Despite being the most popular politician in Venezuela, María Corina Machado has been banned from standing in this weekend’s election. Forbidden from flying, she must rely on cars and motorcycles — even canoes, horses and tractors when the roads are deliberately blocked — to criss-cross the country for campaigning. She is kept off most of the media. Her rallies have been attacked. Her aides and supporters have been beaten, detained or forced to flee into friendly embassies.

Machado endures all of this in the hope of forcing out a thuggish regime that preaches socialism while pillaging the state, sparking economic meltdown, mass hunger and the world’s worst displacement crisis. “Last week, we went to the state of Apure and we stopped to have breakfast,” Machado said when I heard her speak last month. “A couple of hours later the regime sent officials to close this tiny restaurant on the route. If we stay in hotels when we travel around the country, they are closed for several months. Many of the people who give us sound, move us around on buses are searched at their homes and their trucks or equipment are detained, for months sometimes.”

Little wonder this 56-year-old woman, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, has been nicknamed the Iron Lady. As she admits, it will be tough to defeat one of the world’s most repulsive regimes — and there have been previous false dawns. If the elections were fair, her rival President Nicolás Maduro would be ousted along with his gangster pals in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela after overseeing the impoverishment of an oil-rich nation and driving out 7.7 million citizens — one-fifth of the population. The polls suggest the opposition has more more than twice the support of the ruling party. But they are taking on a government with a record of electoral fraud and frustrating democracy.

So Machado plans to mobilise hundreds of thousands of supporters to monitor all the polling stations during Sunday’s vote, which is being held after a deal was brokered last year in Barbados for fair elections in return for lifting United States sanctions and allowing in some outside observers. “We are not naive knowing what the regime will do,” she told fellow dissidents attending the Oslo Freedom Forum. “We’ve been facing persecution, violation of human rights. But the regime is weaker and weaker every day. They have totally lost their social base and at the same time the networks they use for terror in the population are breaking down.”

Last October, the charismatic Machado — a conservative former parliamentarian who once called for outside intervention to save her country — won a massive majority in the opposition’s primary contest. But after one survey found she was backed by more than two-thirds of voters with Maduro languishing on 8%, officials disqualified her from running for public office for 15 years on grounds of supporting sanctions. But she remains the driving force behind Venezuela’s united opposition. Machado and her substitute candidate, former ambassador Edmundo González, have been drawing big crowds to rallies despite all the efforts to disrupt their campaign. Such is the disillusionment over the country’s economic collapse and desperate desire to reunite families divided by the mass exodus of citizens, they claim they can win power against the odds.

Analysts compare Machado’s popular appeal, energising the opposition and rousing people out of apathy, with the rise of her arch-enemy Hugo Chávez in the Nineties — although her mission is rooted in despair rather than Marxist ideology. The flamboyant former army colonel, who led a failed coup in 1992, took office seven years later by harnessing public anger over corruption, inequality and nepotism. Then his socialist party machinery strangled democratic institutions such as the civil service, courts and press, while his cronies plundered state coffers. Chávez’s former finance minister estimated they stole $300 billion before their leader’s death in 2013, when he was replaced by Maduro.

Yet Chávez was feted by Western Leftists as a progressive idol supposedly fighting for social justice. Seduced by his social programmes, foolish Western celebrities, journalists and politicians turned a blind eye to his human rights abuses and looting. Never mind that his government fired 18,000 workers who went on strike in protest at the politicisation of the state-run oil firm, replacing them on the public payroll with loyalists. Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called him an “inspiration” for demonstrating “wealth can be shared”, while his sidekick John McDonnell praised Venezuela for showing “the contrast between capitalism in crisis and socialism in action”. Hollywood actor Sean Penn called Chávez a model democrat, even demanding jail for “mainstream media” journalists who dared to brand him a dictator.

Amid all this naive adulation for the Chavismo creed, Venezuela’s economy ended up suffering the biggest collapse outside of wartime in the past half-century. A country with the world’s biggest oil reserves was hit by severe blackouts, hyperinflation and mass hunger as bakeries could not find flour, hospitals ran out of medicines and pro-government militia terrorised urban areas.

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Faced with the inevitable disillusion that followed, last year Maduro tried to stir Venezuelans up into patriotic frenzy with a referendum on grabbing two-thirds of next-door Guyana after the discovery of big offshore oil reserves. But his ploy failed: turnout was thought to be lower than the 2.4 million voting in the opposition primaries, which were run without any state support. This did not stop the Venezuelan president from stunts such as printing new maps of his enlarged nation and granting energy licences for the disputed region, provoking fears the border dispute might be used to postpone the presidential election.

The tragedy of this failed revolution was symbolised by the mass exodus of people, many of whom fled across Latin America and into the United States. In the past two years alone, almost half a million Venezuelans entered the US. Two months ago, I was in Ecuador — home to the fourth largest number of these refugees and under a state of emergency amid spiralling gang violence — where I heard of growing hostility and xenophobia towards Venezuelan exiles. Yet one journalist told me how the region used to look wistfully at oil-rich Caracas, seeing a peaceful and prosperous beacon of stability.

But this is an election that might have immense significance extending far beyond those exiled Venezuelans who dream of going home. For if Maduro’s regime can be forced from power, it would be a serious setback for the axis of autocracy led by Russia and China that is engaged in an epochal global struggle against democracy, seen most acutely on the battlefields of Ukraine. As the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum dissects in her book Autocracy, Inc, Venezuela has evolved under Chávez and Maduro into a central player in an international alliance of repressive regimes. These states assist each other with a sinister and self-serving web of kleptocratic financial systems, surveillance technologies and propaganda machines to defy sanctions, shred internal dissent and challenge democratic freedoms. So Caracas developed commercial, fiscal and political links with Beijing and Moscow while Cuban security experts helped stifle opposition and showed them how to weaponise chronic food shortages created by theft and incompetence. Few were surprised when, in March, Maduro hailed the re-election of his Russian ally Vladimir Putin as “a flawless electoral process”.

Yet Applebaum points out that these Left-wing internationalists built their most important ties with the Islamic theocracy in Iran, highlighting how these new networks of repression are built on shared lust for power, wealth and impunity rather than ideology. “What binds them is oil, anti-Americanism, opposition to their own democracy movements and a shared need to learn the dark arts of sanctions evasion,” she writes. Iran has bought Venezuelan gold, advised on crushing dissent, helped with a drone factory and assisted with repairs on oil refineries. In return, Caracas has laundered cash for Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group, and has provided passports for its leaders.

It is hard to believe that people power might finally topple the government of Venezuela, that its leader would accept the electoral verdict and not resort to trickery or violence even if defeat is beyond doubt. Yet Machado insists the regime is alarmed by her civic uprising and that even many former Chávez supporters want the misery to end so their children can return from exile. Her declared mission is bold: to turn the most corrosive hub of crime and destabilisation in the Western hemisphere and a key ally of Putin and Iran “into the biggest promoter of human rights in the region”. If that happens, it would certainly be a victory to celebrate far beyond the borders of this devastated South American country.

Many of these ambitious youth have flocked to the cities from the countryside in search of a better life. But according to the most recent census, 39% of its population still hold rural hukous, or legal housing registrations. This means that when inhabitants leave their homes to work in the cities, the land cannot be sold. It remains bound to them forever.

Not everyone thinks this is wise. Reformers argue that farmers should be allowed to sell their plots before moving on. Large agricultural companies could then swoop in to buy the land and build vast Iowa-style factory farms all over the Chinese countryside. This, they say, would enhance China’s agricultural productivity and yield, which is currently comparatively low: the snaggle-toothed, sun-beaten peasants are deeply inefficient compared with the robot harvesters, fruit pickers and milkmaids at work in the West.

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The reformers warn, too, that China is becoming too reliant on America. And while still self-sufficient in grain crops, it is struggling to satisfy a growing appetite for meat which it currently imports in large quantities from America and Brazil. So in order to wean itself off American cattle, something which may become even more urgent with the advent of Trump 2.0, China will have to disinherit its peasantry and embrace the factory farm.

While tempted by the vision of agricultural self-sufficiency, President Xi Jinping is loath to do this. On a practical level, China’s political elites see the bountiful countryside as a social safety net during times of economic hardship. China doesn’t have a government-managed welfare system; faint gestures, such as the 医保 healthcare system, are still in their infancy. So the fact that the poor know how to grow their own food and have the land to do so is hugely important. It also provides a useful safety net in case of emergencies. During the Covid lockdowns, many of the migrant workers who keep Chinese cities running returned to their rural hometowns, planted cabbage and lived off their land. Had that land been sold, they might have starved instead.

China’s top brass also fear that if rural villagers were able to sell their land, they would be targeted by predatory corporate interests in league with corrupt local governments. This is exactly what happened in Russia during the Nineties, when citizens of the former USSR were given vouchers representing their share of the collective economy as it was privatised. Many of them immediately sold these vouchers to cowboys for cash, and drank it the same afternoon. Out of such misery, the oligarchic fortunes of Roman Abramovich and his cronies bloomed.

In any case, the CCP is terrified at the thought of swarms of disinherited peasants destabilising the urban outskirts. The hukou system currently keeps the 300 million peasants working in the cities in their place. These migratory workers are treated as second-class citizens and only residents are given priority access to local schools and hospitals. Eliminate this pecking order and Chinese public services will be overwhelmed.

But there’s another reason that Xi is hesitant to abandon the peasantry. Like the majority of Chinese leaders, he was sent to the countryside as a teenager during Mao’s Cultural Revolution — and still harbours deep admiration for the soul of the Chinese peasantry. At the age of 15, Xi was sent down to a village in northern Shaanxi, a poor and barren region, where locals live in caves. At first, by all accounts, he found it difficult to adapt to this troglodytic way of life. But it soon toughened him up. According to official propaganda, which is no doubt embellished, he built methane tanks, and dams to protect villagers from flooding. To this day, Xi credits his time in Shaanxi for teaching him what life was really about; happiness comes from struggle, he says, as he urges today’s young Chinese to do the same.

These feelings are echoed by the wider CCP leadership. For China’s elites, abandoning the countryside to robots and drones would be a sociocultural tragedy. Some respected theorists, including Wen Tiejun, believe that if the CCP betrays the peasantry, it is making itself vulnerable, as city dwellers aren’t nearly as loyal as the villagers. For Wen, the villagers preserve the true spirit of China, while the essence of the West has seeped into the corrupt cities. He has a point: the process of urbanisation is inevitably a process of social atomisation. In a city, it is every man for himself. Yet the CCP desires the opposite: for every man to be united in a shared effort, and it is villages, not cities, which produce men like that.

In 2006, former president Hu Jintao said that: “The countryside is the cradle of the Chinese nation, agriculture is the foundation of the national economy, and farmers are our bread and butter. If we lose these three, we will also lose the foundation of our nation.” Like Xi, Hu Jintao comes from a generation of elderly Chinese policymakers who once tasted rural life. They still prefer the austerity foods of their youth and many retire to the countryside in later life. These men often have an instinctual, conservative contempt for cities, and hold a near religious reverence for the ancient traditions of the villages.

So after decades of facing outwards, China’s elites are now turning inwards. Xi’s recent drive to protect Chinese ecology is a case in point: in the Qinling mountains of Shaanxi, he has ordered the demolition of villas and hotels three separate times. It has become one of his signature policies, deeply intertwined with nationalist ideas and anti-corruption campaigns. For Xi realises that while urbanites have no connection to the land, its past, or to each other, the peasantry keeps the idea of China alive. For as long as there are people tilling the fields and speaking in dialects, China will never forget who she truly is.

Insecurity, then, drove Hastings into devising the “system of conciliation”, essentially a vanity project that entailed winning over the déclassé intellectual elites of India to the Company cause. And so, surrounded by a coven of Hindu and Muslim clerics and thinkers, he was able to reinvent the Company man as a patron of the native intelligentsia. The upstart merchant-mercenary of yesterday was now the enlightened scholar-statesman of the new dispensation. As it was, the overwilling Hindu and Muslim pundits cynically, and perhaps understandably, treated the whole exercise as a power grab, letting on to the Company’s pen-pushers that they were the repositories of India’s unchanging laws. Their spurious claims about the existence of a fairly coherent body of “Hindu law” and “Muslim law” were taken at face value and willed into being.

With a few minor tweaks, it’s a system that still exists in India today. Under its original terms, the state abdicated responsibility on matters relating to inheritance, marriage, and divorce, ceding control over “personal law” to hastily appointed ultraconservative religious authorities. The upshot for Indian Muslims was a legal regime of shariatic derivation in which unilateral divorce without alimony was a male prerogative. The inheritance law was of a piece with this vision: sons were entitled to twice the share passed to daughters. This was just as well for the “orientalists” of the East India Company, enamoured of “authentic” native custom, even if no such thing existed. It likewise suited its more hard-nosed businessmen, anxious to rule on the cheap. Public law — land contracts, taxes — was kept in British hands, while pesky personal law was offloaded to priests.

Over the past quarter-millennium, no universalising countervailing influence has been able to breach this identitarian consensus. Indeed, only two serious stabs have been made by rationalists to undermine religious authority, the first of which was the zestful Utilitarian attack of the early 19th century on a range of religious customs. The second was the largely passive revolution of 1947, when the baton passed from an English to Indian elite, committed notionally to secularism. But Hindu and Muslim personal law remained on the books.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Hastings is to blame for Modi, or that a direct line can be drawn from 1772 to 1992, when Hindu fanatics sparked nationwide riots after tearing down Babur’s Mosque, a pivotal episode in the rise of Hindu nationalism. Rare though it was, precolonial India was no stranger to confessional violence between Hindus and Muslims, not least over matters of cow worship and slaughter. Yet the fact remains that Indians, in the main, clung to their primary identification as members of this and that sect and subcaste. It took British legal reform and Hindu and Muslim religious revivalism in the 18th century to convince a great many to start thinking of themselves above all as Hindus and Muslims.

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Devolution added a further fillip to fanaticism. As the franchise expanded from the 1860s on, and first councils and then provinces fell into Indian hands, religion offered a crude shorthand for political difference. Hindus and Muslims milked votes through their respective positions on cows, and increasingly the stakes went beyond bovine blood, also encompassing human flesh. Here was the unholy alliance between votes and violence that would have crippling consequences for the country after independence. And the arrival of the new intellectual current of nationalism only compounded this confessional problem. Deciding to mine the rich vein of national identity, the Hindu-dominated Congress Party, established in 1885, propounded an anticolonialism which amounted to a sentimental tribute to Hindu gods. It unsurprisingly found itself at loggerheads with the Muslim League, founded in 1906, which successfully lobbied for a Muslim quota in the services and in parliament, essentially an electoral extrapolation of the Hastings principle. If still far from a foregone conclusion, the road to Partition was now clear.

By the time the cantankerous and identity-obsessed Mohandas Gandhi seized control of the Congress in 1920, it was, in a sense, already too late for course correction. Rather favourably disposed to Muslims unlike many a rabidly prejudiced Congressman, Gandhi nevertheless inaugurated a political style that precluded any semblance of common ground between Hindus and Muslims. “My Hindus” could strike deals with, even befriend, “you Muslims”, but any alliance between the two faiths could only ever be skin-deep. The chasm between Hindu and Muslim was far too existential to warrant any meaningful connection with a member of the opposite team. More dismayingly, Gandhi’s handpicked henchmen didn’t so much as even pay lip service to the official ideology of secularism. By 1937, a mere 2.2% of the party membership was Muslim; at the time, one in four Indians swore by Islam. When the bulk of the provinces fell to the Congress that year, the trial run at independence revealed what a farcically one-sided affair the party was. Cow slaughter bans were introduced. In schools, idolatry was forced down the throats of hapless Muslims. Not long after, in 1940, Jinnah’s Muslim League would demand a separate homeland for Muslims.

