem with teacher retention, with violence in schools against teachers, with crumbling schools — but all they want to talk about is Palestine.”

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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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.

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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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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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.

While this dynamic may seem exotically Irish to mainland British eyes, it shouldn’t. The discourse surrounding the Gaza war has, over the past year, become markedly unmoored from the causes and conduct of the war itself, instead becoming a safe, symbolic means for a newly multiethnic British polity to express its own domestic demographic anxieties and aspirations. For the Conservative influencer Bella Wallersteiner, pro-Palestine demonstrations sparked her Damascene conversion from advocacy for mass immigration to the view that “multiculturalism has failed” and “migrant numbers will need to come down”. When Kemi Badenoch wished to stake her claim as the champion of newly sensible immigration policy, remarking that “we cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border”, the example she chose to make her case, rather than anything centred on Britain, was “the number of recent immigrants to the UK who hate Israel”.

Conversely, Labour MPs electorally threatened by the pro-Gaza vote among ethnic Mirpuri constituents emphasise their pro-Palestinian credentials, to the extent that Jess Phillips made the remarkable, if improbable, claim that an ethnic Palestinian NHS doctor gave her preferential treatment to reward her stance. Baroness Warsi’s self-expulsion from the Conservative Party was the consequence of calling Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman “coconuts” — that is, race traitors — for supporting Israel. While the cultural logic of her claim is incomprehensible, it is another striking example of the sorting of British party politics along ethnic and sectarian lines in which the Palestine conflict, for reasons that remain stubbornly unarticulated, has become a major dividing line.

There is a natural tribal logic for British Muslims to feel aggrieved by the suffering of their co-religionists in Gaza, just as there is for the Chief Rabbi to condemn the halting of Britain’s arms sales to Israel: whether the increased domestic salience of Middle Eastern wars is healthy for British politics or the British people generally is now beside the point. In a culturally diverse democracy, the forms of party organisation inevitably take on an ethnic or confessional cast, as groups compete to maximise their collective advantage, and parties compete to cater to the rival voter blocs. In the United States, this dynamic is more or less formalised, despite the official “melting pot” rhetoric: if anything, it is most pronounced in Washington’s “natsec” sphere, as members of diaspora groups compete to wield the empire’s military power in pursuit of their own group interests.

In Britain, the ongoing sorting along ethnic and sectarian lines rather than the racial categories of popular discourse — with Hindus and Nigerians leaning towards the Conservatives and Muslims and West Indians to Labour (both reflected in Cabinet choices and policy decisions) — remains only tacitly recognised. As the renowned sociologist of ethnic conflict Donald L. Horowitz put it, in a divided society “the election is a census, and the census is an election”, just as we see in Northern Ireland. Britain is not so dissimilar to Northern Ireland after all — nor are Palestine flags hanging from lampposts in Stepney markedly different, in their symbolic meaning, to Israeli ones flying on the Shankill.

There is a dark historical irony, then, in Conservative critics of mass immigration simultaneously presenting themselves as Israel’s strongest supporters. The process by which most of Mandate Palestine became the State of Israel was after all the direct consequence of immigration policies enabled by Westminster officials, who set in train, as the Israeli historian Benny Morris observes, “a demographic-geographic contest the Arabs were destined to lose”. From a tenth of Palestine’s population when Britain assumed the Mandate in 1918, Jews made up a fifth by 1931 due to immigration from Europe. By the time of the 1948 war, and the forced expulsion of the Palestinians, Jews comprised a third of Palestine’s population, and owned 5% of the country’s land. “Palestinians now saw themselves inexorably turning into strangers in their own land”, the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi records, but were given no democratic recourse to opposing this vast and irreversible upheaval, carried out over just 30 years: “This was still the high age of colonialism, when such things being done to native societies by Westerners were normalized and described as ‘progress.’”

Yet even as the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion observed that “immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all Palestine”, British officials soothed angry and worried Palestinian leaders with false claims that mass immigration would not harm their collective interests, but would instead boost Palestine’s economy. Responding to Emir Abdullah of Transjordan’s complaint that British officials “appeared to think men could be cut down and transplanted in the same way as trees”, then Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill assured him that only “a very slow process” of immigration was envisaged. “There really is nothing for the Arabs to be frightened about,” Churchill would tell Parliament after violent Palestinian riots in 1921. The Zionists themselves were more realistic. As David Ben-Gurion observed, the Palestinian rioters were “fighting dispossession… [their] fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people”. As the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky dispassionately remarked of Palestinian rioting: “every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.”

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Yet British officials disagreed. Palestinian objections were merely the result, as the Balfour Declaration had it, of Arab “prejudices” and antisemitism. Riots, when they occurred, as they began to with increasing frequency and violence, were stoked by malign agitators, and did not reflect popular Palestinian sentiment. Following the bloody 1929 riots, Whitehall’s Shaw Commission blamed “excited and intemperate articles” and “propaganda among the less-educated Arab people of a character calculated to incite them” for the violence, while urging that “machinery should be devised through which non-Jewish interests could be consulted on the subject of immigration”. This was a partial sop to Palestinian opinion, though as Rashid Khalidi notes, throughout the British mandate the Palestinians were never referred to as such in official discourse — they “were not even thought of as a people per se” instead merely termed “communities” or “the non-Jewish population”, the better to detach them from any claim to their own ancestral land. Even so, in a dissent to the Shaw Commission’s report, the British Fabian Henry Snell asserted that Palestinian “fears are exaggerated and that on any long view of the situation the Arab people stand to gain rather than to lose from Jewish enterprise”, proposing that Palestinian and Jewish community leaders come together, over sporting events and other government-backed initiatives,“to unite Arab and Jew in the task of building up a happy and prosperous land”.

History was to prove Snell and Whitehall wrong, and Palestinian fears correct. World events outside Britain’s control, coupled with America and Britain’s closure of borders to Jewish immigration directed a vast wave of Jewish refugees from Nazism towards Palestine, accelerating the process, as Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had it, of making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English”. As Rashid Khalidi observes, “the flood of tens of thousands of new Jewish immigrants yearly in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power transformed the fundamental dynamics of the demographic battle, to the deepening disadvantage of the Palestinians.” Following the Arab Revolt from 1936 onwards, British officials vainly attempted to stem the migration wave they had initiated, realising they had lost control of the situation; by 1948 Britain was forced to withdraw, and the modern Israel-Palestine conflict, which at the time of writing threatens a third wider Middle Eastern war, had begun.

No-one can argue that the flood of Jews fleeing Hitler were not genuine refugees: the greatest justification for the Zionist project is that the millions of European Jews who did not make it to Palestine were almost immediately murdered. As the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe remarks, “unlike conventional colonial projects conducted in the service of an empire or a mother country, settler colonialists were refugees of a kind seeking not just a home, but a homeland. The problem was that the new ‘homelands’ were already inhabited by other people.” Both Jews and Palestinians in Mandate Palestine were acting rationally, in pursuit of their own best interests: the problem was, and is, that those interests were inherently opposed.

Throughout this baleful saga, entirely a product of 30 years of British governance, as Rashid Khalidi notes, “the preferred posture of the greatest power of the age was to pose as the impartial external actor, doing its levelheaded, rational, civilized best to restrain the savage passions of the wild and brutish locals”. Indeed, he continues, “one cannot read the memoirs or many of the official reports of British officials in mandatory Palestine… without being repeatedly struck by this tone of innocent wonderment at a bizarre and often tragic sequence of events for which these officials rarely if ever acknowledged the slightest responsibility.”

But then, Khalidi observes, “such radical social engineering at the expense of the indigenous population is the way of all colonial settler movements”, which “always claim that they will leave the native population better off as a result of their rule”. For all the progressive and humanitarian discourse British officials employed in their demographic experiment in Palestine, it is impossible for Palestinians to view British rule as anything other than “a colonial war waged against the indigenous population” to  “force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will”.

The Palestine conflict, and its destabilisation of the entire Middle East, is surely the greatest single historical disaster wrought by Whitehall governance so far. British conservatives aggrieved at the domestic culture war over British imperialism — in which their own barely expressed demographic fears underlie much of the discontent — would do well to recognise that there was a darker side to the imperial experience than railways and parliamentary democracy. British Conservative opponents of mass immigration ought surely to show more empathy for the Palestinians whose society British civil servants destroyed. Equally, now that Britain’s experiments with demographic engineering and management of ethnic tensions have turned inwards, domestic advocates of mass immigration should reflect on the historical precedents, and the dismissive contemporary discourse surrounding Palestinians’ ineffective and sporadically violent resistance to their displacement.

The symbolic centrality of the Israel-Palestine conflict in this new British discourse is surely fitting. The very existence of the conflict is the product of Westminster governance, and decisions made in London a century ago which, Woodrow Wilson’s aide warned at the time, were certain to make the Middle East “a breeding place for future war”. It is not heartening, given the ethnic riots which spread across England and Northern Ireland this summer, to reflect that, according to the academic literature, both Westminster state’s management of differing ethnic groups within Britain is a direct descendent of its colonial policies, nor that a legacy of British colonial rule is famously one of the greatest statistical predictors for current ethnic conflict.

Whitehall has a long tradition of creating ethnic conflicts where none previously existed, through its movement of populations for reasons both idealistic and cynical, its privileging of chosen ethnic groups over rivals for reasons of political utility, and its proven inability to manage the inevitable consequences. In Northern Ireland, the consequences remain unresolved, and may always remain so. In Palestine, they seem to be leading to their final, grim conclusion. As shown by Labour’s transfer of the Chagos islands to Maldivian sovereignty, over the heads and against the desires of the Chagossians themselves, Whitehall’s attitude to the rights of the peoples it rules to remain masters of their destinies in their own lands remains slipshod. Perhaps the greatest historical lesson of the Palestine Mandate is that faith in the wisdom and competence of the British governing class could be disastrous for those fated to be ruled by it.

The festival, founded in 2013, will also be showcasing Mohammad Sabaaneh, whose work is alleged to contain antisemitic tropes. UnHerd has learned that one former LICAF board member, Peter Kessler, resigned from his position in July over Sabaaneh’s involvement, as well as over what he considered to be the board’s decision not to challenge the artist’s previous work.

Earlier this year, LICAF invited Sabaaneh to co-curate an exhibition on Palestinian comic-book art, alongside the writer and comic book expert George Khoury. But during online discussions with festival director Julie Tait in June, Kessler expressed concern about Sabaaneh. Citing images in which the Palestinian artist depicted Israel as an octopus in control of the global financial system, and as a locust with an oversized nose, as well as one showing a Jewish concentration camp internee in 1945 transforming into an Israeli settler, he claimed that “in putting [Sabaaneh’s] work on display, and in allowing him to speak, I’m concerned that we are giving a platform for a racist”.