So it was that when the Brits Brexited the subcontinent seven years later, the transfer of power was accompanied by a carve-up: a largely Hindu India achieved independence sandwiched by two pools of Pakistan snipped from its sides.

Since independence, Indians have struggled to make one nation out of two communities. Already in the early Fifties, a purge of Muslims had left the higher echelons of the civil service entirely devoid of minorities. More recently, the Hindu nationalist BJP — in power since 2014 — has given carte blanche to Hindu militias to break up interfaith marriages and bulldoze Muslim homes. Its new citizenship law is designed to disenfranchise millions of Muslims in the borderlands. In cities such as Ahmedabad, laws have been passed preventing Muslims from buying and renting property in Hindu areas.

Detached observers will rightly point out such enormities are par for the course in young democracies, where the demos falls hostage to the ethnos. Indeed, the Indian dilemma is far from unique. As in the former colony, so in the metropole. Postwar Britain, too, was after a fashion a new nation, having just emerged out of the British Empire. It is no accident that the rise of English nationalism in the mid-century was roughly coeval with the rise of Hindu nationalism. As the historian Olivette Otele has recently reminded us in African Europeans, race mattered rather little in Europe in the age of empire; prejudice turned instead on religion.

The experience of black Britons in the 20th century confirms this. In their brilliant sociology of the British elite since Victorian times, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman recall an interview with a black British woman who contrasted her experience of Oxbridge in the Seventies (“Don’t come to my room while my parents are here. They don’t like coloureds,” she was told) with that of her parents in Thirties Oxbridge (they “absolutely loved it, so I had a slightly rose-tinted view of the whole thing. So I walked into the kind of prejudice that my mother never met. She was met by a lot of curiosity, but not overt racism”.)

Their strikingly different experiences point to a broader phenomenon. As a rule, modern empires have handled diversity better than nation states. In the latter, parochialism has all too often trumped cosmopolitanism; and prejudice, toleration. So it shouldn’t surprise us that the experience of a black Briton in the Thirties, when Britain was still an empire with at least a smidgen of commitment to ethnic plurality, was altogether different from that of her daughter in the Seventies, when Britain was in the throes of a rabidly intolerant postimperial nationalism. It is the reason why, despite being a Brexiteer, I maintain a theoretical sympathy to supranational projects, even the one that has gone horribly wrong next-door. For it can hardly be denied that Britain’s return to cosmopolitanism, in great part of Europhilic stamp, took the edge off English nationalism.

If Hindu nationalism has succeeded where English nationalism has failed, it is because identity politics has won out in India. Segregation in all its declensions — legal (the long shadow cast by Hastings and the orientalists); electoral (the marriage of votes and violence); social (Modi’s war on miscegenation and mixed neighbourhoods) — has been placed on a pedestal. Contrariwise, in England, a steady universalisation of laws has resulted in the dismantling of the pillars of minority oppression — Catholic emancipation in 1829; decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967; abolition of blasphemy laws in 2008 — all the while steering clear of the kind of identitarian quotas and carve-outs, exemptions and exceptions, that have gained ever greater currency in India. It is no accident that, beyond the crenellated confines of the ivory tower, so few Brits set any store by racial or religious identity politics today. Compare Tommy Robinson’s itsy-bitsy fan base with that of Enoch Powell’s in his prime. Small wonder the far-Right’s brat summer proved to be such a damp squib.

Under orders from the Dutch East India Company not to antagonise the locals on whom it depended for trade, van Riebeeck restricted himself to planting a protective bitter almond hedge along the borders of his besieged encampment while continuing to negotiate with the enemy. Thus was early laid the pattern of future South African race relations: an equilibrium of teeth-gritting mutual tolerance mitigated by social distance and punctuated by sporadic violent irruptions, conquests and subjugation.

Remarkably, a single South African constitutional order emerged 340 years after van Riebeeck’s almond hedge through the Act of Union of 1910, and after another 84 years, in 1994, a functioning modern democracy. It is the one we have now, an imperfect and in many ways still teeth-gritting order, but somehow hanging together, somehow prevailing over a society where race may be the driving narrative but economic self-advancement, the consuming passion.

There have indeed been episodic attempts at creating a multi-racial system, such as the qualified enfranchisement of mixed-race people in the Cape Colony. The segregationist viewpoint, however, has long held sway: from its mildest imperial form under the famed administrator Sir Theophilus Shepstone, who created reserves in the Natal Colony for native populations in the mid-19th century, to the ruthless segregation of the Boers, who even trekked from their homes in the Eastern Cape in the early 19th century to escape what they saw as the iniquitous egalitarianism of the British.

But the policy of separation, Apartheid, was only officially crafted in 1948. Race, from then on, was no less omnipresent than it was in the previous century; it was just more complex. After the resurgent Afrikaner middle class, driven by the new Afrikaner nationalism, seized power as the National Party, a class alliance between the poor Afrikaners and poor black population was off the cards. Instead, the Afrikaner nationalists created tribal statelets in which the black population were supposed to be grateful to exercise their vote but still forced to export their labour. The scheme foundered on the implacable reefs of economic implausibility and passive African resistance.

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More successful was the way the National Party turned the state into a vast affirmative action engine for the working-class white population, so successful that three generations later their confident descendants, now affluent, educated and cosmopolitan, overwhelmingly voted in a referendum in March 1992 to surrender political power to the black majority, one of the few occasions in history when a dominant minority voluntarily cedes power to a dispossessed majority.

It would be pleasing to report it all turned out well in the end. It did not, or at least not as well as it could and should have. Racism, like all addictions, continually reinvents itself. In South Africa’s case it was through a corrupt political elite under the flag of the African National Congress that after gaining power in 1994 simply reversed the racism, legislatively favouring their rich black cronies and their children over all comers in jobs, educational opportunities and contracts. Nothing has exacerbated the problem of race relations in South Africa, and driven high skills abroad, as much as this policy of systemically placing race and patronage above any conceivable consideration of merit. It could not work and so, unlike their Afrikaner predecessors, the ANC failed miserably in uplifting their impoverished compatriots through a growing economy. Reverse racism proved to be a zero-sum game.

The dread price for this neglect was upon the ANC in May this year when it lost its majority in Parliament and was forced into a so-called Government of National Unity (GNU), although it is in fact a grand alliance representing two-thirds of the electorate, gathered in an uneasy partnership of the ruling party, liberals, mavericks and traditionalists. Another quarter is represented by the left-behind racist, nativist and anti-constitutionalist rump gathered in the two main opposition parties, the recently sprung Zulu-based Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) and the Economic Freedom Fighters, the latter a diminished Gucci revolutionary movement now competing with the real deal guys in MK, those who actually do revolution.

The founding principle of our very fine Constitution, enshrined in Chapter One, is that of non-racialism, a notion that has been knocking around South Africa for decades. It embodies the liberal democratic ideal that a person’s worth and life opportunities should be determined by their character, not their colour, and that state institutions should reflect that self-evident truth. Non-racism is the mantra of the political elites, endlessly espoused by the luminaries of the ruling party and the liberal elements of the Opposition.

It has, however, scant basis in current South African reality. Considerations of racial identity infuse all hiring, investing and policy decisions. It is rare that a contentious point of public policy is not turned into a racial bun-fight; the appointment of a deserving white person to high office is not met with catcalls of “anti-transformation”; the announcement of a national sporting team not assailed for “lack of representivity”; an incautious word or action not maliciously turned into a racial cause célèbre by politicians. Is this a temporary malaise? Unlikely: racial preferment is now so embedded in the national psyche that it is hard to see its early demise. Where once the modest demand by black South Africans was equality of opportunity it is now the unattainable equality of outcomes. It is a worn plaint, universally replicated.

In May, the South African electorate voted overwhelmingly on racial lines. African National Congress support came 98% from Africans, Umkhonto we Sizwe 99.4% and the Economic Freedom Fighters 97.6%. The exception was the liberal Democratic Alliance which, although majority white, had a better spread of other races and thus qualifies as the only major South African party that is “non-racial”. As the DA has always battled to attract more than a fifth of the voters and as only 4.2% of African voters supported it in May, the prospects for a change anytime soon seem to be receding. The sobering lesson of the last three and a half centuries, and in particular the last three decades, is that non-racialism is, and always was, a non-starter.

And yet, and yet, the society and the nation shambles forward, often precariously, sometimes purposely and occasionally wondrously.

Partly this is due to the institutional foundations that help hold it together: an excellent constitution and impeccable Constitutional Court; a still largely competent high court system to which South Africa’s squabbling political elites turn with refreshing readiness to resolve their spats. There is also a vituperative and watchful media and many civil activist groups. These entities survive the rolling crises that periodically sweep the country like wild fires in the dry season.

Again, despite all the lip-service to non-racialism, and the failed attempts by the Left and the commercial advertisers to force an image of beery non-racial bonhomie, South Africans, although diverse, remain unrepentantly different. Unlike the United Kingdom, for example, where the establishment talks of diversity but savagely penalises any mention of difference, South Africans are quite happy to talk about their ethnicity, culture, clan, family name, tribe, likes, dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes, as long as one does not resort to pejorative colonial expressions of race or be condescending. Foreign visitors are often struck by how politely ordinary South Africans treat each other in their daily encounters, seemingly able to look beyond a fraught history, difference and a lived legacy of considerable inequality.

Indeed, South Africans have gone to the extent of recognising 11 official languages, one effectively extinct. They have created a Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Rights Commission, a Council of Traditional Leaders, an Equity Court and a Human Rights Commission. All of this is to protect difference and mediate conflict arising from our differences.

The Government of National Unity forced on the ANC mirrors this existent political, social and racial pluralism. It is not a non-racial alliance but a wary coalition of ethnic parties united in the common objective of enriching themselves and their groups and, along the way, hopefully and eventually, all of South Africa. It holds out the possibility of a fresh beginning after all the romantic hogwash about a Rainbow Nation.

Herein the irony: as a riven South Africa grapples to forge a set of national values that yet recognise historic, social and cultural differences, however imperfectly, the political elites in so many developed world countries, United Kingdom included, have done little in recent decades but deny, traduce or belittle the worth or even existence of such values.

More to the point, much of this bonanza in theory belongs not to the penguins, or even humanity, but to His Majesty’s Government. Consider the numbers. A new discovery in British Antarctic Territory could hold more oil than the North Sea’s entire output over the last five decades, while the world’s largest fish stocks are found at the poles too. 

Yet we shouldn’t necessarily expect Britain to suddenly become another Opec member overnight. Apart from the legal hurdles — there are strict rules around industrial exploitation at the poles — it’s unclear whether London could protect these far-flung territories even if it wanted to. With rivals circling, and foreign investors already rushing ahead with claims of their own, Britain risks losing out, particularly when its rulers seem so unwilling to protect their possessions overseas. 

Britain has interests around both the North and South Poles. As far as its vast British Antarctic Territory is concerned, that’s clearest around black gold. Beyond that striking comparison with the North Sea, experts believe that the most recent oil discovery, in May 2024, could meet the entirety of global demand for almost 15 years. 

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The North Pole, for its part, is important less for physical resources — and more for communications. Modern staples like GPS and satnav can only happen because many satellites connect to Earth via Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago some 2,000 kilometres north of Oslo. Whether it’s home food deliveries or Nato missile guidance, both would be impossible without Svalbard’s network of satellite ground stations. No less important, these barren islands also host a vital high-speed internet cable. No wonder Sir Tony Radakin, head of Britain’s armed forces, has stressed that the region represents a fulcrum of British security.

Now, however, this security looks threatened. In January 2022, someone cut the main subsea cable in the area. In April this year, the cables at the Evenes Airbase were disabled too, especially ominous as it’s where Norway and Nato keep a fleet of F-35 aircraft. The Norwegians have investigated both events and concluded that there is no clear culprit. But some believe that they’re skating around the problem because they don’t want to provoke a direct confrontation with Russia. 

Given all this, at any rate, it’s unsurprising that Whitehall is upping its presence both north and south. In 2023, for instance, the Ministry of Defence announced it was founding a Royal Marines camp near the Norwegian town of Tromsø. As I write, the UK is also upping its presence on the other end of the planet too, promising repairs to a key RAF base on the Falkland Islands. This surely makes sense: its Argentine rival has clearly noticed that the Antarctic oil fields stretch as far north as the Falklands, with Britain preparing to tap oil from 23 wells in the Sea Lion oilfield.

In practice, though, Britain’s commitment to its territorial defence remains suspect: just look at its surrender of the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia. Sensing a cash cow, meanwhile, Argentina’s foreign minister has now vowed to “recover full sovereignty” over what he calls Las Malvinas. Britain officially insists its position is “unwavering” — but Keir Starmer appeared, at least at first, surprisingly reticent about keeping the Falklands British.

Even if Britain suddenly turned its foreign policy on its head, meanwhile, it seems unlikely that it’d actually make use of its vast polar hoard. For one thing, London strictly abides by the 1998 commercial protocol of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which prohibits seabed extraction. The UK seems equally unwilling to approve of deep-sea mining in its oceanic preserves, particularly now that scientists have discovered so-called “dark oxygen” some 4,000 metres beneath the surface of the chilly Southern Ocean. To quote Nick Owens, director of the Scottish Association for Marine Science: “The fact that we’ve got another source of oxygen on the planet other than photosynthesis has consequences and implications that are utterly profound.” 

Yet whatever Britain’s ethical scruples, it’s now becoming much simpler to harvest resources at both poles. One reason is climate change: with the ice sheets melting, the goodies below are easier to access. Another factor is technology: China recently unveiled the Kaituo 2, a 14-tonne deep-sea mining vehicle that can dredge the polar seabeds below a record-breaking 4,000 metres. Britain, for its part, has no such machines. 

There are signs, in short, that the polar regions could soon be subjected to an industrial rush. Indeed as we approach 2048 — the year the Antarctic Treaty can finally be renegotiated — Beijing and Moscow are already trying to gather enough allies to overturn the 1959 ban. They’re prospecting too: it’s no accident that the recent mega-discovery in the British Antarctic Territory was found not by the Royal Navy, but by Russia. Nor are the West’s headline geopolitical foes alone here. As one Iranian rear admiral recently (and somewhat implausibly) claimed, the Islamic Republic has “property rights” in Antarctica. 

The interest of national governments is echoed in the private sector too. Chinese investors recently tried to buy Søre Fagerfjord, which was the last remaining parcel of private land on Svalbard. China thought the 60 square kilometres of pristine wilderness was a steal at $326 million. In the event, the Americans and British apparently warned their Norwegian counterparts of the deal, and the acquisition was squashed. Unperturbed, China is teaming up with Russia to invest in mining firms, scientific research stations and policy programmes right across Svalbard. That echoes a long-standing Russian policy: the Svalbard town of Barentsberg has long been dominated by Russian miners, many of whom later went off to fight in Ukraine. 

While, therefore, our minds may first go to Ukraine or the Middle East, the poles could yet become geopolitical flashpoints. Svalbard, after all, is just 400 nautical miles from the Russian mainland. Elizabeth Buchanan, head of research for the Royal Australian Navy, has described the South Pole in similar terms. Fair enough: what if Russia or China started drilling there, or else erected critical infrastructure, just as Beijing has done in the South China Sea? 

Nor is this necessarily just a theoretical threat. China currently has five research stations right across Antarctica. The 1959 treaty specifically prohibits military activity anywhere on the icy continent. In practice, though, it’s hard to tell what China is up to because they seem to use radar to block overhead satellites. Rumours abound that they park their planes sideways on their runways, so that no one else could land even if they wanted to. At the same time, Western observers worry that the People’s Republic’s new Qinling Station is being used to spy on Britain and her Five Eyes intelligence partners.

Given all these opportunities for conflict, at any rate, could Britain and its friends defend their varied polar interests? Perhaps not. Faced with draconian spending cuts — day-to-day spending on defence has been slashed by nearly £10 billion since 2010 — the Royal Navy now only has 16 “major surface combatants” in its fleet. To offer just one point of comparison, the Chinese navy is the world’s largest, boasting almost 800 vessels of various sizes. 

To be fair, 2021’s Aukus treaty means that London could rely on US and Australian support in any Antarctic conflict. And there are signs, too, that London isn’t totally insensitive to the threat. Apart from dispatching troops and repairing airfields, Britain has also led the charge in encouraging the building of two entirely new subsea cable systems to Svalbard. One is the so-called IOEMA Project, which is due to go live by 2027. NORDUnet is another. Linking Svalbard with Scandinavia — as well as Japan and other Western allies — it’ll bypass Russia and China entirely.

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Yet Britain’s resolve will only truly become clear if and when a contest for polar assets — or indeed fully-fledged polar war — finally arrives. And in the event, any showdown could come sooner than we think. Long-term oil reserves are one thing. But Russia also has a profound strategic interest in the Arctic in the here-and-now. Last February, Norway’s normally reticent intelligence service publicly warned that nuclear weapons could be present on Russian vessels in the High North. No less important, Sweden and Finland’s accession to Nato also brings the possibility that Western nuclear weapons might be deployed in the Arctic too.

China, for its part, needs the Arctic as well. With sea lanes in the Red Sea threatened by the Houthis, and the Panama Canal with problems of its own, Beijing needs a reliable route from its port at Dailan to Rotterdam in Europe. The Arctic is the obvious choice here, not least when Chinese ships can now make the journey in less than 25 days, and when its economy would surely struggle without it. Britain, in short, seems unwilling or unable to exploit its polar bounty. But its future here may ultimately depend on decisions taken by others — something Keir Starmer and his admirals would both do well to remember. 

As the Metropolitan Police quickly discovered, the headscarf-grabber was Bahar Mahroo, a social media personality and controversial member of the Persian diaspora. The day of Iran’s presidential election, she and other foes of the ayatollah prowled the streets around the embassy, assaulting or otherwise abusing those compatriots casting their votes in what the opposition see as an illegal regime’s “circus” election. “You voting is the same as dipping your finger in the blood of the youths of our homeland!” proclaimed one member of the so-called “Embarrassment Campaign” as he castigated a young lady carrying a Gail’s cup.

This farce epitomises the hopelessness of Iran’s exiled opposition. “Embarrassment” stunts remain in vogue, and animate dinner-table conversations for days. But ask an activist what they really achieve and they’d be hard-pressed to answer. Split into an array of factions, the diaspora harbours several distinct visions for the future. Glossing over their foreign homes, they patronisingly tell compatriots how they should behave, even as they unceasingly bicker among themselves. Yet most of what they actually do is unpleasant, unedifying — and ultimately pointless. 

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Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been challenged by a constellation of dissident groups. Indulged by wealthy funders, all keen to bring the ayatollah down, forecasts of the regime’s imminent collapse ceaselessly flow from Persian-language TV networks in London and Los Angeles. That the status quo is untenable is, after all, a foregone conclusion. There is no doubt about the Islamic Republic’s undemocratic nature, its gender apartheid, its muzzled press, or its aggressive support for Shi’a nationalism at home and militant proxies abroad. 

Yet if many overseas Iranians agree that the ayatollahs must go, why have they utterly failed to accelerate the ousting of the clerics in Tehran? The answer partly lies in their own internal divisions. For if the expats are united in loathing the Islamic Republic, they violently disagree on what should come next. 

Consider, for instance, the pro-monarchy camp. Straddling a range of ideological and cultural backgrounds — from atheists and liberal Muslims to alienated supporters of the Islamic Republic — they harbour nostalgic visions of reinstating the deposed Pahlavi dynasty. Their attention typically focuses on Reza Pahlavi, who currently lives in Virginia but is imagined to someday return to Iran and reclaim his father’s throne. From there, the royalists hope to recover the glories of ancient Persia. Drawing on documents such as the Cyrus Cylinder, a cuneiform legal tablet from the 6th century BC, they envision an Iran of universal human rights and joyous festive rituals. That’s echoed by praise for Zoroastar, the ancient prophet and founder of Iran’s traditional pre-Islamic faith.

Their exaggerated use of Zoroastrian symbols obviously doesn’t necessarily mean the monarchists subscribe to the triple tenets of “good thoughts, good words and good deeds” laid out by Zoroaster. Nor does it mean that they particularly care about spirituality in general. Rather, such iconography appeals to them as symbols of Persia’s glorious past. It goes without saying, of course, that these conceptions are utterly eclipsed by the realities of modern Iran, a country of 85 million people wobbling between Shi’ite conservatism and the rising secular thirst for modernity. It hardly helps, moreover, that many royalists haven’t returned to their native land in decades, leaving them physically as well as psychologically unmoored from the Iran of today.

Not that they’re the only ones to harbour fantastical ideas about the country. There remains, after all, a liberal opposition to the Islamic Republic. They envision a replica of French democracy being built in Iran. Their unofficial chieftains are social media influencers, artists and exiled athletes. One example is Masih Alinejad, a celebrated activist who’s spoken everywhere from the World Economic Forum to the Munich Security Conference. There’s also Hamed Esmaeilion, who lost his wife and nine-year-old daughter when the Revolutionary Guards shot down a Ukraine International Airlines plane in January 2020, killing 176 passengers. His quest for justice propelled him to fame. 

That’s complemented by more marginal groups. Blending Islamism and Marxism, and led by Maryam Rajavi, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) is perhaps the most disciplined example. Then there are those unaffiliated and apolitical Iranians who yet dream of a rejuvenated nation. That surely includes some who voted in the 2024 election who nonetheless hope that home-grown reform, supplanting an indefinitely delayed promise of regime change, can boost their country’s fortunes.

Taken together, then, the Iranian diaspora hardly knows what it wants. And if that makes concerted action difficult, the would-be revolutionaries are also split on strategy. Some, including the more nuanced academics and journalists rejecting opposition militancy, believe it’s only through splits in the regime’s top brass that change can finally come. Others back the idea of rebellion from below. Still others, notably Alinejad and anchors on the popular London-based Iran International TV, support sanctions and military action by the US and Israel. It’s surely no accident that, when officers began inquiries over the headscarf-snatching incident, Bahar Mahroo announced on X that she was leaving Britain — and flying to Tel Aviv. 

If the diaspora were adept at grassroots campaigning, these strategic disagreements might not matter. As it is, and as events in London so vividly show, many of them are remarkably skilled at securing bad press. Waving monarchist flags — emblazoned with a golden lion — they targeted polling stations across 90 different embassies. And though Pahlavi himself initially backed the action, much of the resulting conduct was anything but regal. Berating older voters with megaphones, activists told them to “plunge into their graves”. Elsewhere, women were scorned as prostitutes. 

Once you recall that some liberals also engaged in “delegitimisation” of the recent elections, you might imagine these people receive short shrift from the outside world.

But in fact, some corners of the Iranian diaspora have been feted over the years. After Mahsa Amini’s murder at the hands of Tehran’s morality police, for instance, Alinejad had a flashy European gig that involved one-on-one audiences with Emmanuel Macron and then-Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Nazanin Boniadi, an actress and activist, shared a platform with the US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the UN, after a private meeting with Kamala Harris at the White House. That’s shadowed by appointments at neocon think tanks: over recent years, Reza Pahlavi has visited both the Hudson Institute and the Henry Jackson Society. 

More radical actors have also enjoyed their time in the sun. Despite its former designation as a terrorist organisation — and the fact that it’s sometimes dismissed as a cult — MEK is now being touted as a reliable alternative to the Islamic Republic. Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo have both visited MEK camps in Albania and France, as have the former premiers of Canada, Denmark and Italy. Even Liz Truss found the time. Delivering speeches about the so-called “saviours” of Iran, the dignitaries have reportedly managed to bring tears to the eyes of MEK’s lieutenants, albeit in return for staggering fees.

How can such sentimentalism be explained? One factor is surely the brutality of the Islamic Republic: with the internal opposition demoralised, it makes sense that the ayatollah’s enemies should be desperate for champions abroad. It helps, too, that some campaigners are more sophisticated than Bahar Mahroo. Soon after her death, Amini was movingly commemorated at events from New York to Istanbul. In Berlin, Esmaeilion assembled some 80,000 people, all chanting for Iran. Even MEK boasts a reasonably efficient propaganda machine. Given its bloody history of extrajudicial killings, the group can’t hope for much sympathy beyond its cadres of celibate fighters. But its online operations have sometimes proved impactful, thanks largely to a dynamic troll farm that plants stories by fake journalists.

Not that any of this can hide the diaspora’s ultimate failure. They may be received in the State Department and the Foreign Office. But almost five decades on from the Shah’s overthrow, the Islamic Republic endures. That’s even as Western officials remain far happier liaising with the theocracy in Tehran than with unreliable subversives abroad. As memories of the pre-1979 world fade, meanwhile, you get the sense that the expatriate conversation is becoming ever more parochial. For many so-called activists, politics starts and ends online, where they’re engaged in interminable arguments about which hypothetical leader is more righteous, or which of their rivals is actually a plant of the Revolutionary Guard. 

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All the while, the opposition’s figureheads enjoy what attention they can grab, visiting extravagant diplomatic banquets and speaking at K Street forums. But while they may once have been lauded for their courage and integrity, this rush to win awards and secure civil society funding feels increasingly hollow. Certainly, the rise of egos such as Masih Alinejad hasn’t struck a chord with ordinary Iranians. Though she certainly has charisma, Alinejad now claims to have marshalled the protests as a “leader” — and has even suggested she needs constant media attention to stay safe.

Despite enjoying the spectacle of a vocal partisan standing up to theocracy, Iranians instead wish the expat elite would put down their smartphones, leave their Brooklyn or Westwood Village bubbles, and help them overcome practical hardships. The exiles could, for instance, pressure foreign governments to provide Iranians with more accessible migration routes. They could encourage them to develop new satellite and digital communication options, allowing their compatriots to overcome internet censorship at home. They could also stress that certain sanctions might be eased intelligently, and that allowing basic international transactions can help freelancers and start-ups.

If nothing else, you got a sense of these frustrations back in June. In one London encounter, an activist lifted his camera to film a group of academics and writers strolling down the street to vote. Focusing on a straggler, trailing slowly behind, the cameraman informed him he was legitimising the Islamic Republic by voting in its “charade” of an election. But as the man was quick to point out, the election offered a choice, and voting against one didn’t mean he backed the system generally. “Damn the Islamic Republic!” he angrily rejoined, referring to hardline candidate Saeed Jalili. “The Taliban are coming, my dear!”

Hezbollah is far from finished. It has continued to fire hundreds of rockets, and at times even ballistic missiles, towards Israel on a daily basis over recent weeks. In Lebanon’s south, its guerrilla forces have reportedly repelled Israeli advances, claiming to have killed dozens of troops and destroyed multiple Israeli Merkava tanks. And if Hamas has been able to endure a year of war with Israel in the tiny Gaza Strip, the expansive Shi’a militia will surely endure too.

Yet whether the war in the north persists for weeks, months, or longer, it’s already clear that Lebanon’s old political order is dead and buried. As its fierce resistance to the IDF implies, this is less about Hezbollah’s military capabilities — and more because of politics. With the group humbled by Israel, Lebanon’s powerbrokers are finally poised to nudge the militants from their prized place at the top of the country’s political hierarchy. That, in turn, will leave space for the group’s allies and rivals to scrap for influence, both in Lebanon itself and across the region. As disastrous as the status quo has been for the Lebanese people, in short, whatever happens next will surely rival the worst crises of the country’s modern history.

The essential problem here is how Lebanon works. It may in theory be a democratic republic, but in practice the country’s politics is a tangle of feudal, sectarian fiefs, each ruled by an oligarchy of former warlords operating though political parties. Woven into this complex tapestry are threads of foreign influence. From Syria to Israel to Iran, they’ve each prodded Lebanon in varied directions since the latter’s independence from France in 1943. No wonder the formal state has become little more than a way for domestic leaders and their foreign backers to enrich themselves at the expense of the Lebanese people.

This reality is unlikely to change after the current war. But it also means that, unlike in Gaza, Hezbollah and its Iranian masters aren’t the only game in town. Certainly, Lebanon’s elite are keenly aware of this. Having for years been forced to watch their country be abused by Hezbollah and Iran, the prospect of winning back some degree of independence is surely enticing.

That’s especially true given that Hezbollah have been making themselves unpopular for years. Consider, for instance, their support of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War. Apart from alienating Lebanese Sunnis, who loathed the Syrian army’s extermination of their coreligionists in Aleppo and Homs, many Lebanese Shi’a couldn’t understand the relationship between Assad’s brutality and Hezbollah’s claims to be fighting for a free Palestine.

In more recent years, moreover, Hezbollah increasingly became bound up within the Lebanese state itself. That meant it was forced to act as a guarantor of the country’s corrupt order, even as people from across the religious spectrum rose up in protest after the financial collapse of 2019. Many Lebanese, especially Christians, also blamed the group for the catastrophic 2020 Beirut port blast, hardly unsurprising given Hezbollah essentially shut down efforts to investigate it.

Though Hezbollah’s level of support among Lebanese Shi’a remains high, and is perhaps more robust than ever right now, it’s now far less popular among other denominations. At the height of the 2006 war, after all, the group was lionised across the Middle East for its stout defence against Israel, with its support among Christians, Druze and Sunnis ranging from 80-89%. These days, almost exactly 18 years later, polls show that their non-Shi’a support had collapsed to just 10%, with more than half of Lebanese stating they had no trust in Hezbollah at all.

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Given all this, the arrival of full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah was the last straw for many Lebanese — and their political representatives. Without a sitting president since 2022, and with a mere caretaker as prime minister, the main representative of the Lebanese state has long been Nabih Berri. A career politician and long-time parliamentary speaker, he’s for decades served as Lebanon’s political kingmaker. And though he’s long tied his political prospects to Hezbollah, in the last few days Berri has signalled that he may sidestep Hezbollah’s preferred presidential candidate in favour of a consensus-minded alternative. The Biden Administration has reportedly backed this proposal too, even as it prods the Lebanese elite to pick a new president before any ceasefire with Israel is signed.

The election of a president without Hezbollah’s blessing — and indeed one backed by the White House — would be a major departure from the tenure of former president Michel Aoun. Serving from 2016 to 2022, he proved a reliable Hezbollah ally. More fundamentally, though, the relegation of Hezbollah’s voice within Lebanon’s bewildering political chorus could have broader implications too. Within the country’s sectarian parliamentary system, it may signal that Berri and his Amal Movement seek to grab more influence among Lebanon’s Shi’a.