Kessler added that the images in question were designed “to stir up racial hatred in the viewers” and recommended seeking advice from the British Council, which is both co-organising and contributing £15,000 towards the event. In an email response at the start of July, Tait denied that Sabaaneh was a racist and argued that “his ‘job’ is to question, to challenge […] a wide range of ‘targets’ to convey a message”. Tait added that the Palestinian artist is “a brave man, a humane man and his only ‘crime’ is his relentless pursuit of what he sees as justice for Palestinian people”. In the same message, she stressed LICAF’s “duty to uphold freedom of speech”.

Later that month, on 11 July, six members of the LICAF board, including Tait and Kessler, convened to discuss the festival’s response to Sabaaneh’s appearance. In a presentation delivered during the meeting, Kessler argued that “Sabaaneh should attend LICAF and speak at his session, but with the conditions that he is questioned about his antisemitic material and that he doesn’t use the festival as an opportunity to attack what he sees as Israeli propaganda”. Kessler added that “there is severe danger to LICAF’s reputation both in cancelling [Sabaaneh] and in allowing him to continue as planned”.

After this proposal was rejected, Kessler resigned from the LICAF board and wrote to the British Council explaining what had happened, attaching some of Sabaaneh’s more contentious cartoons. He stated that he felt inviting the artist “without addressing this more controversial aspect of his work would be tantamount to ignoring hate speech”. The next day, Paul Thompson, chair of the British Council, replied, agreeing that the images — which do not feature in the LICAF exhibition — contain “some extremely distasteful tropes”.

Scott McDonald, the Council’s chief executive, then informed Kessler that senior staff were now investigating the dispute. Kessler claims that during a later phone call, McDonald revealed how Council members had undergone trial antisemitism training sessions — but that he was unsure how successful those sessions had been. McDonald also reportedly said that the cartoons shared were antisemitic.

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In his last communication with Kessler on 19 August, seen by UnHerd, McDonald concluded that the Council “will continue to provide input to the LICAF team to support them in ensuring the safeguarding of all speakers and audience members, and providing a respectful safe space for dialogue”. In a statement, the British Council told UnHerd that “we have supported this year’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF) by helping to fund an exhibition of work by twelve Palestinian comic artists. We are aware of concerns that have been raised regarding a selection of political cartoons previously produced by one of the curators. These cartoons do not form part of the exhibition at LICAF, which aims to highlight the unique creativity of Palestinian comic art.”

For the past decade, LICAF has been funded by Arts Council England (ACE), receiving an annual grant of £240,000. On the same day that Kessler first contacted the British Council, 19 July, he also emailed ACE to draw attention to what he viewed as a “grave failure of governance, breach of policies, and misuse of public funds”. He accused the remaining members of the LICAF board of “breach[ing] basic principles of good governance by preventing full and free discussion of a highly sensitive issue relating to race discrimination”.

ACE chief executive Darren Henley responded by saying that his organisation would investigate the claims. UnHerd was told this week by an ACE spokesperson that “Arts Council England is not a regulator, but we have comprehensive processes in place if concerns are raised with us about an organisation we fund, and we can look into whether they are in breach of their funding agreement with us”. They added: “While we cannot share details of confidential concerns that are flagged to us, we have robust processes in place to make sure organisations address them.”

Then, on 16 September, an ACE official contacted Kessler to say that the investigation was complete and that he had written to LICAF with “conclusions and recommendations”. In an email seen by UnHerd, the representative stated that “we did find minor breaches of the terms and conditions of their current funding agreement with us, relating to the organisation’s policy about handling complaints, and we are now satisfied with the actions proposed by LICAF to address these issues [sic].” The message made no direct mention of Sabaaneh, his work, or racial discrimination more widely. 

Kessler responded that he was “flummoxed”, and that ACE had “investigated something that I hadn’t actually complained about”. In a further email to Henley and the organisation’s chair, Nicholas Serota, he concluded that ACE’s handling of his complaint was “not just woefully insufficient. It borders on complicity.”

Sabaaneh is currently scheduled to appear at two LICAF events, one alongside Khoury and another in which he is set to discuss freedom of speech in comics with Russian graphic artist Victoria Lomasko. During an interview with the New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium in May, Sabaaneh said he wanted to use his involvement with LICAF to “dismantle the Israeli propaganda, dismantle Israeli discourse when they describe the Palestinian people as human animals”. Speaking to the Washington Post at the end of last year, he claimed that “my main mission is to rehumanise the Palestinians”; earlier this year, he argued online that “antisemitism has become a tool of anti-free speech and censorship. Israel uses it against anyone who criticizes it.”

The artist — whose work has been exhibited in Britain, America, and across Europe — was previously imprisoned in Israel. Arrested by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank in February 2013, Sabaaneh was kept in solitary confinement for two weeks and jailed for a further five months. The reason given for his internment was that his artwork appeared in a book about Palestinian political prisoners written by his brother Thamer, who has been accused by an Israeli military court of being a Hamas member. 

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Sabaaneh was also targeted in 2015 by the Palestinian Authority for allegedly depicting the Prophet Muhammad, a charge he denies. Earlier that year, he had marched in Paris in support of the right of artists to mock and criticise Islam, following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in the city. He has previously said that Hamas “hates” him. 

Sabaaneh did not respond to a request for comment, though a LICAF board member informed UnHerd that the artist was aware of the disagreement over his appearance and Kessler’s ensuing resignation. They also made clear that Sabaaneh will defend himself against charges of racism “coherently and persuasively at the festival”.

This week, Tait told UnHerd that the current LICAF board is “fully supportive of [Sabaaneh’s] attendance”. She also stated that LICAF had been in contact with the British Council about “safeguarding all groups at the festival”. Kessler, for his part, told UnHerd that “when you see racism, it is your responsibility — especially as a publicly funded organisation that inspires others — to call it out”. 

According to its equality policy, “LICAF aims to create a safe and welcoming atmosphere for everyone. We will ensure that all people are treated with dignity and respect and will challenge all forms of discrimination.” Yet speaking to UnHerd, Kessler attacked the festival’s attitudes towards discrimination: “It is not right to conceal [racism], forgive it, or deny its existence. But this is what LICAF is now doing.” 

Where Kessler believes that LICAF is promoting an antisemite, the festival board maintains that Sabaaneh is categorically not a racist and stresses the importance of upholding artistic freedom of speech. For all of the British Council’s reassurances about “providing a respectful safe space for dialogue”, next weekend’s events risk being overshadowed by the dispute.

For Jews, Temple Mount is where God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. As Abraham set out to obey God’s instruction, an angel appeared to stay his hand. A ram is caught and sacrificed instead — a founding event of Jewish theology. This place would later become the site of Solomon’s Temple, the spot where God was called down to be among His people, and where priests made daily sacrifices for the atonement of the people’s sins. Even before the Babylonians destroyed this First Temple in 587 BC, violence and religion sat side by side here.

In 70 AD, the Romans razed the so-called Second Temple as punishment for Jewish rebellion. They built a shrine to Jupiter on the site of Jewish sacrifice, and slaughtered pigs there as an insult. Later, Christians would use the site as a rubbish tip, doubtless for similar reasons. It became a holy space again only with the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in the seventh century. It remains the oldest surviving example of Islamic architecture. This was where Muhammad was said to have landed on the back of a winged horse to lead Abraham, Moses and Jesus in prayer. For Muslims, then, this is the spot from where Muhammad ascended to heaven.  

Ever since the Crusaders were ejected from Jerusalem by Saladin, the hill has been administered by Muslims. But when Israeli paratroopers re-took East Jerusalem during the Six-Day war, in 1967, they raised the Israeli flag over the Temple Mount compound. Watching with his binoculars a few miles away, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan ordered the soldiers to take the flag down. “Do you want to set the Middle East on fire?” he apparently barked down the radio. The flag was removed. For a brief moment, Jews had taken back control of Temple Mount. But even in the midst of victory, Dayan knew this was a step too far. The third-holiest site on earth to Muslims, the Star of David had the potential to engulf the region in an apocalypse of Biblical proportions. 

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To this day, Temple Mount is administered by Jordan. Even the Rabbis have been remarkably consistent in forbidding Jews from climbing up the hill. The place is just too holy, and without being properly purified according to ancient custom, the very act of walking on the site constitutes an act of defilement. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a very direct statement to his Security Cabinet that there has been no change to the status quo regarding Temple Mount — nor would there be. Even Netanyahu knows how dangerous such a prospect would be. 

But the very fact the prime minister felt forced to clarify Israel’s position is worrying enough. 

After the Babylonians destroyed the original Temple, the prophet Haggai urged his people that rebuilding was an absolute priority: “Is it a time for you to live in your panelled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” He then explains why things haven’t been going well for the people of Israel. “Because my house lies in ruins, while all of you hurry off to your own houses. Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth withheld its produce.” 

There have always been Jews who believe this instruction applies to the present as well as the past. Until the Temple is rebuilt, they think, God will not act with favour towards his people. This Third Temple movement has long existed as an extremist fringe. But the Hamas war has emboldened it. 

“Bless the state of Israel, God almighty, please unite our hearts to rebuild your temple,” proclaims Yehuda Glick, a US born rabbi and the most prominent of the leaders of the movement. Previously arrested for trying to go up to the Temple Mount to pray, now he walks there freely with groups of settlers, protected by the very police who would once have arrested them and encouraged by those at the highest level of government. Powerful people are now saying openly what was once one said quietly. As Yitzhak Pindrus, a member of the Knesset, said earlier this year: “We are hoping that soon the Third Temple will be built there, and that we’ll be able to eat there from the Passover sacrifices.”  

Most powerful of all is Itmar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister and leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, a man who hands out rifles to settlers and has a picture of mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein on his wall. Talking of Temple Mount he recently stated: “If I could do anything I wanted, I would put an Israeli flag on the site.” Since taking office, Ben-Gvir has visited the site at least half-a-dozen times.

Repeatedly challenged if he wanted to build a synagogue there, Ben-Gvir finally admitted he would. Less messianic members of the Israel cabinet have been quick to oppose him. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said: “Challenging the status quo on the Temple Mount is a dangerous, unnecessary and irresponsible act. Ben-Gvir’s actions endanger the national security of the state of Israel.” The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said Ben-Gvir’s actions would “lead to much bloodshed and will change. The face of the state of Israel beyond recognition.”

Yet an article in Haaretz reports that Ben-Gvir and others are secretly planning for a Third Temple. According to biblical instruction, only someone suitably purified can walk up to the Temple Mount to begin the task of rebuilding the Temple. And the ancient ceremony of purification requires a perfect red heifer to be burnt. Today, though, the heifers are being bred, the altar has been built, priests are being recruited, and messianic extremists are gathering: first to pray, but with a longer-term aim of flattening Al-Aqsa and building a Jewish temple in its place. And the people who believe this are the same people with whom Netanyahu has gone into coalition, and together they are running the country.