Other political factions could be quick to pounce too. One example is the Lebanese Forces, the country’s largest Christian party, which has long opposed Hezbollah. They’ve already spoken out against Hezbollah, Iran, and the current war, and may ultimately seek to absorb burgeoning discontent among Lebanese Christians toward Hezbollah — and in doing so may try to gain leverage over their confessional rivals, namely Michel Aoun and his Hezbollah-aligned Christian party. Lebanon’s Sunni leaders, who’ve struggled to make their voices heard amid Hezbollah’s dominance, could also feel reinvigorated to pursue their interests — especially if Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States decide to reinvest in Lebanon now that Hezbollah is weaker.

Naïve observers may be inclined to see this political merry-go-round, and Hezbollah’s potential weakening within it, as a sign that Lebanon’s prospects could improve. But even if you ignore the country’s mountain of social and economic problems, a humbled Hezbollah would hardly slink off without a fight. We’ve seen exactly what the group is capable of when it feels threatened. On two occasions, in 2008 and 2021, it deployed fighters to the streets of Beirut, clashing with other militias as well as the Lebanese army proper.

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That’s hardly surprising: vastly more powerful than the nation’s official soldiers, Hezbollah is used to throwing its weight around. Just as important, the destruction of some of its arsenal may delude Hezbollah’s enemies into believing the group is primed for annihilation. That would be a mistake — and anyway, without the deterrent of the group’s missiles and armoured vehicles, the risk of bloodshed between Lebanon’s various militias becomes ever higher. To put it bluntly, then, the end of the conflict with Israel may yet return civil war to Lebanon itself.

As so often, though, what happens to Lebanon is ultimately for outsiders to decide. Crucially, Hezbollah has never acted independently, and as the region takes stock when the current round of killing finally ends, Iran will be there to pull the strings of its favourite Lebanese puppet. One option is that Tehran chooses to strengthen Hezbollah once more. In practice, however, it may find its freedom limited by a range of potential post-war agreements. One is the implementation of UN Resolution 1701, adopted in 2006, which mandates a withdrawal of Hezbollah away from Lebanon’s border with Israel. Both the US and Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister have endorsed the resolution as a way to end the war, though practical implementation remains hard to envisage. If Tehran decides Hezbollah is no longer up to the task of carrying out its wishes in Lebanon, Iran may instead opt to borrow the lesson of Syria — and deploy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards directly. Paradoxically, this would only further erode Hezbollah’s influence within Lebanon, and introduce even more jockeying into the region’s Shi’a ecosystem.

As far as the Americans are concerned, the current uncertainty offers a striking opportunity. After decades of failure in Lebanon, the White House could finally rebuild the Lebanese state and empower its army to become the country’s primary armed force. Despite its relative impotence, and the fact it’s been hamstrung by the government’s near bankruptcy, it’s long been one of the few state institutions to enjoy cross-confessional support. All the same, the idea that the Lebanese state can easily overcome its sectarian corruption is fanciful. This, after all, is a country completely bound by domestic venality and foreign power politics — just as it has been for most of the last century. Whatever happens to Hezbollah, that’s unlikely to change.

That is true both in terms of scale, which was vast and could have killed 20,000 Israelis, were it not for the advanced Arrow interceptors, and in its very meagre results. A Gazan Palestinian died in the West Bank, and debris from intercepted missiles caused widespread but only superficial damage to civilian houses and airforce bases. Certainly, Israel will not dispatch its pilots all the way to Iran without destroying targets that materially weaken the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities. 

Not that Israel can act alone in choosing its targets. For while the US fully accepts that Netanyahu must respond for the sake of deterrence, the Biden Administration is equally reluctant to give the IDF carte blanche. For one thing, the White House doesn’t want Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Even now, those officials who run Biden’s foreign policy cling to their dream of reconciliation with Tehran, believing that all would now be well if only Trump had stuck by the nuclear agreement negotiated by Obama, their former boss. 

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To persist in that fantasy, of course, they’re obliged to ignore what Iran did with all the oil money it gained after US sanctions were lifted: the great build-up of Hezbollah, the Houthis and the other Shi’a militias; the large-scale importation of missile components from North Korea and China; and the growth of the Revolutionary Guard.

It’s clear, then, that Iran’s rulers were never interested in making peace with Washington. Nor, indeed, could they do so without losing power to the secular opposition now bitterly hostile to the Ayatollah’s rule. Still, because of the persistence of the Obama delusion, Israel is forbidden from attacking the Natanz centrifuge complex, where Iran enriches its uranium to weapons-grade levels. The Isfahan uranium hexafluoride plant, whose destruction would release highly corrosive radioactive gases, is also out of bounds, as is the Fordow centrifuge hall — deep inside a mountain and safe from bombs, but which could nonetheless be wrecked by air-to-ground missiles.

If the nuclear installations cannot be attacked, there is still the Khark Island oil terminal that delivers most of Iran’s exported oil, and which provides the foreign currency that Iran uses to import missile parts and pay its Shi’a proxies. Hezbollah, which even under Israeli bombardment relies on Iranian paychecks, is the most obvious example. But there’s also the Iraqi Kataeb militia, as well as the Houthis in western Yemen. Quite apart from the threat they pose to Israel, that last group has successfully disrupted much of the Mediterranean’s trade with Asia, even as European navies have sat back and watched. 

Beyond immediately weakening the militias — if unpaid, their men must find work elsewhere — bombing the Khark terminal would also accelerate Iran’s catastrophic inflation. Right now, it takes 42,105 rials to buy one dollar, up from 70 rials when the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979. That, in turn, would further increase opposition to the regime. After all, millions of salaried employees in Tehran already cannot afford proper meals for two weeks of every month, as modest salary increases are immediately outpaced by bewildering jumps in prices.  

Yet whatever the tactical and strategic advantages of destroying the Khark terminal platform, Biden officials oppose that too. Why? In essence, because they’ve been spooked by Iran’s not-so-veiled threat to bomb Saudi Arabia’s gigantic terminal at Ras Tanura. Handling over 15% of the world’s total oil supply, any disruption here would disrupt the world economy at a stroke.

But Saudi Arabia is not Israel, nor is it Israel’s ally. There’s therefore no earthly justification for Iran’s threat, beyond an outrageous attempt at blackmail by a regime tripped up by its own boastful propaganda. Even now, Iranian radio and television channels claim that 90% of the ballistic and hypersonic missiles launched at the “Occupied Territories” (their dismissive term for Israel) successfully struck their targets. Among other things, the Revolutionary Guards claimed a direct hit on the Mossad headquarters just north of Tel Aviv, which they said were “completely destroyed”. That in itself shows the regime is rattled: its propaganda lies might be just about plausible to the people of Iran, but anyone who actually drove past Mossad’s building could see it’s perfectly intact.

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Having sailed too close to the wind by attacking Israel with hundreds of missiles — notably the Fattah-1 variety, which reach hypersonic speeds and are devilishly hard to intercept — Iran’s rulers are now desperate to avoid the consequences of their actions. In so doing, they’re threatening their own Saudi neighbours, with whom they recently reconciled after years of tension. After years of indulgence, the Biden Administration must finally stand up for US and Western interests. It must make it perfectly plain that an Iranian attack on the Saudis, or indeed any other Arab oil terminal, will result in massive retaliation. Nor can this be an idle threat: each US Air Force’s B52, taking off from Diego Garcia, could drop some 70,000 pounds of bombs anywhere in Iran.

To issue such a threat would certainly be an abrupt reversal after years of appeasement, and would not be an easy pivot for an ageing president at the end of his term. But the alternative would be to surrender to Iran’s blackmail, a decision that would soon destroy American power across the Middle East. Israel, fighting for its basic security and under attack by Iranian proxies to its north, east and south, is bound to act decisively and will not be stopped. So it is Iran that must finally be deterred from further destabilising the region — and the global economy at large.         

For all these reasons, Dubai is loathed by a certain other type of person — one who abhors philistines, and for whom that city represents the vacuous vanity of a class which should be relegated to Tenerife all-inclusives. Much of this ire is trained on the marriage of luxury and meaninglessness at the heart of Dubai holiday culture: a tangle of fake wealth, fake boobs and fake sophistication is perfectly calculated to enrage the skiing set. While they may have some points (holidaying in a supersized House of Fraser isn’t on my bucket list either), this snobbery runs in parallel to one of the most ubiquitous and noxious legends of our time. The story goes that there are only two reasons why a young woman of small fortune might find herself in Dubai: to shop, or to get rich by having the weirdest sex imaginable.

I will not explain these familiar pub myths in too much depth in the interest of decency, but rest assured they are gross. A couple of years ago, these stories exploded onto Twitter timelines, with subsequent waves of interest sparked by “leaked” images and videos (of which Katie Price most recently fell victim). They involved extremely niche, and extremely extreme, sex acts which influencers were paid eye-watering sums to carry out during “content” trips to the UAE. National newspapers took note, revealing the haggling over £10,000-a-night deals that went on in Instagram DMs. Gossip websites speculated about heinous acts intended to satisfy the deviant tastes of loaded, mysterious Arab men — these involved coprophilia, German shepherds, underage boys who needed to “become men” and, invariably, exclusive hotels or yachts.

There is decent evidence for at least some of these acts — not least one particularly stomach-churning video which emerged in 2022, sparking the first wave of social-media obsession with the influencer/sex-worker crossover. We must not be shocked that in every city the world over, there are enough freaks to make a party; even less so when a city is sloshing with gold. But what is so different, so unsettling, about the “Dubai porta potty” legend — as it is known for reasons you can work out for yourself — is how wilfully it has taken root, and how ancient the Western fantasies are that it speaks to.

For centuries, the orientalised perversity of the Arabian world has been a titillating, disgust-flecked obsession in the West. What began in pre-Islamic Persia with Scheherazade’s tales in One Thousand and One Nights quickly spread throughout Western Europe after Antoine Galland’s French translation in 1704. This provoked a flurry of imitations, contes de fées set in oud-scented wonderlands. The archetypes were set: as in Western fairytales, bloodthirsty aristocrats and fraught sex-relations are everywhere — a wife is caught in bed with a black slave; she transfigures her husband with magic, but is killed in retribution. A woman’s dismembered body washes up in a river; her husband has killed her, wrongly suspecting that she was unfaithful. The jealous Prince Behram imprisons Princess Al-Datma in a tower and, pursuing her after her escape, murders her. These fairytales fed the Western appetite for Eastern narratives of cruelty and debauchery, and came to shape the character of the deviant Arab which lingers today.

As the 20th century unfurled, this trope picked up scandalous pace. The Sheik — first a novel by Edith Maud Hull which sold one million copies upon its release in 1919, and then a film starring Rudolph Valentino in 1921 — portrayed its kidnapping protagonist as exotic and sexually aggressive, an arc which is redeemed when he is discovered to not in fact be Arab at all, but a harmless Western romantic in disguise. The allure and threat of the voracious Sheik spawned a thousand afterlives, not least with the wildly popular 1921 ditty The Sheik of Araby, composed to answer the mania surrounding the film. What is essentially a parody song contains some rather choice lyrics: “At night when you’re asleep / Into your tent I’ll creep.” It’s a love song — the damsel will “rule this world with me”, after all — but the comedy comes from a vision of a lascivious brute who invades tents, pompously reiterates his status as sheikh, and is both floppily romantic and latently vicious.

Later renditions only reinforce this type, and have been compiled by the writer Jack Shaheen in the documentary Reel Bad Arabs. Versions of the sheikh haunt pop culture: Disney’s Aladdin (1992) includes the lyrics: “Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place where the caravan camels roam; where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric but, hey, it’s home.” In the 1975 bawdy comedy The Happy Hooker, we get a gag about being “forced to perform unspeakable acts with circumcised dogs” (sound familiar?); the Burt Reynolds caper Cannonball Run II (1984) includes the quip: “I have a weakness for blondes and women without moustaches.”

It is not hard to appreciate the modern mythologies of Arabian nights — now situated in VIP areas of Dubai nightclubs, the presidential suites of golden hotels — as continuations of centuries-old titillating fantasies of otherness and sexual abandon. Key to these stories is the alabaster-skinned Western blonde, who is regularly abducted by some high-ranking Arab, bored of the casual debauchery of his harem. In The Jewel of the Nile (1985), Kathleen Turner is our kidnapped heroine; it’s a trope repeated in the Connery Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983) and Sahara, also from 1983, in which it is Brooke Shields’s turn to play defiled American beauty. Now, this role has been taken on by the scores of influencers who, modern legend tells us, are going out to Dubai to be defecated on.

This eternal plot relies on assumptions about both Eastern and Western women: that the former exist in both oppressive conservatism and in a world of supposed harems, and that the latter are more highly prized for their own blend of defilable innocence and sexual liberation. Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North certainly points to such an assumption held by the murderous Sudanese lothario Mustafa Sa’eed, who spends his twenties roleplaying the oversexed Eastern villain to the young women of London. In the novel, Western women are willing, naive and corrupting. If there is a thriving sex trade based on itinerant British Instagram models, then this provenance must be part of the sales pitch.

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Whether these stories are true or not is less interesting than the appetite for them itself — an appetite which shows that we have not become any more self-critical about our prurient fascination with sex, Eastern-style, than The Sheik’s swooning readers in 1919. But while there is little doubt that the Dubai sex industry is big, monstrous and, by the very nature of prostitution, riven with exploitation, it might also be the case that these stories of hardcore depravity say something about us and our desire to see Western vulnerability — stereotypically contained in the body of the blonde woman — defiled and jeopardised by a sexy and unknown other, to enact our own fears and fantasies. If Instagram influencers are our new Hollywood stars, then they, too — just like the ultimate woman-child blonde, Marilyn Monroe, will forever be subject to suspicion over having done sex work to get to where they are today. Because of the mystery of an influencer’s day-to-day job — and the huge crossover with porn sites such as OnlyFans — this suspicion is even more marked.

We do not tell these squeamish stories out of compassion for their protagonists. For many, they are little more than masturbatory fantasies, or opportunities to imagine untold degradations to another woman and her hated high cheekbones. The legend of the Dubai sex industry, the natural heir of the desert romance, allows us the luxury of contemplating vicious things being done to women at one remove: it is happening over there and, we assure ourselves, never here. Yet the fact is, shoving a live salmon in unmentionable places for £40,000 is, if true, just another grotesque tumescence of our own porn-saturated culture that social media has helped to create — and is probably just as likely to go down in a Kensington mansion as an Emirati penthouse. Instead of addressing the cruelty at the heart of prostitution itself, these one thousand and one tales of our new Arabian Nights keep sex work safe and harmless: an exotic, erotic joke.

And these fables serve another purpose too: they keep our snobberies contained in the dystopian glass city in the desert, confirming our worst fears about what happens when decadent sexual tastes meet the unbounded wealth of the Gulf, the West’s playground. If Dubai remains, in the orientalising imagination, a moral vacuum — Sodom-sur-Mer — it is only to comfort us that we are different. In fact, the worst things about this story, the cruelty, the ostentation, happen absolutely everywhere.

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.

It’s a risky business for a people to remember the grievous wounds they have suffered, especially when they are still raw and the evil that would destroy them rages on. But tomorrow, Israelis and diaspora Jews will be compelled to think about the mass murders, tortures, rapes, and kidnappings that 6,000 Gazan invaders perpetrated a year ago. On the liturgical anniversary of the deaths of 1,200 victims, relatives will say Yahrzeit prayers to commemorate them. And even secular Jews will pause to grieve an event that plunged Israel into a war on multiple fronts and ignited worldwide displays of antisemitism.

The Jews have more to forget about than any people in history: captivities and resettlements, expulsions, confiscations, pogroms, and genocide. Yet for three millennia, they’ve displayed a miraculous capacity to overcome hardships and begin anew. Their irrepressible life-force has repeatedly helped them forget the immediate past and rebuild shattered lives.

But the rising waters of forgetfulness can be as perilous as those of memory. Israeli leaders and security officials forgot the measureless hatred and viciousness of those running Gaza and Lebanon. Diaspora Jews, at least in Anglophone nations, foolishly convinced themselves that antisemitism was a thing of the past. Both groups, exemplified in this respect by the young doves who celebrated “friends, love and infinite freedom” at the Supernova music festival where 364 people were murdered, let their wish to live in peace and security be father to the thought that their goal was virtually at hand.

In the United States, many Jews on the Left implicitly forgot their faith when they embraced identitarian progressivism. Since the days of the prophet Isaiah, Judaism has emphasised care for the poor, the oppressed, the widow and the orphan. To many Jews, explanatory frameworks such as critical race theory and intersectionality seemed to advance these noble aims. During Obama’s presidency, social justice activism began to invade American synagogue services. But when the people these Jews had mistaken for allies vigorously supported Hamas after October 7, it became impossible to ignore the fact that progressive ideology is fundamentally antisemitic.

How does it feel for Jews to realise that their supposed friends effectively wish them ill? More or less, I’d say, like the survivor Simon Srebnik felt when he returned to Chelmno decades after the Nazis exterminated 400,000 Jews in that Polish village. In a scene in the epic Holocaust documentary Shoah, Srebnik is surrounded by old men and women who remember him walking in chains as a teenager and are “very pleased” to see him again. They are standing outside a church where Jews were imprisoned before being gassed. A woman states that the doomed Jews “called on Jesus and Mary and God” for salvation; a man says that, when “the Jews condemned the innocent Christ to death”, they cried out “Let his blood fall on our heads and on our sons’ heads”. Srebnik smiles stiffly as they justify the persecution he suffered as a Jew even as they express affection for him.

The explosion of antisemitism after October 7 bodes ill for everyone, not just the Jews. That’s because the fundamental Jewish values — biblical faith; a reverence for tradition; the preservation of the family; national solidarity; the protection of state borders; attachment to the land of one’s ancestors — are the basic values of Western civilisation. I’m reminded of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s chilling prophecy, in his 1846 book Two Ages, that the late-modern phenomenon of levelling — the ongoing destruction of the organic communities which have sustained human beings for millennia — is “a demon that no individual can control”. He predicted that levelling will be a global phenomenon, driven by an ideological abstraction so extreme as to be utterly devoid of ethical and political content. “Not even national individuality will be able to halt it,” he wrote, “for the abstraction of levelling is related to a higher negativity: pure humanity.” It is this utterly vacuous concept — pure humanity, without respect for actually existing individuals and the thick bonds of family, congregation, locality, and peoplehood of which their lives are woven — that animates the angry mobs of atomised Westerners whose call to “globalise the intifada” expresses their implicit desire to destroy civilisation as such.

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That nihilistic desire springs, in large part, from a failure to transmit the precious wisdom of our ancestors “from generation to generation” (l’dor vador in Hebrew). The result has been widespread cultural forgetfulness concerning the conditions of a decent human life. But Western antisemitism seems to be rooted in another kind of forgetfulness as well, one bordering on the psychological category of repression. We human beings perversely find it difficult to forgive others for the wrongs we’ve done them. Instead of paying our moral debts, we prefer to let them slip from memory while fabricating justifications for doing so. For some Europeans, the guilt of the Holocaust is assuaged by associating Israelis with Nazis and accusing them of genocide.

The Islamist enemies of Israel are consumed with bitterness and envy. Their goal, a demonic inversion of good and evil, is purely negative. They remember — and in a perverse manner observe — the Jewish holy days. The unspeakable atrocities of October 7 occurred on Simchat Torah, the celebration of the completion of the annual liturgical cycle of public Torah readings. Hamas’s barbaric attack was explicitly directed against Judaism as well as Jews.

What Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and the other Islamist enemies of Israel have forgotten is that God chose the Jews to be a light unto the nations. Dispersed throughout the world, their light seems small and weak when times are good, but shines most brightly in the deepest darkness. The attacks of October 7 have stirred in the Jews — Hasidic and atheistic; Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic; Indian, Chinese, Australian, and American — what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory”. Today, in an existential crisis that may turn out to be the denouement of the central drama of Western civilisation, these unwilling protagonists — the whole people of Israel — are determined to defend themselves and the light they carry.

Founded by the French, at the end of the 19th century, Belvedere Park feels like an appropriate spot to reflect on how much changes here — and how little. In 2009, after all, long-term dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ran for his fifth term as president. A year later, he was gone, ousted in the Arab Spring’s first successful revolution. 

Yet soon enough, another despot would come and take his place. Today, Kais Saied is running for his second term as president, one of only two approved candidates. As in 2009, the results are largely a foregone conclusion, with Tunisians expected to vote for a man who’s tightened his grip on their lives. Between political clampdowns and the suppression of criticism, no wonder many Tunisians fear a repeat of Ben Ali’s iron rule. 

Not that the situation is completely hopeless. For as the Saied regime goes through the motions of democracy, and the economy wheezes on, Tunisians young and old fight to save something of their country’s Arab Spring, even if it may not be enough to banish the winter they now find themselves in. 

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Contemporary Tunisian politics can really be traced back to 14 July 2011. That Friday, Ben Ali dissolved his government and declared a state of emergency. A few hours later, he fled to Saudi Arabia, and the Tunisian people rejoiced. “We all bet our lives on 14 January!” is how Benabdallah puts it, recalling the massive street protests that forced Ben Ali into exile. 

Yet just like other risings in Syria and Egypt, these happy memories would be crushed. For Benabdallah, the root of Tunisia’s problems can be summarised in a single word: Ennahda. A moderate Islamist movement, it dominated Tunisian politics in the years after 2011, and was a leading party in every post-revolutionary government until 2019. But though its name means “renaissance” in Arabic, Benabdallah says Ennahda ruled “without a vision” for Tunisia’s future. 

That, Benabdallah continues, paved the way for Kais Saied’s landslide victory in the 2019 poll. “Ennahda produced the environment we’re in nowadays”, Benabdallah explains, arguing that while the Islamists claimed to be building Tunisian democracy, they in practice privileged short-term stability over proper reform in areas such as social justice and graft. Certainly, Saied’s remarkable rise reflects widespread disillusionment with the post-2011 political order, not least around the bread-and-butter economic issues that caused the revolution to start with.

But if Saied promised an anti-corruption drive before he entered office, under his rule the authorities have carried out waves of arrests, aimed at everyone from opposition groups to journalists. 

Even so, the President still benefits from public discontent with the political elite, widely perceived as corrupt and incompetent. Saied’s own background surely helps here. A former law professor, some Tunisians continue to see him as a man of integrity, even as others continue to admire his supposed status as a political outsider. “Tunisians were fed up with parties,” concedes Najla Kodia, a member of the socialist Al Qotb party. “Saied seized the opportunity to initiate his putsch, and now he doesn’t want to give up his power.”

This context has become especially urgent over recent years. In the summer of 2021, amid a deepening economic crisis, Saied suspended parliament and took executive control of the country. A year later, he pushed through a new constitution granting himself almost unlimited power to rule by decree. Over just three years, then, he’s built a new hyper-presidential system and dismantled the liberal institutions established back in 2011.

The dire state of Tunisian democracy is clear everywhere you look. Freedom of expression, for instance, has shrunk. Promulgated in January 2019, Decree 54 allows the state to curtail independent voices under the cover of combating cybercrime. More than 70 political activists, lawyers, journalists and human-rights defenders have been arrested or prosecuted this way since the end of 2022. 

As the election approaches, meanwhile, repression has become even more shameless. The media is gagged and judicial independence attacked, even as politicians are detained or prosecuted. Consider the case of Ayachi Zammel, a presidential candidate who nonetheless just received a hefty jail term for allegedly falsifying voter endorsements. That’s before you consider those 14 presidential contenders disqualified from running by Tunisia’s electoral commission, a body whose members are now nominated directly by President Saied.

In another unprecedented step, and just two weeks before Sunday’s presidential vote, Kais Saied even ordered parliament to amend the electoral law and strip the administrative court of its oversight authority. The tweak, which was adopted by the legislature last Friday, directly threatens the role of the judiciary in maintaining the integrity of an election process. 

If Saied had managed to improve Tunisia’s ailing economy, this looming dictatorship might have mattered less. As it is, the erstwhile academic has struggled to improve on Ennahda’s record. “The ruling elite in all these years has been responsible for not changing the economic model as it should have done”, explains Nafaa Laribi, a human rights lawyer, with Saied and his fellow politicians all failing to open Tunisia’s creaking state-run economy to private investment.  

In practice, these problems are clear across a range of metrics. For one thing, inflation remains high. For another, unemployment hovers at 15%. Growth, for its part, is stagnant, even as foreign debt hovered at about 90% of GDP in 2022. Food prices, already squeezed by the war in Ukraine, rose by almost 12% last year, while basic goods such as flour remain in short supply too. All told, half of public sector spending is now spent on the public payroll — leaving precious little for health, infrastructure and social services. No wonder Tunisia’s credit rating has slumped, making access to international markets even harder.

Squeezed between economic turmoil and a rising police state, what remains of Tunisia’s civil society has rallied. As politicians and activists caught wind of the amendment to the electoral law, the newly formed Tunisian Network for Rights and Freedoms staged a protest on 22 September, the sequel to another one the previous week. I watched as hundreds marched down Habib Bourguiba Avenue in central Tunis, chanting and shouting as they went. 

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But here too, history lies heavy. Beyond the usual anti-government banners, after all, the protesters equally tried to place their unhappiness within the broader revolutionary tradition, hardly surprising when Habib Bourguiba Avenue once served as the focal point of the 2011 protests. “The people want the fall of the regime!” protesters sang, evoking a cry made famous in Cairo and Damascus during those heady spring days in 2011. 

Kodia, for her part, makes a similar link between the past and the present. “This amendment is another attempt to remove an institution that has dared to challenge the authority,” she says of the new electoral law, raising her voice as the crowd cheers around her. “And these elections are a façade — Kais Saied will take power by force once more.” 

Beyond Leftists like Kodia, friends and relatives of political detainees attended the rally too. One journalist held a photo of Mourad Zeghidi, a legendary reporter arrested in May on vague speech charges. Nearby, I met Souhaieb Ferchichi, a campaigner for the I-Watch rights group, who dismissed a government that “scapegoats” food speculators and black migrants for its own failings. 

Ferchichi is clearly determined to keep fighting, something he shares with younger Tunisians too. “Kais Saied thinks he sits on a throne and wants to stay there for his life,” says a student called Ines, who attended the demonstration with a friend. “We want to encourage more people to stop falling into fear, and open their eyes to this situation.”

Clearly, then, not every Tunisian is resigned to Saied’s rule. But can chanting and marching hope to displace him? Aymen Zaghdoudi is sceptical. “Tunisia,” suggests the academic and human rights expert, “is on the brink of going back to the pre-2011 era.” Quite aside from the ominous similarities between Saied and Ben Ali, Zaghdoudi points out that the opposition is just too “scattered” to be effective. Benabdallah agrees. “The mobilisation is there,” he says, “but it’s a scattered minority of people coming from very different camps.” A fair point: between Islamists and secularists, socialists and liberals, Tunisian politics is riven by factionalism.

Beyond these ideological cleavages, other observers point to the relative weakness of the country’s civil society, yet another consequence of Tunisia’s past. “The democratic transition was left unfinished because it didn’t succeed in creating solid political and independent institutions that would resist any kind of drift”, says Romdhane Ben Amor of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, noting that terrorist attacks and political assassinations stymied mature institutions alongside roiling economic turmoil. 

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Yet if Zaghdoudi says the result of today’s election is “likely known” in advance, he does retain some optimism. With the official opposition split, he nonetheless believes the Tunisian Network for Rights and Freedoms has the potential to unite civil society, not merely in its hatred of the president but also in formulating a broader vision for Tunisia’s cultural and economic future. 

Change is surely needed. Tunisia, after all, is floundering. On a downtown street in Tunis, I watched unemployed young men sitting outside cafes, smoking and scrolling through their phones. Informal vendors were there too, waiting for buyers, as stinking bags of rubbish dotted the pavements. In two supermarkets I visited, supplies of sugar, semolina and coffee were all dwindling on the shelves. Milk and rice were nowhere to be found. 

For those with long enough memories, these conditions feel eerily similar to those in 2010, just before Tunisia was enveloped by revolution alongside the rest of the Arab world. To put it differently, then, and even if he does romp to victory tomorrow, President Saied should surely be careful. As Ferchichi warns: “We once revolted against a dictator. We’re ready to do it again today, tomorrow, in the years to come.” 

Not that Belvedere Park felt particularly revolutionary when I visited. At one point in our conversation, Benabdallah and I pass a pond, a place he remembers as a child. Back then, it teemed with ducks and fish. Now, though, the basin sits empty — and Benabdallah can’t help but joke. “Even they have had enough.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There is no solution to the Gaza War

By Rajan Menon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jenin,” he answers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Life on Israel's home front

By Michael Tobin

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

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

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

So, in the meantime, what can we do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The No-State Solution

By Rajan Menon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was a formidable threat to Israel’s survival in its first decades. But nobody there even considered the possibility of striking directly at the Soviet Union itself. Aside from the certainty of a massive retaliatory response, there were simply no relevant targets that Israel could strike, even if its small airforce managed to penetrate Soviet airspace. These days, however, everything is different. The Shi’a militias that have been targeting Israel for years, which greatly escalated their attacks after October 7, are entirely armed and directed by Iran. That’s true right across the Middle East, from Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen to a pair of militias in Iraq. But unlike the Soviet Union, Tehran enjoys no immunity from Israeli action.

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Iran is weaker than we think

By Edward Luttwak

The crucial vulnerability is the money from Iran that sustains the militias. Iraq’s Shi’a fighters can extort some cash from the country’s oil revenues. Hezbollah, for its part, receives some funding from Shi’a diamond buyers in Sierra Leone and smugglers in South America. Yet over the years, it and its cousins elsewhere in the region have become increasingly reliant on the funding they receive from their paymasters in Tehran. Cut the cash off, then, and they will quickly wither because even the most committed must receive their pay to feed their families.

That is most obviously the case in Yemen, one of the world’s least productive countries, where the Houthis are funded by monthly payments from Iran. But Hezbollah too has become more reliant on its Iranian ally, not least because its extortion of airport and customs receipts has yielded less and less with Lebanon’s descent into poverty.

This all means that Iran’s export revenues must now pay for a bewildering range of military expenditures abroad, in US dollars rather than home-made rials. Beyond the upkeep of foreign allies starting with Hezbollah, there are the imported components and supplies consumed by the domestic Revolutionary Guards, with its 125,000 troops and a naval force. This includes the imports of Chinese and North Korean missile and rocket components, as well as the foreign-currency costs of the entire nuclear programme which proceeds at a very large scale.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. It’s true that Iranian farmers grow pistachio nuts and other exportable crops, and that there are some manufacturing exports, even if Tabriz’s famous carpets are out of fashion. Yet at the last count, in 2023, oil accounted for 83% of Iran’s exports. For their part, the merchants who export Iran’s agricultural and craft exports tend not to repatriate the foreign currency they earn, using it instead for the imports they bring in. While much celebrated in regime propaganda, meanwhile, state-controlled industrial exports remain slight.

In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometres off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometres from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeidah in Yemen — a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again yesterday.