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This November, The Third Temple by Yashai Sarid, will be published in English. Set in the future, Sarid’s original is narrated by someone whose father “removed the mosques from the top of the temple” — and where, in retaliation, the coastal cities of Israel are destroyed by a nuclear fire. His novel highlights the huge division in Israeli society, symbolised by the contrast between secular Tel Aviv and an increasingly zealous Jerusalem. These imagined future divisions could be seen recently, however, as tens of thousands of mostly secular Israelis protested on the streets of Tel Aviv, furious about the way the Netanyahu government, and their religiously zealous acolytes, seem to have put the messianic narrative about Israel’s place in the world above the desire to make peace with the Palestinians. With men such as Ben-Gvir undermining much of the sympathy many of us have for Israel’s legitimate defence by casting the story of Israel’s purpose as being one of fulfilling some greater messianic calling — rather than as a safe haven for the Jewish people.

This is not to abandon any sense of theology when thinking about Israel. But what many zealots fail fully to register is that peace is the ultimate symbol of the messianic age: the lion laying down with the lamb, as the prophet Isaiah put it. Written after the first destruction of the Temple, Isaiah experienced the full horror of a devastated Israel. “Our holy and beautiful house, where our Fathers praised you, has been burned by fire and all our pleasant places have become ruins.” Sarid’s dystopian novel is a terrifying prophecy of this happening once again.

Britain is a country with moderate natural resources and moderate human capital. Where we have excelled is in the strength of our institutions. But the effective delivery of public services depends on the capability, motivation and organisation of public servants, and right now, that can’t consistently be counted on.

So what’s changed? I joined the Civil Service not long before the financial crash when, despite the relatively low salary, good roles attracted smart graduate talent because the work was interesting, often prestigious, and because people had a stake in the ultimate outcome — the successful functioning of the state.

That balance has shifted as years of pay restraint, combined with soaring living expenses, especially in London, have affected the calibre of staff. I know many excellent public servants who have left to triple their wages in the private sector. As a result, the country is getting fewer of our best people and state capability is suffering.

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Troublingly, this isn’t just a question of splashing the cash. Even if there were budget to spare (which there won’t be), rebuilding and remotivating the workforce would be tricky. This is partly because the problem isn’t just a numbers one. It’s an attitude one. Even though the overall size and composition of the Civil Service today does not look that different from when I joined, some of the cultural norms — or “expected behaviours” — are unrecognisable. The most noticeable change is how comfortable younger cohorts have become with publicly expressing ideological views.

The politics of identity is by no means unique to the public sector, but it is uniquely problematic within it. To take one example, it is common to see pronouns attached to the email signatures of public servants. This does not concern me because of what it tells us about those public servants’ views of gender, but because it tells us something about their views. Public servants should be aware that exposing their institutions to accusations of ideological capture, by any type of political persuasion, is damaging.

Stephen Webb, a former Cabinet Office Director, points out that ambiguity around employers’ legal position makes the hierarchy hesitant to challenge any exhibitionist public-sector behaviours, such as displaying pronouns (sometimes incongruously overlapping with the wearing of Palestinian flags and other signalling devices). Or maybe the leadership feels it’s nothing more than passive social compliance and, therefore, not worth the fight. But the effect should not be dismissed. While it’s hard to imagine this kind of signalling leading to any of the outcomes proponents want to see, normalising this sort of ideological signalling has given licence to a growth in cause based, non-work activities in the workplace, which draws focus from core business. Inevitably it also affects productivity.

Such behaviour also blurs the distinction between passive exhibitionism and more overt acts of ideological capture. This could be seen when some civil servants in the Department for Business and Trade decided that, of all the countries to whom we export military equipment, they should threaten to refuse to process export licences to Israel. There is a balance to be struck between engaging sincerely with employees to get the best out of them, and pandering to the latest TikTok cause and its pseudo intellectual underpinnings.

And while the majority of public servants are passionate and professional, their jobs become increasingly difficult when the behaviour of their colleagues degrades their institution’s legitimacy. The Met Police, for example, were already struggling to defend themselves against accusations of permitting antisemitic and intimidating behaviour during the Palestine marches; something which has been made all the harder now one of their most senior advisors has been shown chanting “from the river to the sea”. Either these public servants do not understand that the role of public service is to serve the whole public, or they believe that ideological actions are more worthwhile than their jobs’ substance.

Or perhaps there is another motivating factor. Professor Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioural science, argued that there is a difference between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self” (that is how the process of retrieving memories is prone to bias, meaning the impression we have of our past experiences can be different from how they really happened). Since, for many, the experience of real life now comes second to the way life can be presented online, I would argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a third “self” — the “representing self” — who experiences life in anticipation of how the experience can be represented on social media.

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The decisions people make have long been influenced by what they think those decisions say about them, but social media has magnified this human frailty to such an extent it has changed the way consumer markets function: people participate in activities, choose their holidays and even adjust their worldview very conscious of how this will make them appear to their chosen identity grouping. Studies have shown a link between narcissistic traits and modern Western activism and — sadly — professionalism is no longer a barrier to this type of vanity: it motivates the choices some make in the workplace (as anyone who has had the misfortune to use LinkedIn will know). This, though, should not be the case in public service. If ideological distractions are permitted, it allows employees to show they feel more connected to ideology-based identity groups than to the communities and national community they are employed to serve.

Shifting behaviours and organisational culture is hard, though, particularly when the barriers to sacking employees is high. But the stakes for the country are even higher. We have many exceptional public servants, who feel increasingly let down by the overall effectiveness of their institutions and we risk losing them to better paying work. So we need leaders who will reclaim responsibility for institutional culture from HR departments and will lead by example. Who will promote the talented and be empowered to sack those who are failing. Our public institutions have been allowed to crumble and if an incoming government fails to retain and reward those who can rebuild the legitimacy of these services, those electoral promises won’t be worth the paper they were written on.

The end effectively came last week, when Benny Gantz resigned and pulled his National Unity alliance out of the emergency government, exasperated by Netanyahu’s refusal to draw up a plan for the aftermath of the war. He was then joined by Gadi Eisenkot, the most moderate of the five members of the body. Netanyahu, presiding over a council that could no longer plausibly claim to represent a unified Knesset, was forced to pull the plug.

The problem here isn’t hard to glean. Gantz and Eisenkot were two of the more moderate voices in the coalition (and indeed contemporary Israeli politics). More than this, they are, unlike Netanyahu, both proper military men. Ganz is a former Chief of the General Staff; Eisenkot is a former Head of IDF Northern Command. Their resignation is a loss both to Israel’s military campaign and to its politics.

It was Gantz and Eisenkot who insisted a war cabinet be set up before they agreed to join Netanyahu’s emergency government in late 2023. Their rationale was twofold. First, the country needed to come together in a moment of national crisis; and second, they wanted to, as far as possible, sideline national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a couple of bloviating extremists with little military understanding or interest beyond constantly urging a more aggressive approach and rejecting any concessions for the release of the hostages. Over the past six months, these malignant cranks have spent much of their airtime arguing for the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza.

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The breakdown of the cabinet is, in certain regards, a microcosm of the problems facing Israel. For a start, the state’s ludicrous parliamentary system of almost pure proportional representation means that every single Israeli government is a coalition. This, in turn, means they almost always contain minor parties populated with various loons who are elevated to the role of kingmakers. It also means that governments tend not to see out their full terms. This is a legacy of Israel’s socialist beginnings; and it was perhaps the most egregious error David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founder, ever made. The results are plain 80 years later. Netanyahu feverishly needs both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to keep his coalition together — especially now. He has no choice but to take account of their various religious and political pathologies. Without them, he’s out.

Perhaps the second greatest mistake Ben Gurion ever made was to exempt the Orthodox Jewish Israelis from military service. He did this because, back then, there were relatively few of them (they made up around 5% of the population). They didn’t have to serve or pay tax, because they fulfilled their duty by “praying for the state”. Obviously, Ben Gurion knew this was nonsense, but it was the easiest way to keep them on side. The problem is: when you don’t have to pay taxes, and indeed get a host of benefits for doing essentially nothing, you tend to have a lot of children (as the Orthodox do anyway), especially when you get benefits for every child. There are now expected to be two million Haredis by 2033.

In early June, as the Supreme Court heard arguments that the exemptions are unlawful, dozens of Haredis blocked roads in protest. The tensions around this issue cannot be underestimated. At the turn of the century, I flew to Israel to take part in a debating competition when I was Chairman of Debating at the Inner Temple during an ill-advised (and ill-fated) foray into law. Inner Temple were the reigning champions and, with my debate partner Michael (a Northerner who had lived in Israel for 20 years), I had to bring the oversized trophy. For this, I purchased extra legroom seats on the El Al flight so we could rest the trophy securely in front of us. After dozing off for a while, I awoke to find the space occupied by two Haredis davening (praying). As they rocked back and forth, a look of disgust passed across Michael’s face. “Fuck off!” he roared. “Michael, you can’t speak to them like that,” I whispered, mortified. “Fuck ‘em — freeloaders,” he retorted. “And pay some fucking tax!” he bellowed at their retreating figures.

These issues have dominated Israeli politics for decades. Now, they threaten to unravel it. Netanyahu is a masterful politician, but, more than this, he is an old man desperate to stay in power. All his political skills are now devoted to this; winning the war is a secondary priority. He knows that when all this is finally done, the official enquiry will come and, as prime minister, he will not be able to escape blame.

With the more reasonable and more military experienced voices now gone, the prognosis for the sanity and pragmatism of Israeli government decision-making does not look good. Israel is engaged in a war in which its avowed and overarching objective — the total elimination of Hamas — has already failed. It had recent success in rescuing four hostages in operation “Seeds of Summer”, an extraordinary military operation involving its special forces. But the effect is ultimately limited. Especially given, as an IDF official admitted to me in Tel Aviv, there is a belief that many of the hostages are now dead. 

With no military solution likely, only a political one remains — to the degree that any “solution” to all this is possible, which I suspect it is not. The best that can be hoped for is a cease of hostilities and some kind of governmental transition to ensure that a terror group like Hamas cannot govern Gaza again. The problem is that there is now a nexus of interests at the centre of Israeli politics that is less interested in compromise. And pragmatism and compromise will always have to come from Israel because, even though Hamas started all this, Israel is a democratic state, and Hamas is a bolus of psychopathic thugs.

At several points since Hamas’s attack, I’ve returned to the words of a fellow Middle East analyst who, over a beer in a Jerusalem bar, summed up the Israel-Palestinian conflict to me in a single sentence. Looking more exhausted than anything else, he replied: “I think the technical term for all this is irretrievably fucked.”

It’s not just Greta who sees a link. When the current conflict in Gaza began, the climate activist group, Just Stop Oil, known for polarising, clickbait-friendly protests, such as blockading the M25 or throwing soup at Van Gogh paintings, promptly organised a sit-in at London’s Waterloo Station. 