Iran has made great efforts to reduce its dependence on the Khark terminal. That’s not because it is too close to Israel, but rather because it was too close to Iraq, and was indeed attacked and burned during the Iran-Iraq war. The result it Iran’s newly opened Jask oil terminal. Out on the shores of the Indian Ocean, it’s much futher from Israel than Khark. But for the IDF’s air planners, that’s scarcely a problem: the oil reaches Jask by a very long pipeline that can be disrupted at points even closer to Israel than Khark Island.

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How America can stop Iran

By Edward Luttwak

Given that Israel could easily cut off Iranian funding for Hezbollah and its other enemies by doing so, why has it refrained from targeting the country’s oil exports? In one phrase: “Obama’s Law”. Tacitly but very forcefully promulgated by the former president, it banned any Israeli or US attacks against Iran, even as the Islamic Republic has continued to kill US soldiers in Iraq and Yemen, and has kept attacking Israel through its proxies. On 13 April, Iran even attacked Israel directly. Stemming from Obama’s great fear that he would be manipulated into going to war against Iran, just as his predecessor was talked into war with Iraq, the then president’s all-out pursuit of a historic reconciliation with Iran utterly ignored the simple fact that the Islamic Republic’s fanatical rulers could not possibly be reconciled with the West. With Obama’s people also staffing Biden’s White House, the US has persisted with this policy of one-sided restraint, which it also imposed on Israel. That’s even as the Ayatollah’s regime has continued to forcibly suppress a pro-Western opposition that hates its corrupt and wasteful rule with a passion. Nor did US policy change when Iran continued to target US allies in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. 

In the event of a Harris victory this November, the Obama crowd would continue to staff the White House. That leaves a narrow window for Israeli action against Iran. To be sure, attacking a vast country of 91 million people would be a reckless act for Israel under any circumstances. But to stop Iran’s oil revenues — whose benefits are denied to its long-suffering population by an oppressive regime that most Iranians bitterly oppose — is quite another matter. Given, moreover, that hyperinflation has brought outright hunger to Iran’s urban population for the first time since the fall of the Shah in 1979, an attack on the country’s oil exports could even trigger the downfall of the regime. There are, of course, very many variables between any Israeli action and such a happy consequence. But if destroying Iran’s oil revenue did finally bring about the end of the Ayatollah regime, it’s not just Netanyahu who would celebrate. 

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

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

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

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David Cameron's vanity trip

By Tom McTague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Starmer has revealed his weakness over Israel

By Tom McTague

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

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

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

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

Little did the Ayotzinapa students know that history was about to repeat itself. As night fell, their buses were stopped by police barricades. There, on a lonely stretch of highway, they were set upon by officers and members of the local drug cartel. Many of the students were shot, a number were hospitalised, and one was found dead by the roadside, a part of his face ripped away. It was only the following morning, however, that the full scale of the horror became clear: 43 students couldn’t be accounted for. A decade on from their disappearance, they’re presumed dead. Their bodies have never been recovered. 

If the Tlatelolco massacre became the defining moment of Mexico’s authoritarian past, “the 43” have come to symbolise the country’s stumbling democratic transition. There are, after all, over 110,000 desaparecidos (“disappeared ones”) right across Mexico, anonymous men and women who vanished one day and never came home. You’re reminded of them everywhere you go, their faces peering out at you from countless monochrome posters. Each, of course, represents a private tragedy. But just like Tlatelolco, the case of the Ayotzinapa students has gained vigour through the years, and ten years on represents abuse of state power at its most absolute.

Though Mexicans were disappeared in the Nineties, the modern epidemic of vanishings really started in 2006. That year, President Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs. As gangs defended their turf, from both the police and each other, the republic was drowned in an ocean of blood. Over the next 18 years, Mexico suffered some 431,000 homicides, from random shootings to organised beheadings. Alongside the violence, disappearances have been normalised too. Alongside those 113,000 desaparecidos, after all, 4,000 clandestine graves have also been found. 

Mexico’s drug cartels are clearly to blame for the mayhem — yet it’s not quite right to see them as straightforward criminals. Their influence is so powerful that it’s nowadays impossible to draw clear lines between cops and crooks. At every single level of government, from the police to the judiciary, there have been countless examples of collusion between officials and the cartels. Indeed Los Zetas, one of the most powerful and brutal of all the gangs, actually emerged out of an elite battalion of soldiers. Trained in counterinsurgency and drug war tactics, the troops then used that knowledge to become one of the most feared cartels around. 

Given these blurred lines, it makes sense that investigations into the missing 43 have gone nowhere, and have instead been met by denial, impunity and red herrings. Only six weeks after the outrage, Mexico’s attorney general famously presented what he called the “historic truth” — and announced the students’ bodies had been incinerated by a cartel, with their remains thrown down a nearby ravine. Yet forensic investigators from Argentina, leading experts in finding desaparecidos after their own country’s history, soon dismissed these claims.

In 2021, meanwhile, drone footage showed the apparent site of mass murder being prepared. First taken by the Mexican Navy, it later shows their presence alongside soldiers and the attorney general. The families of the victims had long suspected official involvement in the massacre, a position later taken by an independent enquiry into the event. Led by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), it concluded that the disappeared 43 amounted to a “state crime”.    

Despite accepting some involvement, however, the Mexican government continues to insist that the truth of the disappeared is ultimately a case of cartel violence, and perhaps a few corrupt politicians and police officers seduced by the violent glitz of drugs. A timely reminder of this has been the recent re-arrest of Gildardo Lopez Astudillo. Kingpin of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, he was detained just a few weeks before the tenth anniversary of the Ayotzinapa attack, with the authorities presenting his capture as a definitive win in the search for truth. 

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As obfuscation over Ayotzinapa persists, meanwhile, all Mexico suffers. In a study on Colombia — a nation with over 100,000 desaparecidos of its own — the former US ambassador coined the phrase “narco-statization” to refer to a situation in which every aspect of life is shaped by the violence and corruption of the drug trade. That’s clear enough from one of the leading GIEI investigators into the Ayotzinapa disaster. As Carlos Beristain has publicly noted, the moment his inquiry got too close to pinpointing state involvement, and especially military involvement, requests for information went unanswered.

Considering all this, it’d be easy to see the case of the 43 is a quintessential example of state failure. Yet in his compelling book, Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman showed how the first systematic attempt to disappear an entire people couldn’t happen without meticulous planning and organisation. Disposing of human life isn’t straightforward. Rather, it requires a monstrous organisational effort to ensure the dead remain hidden. What we see in Mexico is not state failure, in short, but state excessiveness and impunity. 

That’s especially true when you recall that violence doesn’t actually come easily to humans. We are far from natural born killers. As with other forms of systematically enforced and culturally normalised violence, rather, disappearance thrives when it’s a learned practice. This requires us to situate the disaster in Mexico in a far broader historical and geographical framing.

In mapping out the global topography of disappearance, our journey could plausibly begin in Nazi Germany. From there, we might follow ex-Nazis down the so-called “ratlines” to safety in South America. Certainly, not enough attention has been given to links between former National Socialists and the Argentinian junta, who also disappeared a number of Jewish activists and intellectuals through the Seventies. Then, like Che Guevara, we could travel up the spine of the Andes, learning how disappearance was remastered and exported, and how many of its advocates were students at the US military training facility now infamously called the “School of the Americas”.

Like all violence, the practice of disappearance has taken new forms as societies have changed. As Latin American countries have been transformed by the globalising logic of the free market, for instance, violence itself has been privatised. Just like global capital, meanwhile bloodshed has moved with the markets, from Colombia to Mexico to the frontiers of the US itself.

The geography of violence, in turn, has shaped how it’s counted. Keen to show how he brought peace and stability to Mexico, President Andreas Manual Lopez Obrador came to power promising to find the 43. Along the way, he founded the National Search Commission, and in one of his final official acts tasked it with reorganising Mexico’s disappeared into a more “accurate” picture. Unsurprisingly, the numbers fell dramatically. At just 12,377, the National Search Commission clearly used a politically motivated methodology. Families, for their part, responded to this development by decrying “the disappearance of the disappeared”. 

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This is far from just a Mexican problem. A few months ago, I was part of an organising committee leading an international conference on disappearance in Belfast. Hosting the event in Northern Ireland was significant — not least given the acknowledgment the UK isn’t immune to the practice either. As Padraig Og O Ruairc’s recent book on the disappeared of Ireland vividly shows, it’s a technique the British government (and its opponents) have employed for centuries, and on a scale unknown even during the Troubles. The Belfast event was opened by testimonies from two women. The first, Elizabeth Santander, described how her husband was vanished by the Colombian state in the Eighties. Dympna Kerr, for her part, explained how she’s still searching for her 19-year-old brother Columba McVeigh, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1975. 

Having spoken with such courage about the weight of absence, I was especially struck by how both women ended their testimonies with poetry. Apart from the beauty of their words, it reminded me how important art has become for the vanished of Mexico, with no local artist more dedicated to confronting the horrors of disappearance than Chantal Meza. In splattered flashes of red and grey, her paintings are a howl of grief for the 43 and every desaparecido. It’s appropriate, then, that today her extensive State of Disappearance collection is unveiled in the Chancellors Building at the University of Bath. A decade on from their final bus ride, it’s heartening to know that the Ayotzinapa students haven’t fully been forgotten.

The quiet stillness of Slim’s villa, its libraries, its garden — all were a refuge from the hustle and bustle of Dahieh beyond. Slim, for his part, offered me coffee as we discussed Lebanon’s complex political existence, apparently unconcerned by his powerful armed neighbours. Yet less than two years later, in February 2021, he was dead, murdered by unknown assailants in his car outside Beirut. Though no perpetrators were ever identified, the assassination was obviously carried out by Hezbollah or one of its affiliates. Slim, like every Shi’a Muslim living in Dahieh, was ultimately swallowed by it.

This is the reality for many people in Hezbollah-dominated areas of Lebanon: sooner or later, you’ll either need to tie your existence to the group, or else be consumed by it. This was made plain by Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks last week, when communication devices exploded in supermarkets, offices, homes, and funerals across Dahieh, south Lebanon, and the Beqaa Valley, leaving no corner of Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state untouched. 

Commentary on this revolutionary event has largely fallen into one of two camps. While some have derided the pager operation as an indiscriminate attack on civilians, others have noted that those who carried pagers distributed by Hezbollah were by default bonafide members of the organisation. 

The truth, however, is that both these viewpoints are accurate simultaneously. Hezbollah in 2024 is not just a militia fighting Israel — it is an entire parallel society, boasting a political party, a social welfare system and charitable religious institutions, alongside five hospitals and hundreds of medical centres. Even the Beirut International Airport and the city’s commercial seaport have for years been under Hezbollah’s sway. 

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Altogether, these institutions serve a living, breathing, multi-religious patchwork of communities. As Lebanon has weathered financial ruin, disasters like the 2020 port explosion, and the intransigence of the country’s sectarian politics, the Lebanese government has slowly collapsed, taking many social services with it. This has pushed Lebanese Shi’a, Hezbollah’s primary constituency, even closer to the group, where they’ve been able to provide much more for adherents than the state itself. Examples abound. As pharmaceutical supplies dried up amid Lebanon’s economic crisis, Hezbollah was able to provide life-saving medication smuggled in from Syria and Iran to people living under its rule. As the value of the Lebanese lira plummeted, it opened supermarkets for its constituents that sold Iranian goods at lower prices than the competition.

The majority of those killed in the pager attacks were indeed Hezbollah fighters. Yet hundreds of people — working as medics and teachers, mechanics and shopkeepers — were wounded too. Though they’d never held a rifle in service of the group, and were by most definitions civilians, they too were caught in the crossfire: Hezbollah’s hold on their daily lives was just too tight. It’s a situation with parallels elsewhere, with Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drug cartels in Latin America playing a similar social function.

Nor is all this merely relevant to Lebanon’s internal dynamics. Deciding where to draw the line between combatant and civilian has been and continues to be a vital matter in conflicts involving non-state actors, blurring as they do the line between guerilla movement and quasi-government. But with Israel seemingly setting the stage for an all-out war with Hezbollah — having now conducted hundreds of air strikes north of the border, which collectively have resulted in the single deadliest day in Lebanon since hostilities began last year — this unresolved ambiguity will continue to produce deadly consequences for the Lebanese people. To put it bluntly: many risk finding themselves declared guilty by association with Hezbollah and its vast, multifaceted network.

As the last year of warfare in Gaza has made clear to the world, Israel has little problem with inflicting devastating civilian casualties to achieve its battlefield goals. Indeed, the policy of bringing maximum pressure to bear on Hamas and Gaza was itself born in Lebanon. In 2006, the IDF smashed civilian infrastructure to bring Hezbollah to heel, ultimately producing the infamous Dahieh doctrine. Since the start of the current round of fighting, now almost a year old, Israel has hit Hezbollah-linked rescue teams, as well as the group’s medical services. This suggests that, for Israel, the distinction between civilian branches of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and its military wing is already null and void.

From a purely military perspective, this brutal policy is understandable. All branches of Hezbollah’s network feed into the same coffers. These play a part in funding its armed wing, so working to incapacitate the entire organisation does make sense for Israel strategically, despite the immense ethical caveats involved. But then the question emerges: how far is Israel willing to go?  Who, to put it bluntly, will it decide is contributing to Hezbollah’s operations — and therefore get a target on their back? Nor are random civilians the only ones at risk here. Since 1992, after all, Hezbollah has held seats in the Lebanese parliament, and is currently part of the country’s governing coalition. Though Israel apologised for killing a member of the Lebanese Armed Forces in late 2023, IDF commanders have previously stated that they wouldn’t distinguish between Hezbollah and the formal state in any future war.

Over the past year analysts have often noted that while Israel may have achieved tactical victories against Hezbollah — notably the pager attack or the recent killing of Ibrahim Aqeel — it has no strategic vision beyond these triumphs. The closest thing they have is the belief, apparently held by many within Israel’s national security and military leadership since October 7, that deploying overwhelming force will awe its enemies into capitulating. This calculus has in effect produced a policy of collective punishment against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for their closeness — voluntary or not — to Hamas. As we’re now seeing, Shi’a Muslims in Lebanon are now suffering a similar fate thanks to their (often unwanted) relationship with Hezbollah.

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From Fifties British Kenya, to post-2011 Syria, where powerful actors tried to tame guerilla forces and the restive populations that supported them, history shows that such a strategy is doomed. Basic group psychology agrees. In Lebanon, punishing people who just happen to be under Hezbollah’s thumb will do nothing but strengthen Nasrallah’s authority, and personalise support for a group that was hitherto more abstract. In the event that Hezbollah can be defeated militarily — and with some 20,000 active personnel and over 100,000 missiles, that’s no sure thing — that inevitably means Lebanese antipathy toward Israel will linger. That, in turn, offers space to new rogue actors, especially in the absence of a fully functioning state.

A brave new generation of Lokman Slims can only appear when Lebanese Shi’a can choose which political group they associate with. Hezbollah’s stifling repression is the most significant obstacle stopping this happening — but how Israel behaves is crucial too. If people working regular jobs in suburbs like Dahieh can expect to be attacked no matter what they do, why bother resisting Hezbollah at all?

Yet even though she was prepared, her death would still be messy: both for her and the family she left behind. Tensions between my siblings had escalated over the months, as we negotiated a difficult and stressful process. Let down by the officials who were meant to help us, it would be fair to say that assisted suicide killed my family along with my mother. 

Mine isn’t just a personal tragedy. As euthanasia inches towards legality in Britain, with a private member’s bill on assisted dying potentially being debated in the Commons this month, we must think seriously about the logistics of death. Ignore it and we risk wreathing a nation in trauma — long after bereaved families leave their loved ones behind. For whether a longed-for release or slow and painful menace, death is a painful business. 

The protocols, though, are simple enough. Following the Oregon Dignity in Death Act, passed in 1998, the Volunteer Assisted Dying Act in New South Wales encompasses 11 distinct steps and a host of safeguards. It is only available to over-18s who have an illness that will cause death within 12 months, or is causing suffering that cannot be relieved. Patients must undergo three assessments and write a declaration of their intentions.

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Beyond these tight theoretical rules, however, the practicalities of VAD are less proscribed. For one thing, unlike in the US, assisted dying is free. And therefore more accessible. But far more important is the way in which amateur family members are roped into the protocols. My mother, as part of the process, nominated one of my sisters as her Key Person who would help her navigate the path to euthanasia.

This, though, was a difficult emotional burden for my sensitive sister, who struggled with poor health. To make matters worse, she was estranged from my other siblings. My mother selected this sister simply for her own ease. Another, more pragmatic sister had long been Evelyn’s Power of Attorney, but when new papers were drawn up, her name was misspelled and Mum wouldn’t sign incorrect legal documents. Instead of having the papers corrected, and waiting until her daughter could make the six hour-return drive to sign them, Mum was impatient.

Instead, she defaulted to the most convenient solution: her most available child. KP worked part-time, due to her health issues, while my other siblings work full-time. For my part, I live in the UK. At any rate, the newly bestowed Power of Attorney laid the groundwork for my KP sister being named as the primary support person. It was treated as a coup against my other sister who mum had always sought advice from on important matters or during a family crisis. In fact, that sister was the family vault on all serious matters. The animosity from one sister to the other was established years before my birth.

So I was commissioned as an intermediary, offering updates from my mother and KP to the other side of the family. I had also been passing along the various visiting times and dates of my siblings, so they could avoid each other at the care home. It was exhausting.

In theory, this muddle shouldn’t have mattered. After all, the rules also provide each family with a so-called VAD “coordinator”. These professionals are there to guide and support families through the challenging process. Empathy, it goes without saying, is key. 

Alas, these theoretical safeguards were inadequate. After attending a couple of assessments, my sister was struggling to cope. Even the most resilient adult will find it challenging to accompany a parent who is arranging their own death. My mother, for her part, made the process trickier. Evelyn’s dark humour — once funny — was now hurtful as she took to saying that she was “being put down.” 

That ominous sign would soon be echoed elsewhere. In January, Evelyn passed her third and final medical assessment, and was formally granted permission to undergo euthanasia. She was elated. “I feel like a huge weight has been taken off my shoulders,” I remember her telling me, “I haven’t felt this free in years.” She sounded so relieved and happy that of course I wondered whether she would go ahead with it. But the date was set. February 22, 2024, the wheels were set in motion — and the trouble really started. 

In January, I took a flight from Heathrow to Chicago for a research assignment, in the belief that she would not go ahead with it. Between long flights and epic time differences, my role as intermediary collapsed, as my sister refused to share information with the other side of the family. Soon enough, I received frantic phone calls from other siblings desperate for crucial information. It seems that information is power and that information was being tightly held.

Now, my KP sister and one of her adult children had started to tell me when I could and couldn’t call my mother. They had established themselves as Mum’s guardians. Of course, I ignored their instructions, and Evelyn was annoyed by their interference — but ultimately did nothing to intervene.

I know, of course, that many families are dysfunctional — and VAD can’t be blamed for our internal squabbles. Yet the shallow, inflexible support offered families makes a miserable process far worse, triggering sleepless nights and agony for all of us. 

Then, on February 15, just a week before she was due to die, staff shortages meant the date had to be postponed. A tough woman, not given to weeping, she crumbled. She could not stop crying. She was terrified of dying and had psychologically prepared herself for it, only to be undone by a bureaucratic bungle. Again, I asked her on the telephone why she was going ahead with it when she was clearly afraid. “I’m more terrified of living,” she told me. 

The delay, though, did offer me the opportunity to say goodbye. So I flew out with my daughter, Ava, to Sydney. And my mother was fascinated by the granddaughter she hadn’t seen in so many years. I sat on the bed watching, mesmerised as they laughed and exchanged ideas. The deep interest Mum showed in Ava’s life made it even harder for me to reconcile her decision to be injected with a lethal dose of barbiturates the following day. The notion that she would be dead in 24 hours had not landed. It would not land.

But my mother was determined. And on February 23, we arrived at the hospital early in the morning. A social worker was assigned who, after a whispered conversation with my KP sister, promptly left the room and didn’t reappear. Unable to sit still, I roamed the sterile corridors until I noticed one of my nieces sitting alone in the public waiting area. Such was her distress I hardly recognised her. The social worker, though, was nowhere to be seen. 

Evelyn arrived at midday, dosed up with painkillers, awake and chatting. Only now did it seem real. When we all entered her room, the VAD coordinator was there, having suddenly reappeared after weeks of silence. There she was at Evelyn’s bedside, acting like nothing had happened. Speaking only to my KP sister and Mum, she merely offered a nod of acknowledgement to the rest of us. As so often, our apparent invisibility felt crippling.  

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My mother was oblivious. And after she had whispered a private message of farewell to each person in the room, an anaesthetist ended her life. Just after 1pm on February 23, 2024. Nothing in Evelyn’s life became her like the leaving of it, such was her grace and courage. 

In 2018, my father-in-law died a merciless death in England. The former country GP had Parkinson’s disease and had been in residential care for several years. When he could still make decisions, he made clear that he did not want to live if he could not eat or drink. Specifically, he refused a feeding tube.

When he was no longer able to swallow his death began. It took five days for him to die of thirst. I remain haunted by the harrowing nature of his departure.

So beyond the beauty of her passing, what have I taken from Evelyn’s death? Would I recommend it? Yes, in a sense I still would. I firmly believe NSW Health has opened a much-needed service for the terminally ill. But the system has a long way to go if it isn’t to destroy an ocean of other families. Even the most cohesive units can fracture under such immense strain. The trauma for our family will never be healed. My KP sister didn’t come to the scattering of my mother’s ashes. And none of my other siblings is in touch with her. Going through the VAD process has turned a once close sisterly bond into something uncomfortable and unwanted.

So as Britain begins its serious discussions over assisted dying, it must obviously consider ethics and morality. But equally important is to create an intelligent, reactive system of euthanasia, which cares for both individuals and their families. Failing to create that risks causing even more suffering — which would be an irony indeed. 

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.

But it was also a threat. In 2007, 22,000 African Union (AU) troops were brought into Somalia to support Mogadishu’s fragile government. But at the end of this year, they are scheduled to leave. And there’s every reason to believe that al-Shabaab could take over and destabilise neighbouring nations with a large Somali diaspora. Indeed, there are already reports that al-Shabaab is in contact with the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. Such an alliance would further imperil international shipping routes and have enormous consequences for the world economy.

It could also spark more serious threats closer to home. After all, in the aftermath of 9/11, it was in Somalia — not Iraq or Afghanistan — that a new generation of Western jihadists were spawned.

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By the turn of the century, London had already become a haven for dissident preachers and jihadi ideologues: Abu Qatada, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, Hani al-Sibai and Abu Hamza al-Masri. But it also produced its own English-speaking radicals, who coalesced in a square mile known as Lisson Green, in the very same borough as the Houses of Parliament.

Many of the youngsters who grew up in the area had been too young to be meaningfully aware of the recent conflicts in Afghanistan or Bosnia, but they swam in the ideological currents of the aftermath. Sheikh Abu Qatadah, a top jihadi ideologue, used to deliver sermons there on Fridays. As did Anwar Awlaki, a firebrand preacher who openly gave jihadist talks and was a favourite of Mohammed Emwazi, the man who would later become known as “Jihadi John”. Just down the road, Muhammad al-Rifai, a man who claimed to be the Caliph of the whole Muslim world, lived in a council flat.

A few years ago, one of those who heard their sermons agreed to speak to me using the pseudonym Abdullah. Abdullah grew up in Lisson Green and attended the youth club where I worked for one summer in 2003. He told me about the Islamist currents that dominated the area: even the local five-a-side soccer team was named the “Shishanees” (the Chechens). Abdullah became devout during his teenage years and joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist organisation that called for the return of the Caliphate. As an activist, he invited many of its members to his secondary school to give speeches to the Muslim pupils.

The youngsters stewed in this ideological cauldron when a new conflict emerged in Somalia. The fall of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre’s government in 1991 created a power vacuum and a decade-long civil war. Eventually, the Somali people’s desire for peace and order resulted in the rise of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). This group, founded by religious scholars, established a semblance of law and order in the capital Mogadishu and succeeded in pushing out the nation’s CIA-backed warlords by 2006. In Lisson Green, this was a cause for celebration. A new generation of British Muslims had grown up with tales of Western jihadis and their spirited adventures in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, and they were eager to emulate them. Suddenly, they saw their opportunity in Somalia.

They were encouraged in this by Abdul Majid, an outspoken Somali-British local who drew many youngsters into his orbit, especially Bilal Berjawi, who attended the same youth club as Abdullah. Berjawi was a pug-faced bruiser with a Beckham-like voice and a reputation as a fighter. He attracted a circle of boys from the youth club and they travelled to Somalia in 2007.

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By Liam Duffy

Some described the times under the ICU as idyllic. Some, such as Mohammed Ezzouek, went there claiming to want to study Islam and live under Islamic law. But the good times did not last. The Ethiopian government, alarmed by the presence of the ICU on its border, pushed them out of Mogadishu and rearmed the warlords who were back in the capital by the end of the year. This attack on the ICU radicalised its youth wing and it later split off as a separate organisation known as Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen — the Young Mujahideen Movement, or al-Shabaab for short. And as they embarked on a war against the Ethiopians, al-Shabaab declared allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Faced with this threat, the young men from Lisson Green fled Somalia trying to reach safety in Kenya. Once there, some were detained and interrogated, while a handful returned to the UK having turned their back on both Somalia and Islamist ideology. Others, however, became more radicalised. And chief among them was Berjawi, who became a full member of al-Shabaab and was purportedly trained by Harun Fazul, the man behind the 1998 terrorist bombings in East Africa. Indeed, Fazul chose Berjawi as the leader of the London network. Over the next few years, Berjawi came in and out of the UK to fundraise for the group.

After proving himself, Berjawi went on to become an important commander for al-Shabaab, until he was killed in 2012 by the US in a drone strike, reportedly with British complicity. But Berjawi left behind those he recruited: in particular, Mohammed Sakr, Mohammed Emwazi and Alexanda Kotey. Sakr and Emwazi tried to enter Somalia again in 2009, using a cover story that they were going on safari in Tanzania. In Syria, Emwazi and Kotey would become the Western faces of the Caliphate.

Meanwhile, those who could not take part in jihad in Syria were recruited to carry out terror attacks in the UK. Michael Adebolajo, an associate of Berjawi who had tried to join al-Shabaab, murdered British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013. Three years later, two promising university students, Tarik Hassane and Suhaib Majeed, were convicted for their part in an Isis terror plot in West London; both men were from Lisson Green or nearby. They had been acting under Kotey’s instructions.

This was the effect of the rise of al-Shabaab. At the time, policymakers appeared to be more preoccupied with threats emerging from Afghanistan and Iraq, or dealing with the aftermath of major terror attacks such as the one that took place in London on 7/7, to appreciate the presence al-Shabaab had on a small but significant number of young Muslims in the West. Somalia appeared distant and war-torn.

Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation, with a turbo-charged jihadi discourse heightened by the horrific situation in Palestine. Young disaffected Muslims watch as the media appears outraged by Russian targeting of hospitals in Ukraine but relatively indifferent when the IDF targets hospitals in Gaza. They see themselves as othered, devalued and forgotten. Spurred on by social media and Telegram groups, they see the likes of the Taliban defeating the Americans or the Houthis doing something for Gaza while the rest of the Muslim world appears impotent.

For them, al-Shabaab offers an animating force. If its flags rise in Mogadishu, a new generation of Western jihadists could return to the Horn of Africa.

Under the proposed six-week ceasefire in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages, the IDF will have to withdraw from the Corridor. But this throws up a conundrum. Vacate the line, and it will be déja vu all over again. Hamas will reconstitute and rearm, waiting for a better day to go after the diabolical Yahud (Jew) again. And Israel will be back to square one.

This is, after all, the lesson of history. Loath to re-occupy all of Gaza after its withdrawal in 2005, the IDF has regularly returned to “mow the grass”, as an Israeli quip has it, to cut down Hamas’ war-making potential. Yet grass grows back quickly. After each IDF incursion, Hamas rebounded with better gear and training. The “Islamic Resistance Movement” used the breathers to build fortified tunnels that accommodated trucks loaded with hardware coming in via Egypt. Cairo could not or would not stop the flow — as it won’t when the IDF does pull out.

Does this make keeping the Corridor a no-brainer? Strategically speaking, yes. But not in a vibrant democracy like Israel, where hundreds of thousands took to the streets after the cold-blooded murder of six hostages, while 101 still remain in Gaza. No doubt, if among the murdered six hostages were my own children, I would march to liberate Yahya Sinwar’s remaining pawns. Anything to “bring them home now”, as the demonstrators demand, and set aside any strategic priorities held up by Netanyahu.

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Yet righteous anger does not crack Israel’s harrowing dilemma: save lives or defang Hamas, secure a ceasefire or keep the Corridor? Let’s not forget that Sinwar, a leader whose tactical savvy is matched only by his inhumanity, is not eying a lasting stand-off, let alone a modus vivendi. The point is to restore Hamas to power.

On the tactical level, the cruel point, which might escape a tortured nation, is obvious: Hamas will not release all 101 hostages. For the simple reason that the value of each remaining Israeli will rise. What is more likely is that they will dribble them out and keep the remainder as human bargaining chips to maintain pressure and trade lives for concessions. This game will not end.

Despite knowing this, defence minister Yoav Gallant continues to dismiss the Corridor’s strategic value. A retired major-general, this old hand should know better. Likewise, opposition leader Benny Gantz argues that the IDF could always return, which is true. But how often has the IDF surged into Gaza in vain? The “grass” has always grown back, while the Qassam Brigades have grown stronger with more sophisticated hardware.

History, too, does not favour the optimists, who are convinced that a 42-day ceasefire will produce stability. The multi-year Arab-Israeli truce of 1949 granted only a pause to this accursed region, which then segued into the three Arab-Israeli wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973. An armistice, after all, only works when a beaten enemy can no longer fight, as was the case of Germany in 1918. More importantly, the “Islamic Resistance” isn’t interested in a durable deal, and neither is Iran, which uses Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis as helots in an unending war against the “Zionist entity”.

And there is also a lesson here for Washington, for Iran’s ambitions dwarf Gaza by an order of magnitude. With its proxies, Iran goes after the Little Satan Israel, but the real target is the Great Satan America. Hit Israel, its only reliable ally, and you damage the US. Gaza is not a local mano-a-mano, but the “Great Game 2.0”, to recall Britain vs Russia in the 19th century. And yet, the US is lobbying for a ceasefire.

None of this is to say that Joe Biden or his successor will have an easy decision to make. Desperate to stay in power and out of prison, Netanyahu insists on clinging to such shameful characters as Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The former heads the “Jewish Power” party that would “cleanse” the West Bank of Arabs; the latter leads “Religious Zionism” and believes that starving two million Gazans is “justified and moral”. But spearing Netanyahu’s domestic agenda does not erase strategic issues where he has a valid point.