 This sort of campaign creep is far wider than just climate and Palestine: all contemporary radical causes seem somehow to have been absorbed into one. A protean animating energy seems to ingest every progressive issue it encounters, to create a kind of ever-spreading, all-encompassing omnicause.

But what is it trying to achieve? Right or Right-adjacent figures as ideologically disparate as James Lindsay and Bronze Age Pervert have suggested it is the destruction of America. Or, perhaps, of “Western Civilisation”. And there may be something in that, at least if you conflate “Western Civilisation” with the American empire. After all, a great many ethnic-cleansing events are casually ignored, even as the state whose existence is explicitly underwritten by American hard power gets taken to court over such allegations. 

Given this, one might be forgiven for suspecting that Gaza’s absorption into the Omnicause really is due to its role as a proxy for hostility to the American project: a suspicion unlikely to be allayed by the sound of Palestine supporters from Yemen to Harvard Yard chanting “Death to America”. And yet, the fact that this chant is heard not just in overseas territories hostile to the American project, but also (and perhaps even more vociferously) within Ivy League campuses, suggests something more ambivalent at work. 

It might seem bewildering to hear young scions of the empire calling for the destruction of the very order that nourishes them. But that’s not what’s happening here; not really. Rather, in calling for “Death to America” they’re breathing new life into the idea they claim to deplore, and expressing a modern version of the same impulse that drove America’s original founders to leave the Old World behind, with its weight of authority and tradition, and seek to begin again in a purer, higher register.

It’s hardly original to notice the Puritan streak in modern progressivism. During the BLM riots in 2020, numerous commentators made that connection. The critic Alan Jacobs characterises this form of progressivism — the moral matrix that now marches as the Omnicause — as religious in this sense: less a precise set of doctrines than a style of believing. A “mythical experience”.

Further out on the neoreactionary fringes, the writer Curtis Yarvin argues that this “nontheistic Christian tradition”, which he calls “Universalism”, has become “the dominant modern branch of Christianity”. And the philosopher Nick Land maps this secularised-but-triumphant Puritan-heritage Christian sensibility squarely onto the American empire:

“After its military victories in the American Rebellion and the War of Secession, American Puritanism was well on the way to world domination. Its victories in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War confirmed its global hegemony. All legitimate mainstream thought on Earth today is descended from the American Puritans, and through them the English dissenters.”

The secularisation of this tradition began in earnest after the Second World War, along with its embrace by the engines of commerce. That was the point where American marketers coined the term “teenager”  — and created modern “youth culture” with it. For, strange as it may seem, after nearly a century of American cultural hegemony, the notion of adolescents challenging their forebears is not universal. Rather, it propagates in tandem with American culture: for example the Inuit community on Victoria Island, Canada, experienced no youthful delinquency until television was introduced in 1980. In the context of the American paradigm, by contrast, rebellion is not just normal but natural, whether presented “compelled” by culture or an inevitable consequence of brain development.

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Though my own memories of adolescence are hazy, I don’t remember ever questioning the idea that it was “normal” to feel rebellious — for all that, in my case, this preceded having any substantial  grounds for rebellion. Rather, it was a matter of looking around for a cause, a seemingly backward causality that’s since led me to wonder whether the normalisation of “rebellion” is the driving force behind youth activism, rather than the other way round, as young people go looking for a cause to rebel about.

And if this is so, it perhaps explains how such issues often seem to spread by social contagion, as in Thunberg’s snowballing school protests — or indeed contemporary LGBTQ activism. A similar mimetic quality can also be seen in the current American Palestine protests, where participants often seem hazy at best about what they’re actually protesting, and mostly there for the vibe. In this sense, it seems less a programme, than a sensibility: a social norm of rebelliousness, sanctified by idealism and spread mimetically, that expresses a secularised version of the Puritan style of faith and has become central to identity-formation.

Crucially, though, this has historically been oppositional only in a superficial sense. The music industry serves to illustrate: when your chief means of signalling rebellion against the staid, venal world of adulthood is buying products marketed to you and manufactured by that very same adult world, the relation between rebellion and conformity is ambivalent at best. In turn, this dynamic has propelled every “counterculture” movement since the Fifties along the same seamless conveyor-belt, from edginess to mass-market conformity, exhaustion and replacement by the next contender.

In each case, the chief by-products were a lot of money for the culture industry’s stars and producers, and a measure of youth identity-formation. But this 20th-century model of pseudo-rebellious youthful self-definition via music and clothing was scuppered by the internet, as streaming made all musical styles simultaneously available, and “fast fashion” emulsified sartorial subcultures into an eternal present. Things haven’t changed much under the surface though. The cultural norm of youthful rebellion, idealism, and mimesis is as powerful as ever. It’s just that since the inception of the internet, the locus has migrated from music and fashion to political opinions, as testified by the booming podcast and political influencer economies.

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In turn, it’s this underlying drive that explains the protean quality of the Omnicause, and its seemingly endless ability to ingest new causes and transcend new contradictions. The Protestant tradition — and especially the Puritan one — always repudiated religious authority in pursuit of religious purity. And the same mix of idealism and secession persists to this day in secularised form, in the ritual of adolescent “rebellion” incubated by 20th-century American marketeers and granted idealistic form today as “youth activism”. The myth of “the West” is that you aren’t Westerning properly unless you’re seceding from something, and what powers “the West” — really, America and its provinces — in its restlessness is this impulse to keep seceding until you find the purer society you were seeking. At the smaller scale, the myth of the American teenager is that you aren’t teenagering properly unless you’re rebelling against something and pursuing something higher. Each American teenager is thus “the West” in miniature, complete with the modern West’s baked-in will to consumerism.

The flip side of this, of course, is that rebellion never succeeds on its own terms. Instead, it simply ends up powering the civilisational engine. Thunberg isn’t American, of course, but she attained prominence in, and orients her critiques to, the America-dominated post-war order. It is, after all, only in the context of broad adherence to its rules-based internationalism that climate policies of the kind she gained prominence for proposing can even theoretically be implemented. Accordingly, we can perhaps assess the success of her mimetic and Omnicause-coded youth climate movement, against every other America-led “youth culture” movement since the Fifties.

We might suggest, indeed, that it’s heading the same way as the rockers, the hippies, the punks et cetera: first edgy, then institutionalised, and on its way to toothlessness, save as a means of powering the machine for another turn or two. Thunberg was internationally feted, and invited to address national Parliaments, the European Parliament, and even the WEF meeting at Davos: surely the climate-activist equivalent of a multi-album HMV recording deal. She became a darling of elites and internationally recognisable for a season. Meanwhile, global emissions went on rising.

So, perhaps she has pivoted to a different facet of the Omnicause simply out of frustration at the effortless ease with which her climate idealism has been absorbed, digested, and neutralised. If so, I suspect she will be disappointed again. To the extent that ongoing campus protests cause a genuine nuisance, they have already been suppressed. Where they persist, we can assume they are serving broadly the same social purpose as a music festival: fostering youthful social bonds in an idealistic context, that helps define popular culture for a generation, but changes very little in material terms.

Does this mean I’m a pessimist about “the West”? Far from it: this paradoxical and seemingly self-destructive cultural juggernaut is in fact flourishing, for the Puritans are still winning. Far from being on the brink of collapse, in their restless wake “Western Civilisation” continues to be reborn, generation after generation, in the very act of seeming to destroy itself. The Omnicause may be hated by conservatives for its destructiveness and seeming hostility to all established authority, all traditions and all institutions. But it is also the vector for that ongoing rebirth — and, with it, however galling Greta Thunberg may find it, the ongoing supremacy of the American project.

Other adherents of his thought have not followed him. Writing recently for UnHerd, Thomas Fazi claimed that the arguments of realism actually fit the war in Gaza very well. He argues that just as any realist appraisal of the Russian invasion of Ukraine must acknowledge the role of Nato expansion, so too an explanation of this war needs to be as rooted in the regime imposed by Israel on the Gaza strip as in the horrors of the Hamas atrocities last year.

Yet a realist appraisal of any war has to go further than an inductive analysis of its immediate causes to also consider the political character of its protagonists. One of the basic distinguishing features of realism is its focus on state power and the ruthless means by which states secure themselves, leading to the recurrence of violent conflict. And in this war, there is only one state to speak of — the Israeli one. Prior to October 7, the dependence of the Hamas authorities on the Israeli state was so extreme that the strip could be characterised as a de facto devolved province of Israel itself, with Hamas expanding to fill the vacuum left by the Israeli military and settler withdrawal in 2005. And as is now well-established and increasingly recognised, Israel has propped up Hamas ever since as a deliberate strategy for dividing the Palestinians of Gaza from those in the West Bank under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

A realist analysis should recognise this Israeli domination over Gaza, but the weight of its analysis should fall on the permissive cause of Israeli policy: the fact of Palestinian national defeat. For if realism is to carry any meaning whatsoever, it must surely include a lucid registration of historic defeats and victories, both political and military. There is one unavoidable fact in the history of this conflict that matters more than Israel’s crude strategies of divide-and-rule, and that is the fact that the Palestinians’ leaders effectively surrendered to Israel many years ago, at the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993.

Oslo was, in Edward Said’s ruthlessly incisive appraisal at the time, nothing short of a “Palestinian Versailles”. In accepting the two-state solution, Said argued, the Palestinian leadership renounced the entirety of Palestine’s national claims, accepting the substitution of municipal for national aspirations, with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) reduced to the role of policing Palestinians on behalf of Israel. The defeat of the secular Arab nationalism of the PLO would create the void that groups such as Hamas now occupy. But the rise of Islamist factions in Palestinian politics also traces a wider arc in Arab politics that began with Israel’s victory over all the leading Arab states of the era in the 1967 Six Day War. Since then, Islamic conservatism has come to substitute for Arab nationalism as the dominant force in Middle Eastern politics, whether backed by Iran on the one side (Hezbollah and Hamas) or Saudi Arabia on the other (the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and Isis).

For Hamas as for other Islamists, the ultimate referent object of politics is the overarching transnational community of believers, the ummah. For them, secular nation-states are provisional makeshifts at best, if not simply idolatrous substitutes for righteous rule. This is significant because as long as there is no agency that can legitimately claim to represent the Palestinian nation, their aspiration to independence remains a defunct and meaningless proposition. Over the years, regional experts have made much of the idea of a so-called “hudna”, a religious notion of ceasefire that some academics take as evidence for Hamas’s willingness to subordinate their religious ideals in favour of accepting secular rule and accommodation with Israel (at least in the short term). But given the fact that Hamas only exists in the ruins of Palestinian national independence, it makes little odds for the future of the Palestinian people, whatever term of Islamic jurisprudence one chooses to drape over Hamas’ thuggish theocracy or the iron fist of Israeli oppression.

Since the defeat of Palestinian nationalism in 1993, there has been no meaningful political agency in the conflict or the region except that of the Israeli state. Any political claim in this conflict that does not begin from this reality will inevitably find itself remoulded around the hard fact not only of Israeli military might but also the fact that the Jewish state is the only real political force in the Palestinian territories. And this is why analysts who otherwise draw from realism end up echoing so many of the liberal humanitarian claims around Gaza — whether describing the Israeli assault as a genocide, or boosting the claims of the International Court of Justice in its recent interim ruling.

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As the founding father of British realism E.H. Carr observed, world-history is the real world-court. Any realist who finds themselves resting the weight of their arguments on the feeble claims of international law has forgotten this prior. The reason that both popular and diplomatic opposition to Israel’s reprisals has taken the form of demanding ceasefires in the name of liberal humanitarianism is because there is no agency that can legitimately claim to act on behalf of the Palestinian nation and imprint its demands on the political process. Or, as Edward Said wrote (paraphrasing Karl Marx) in the opening to his 1978 book Orientalism: “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented”. This is the case for the Palestinians today. The profusion of support for them around the world is in inverse proportion to their political inarticulation and powerlessness. The more hapless and weak they are, the more support they earn.

This is the bitter lesson realism has for this conflict. While a ceasefire may be desirable to relieve the suffering of Gaza’s civilians, it is no diplomatic solution to the conflict. This is not because it is not desirable or because one should never talk to terrorists — there is simply no party to treat with. Israel negotiating with whatever remains of Hamas after the end of the Israeli operations will produce no lasting solution simply because Hamas does not represent the Palestinian nation and does not even aim to. The idea that the two-state solution can be revived is the height of idealist utopianism, as decades of stalled peace talks and ever-worsening violence should have made clear.

But this logic applies to Israel too. As long as it refuses to take responsibility for its victory in 1993, and the Palestinian nation remains dead, any two-state solution will mean Israel devolving its authority to a quisling regime to rule over the prostrate Palestinians. It is hard to see how this is compatible with any definition of genuine Palestinian freedom. And if so, how can there be a lasting settlement to the conflict? Israel is thus in the wrong not for moral reasons but for political ones — it refuses to follow through on the implications of its own victory, opting instead for the dystopian prospect of waging forever war against those it has already defeated many times over.

A genuinely realistic analysis should make clear there is currently only one state across the whole of the historic mandate territory of Palestine, and it is Israel. But if Israel continues to evade the task of exercising sovereignty over its subjects in the Palestinian territories, then the only other option for Gaza is some kind of international protectorate. This will be accepted by Israel in preference to ruling Gaza directly and perhaps policed by international forces provided by Muslim states, likely involving Saudi Arabia, if only to preserve Saudi efforts to normalise relations with the Jewish state. Israel’s sovereignty will be compromised by the intrusion of the international community into its territory, and the Palestinians will certainly not be free in a little Saudi-sponsored colony.

It is doubtful that anyone would march for Palestine in this endgame: the Palestinians safely cosseted under a “permanent ceasefire” policed by foreign forces from the ummah. A protectorate for Gaza will return Palestine to its modern roots as a League of Nations mandate, its independence deferred to some remote feature. Doubtless some Quranic mot juste will be found that can be bandied about sagaciously by Western academics in order to give an authentic “decolonial” legitimacy to the new humanitarian colony. Anti-Israel protestors who have marched in cities around the world to condemn Israeli atrocities will find that they were a stage-army in the service of the global NGO-cracy, which will rapidly assimilate Gaza into another province of their own mini-empire of charitable sinecures.

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Where does this leave realism in this war? In overlooking the reality of Palestinian defeat, its supposed adherents have allowed moralism to creep into their realism (in modern international relations, moralism means the “international community”). That is to say, they end up supporting the exercise of the exact kind of Western power that they so eloquently criticise elsewhere. That said, realism alone will not offer a solution to the conflict. As Aris Roussinos observed in his recent meditation on realism and E.H. Carr, taken to its logical extreme of endless cycles of competition for power, realism is ultimately barren, with no political meaning at its core.

By contrast, it was James Burnham who conjoined realism with freedom through the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli who, despite his reputation as an amoral powerbroker, understood that strife was a necessary condition for the preservation of liberty and independence. As Machiavelli maintained, anyone who is serious about freedom must be serious about political power — not only to understand how to hold it in check but also to understand how it is wielded and deployed. As long as there is no Palestinian nation, there is no political agency that can bear the weight of Palestinian freedom. All arguments that do not start from this premise inevitably devolve into liberal humanitarian arguments which prioritise the Palestinians’ human rights over their national rights. Conversely, as long as Israel refuses to recognise its own domination over the Palestinians, the longer it will be trapped in a forever war against a people who are already entirely in its power.

We drove up, parked a way off, and had a look. The uniformed men had the surly arrogance of most border officials but overlaid with an air of proximate violence. I could understand Mohammed’s reservations.

Rafah is a metaphor cast in concrete and steel for Egypt’s fraught role in the decades-long conflict between Israel and Palestine. Egypt, the only other state apart from Israel that borders Gaza, has had an uneasy peace with Jerusalem since 1979. And as the most populous Arab state in the world (Sudan is second with less than half its numbers), its leaders know well that most of their citizens loathe Israel. Whoever rules Cairo is always juggling several flaming torches at once.

Officially, Egypt is, like all Arab states, a proud and steadfast supporter of the Palestinian cause. Just over a week after the October 7 massacre, president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declared that “the Palestinian cause is the mother of all causes and has a significant impact on stability and security”.

But in terms of its Gaza policy, Cairo is aligned with the United States. It wants Fatah, which governs the West Bank, to take over the strip as a precursor to Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and an end to the violence. At the end of last year, Arab media was filled with reports that Egypt and the US wanted former Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to run Gaza. Cairo was seeking a “government of technocrats” and Fayyad, with his extensive connections in Washington and close relationship with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, was seen as the perfect candidate.

Egypt’s plan was fleshed out on Christmas Day: following a ceasefire, officials explained, Cairo would lead talks to bring together Hamas and the PA, after the latter was driven out of Gaza following its 2007 elections. The two groups would then create a joint “government of experts” to run the West Bank and Gaza ahead of future elections. “We are ready for this [Palestinian] state to be demilitarised, and there can also be a guarantee of forces,” Sisi outlined a month earlier.

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Yet beneath the rhetoric is a more complex reality. First, there are the practical considerations. Gaza was in Cairo’s hands from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence until Israel’s conquest of the strip in the Six Day War of 1967. During those two decades, it made no attempt to found a Palestinian state, nor did it want Gaza to become a part of Egypt, let alone allow many Gazans into the country. Gaza is a problem that Egypt simply doesn’t want.

And since October 7, that has not changed. Soon after Israel began its offensive, Sisi warned that any “displacement [of Gazans] to Sinai means transferring the attacks against Israel to Egyptian territories, which threatens the peace between Israel and a country of 105 million people”. Egyptian officials worry that if refugees flow in and camps spring up, they would become recruiting grounds for extremist groups, particularly the various malign Islamic State offshoots marauding around Sinai. This is largely why, in November last year, the Egyptians met with CIA Director William Burns and flat-out refused to manage Gaza even temporarily. Nor did Egypt get involved with counterinsurgency operations, or take any responsibility for post-war security in Gaza — something it obviously has a vested interest in.

Second, of course, is the inescapable matter of ideology. If the Egyptians dislike Israel, then its leaders detest the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian pan-Islamic Islamist group whose professed aim is to set up a Caliphate ruled by Sharia law. Indeed, Sisi got his job via what they call a “military-led takeover” in 2013 against the former president and Muslim Brother, Mohammad Morsi. In other words, he really despises the Brotherhood — and Hamas, after all, emerged from Mujama’ al-Islami (“Islamic Centre”), an Islamic charity founded by one of the Brotherhood’s leaders in Gaza.

Egypt targets the Brothers with unyielding ferocity. In 2015, Morsi was sentenced to death for conspiring with foreign organisations including Hamas (he died four years later of a reported heart attack after collapsing in court). The following year, Egypt’s interior minister accused Hamas of assassinating a public prosecutor, leading one prominent talk show host to call for an Arab military offensive against Hamas. “I ask to strike the terrorist camps inside Gaza because terrorism always comes from within it, and the Arab countries must take action to reject the Hamas movement,” he said. But this isn’t a mere war of words. Cairo has also taken action on the ground, with the Egyptian military destroying 1,370 Hamas tunnels under Rafah in 2014; the following year, it used sea water to flood yet more tunnels.

Even so, there has been some cooperation between Cairo and Hamas when interests converge, notably in early 2020 when Hamas arrested an Islamic State member after Egyptian intelligence handed it audio recordings. The two sides also collaborated on the construction of a border wall in Sinai as part of their wider anti-Islamic State efforts, which also saw Rawhi Mushtaha, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, travel to Cairo to discuss security co-operation.

But like shrubs in the Sinai, these instances go against the norm. Hatred and fear of Hamas runs deep in Egypt’s rulers — which makes growing public support for the former’s war against Israel an increasing cause for concern. Recent polling conducted by the Washington Institute, for instance, found that 97% of people agreed that Arab states must “immediately sever all diplomatic, political, economic, and any other contacts with Israel in protest against its military action in Gaza”. Moreover, 96% agreed that Egypt should provide more humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

These are troubling figures. And not least because neither Sisi nor any of those around him will ever forget that Morsi was legitimately elected by a majority of Egyptians (though he then proceeded to blow that legitimacy by trying to change the constitution to effectively make him a modern-day pharaoh). The Brothers took power once, and they can do so again. But all Sisi can do is sit in his palace and watch on as the nation his people most despise tries to do the thing he most desires: destroy Hamas.

As each day goes by, Hamas in Gaza grows weaker, but the Brothers in Egypt grow stronger. It does not help that the country is also in the grip of a financial crisis of almost existential proportions. When people talk about the wider consequences of the Gaza war, it is normally about the possibility of the Middle East exploding. But lost amid this is the prospect of something just as bad: the very real possibility that the world’s most populous Arab state might implode first.

The two cases differed in important respects. The first came after the German regime, actively supported by much of the population, had launched the most murderous war in world history, and committed the worst crime in world history. Palestinian Arabs bore nothing like this responsibility. The first expulsion, though, took place largely after Germany had surrendered, while the second occurred in the middle of a conflict in which Palestinian leaders called for driving Jews from the land between the river and the sea — and welcomed an invasion by Arab armies to achieve this goal. In other differences, the ethnic Germans still had a German state in which to make new lives, while the Palestinians — though they could seek refuge among fellow Arabs — had no country of their own. But in both cases, massive numbers of mostly innocent people ended up in miserable refugee camps.

The two stories, however, then took radically different turns. Three quarters of a century later, the descendants of those expelled ethnic Germans have built a permanent existence in new homes and no longer dream of reclaiming towns and villages that most of them have never seen. As late as the Eighties, lobby groups of the expellees remained visible in West Germany — I remember coming across a small protest in Munich in 1983 in which old men and women carried banners reading “Schlesien bleibt unser” — “Silesia is still ours”. But these groups had little political influence and have largely faded away as the last survivors have aged and died. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still live in what are called “refugee camps”. More than five million have the formal status of “Palestinian refugee”. They raise their children on stories of the towns and villages that were theirs, and that might be so again. Many of them support terrorist attacks on Israel, claiming that it is the only way they have of recapturing their lost homeland.

I am not drawing this contrast to cast blame on Palestinians for not following the example of the ethnic Germans. Jews like myself, who have chanted “next year in Jerusalem” every Passover for many centuries, can hardly lecture others on the need to “move on”, and to forget a lost homeland. My point is rather that in the modern world it is actually the experience of the ethnic Germans which has become increasingly unusual. Fewer and fewer conflicts have as decisive and permanent a resolution as the Second World War, and this change has had decidedly mixed consequences.

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Before the era of the French Revolution, peoples around the world mostly accepted that military victory conferred certain legitimate rights upon the victor. The Yale historian James Whitman has argued that in 18th-century Europe, jurists viewed battles as akin to legal procedures, their outcome having legal force that peace treaties would then codify. When Prussia seized Silesia from the Austrian Empire in the 1740s, for instance, contemporaries accepted the conquest as legitimate because of Frederick the Great’s battlefield victories, not because of arguments as to whom the province rightfully belonged. That particular transfer of territory did not involve a transfer of population, but others did.

Starting in the late 18th century, however, a belief in what Whitman calls the “law of victory” began to fade. Jurists increasingly defined all war not waged for strictly defensive purposes as illegitimate, and thereby denied that acquisitions achieved by force could ever acquire the force of law. Already in the 1790s, when the French Revolutionary state took over new territories, it took care in most cases to legitimise the annexation through plebiscites. After the First World War, transfers of territory, at least in theory, likewise depended on the will of the population in question. And since the 19th century, nationalist movements have insisted on the unbreakable and eternal right of particular peoples to sovereignty over their historical homelands. Go to Hungary today and you will see maps of the country that still adhere to the boundaries of 1918 — when the country included all of present-day Slovakia, most of Croatia, and large chunks of present-day Romania and Serbia.

In this history, the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe stands out as exceptional for the modern period. Joseph Stalin’s determination to punish Germany for its aggression and ensure the future safety of the USSR trumped what had become the usual pattern of European conflict resolution. The cataclysmic scale of the conflict, and of Soviet losses — with more than one in seven Soviet citizens killed — encouraged the allies to go along. As late as 1940, when absorbing the Baltic States and eastern Poland, the Soviets had first staged sham elections to choose representatives who then “requested” annexation. But when, in 1945, the USSR added half of East Prussia to its territorial gains, it effectively did so on the basis of the law of victory. It had no historical claim to the territory, whose pre-war population was 85% German. At the same time, Stalin insisted that Germany surrender its other eastern provinces. The expulsions followed.

It would be natural to applaud the eclipse of the “law of victory” as a triumph for enlightened human values. How can a civilised society possibly accept an idea that boils down, in essence, to might makes right? When Whitman writes that “18th-century wars were more contained and civilised than the wars that have been fought since 1860, not less”, he is surely uttering an absurdity. Or is he?

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The paradoxical consequence of this shift away from the “law of victory” is that, today, international conflicts often prove almost impossible to bring to a definitive conclusion. In case after case, each side endlessly accuses the other of illicit aggression, of violation of sovereignty, of illegitimate seizure of territory, of illegal expulsion of populations. Even when the actual fighting ends, or dribbles down to the occasional skirmish, definitive peace agreements prove frustratingly elusive. Instead, we are left with “frozen conflicts” that drag on for decades, often accompanied by the emergence of new states that have a shadow existence, unrecognised by others and unable to join the United Nations: Northern Cyprus, Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Kosovo, etc. Of all these frozen conflicts, Israel-Palestine is the most prominent — although “frozen” seems a singularly inappropriate term for such a ferocious situation.

Meanwhile, encouraged by international opinion and homegrown nationalists alike, national leaders refuse to contemplate ceding even an inch of their legally recognised territory to military opponents. Is there anything sacrosanct about the present-day borders of Ukraine, which Soviet politicians drew in the Fifties for reasons that had very little to do with history, or the desires of the affected populations? The Crimean Peninsula in particular has a largely ethnic Russian population, and historical ties to Russia — which itself, admittedly, seized the territory by force from the Ottoman Empire, which in turn seized it from someone else. But Ukraine has absolutely refused to contemplate ceding Crimea or anything else within its borders to Russia, insisting on the integrity of its territory, and (quite reasonably) protesting that any legitimation of Russia’s aggression will only encourage more of the same. But the alternative has meant leaving Crimea in legal limbo for the foreseeable future, along with the eastern Ukrainian territories that Russia has occupied, even as the Russia-Ukraine war devolves into yet another frozen conflict.

The conundrums created by renouncing the “law of victory” are all the greater because the modern world recognises no statute of limitations on aggressive conquest. Very few living Israelis played a part in the events of 1948-49, but, in the eyes of much of world opinion, the present-day Israeli population still bears responsibility for correcting them. For that matter, do the United States, or Canada, or Australia or New Zealand have legitimate sovereignty over their territories? According to increasingly popular theories of “settler colonialism”, they do not: colonists stole these territories from their rightful, indigenous owners, which retain at least a moral claim to sovereignty.

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One result, in the US, is the spread of “land acknowledgments” in which various institutions make public statements that they exist on illegitimately seized land (I happen to be writing this essay on the ancestral lands of the Lenape people). In practical terms, such statements make little difference, but people who see their own state as fundamentally illegitimate because of events that happened hundreds of years ago are unlikely to treat the dispossession of the Palestinians as a settled issue, particularly when they cast Israelis as “colonists” — although a majority of the Israeli population descends from Jews who lived in the Muslim world, and were themselves expelled in the wake of 1948.

Obviously, these conundrums are not going to be resolved any time soon. The principle that aggressive war cannot be countenanced or encouraged is too powerful to resist, and in part for good reasons. But it might help if states at least did more to acknowledge that the conundrum exists, and that, as Whitman argues, our enlightened principles have often produced surprisingly dark outcomes. It might help as well if states more readily conceded that as time passes, even if the rights of a dispossessed people remain valid, the form in which they deserve restitution should be open to change. We need to recognise the difference between people reclaiming land that they personally lived on, and land that their grandparents lived on, now inhabited by grandchildren of the people they accuse of having dispossessed them. Even in the space of less than a generation, at some point it may make sense for contending parties to reach an agreement in which compensation takes a non-territorial form. An insistence on justice should not condemn us to conflict without end.

In recent years, however, the people of Oberammergau have significantly reworked the play; Jesus and the Apostles are now clearly Jewish themselves, the Judaism of Jesus’s time is presented with nuance and understanding, and crucially, Roman imperial power is depicted as pervasively as it was. Yet though Oberammergau has changed, the Passion Play endures — most recently on stage last week at the International Court of Justice, northwest of Bavaria, in the Hague. There, South Africa initiated proceedings against the State of Israel, alleging that it is actively committing genocide in its war in Gaza.

The texts being invoked are no longer the Gospels but treatises of international law; the figure in the dock is not the traditional Jew living by centuries-old laws, but a sovereign, in many ways, secular state, with considerable military and political power. Yet again, the Jews are charged with being the criminal outliers of global society; whether they are, in a devilishly complicated situation, acting wisely or unwisely, proportionally or disproportionately, is beside the point. Their guilt is total and collective.

The magisterial historian Gershom Scholem remarked that one of Zionism’s consequences is that the Jews will no longer have to play the symbol in other people’s myths. Great a scholar as he was, he was wrong.

That Israel’s allegedly genocidal war is a response to a religious terror movement’s gleeful, forthrightly genocidal marauding was largely unmentioned by Israel’s accusers at the Hague. That the terrorists retreated, hostages in hand, to a painstakingly prepared and boobytrapped subterranean city below mosques, hospitals and schools, mentioned even less. Amid these gaping omissions, one can’t but wearily conclude that Israel was bound to be accused of genocide, no matter what it did following October 7, short of bowing its head in surrender.

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Hypocrisy is at work here, of course, but that is almost trivially beside the point. Genocide is more than a justifiably hideous characterisation: as a legal category, as rhetoric and policy framing, it is a doomsday weapon of epic proportions. It is, in its heightening ignominy to the nth degree, almost uniquely totalising.

Under the terms of the Genocide Convention, passed by the United Nations in 1948, states can be called upon “to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide”. In other words, designating something as genocide brings with it a duty to act — and it is the fear of that duty that paradoxically encourages responsible states to desist from using the term and thus draw on its moral and mobilising force.  That is why the US took 40 years to ratify the Genocide Convention and has been so hesitant to invoke it long after it did. When I served in the US State Department we deployed an ensemble of verbal acrobatics — “acts tantamount to genocide”, “acts constituting genocide”, “acts of a genocidal nature” — rather than plain old “genocide”, since we knew what it entailed.

None of this is to say that Israel is immune to criticism. So much of what makes this war so very miserable is its happening on the watch of the worst government in Israel’s history. Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners, each for their own reasons, spent most of 2023 trying to replace the country’s flawed but vibrant democracy with an ultra-Right, mercenary dictatorship. They, like Hamas, badly misjudged the ranks of Israel’s civil society, who mounted massive efforts to preserve judicial independence and the rule of law, and then, come October 7, pivoted to military service, and to offering as much as they could of the social services that their hollowed-out state was unable to provide.

Netanyahu deliberately kept Hamas in power, on a low flame, rather than deal with the Palestinian Authority, whose own fecklessness made his life easier. And for years, many Israelis, myself included, went along with Netanyahu here, at least as regards not militarily confronting Hamas, because we knew that doing so would necessarily entail the nightmarish urban warfare and civilian suffering unfolding now. This was a trade-off, and one that ended very badly. But my very mentioning of the term “trade-off” reminds us that we live in a complicated world, one in which moral clarity is a hard, unending challenge, with myriad decision points along the way.

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Fortunately, we have a branch of international law to help guide us in wartime: International Humanitarian Law, including the Laws of Armed Conflict. Here, Israel has laid out its understandings of that body of law as it pertains to this conflict, and its interpretations. Those interpretations are of course open to criticism, particularly around the issue of “proportionality”, as any warfighting might be. But that requires attending to the actual facts on the ground; and that is precisely what South Africa’s presentation last week at the Hague deliberately did not do.

As Itamar Mann, a well-respected Israeli scholar, himself strongly critical of the present war, has carefully pointed out, precisely because South Africa itself is not a party to the conflict, it was perfectly positioned to lay out a more complex picture of the facts than it did. By acknowledging, for instance, Hamas’s deliberate shelling of Israeli civilians since October 7, and subsequent warfighting from its tunnels, it could have presented a much stronger case.

South Africa, of course, had reasons of its own for presenting the case as it did. It is, after all, attempting to position itself as a leader of the blocs of countries increasingly challenging the already-tottering US-led world order. But even so, pressing a case of genocide still requires proving two elements of the crime: genocidal intent and genocidal actions.

South Africa was able to present evidence of genocidal-sounding intent from any number of political actors in the Netanyahu government. None of them, though, have direct decision-making authority over the conduct of the war, leading to open hostility between some of them (Itamar Ben-Gvir above all) with the IDF high command. That direct authority is reserved not just to the military professionals, but to the war cabinet, convened by Netanyahu to insulate him from his own coalition partners, and in which the political opposition to Netanyahu is well-represented; given Israeli public fury at Netanyahu, he would no longer be in power if they weren’t in the room. Moreover, if genocide were Israel’s aim, issuing warnings before bombings, creating humanitarian corridors (however limited), and allowing in food and other necessities would be a pretty poor way of going about it.

And if this is genocide, its meaning has been far removed from its usage following the Second World War, when the term, along with “human rights”, entered the global lexicon. The two designations are far from identical, and in some respects push in different directions. But both resulted from well-meaning efforts to wrest from the teeth of unimaginable horror some new, bedrock principles on which there could hopefully rise a better world.

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People from a range of countries, religions and cultures worked to establish these new ideas, Jews and Zionists among them. For Jews, human rights’ grant of individual rights separate from citizenship was a welcome solution to the trauma of statelessness that doomed so many in the years before the war; “genocide”, meanwhile, reflected the understandings that groups, national and ethnic groups, have a personality all their own.

The crucial figure here was the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” and is widely regarded as the Godfather of the Genocide Convention. Well before the Second World War, he had been thinking and working, along with a number of other jurists, on a central question vexing modern nation-states: the rights of national minorities.

He recognised that national groups, like individuals, exist prior to the state — and sought to reconcile their group-belonging with the individualised nature of citizenship. In 1919, this idea found hopeful expression in the national minority treaty system of the nascent League of Nations, under which member states pledged to honour the collective rights of national minorities within their borders.

We know how well that all worked out. The point, though, is that while the League was a disastrous political and moral failure, it was a legal failure too — and it was those treaties for minority protection that failed, for Jews above all.

After this collapse, Jewish jurists sought alternatives — the framework of human rights, the nation-state of Israel — and sometimes both at once, as James Loeffler’s magnificent scholarship has shown. Lemkin (though himself a Zionist in his early years, as Loeffler has shown), took a different tack. To him, the idea of human rights was amorphous and unenforceable. As for Zionism, while it had indeed contributed to his own thinking on minorities’ group rights, he chose to downplay its role — largely to avoid genocide’s politicisation in a solely Jewish context.

For Lemkin, if Human Rights was a way of granting individuals rights prior to the state and even if they had no citizenship at all, the Genocide Convention was a way of preserving collective groups from the modern state’s uniquely centralised, industrialised and murderous power. Implicit in the Genocide Convention is the notion that the extermination of the Jews was paradigmatic but sui generis. The Holocaust, in other words, was not to be seen as utterly and unreservedly unique, not least because then we would be left with nothing to learn from it. Vicious regimes have savaged innocent groups of people throughout history. Rather, what is so striking about the Holocaust is the way nearly every form of degradation and slaughter known to history, compounded by such modern creatures as industrialised mass murder and racial ideology, made for an apotheosis of physical cruelty and cultural extermination.

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The Holocaust was thus the model, the catalogue, of all that hatred of groups could bring and all that international law was meant to prevent. Despite his deeply held differences with Jewish architects of human rights such as Hersh Lauterpacht (who was responsible for the idea of “crimes against humanity” at the Nuremberg Trials) and Jacob Robinson (a key drafter of the UN’s Refugee Convention), he shared their fundamental conviction that Jewish suffering yielded powerful new lessons for the world.

Which brings us back to last week’s activities in the Hague. Israel, too, emerged in 1948 in the aftermath of monumental genocide, and the circumstances of its birth are joined to the concept of genocide at the root. If it practises genocide, one might conclude that it therefore forfeits its “right to exist”. Indeed, Israel appears to be the only country regularly talked of in terms of having, or not having, “a right to exist”.

This is a marked shift from Lemkin’s vision, which hoped that extending the idea of personhood from individuals to groups would help those groups survive. The “right to exist” euphemism, by contrast, inverts and weaponises the language of individual rights to facilitate the kind of mass murder we saw on October 7. It contorts the immense, pained complexity of the Jewish State, the cruelties and injustices attending its birth, as well as those it has itself committed, into a vicious contest, in which one side is always on the defensive, just an argumentative slip away from offering itself up for destruction.

What’s worse, the always conditional nature of Israel’s existence in so many precincts is exactly what Netanyahu and his ultranationalist partners count on to keep them from coming to terms with Palestinian national identity. Pile-ons like those we have seen these last months in the end disserve the Palestinians and their genuine needs, and serve the ends of the most malignant actors involved, Hamas not least among them.

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Jihadism, the stated ideology of Hamas, doesn’t accept the legitimate personhood of national groups and is in both theory and practice genocidal to the core. Its accusing Israel of genocide, in a fact-free way that undercuts the legitimacy of the idea of genocide as a whole, works to erode the rules-based international legal order that Hamas rejects to begin with. That international legal order and its aspirations to universalism is far from perfect, to say the least. Yet what might take its place? If another universalism, then of what? Not all universalisms are benign — and as universalisms go, Jihadism is singularly unforgiving.

Several nephews of mine serve in the Israeli Army and have been in the thick of fighting in Gaza. I asked one of them, a reservist in a commando unit and a bohemian neuroscientist in civilian life, what he thought of last week’s proceedings at the Hague. He didn’t get defensive, but told me that he and some comrades had been talking about it. He calmly asked: “What is the value of doing this now? I’m not doing genocide. Are others? I didn’t see it. Is the state? I don’t think so. But what’s going on there? What exactly do they want to get out of this?”

The answer, I’d venture, is much — and also nothing at all.

Much — in that some of what motivated the proceedings has to be the result of genuine concern for Palestinian suffering. But so much of it seems to be foisting onto Israel blame for all that colonialism wrought, and all that post-colonialism failed to do; beating up on America via its Israeli client; keeping alive Soviet-style Third Worldism for the sake of Western progressives; blaming the failures of the Gods — of ideologies, of utopian legalism — on the all-too-human Jews; retreating from a confrontation with Jihadism by hoping that one day Israel will simply go away.

And nothing at all — in that there is no attempt in these proceedings to ease the very real suffering of Palestinians on the ground from all that Hamas has brought upon them on its own, and by bringing down upon them the full force of Israel; and no attempt to convey to moderate Israelis that there actually is an international community trying to use international law to end conflicts rather than carry them on by other means.

Few doubt that our world needs International Humanitarian Law now more than ever. But that law needs to be credible — or it will be worse than nothing at all.

Today, as the dust settles, the global community cannot afford to let this threat escalate. The Houthi attacks, combined with the worsening Israel-Iran confrontation, have raised oil prices and forced 20% of the world’s container ships to avoid the Red Sea — instead taking the far longer route around the southern tip of Africa. Increased insurance rates and freight charges will soon be passed on to consumers. There is a clear need for international action to restore freedom of navigation — yet the West finds itself with few good options.

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But before we go to war with the Houthis, or launch further strikes, it is probably a good idea to understand exactly who they are. “Houthi” is a derogatory name for Yemen’s Ansar Allah or Supporters of God movement, which was founded in the Nineties by Hussein al-Houthi and, since his death in 2004, led by his brother, Abdul Malik al-Houthi. Hussein was a gifted orator whose message found many listeners in Yemen’s neglected and impoverished northern Sa’dah province, where most inhabitants belong to the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam. The Houthi brothers called for a Zaydi religious revival, opposition to Yemen’s central government, and hatred of Israel. Their signature chant remains “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, God is Great”.

In 2011, when Arab Spring protests brought Yemen’s government down, the Houthis seized control of Sa’dah province. Then, in 2014, they joined forces with the deposed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh to overthrow the internationally recognised transition government of Abdu Rabbu Hadi. With Saleh’s help, they advanced from their homeland in the north all the way to Aden in southern Yemen in just two months. Then the Houthis turned on Saleh and killed him. The United Nations condemned the Houthi’s coup and human rights violations, while also authorising the inspection of vessels bound for Yemen in order to confiscate weapons.

Today, the Houthis nominally control most of Yemen, where they have imposed a vicious police state — although much of the country is in fact ruled by local tribes and war lords. The multinational naval blockade has caused great suffering in a nation that imports most of its food, fuel and medicine, and rampant corruption in Houthi-controlled ports has made delivering foreign assistance difficult. Thousands of Yemenis have died from fighting, disease and malnutrition; millions have been made homeless and unemployed. The Yemeni people are not looking for another war.

Iran did not create the Houthis but, recognising them as fellow Shia Muslims, it has long provided the movement with funds, arms, training and advice. And for more than a decade, Iran has aggressively used the Houthis — along with other paramilitary proxy militias, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — as a vehicle to expand its influence in the Arabian Peninsula and undermine its traditional rival Saudi Arabia.

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Yet Washington also bears some responsibility for today’s Houthi crisis due to its failure to maintain its longstanding security partnership with Saudi Arabia. In 2015, the Saudis tried to prevent the Houthi takeover of Yemen. They had numerous reasons for doing so: they wanted to limit the smuggling of weapons, drugs and people across their southern border; they did not want al-Qaeda terrorists fleeing from Saudi Arabia to find a haven in Yemen; and they did not share the Houthi’s view that much of southern Saudi Arabia should belong to Yemen. Above all, the Saudis did not want Iran to expand its influence in Yemen.

The Saudi effort was largely confined to an air campaign which at various times relied on American weapons, refuelling and intelligence. Like all bombing campaigns, this resulted in civilian casualties — remember that more French civilians died on D-Day as a result of the pre-invasion allied bombardment than allied troops died on the Normandy beaches. While it seems unlikely that the Saudis spent expensive munitions deliberately targeting school buses, such incidents prompted harsh criticism of Riyadh, the termination of some US military assistance, and eventually the effective end to their campaign.

Washington’s tepid support for the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis caused the Saudis to doubt the credibility of US security commitments, especially when threats to cut off arms sales became almost routine. And American hesitancy to supply the Saudis with drone technology forced them to turn to Italy and China. When the Biden administration removed the Houthis from the list of designated terrorist groups and withdrew Patriot air defence systems from Saudi Arabia, the Saudis had even more reason to doubt America.

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By David Patrikarakos

The Saudis soon found themselves in a difficult situation, wishing to devote financial resources to economic development rather than an endless war in Yemen. With Washington appearing to ignore their security concerns and facing persistent Houthi missile attacks, the Saudis changed course. In 2023, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, renewed diplomatic relations with Iran, reopened his country’s Embassy in Tehran after seven years and welcomed a series of high-level Iranian officials to Riyadh. The reconciliation between Tehran and Riyadh was brokered by Beijing, not Washington. Part of this process involved a ceasefire in Yemen which continues today.

It would have been much wiser for America to have supported Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates when they were willing to commit their own troops to defeat the Houthis. Now, these two states benefit from a fragile peace with Iran and are not interested in a renewed confrontation with Iran’s proxies in Yemen. As a result, although the Saudis and Emiratis have a long history of cooperation with the US Navy, they have politely declined to join Operation Prosperity Guardian, the US-led attempt to protect Red Sea shipping. They are even less likely to participate in any offensive actions against the Houthis.

The broader problem is the emergence of a multipolar global order in which the United States is no longer the controlling superpower. In 1990, when America successfully led an international coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraq’s invasion, Russia supported Operation Desert Storm, China remained neutral, Saudi Arabia underwrote the costs and Israel stayed on the sidelines. None of that is likely to happen today if the United States goes to war against the Houthis. Indeed, both Russia and China abstained from voting for Wednesday’s UN resolution demanding a ceasefire.

America’s hands have been also tied by the war in Gaza. By claiming that their attacks are made in support of the Palestinians, the Houthis have transformed themselves from pirates into resistance fighters. Much of the world agrees with them that Israel should withdraw its forces from Gaza, which has made forming a multinational coalition against them difficult: not wishing to be accused of supporting Netanyahu, the rest are happy to free ride.

Meanwhile, Tehran’s quest for regional hegemony is also influencing events in the Red Sea. Without Iranian missiles and drones, the Houthis’ attacks would be much less effective. However, dealing with Iran is a long-term problem. The immediate issue for the West is protecting commercial shipping in the Red Sea. There are no good solutions: doing nothing poses serious risks for global trade; taking offensive action against the Houthis risks igniting a larger war that could jeopardise Middle East oil production.

Suggested reading

Human rights died in Gaza

By Yehudah Mirsky

Most probably, the war in Gaza will end, and when it does, the Houthis’ justification for their attacks will evaporate. If they continue after the war is over, most nations will regard them as dangerous terrorists. Yet, once started, a war with the Houthis may not end quickly or easily. Before beginning another “as long as it takes” conflict, Washington should consider less risky options: expanding a formal convoy system such as the one used to protect Kuwaiti tankers during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) appears to be the least bad option, at least initially.

And with this, there is no reason why protecting freedom of navigation in the Red Sea should be the sole responsibility of the United States, Britain and a few willing partners. Most of the cargoes transiting the Suez Canal are bound for Europe and Asia, not the United States or Great Britain. Many nations, including China, Japan, Korea and Germany, do not want their trade disrupted by Houthi attacks on commercial shipping. Nor do they want their energy supplies disrupted by a large-scale war to eliminate the Houthis. They have very tangible interests in finding a peaceful solution to the Houthi problem.

Transforming Prosperity Guardian into a truly multinational operation would increase its effectiveness, reduce its costs for each participant and isolate the Houthis. Perhaps more important, it would demonstrate clearly that all options short of war had been tried and thus help to justify any offensive military action in the eyes of global public opinion.

But creating a more multinational operation is a political and economic problem, not a military one. Finding a solution is a job for creative diplomats, not admirals. Support for a more multinational operation need not involve sending ships: statements of public support condemning maritime terrorism would help, so would financial contributions and logistical support. The justification to emphasise is that the war in Gaza and piracy in the Red Sea are two different issues and that secure global trade is in everyone’s interest. Before we enter yet another easily expandable armed conflict, we should use diplomacy to convince the rest of the world of this.

All of this activism has propelled him from just another Democrat megadonor and lockdown enthusiast to the latest hero of the political Right. But while you can understand conservatives’ excitement at sticking it to overpromoted DEI hires at elite universities, there has been a distinct lack of questioning over his methods. Putting the plagiarism to one side, surely conservatives should deplore these tactics on principle: publishing lists of people guilty of political wrong-think on university campuses, abandoning the much-vaunted value of free speech, orchestrating pile-ons and demanding resignations on social media. This is what they have been campaigning against for years.

This won’t be popular among my many conservative friends, but since the terror attacks in Israel on October 7 and the divisive war that followed, the tenor, emotion and heavy-handed tactics employed to control the current debate across campuses and throughout our institutions reminds me of how the BLM narrative was ferociously politicised during the summer of 2020. Back then, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the people who lost jobs for incorrect political positions were almost entirely those who were critical of BLM or leftist identity politics. Since October 7, while the circumstances of each termination vary, the firings have all been of people holding pro-Palestinian views.

The departure of Gay, along with Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, has given conservatives much to celebrate. Activist Christopher Rufo sees the whole event as a “successful strategy for the political Right”, while politicians such as J.D. Vance regard Gay’s defenestration as a decisive victory against DEI hegemony. But their original crime — the event that made them a target — was the refusal to crack down on pro-Palestinian activists in the wake of October 7, followed by their congressional testimony on the subject of anti-semitism on campus. The video clip of each leader apparently failing to condemn alleged calls for the genocide of Jews has gone viral worldwide, and on the face of it seems impossible to defend.

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Claudine Gay and the mafia of mediocrity

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

But if you watch the full hearing, instead of just the clips, it is very clear what took place. Republican attack dog Elise Stefanik spends her entire questioning slot trying to trap the university heads in specific logical sequence: first, do they agree that calling for “intifada” and chanting “from the river to the sea” are direct calls for genocide? They refuse to concede this point, insisting (I think reasonably) that both terms are context-dependent, and that students must be allowed to express political opinions even if they are personally abhorrent to university administrators. At the end of the hearing, in her final round of questions, Stefanik returns to the theme, asking in summary whether calling for genocide of Jews constitutes bullying and harassment and is against their colleges’ code of conduct? If they were to answer a simple yes, then every student calling for “Intifada” or chanting “from the river to the sea” would have to face disciplinary proceedings, so naturally each university head refuses to bow to that logic and continues to insist that each incident would be a “context-dependent decision”. Hence the now-infamous smirks: everyone in the room could see what the congresswoman was trying to get them to say.

In the event, Stefanik won the day, because their prevaricating clip looked just as bad out of context. She went on to point out the hypocrisy of university administrators spending the past decade training students that “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” constituted violent and dangerous speech and yet couldn’t condemn actual calls for genocide. The argument landed. But consider the principles that have been conceded in the process of deploying it: not only should the most hateful and extreme interpretations of every word or phrase be used when judging them, but speech is, after all, violence. These are far-Left ideas that conservatives were supposed to be against.

During the height of BLM furore, the far-Left pursued and cancelled high profile targets by inflating the risks posed by conservative speech. In 2020, James Bennet, editor of the opinion desk at The New York Times, was forced into early retirement after running a column by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton. In it, he called for the military to disperse violent BLM riots sweeping the country. Such was the political tenor at the time that the Times’s labor union claimed the article was a call to “invoke state violence” against racial minorities — the mere publication of the piece, the union claimed, placed “Black staff members in danger”. Bennet issued an apology and promptly resigned. And yet the column contained no demand for violence against Black Americans. When the National Guard was indeed called in to restore order by a variety of mayors and governors, just as Cotton had requested, there weren’t any instances of soldiers harming minorities. Was this so different from the current campaign against the university presidents?

Suggested reading

Why Israel can't accept a ceasefire

By Edward Luttwak

The new mood in the political Right goes far beyond Claudine Gay. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his presidential bid promising a war on “woke censorship”, is now demanding the removal of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group his administration claims provides material support for terrorism. This may well be a radical organisation with, at times, poorly informed views. And its toolkit did appear to glorify Hamas’s paragliders. But rather than ban the organisation outright, would it not be more prudent for conservatives to address its insensitive shortcomings in the cold light of day? The Left has long attempted to cancel conservative leaders on campus who were accused of legitimising torture and advocating for pro-American death squads — policies that one might find odious but which should be debated, not deplatformed.

Where direct violence isn’t being threatened, shouldn’t we trust students and readers to digest and assess for themselves? Is it not the duty of a university to allow students to grapple with contentious beliefs and slogans in the marketplace of ideas? Authoritarian states such as Russia and China stigmatise and remove dissenting views on foreign policy on university campuses, broadly categorising any protest as dangerous to national security — Western democracies should be wary of following this path.

Even supposedly neutral academic studies are beginning to show some of the same motivated reasoning that has infuriated conservatives in the other direction in recent years. Exaggerated claims of racism have abounded since 2020, when a widely cited University of Michigan study claimed to have found surging hate incidents against Asian Americans. A closer look at its methodology, however, showed that the researchers counted every major public figure who raised the lab-leak hypothesis to explain the origin of Covid-19 as an example of “anti-Asian” racism. Hardly an example of overt bigotry.

Today, the highly influential Anti-Defamation League has reported a nearly 400% increase in antisemitic attacks across the country. There is every indication that antisemitism is on the rise worldwide, and that Jews are uncomfortable and unsettled with the rising heat of the argument. But the presentation of evidence must be rigorous if it is not to be dismissed as propaganda. In fact, the ADL study counted rallies and protests among its list of hate incidents, including a recent rally by Jewish Voices for Peace and other pro-Jewish groups opposed to Israel’s occupation and military assault on Gaza. This is only one example, but it is a prominent one that cheapens the charge — and by conflating all criticism of Israel’s government with antisemitism it ignores precisely the distinction that some pro-Palestine activists need to be reminded of.

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Jerusalem is Israel's future

By Ben Judah

As usual, politicians are the worst offenders and the quickest to jump on a new division for partisan advantage. Democrats have long leaned on fear of fringe white supremacists and minor hate groups to galvanise voters: President Joe Biden even launched his campaign with images of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, to draw a comparison with President Donald Trump. Now, Republicans are capitalising on fears of terrorism and anti-Jewish discrimination. Republican groups are flooding competitive districts with messages denouncing opponents for failing to condemn campus protest rhetoric. In a sad twist, the Republican House committee overseeing academic issues went from hosting hearings just months ago that proclaimed the “ability to speak freely to build one’s knowledge is a cornerstone of the American system and postsecondary education” to demanding speech rules.

No group better embodies this shift than Ackman’s conservative supporters. Gone are the days when appeals to “free speech” were a useful defence for them in the culture wars on race and gender. Instead, its virtues have been abandoned amid a climate of fear and outrage. Ultimately, this calls into question whether these conservatives really believed in free speech in the first place. And this, I fear, could end up being their undoing. For perhaps more than anything, in America, the past months have revealed how swiftly the tables can turn when it comes to censorship. Whatever happens in the coming weeks, however many more academics are defenestrated, the Right should be careful what it wishes for.