For argument’s sake, let’s sketch a scenario where Israel vacates the Philadelphi line. Billions of dollars would pour into the Strip for reconstruction. Re-embedded, Hamas would determine who gets what from this cornucopia to restore control and allegiance. With Iran at one step removed, the “Resistance” would rebuild tunnels, re-arm and prepare for the next strike. So far, so bad for the Jewish state — a familiar remake.

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By Armin Rosen

Now, contrast this with Israel’s long-term control over Philadelphi, with the Navy patrolling the coast and the Air Force the skies. With its southern flank secured, the Army could concentrate on the far more potent Hezbollah threat in the north. Reliable deterrence would sober up Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon and Ali Khamenei in Iran. All of which is good for the US, as well.

And what of the wider Arab world? Its rulers do have to keep an eye on the “Arab street”, but it is no secret that they want to neutralise Iran’s Hamas stand-in. Though mumbling to do so, Egypt will not tear up a 45-year-old peace treaty, while the “Gulfies” plus Riyadh are not eager to shred the Abraham Accords — an insurance policy against Iran. Not even those 40,000 Gazan dead hawked by the Hamas Health Ministry (and not checked by Western media) have ruptured the tacit alliance. Such is the icy logic of power politics. Yet in a democracy like Israel, exhaustion, angst and anger about slain hostages can overwhelm the reason of state.

Tyrannical regimes such as Hamas and Iran suffer no such constraints. Just regard their murderous game. Hamas wanted to sacrifice its own multitudes to rouse the world against the Jewish state. Part one worked perfectly: Israel is isolated, sanctioned and abhorred. Now we are in phase two: Hamas murders hostages to demoralise and immobilise Israel. That deadly gambit is bearing fruit, as well. But how could Israel give in?

“The state is the coldest of cold monsters,” Nietzsche once wrote. And no state, least of all beleaguered Israel, genuflects before the God of Goodness. It must act morally when it can and avoid foolish wars when it must. Nothing is more important than strategic necessity when the security of the nation is at stake. And it doesn’t take a Clausewitz to figure out why the diminutive Philadelphi Corridor is so critical in this new Great Game.

The book he was promoting was called The Invention of the Jewish People, which argued that the concept of Jews as a distinct people with a shared lineage, culture and homeland didn’t exist until the arrival of 19th-century nationalism. The exile from ancient Israel in 70AD, a central event in Jewish tradition, he called a “myth”. These sorts of claims were, he wrote, thrown together to give the Jewish people a cohesive national identity and, inevitably and tediously, to justify Zionism.

Leaving aside that the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” (“L’Shanah Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim“) — recited at the end of both the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur — dates at least from the Middle Ages, and that the book was intended to provoke, its objective was clear: the delegitimisation of Jewish nationhood and, by extension, any Jewish claims to the land of Israel. It was desperate stuff; even The Guardian’s reviewer wasn’t convinced.

And so, we come to his latest book Israel–Palestine: Federation or Apartheid?. Here, Sand “explores” two political solutions for the current conflict: a bi-national federation or what he terms an apartheid-like reality. There is, glaringly, no option of two states. The idea of a state for Jews, the state of Israel, is a non-starter.

It is from this bogus binary that we begin. What follows is expected: the first chapter opens with Sand quoting the Right-wing Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky, allowing him to make the case for Zionism being an entirely colonial endeavour. Predictably, there is no mention the continuous Jewish presence in the land since the defeat of the Jewish prince Simon Bar Kochba in AD135 and the fact that, apart from a brief period in the 18th century, the Palestinians who lived there did so as subjects of foreign rulers.

Jabotinsky, by the way, is more comprehensively dealt with by the other Israeli revisionist historian Avi Shlaim, in his book Iron Wall. I have my own issues with Shlaim’s work, but he is a harmless man and possessed of magnificent hair. I once sat in a lecture of his at university, marvelling at how it corkscrewed out of his skull in all directions, so white and flocculent you could stuff a duvet with it.

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Sand is a more aggressive polemicist, but he does make some valid points. His youthful activism was, he said, filled with hope that “the Israelis would see that, logically speaking, they simply could not expand their country at the expense of others while continuing to live in peace with them”. Few would disagree with that. He then goes on to lament that the articles he wrote and the marches he attended didn’t succeed in drilling this notion into the establishment — a sentiment also shared by many Israelis.

He fails to properly interrogate the degree to which the Palestinian side is culpable for the failure to reach peace. But again: fair enough. He’s far from alone in this. No, the bigger problem here is one of intellectual dishonesty. Take this — frankly pretty important — paragraph:

“And then October 7 came upon Israel, with Hamas’s brutal attack on areas next to Gaza. This horrible massacre bears certain similarities to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was carried out by Christian Phalangists while the Israeli Defence Forces under Ariel Sharon stood by, allowing the attack to take place. It was the same Ariel Sharon who, later, in 2005, evacuated the Gaza Strip and contributed to Hamas’s rise to power, further exacerbating the discord within the Palestinian leadership.”

It doesn’t take much effort to parse this sort of guff. The biggest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is perfunctorily dealt with in a single line, before Sand moves on to invoke a massacre committed by Lebanese Christians almost half a century ago. As it happens, the two events “bear certain similarities” (mark the weasel phrase) to the degree that almost any acts of horrific violence do — and this illuminates nothing. He then castigates Ariel Sharon for literally doing what Sand says he spent most of his youth calling for: withdrawing from occupied Palestinian land. Sand goes on to describe how October 7 “came as an utter shock to the Israeli public”. I’d argue it came as a “shock” to any right-thinking person – unless you believe that Palestinians are savages, which I do not.

He then asks: “So what was the source of this raging hatred that translated into such terrible war crimes?” It was “convenient”, he says, “for many Israelis to explain the massacre in terms of the traditional hatred of Islam towards Jews, thus ignoring the long history of Muslim–Jewish relations since the Crusades and Salah ad-Din”.

Well, ok. It’s true that Jews tended to fare better in Muslim lands than in Christian ones, but they did so as dhimmis — religious minorities under Islamic rule who could not bear arms, hold various public offices, were generally forced to wear distinctive clothing, and often subjected to pogroms. And then there is the question of Jew-hatred.

Unlike most armchair pundits, I have been to both the West Bank and Gaza. There I have met countless Palestinians who impressed me with their charm, their stoicism in the face of undoubted suffering, and their hospitality. Many Palestinians are absolutely not antisemitic.

But there are also a lot who are; and they tend to be in Hamas. The conditions in Gaza will inevitably create resistance, but October 7 was about something else. Just weeks after the atrocity, I was shown footage of a jubilant Hamas terrorist calling his father after the attack. “Father… I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands,” he roared. “Check your WhatsApp. Father, be proud of me!” In Khan Younis, a member of Islamic Jihad told me that Jews are the descendants of pigs and apes and should be killed.

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These people are of little concern to Sand, whose sophistry leads him to his central concern: “Given these circumstances, can an exclusively Jewish state in the Middle East have any secure future?”

Again, to be fair to him, Sand understands the geopolitical Molotov cocktail that one state would be. But, he says smarmily, “as Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist idea, once said [of the idea of a Jewish state]: ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’”. Sand correctly points to the systematic settler theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank, and the reprehensible legal architecture that has sprung up to enable it, giving many incontestable examples of both. These “facts on the ground” make two states no longer viable, he argues. The reality, however, is that there is no “solution” to this nightmare other than compromise, and certainly not self-erasure by one side. Because in the end, when you strip away all the rhetoric, hate, and endless debates about history, the only germane fact is this: the land has two peoples, and neither of them are going anywhere.

Let’s be clear: the one-state “solution” is not an alternative for Israel but an alternative to Israel. To expect the only Jewish state in the world to voluntarily extinguish itself is fundamentally unserious. My family lived as Jews in Iraq for centuries — possibly even before the advent of Islam. But none of that mattered: a few years after Israel was founded, they were forced to leave for fear of facing violence or worse. This is why Israel exists. Against that there can be no retreat.

In a recent update to his book Jerusalem, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore proposes a different mental formulation for thinking about the future: “Two nations, two republics.” Two peoples living in two separate sovereign states alongside each other. This is the only viable future. Yes, the settlements must be dismantled (or equivalent land given from Israel). Yes, it will be an immense political (and indeed physical) undertaking, but it happened in Gaza, albeit on a smaller scale. It just takes political will. And for now, that is lacking on both sides.

Even so, we must hope that it will come because “one state” is not just delusional, it is dangerous. It helps to keep the conflict alive by making Palestinians believe that no compromise is necessary, which emboldens Israel’s fanatics and undermines its moderates. In the interim, both sides are condemned to interminable suffering. This is what matters. Not that people in Europe or the United States, which really do have long traditions of meting out colonisation and genocide, get to feel better about themselves.

Sand is an Israeli — though he has publicly declared that he no longer wishes to be considered a Jew — so he does have skin in the game. But in the end, one has to ask: what’s the difference between him and Netanyahu? Both are living in an alternative reality, talking about different variations of a one-state “solution” that, practically speaking, will only bring civil war, which the Israelis would win, as they have an army, navy and Airforce. Look around the Middle East and consider how non-Muslims fare in society. Look at Lebanon to see how trying to cram various confessions into a single entity has worked out.

So “two nations, two republics” it must be. It is the only hope of real justice for two peoples who are, however much they might wish otherwise, manacled to each other forever. The road will be long and incredibly hard — but remember, Shlomo, if you will it, if you truly will it, it is no dream.

Lately, however, another set of immigration policy trendlines have begun to alter the town’s pacific character. Demonstrations consisting of more recent arrivals, also from South Asia, can now be seen in Brampton, protesting the prospect of their deportation. Though they came to Canada either with temporary worker or student visas, they believe themselves entitled to permanent residency; some of these students are even protesting their own failing grades! That their presence in the country — amounting to a mind-boggling 2.8 million temporary residents in a population of 40-odd million — continues to exert distortionary effects on wages and housing seems not to bother the rally-goers.

Meanwhile, authorities have registered a 30% rise in hate crimes, a 187% increase in auto theft, and a staggering 350% rise in home invasions in the Peel region of which Brampton is part; this has come on the heels of last year’s interethnic tensions, following the slaying of a Sikh activist. These statistics are not to suggest that all crime stems from immigrants but rather that an environment of material scarcity and institutional breakdown conduces to higher rates of crime, whether committed by immigrants or native-born individuals.

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In other words, Brampton, a microcosm for Canadian society, has begun to move away from the “bland” Bill Davis country of yesteryear, looking everyday a bit more like those politically fraught immigrant ghettoes found elsewhere; and its condition brings to mind another kind of Tory politician: Enoch Powell. Though Powell, of course, lived in another time and another country, his legacy had been to mark the passage of immigration from a point of quiet consensus into a source of intractable polarisation and social fragmentation. With more Canadians now expressing opposition to immigration, Canada faces its own “Enoch Powell moment”. And as the rest of the West reckons with the consequences of permissive migration, we must ask: how did Canada, so long a liberal multicultural oasis, begin to lose its exceptional status? To answer this, we must first understand the standards of the pre-existing immigration system, from which the current policies have so radically deviated.

Since the Sixties, Canadian immigration has operated on a principle of prudent control, both in terms of quality and quantity. In 1967, Ottawa came up with perhaps the greatest policy innovation that Canada ever produced: the points system, which could be used to measure candidates’ suitability for contributing economically and integrating socially in Canada.

At the same time, the nations of Western Europe, including Britain, were importing migrants from post-colonial peripheries to act as a “lumpenproletariat” or reserve army of labour, leading to a general erosion of social trust. Unlike in Canada where multiculturalism worked as a rhetorical gloss, European societies could not adjust so easily to their new situation, and it is in this context that Enoch Powell gave his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, a divisive act that nonetheless served as an expression of the sense of alarm felt by many ordinary people.

Canada avoided this path — and not just because of its isolated geography. Its leaders consciously opted for a different approach, choosing to prioritise Canadians’ cohesion and security. As the demographics of post-Sixties immigration show, the points system does not discriminate on the basis of race. But it does discriminate in favour of a certain type of immigrant: English or French-speaking, skilled, educated, financially secure, upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial, and so forth, drawn from the middle classes of many nations. This is borne out by positive immigrant performance in such metrics as social mobility, savings accumulation, skills and educational achievement, and overall economic independence.

Thus, Canada is formally multicultural but functionally unicultural. The prevailing leitkultur is not ethnic or racial but rather sociological and class-based.

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By Michael Cuenco

It was Max Weber who made the connection between the austere theology of Calvinism and the ascendancy of the middle classes of industrialising Europe. At comparable stages of development, it is no surprise that something like Calvinism infuses the outlook of the middle classes of the developing world today, whatever their actual religion. It is an acquisitive (yet ascetic) classically bourgeois disposition that strives for success and respectability while retaining a commitment to family, community, and social order. This is what the points system draws from: it works to pre-empt Powell-esque backlashes by ensuring the quantity of immigration can be adjusted to economic conditions, while the quality is such that new arrivals reinforce the stabilising egalitarian character of society.

Until recently, parties cooperated to maintain this consensus, before a sea change unfolded around the time of Canada’s emergence from Covid-19, which had brought immigration to a standstill. The post-pandemic economy witnessed upward pressure on wages from tight labour markets and downward pressures on rental prices as well as the cratering of international student tuitions: businesses, landlords, and the higher education sector all stood to profit less. And as governments are more likely to respond to the concerns of these groups, policymakers rushed to restore a profitable climate for them. This meant one thing: jacking up the immigration intake.

Alongside immigration targets of more than 2 million new permanent residents until 2025/26 came a still more senseless move: the lifting of restraints on both the hiring of foreign workers and enrolment of international students; notably, these latter temporary streams did not have to pass through the points system to come to Canada, being let in with ever more liberality. The fact that federal Liberals under Trudeau and Ontario Tories under Doug Ford seemed to be of one mind on this only underscored how this arrangement — a betrayal of the previous, pro-middle-class system — had become the new consensus.

Even more damaging than the economic stress are the long-term social implications of having imported a new “lumpenproletariat”. Unlike the “Calvinist” middle-class immigrants of previous cohorts, these ones have often been taken en masse in from the villages and rural regions of their home countries, where lifestyles are markedly “pre-Calvinist”.

Canadian media, for predictable reasons, have been reluctant to report on just how problematic and maladaptive many in these cohorts have been, so journalistic accounts are scarce. But I have it on good authority from sources in the government, educational, and NGO sectors that many of these migrants are failing at most cultural markers of integration: from rampant cheating to disregard of basic norms to glaring lack of linguistic ability to a brazen willingness to bend public policies at every turn. If these trends continue, it won’t be long before places like Brampton acquire toxic reputations akin to the cultural powder kegs of Europe: the banlieus of Paris or the no-go zones of Malmö.

Beyond cuts to future intake across all streams, there can be only one sure way to restore balance to the system, so that it becomes bland again; and that is a sustained and far-reaching campaign of deportation of visa overstays.

But how can this be done?

It’s important first to note that the status quo in Canada is not open borders, even though the effect is similar. It is still a highly regulated and bureaucratised process that’s heavily reliant on visas, permits, and hiring forms; unlike in the US, where millions can live indefinitely as undocumented immigrants, Canada still has elements of a formidable “bureaucratic wall” and functional equivalents to “E-Verify” that could theoretically keep tab on overstayers. The Canadian government could use the vast array of data at its disposal from this system—bank accounts, employment records, bits of personal information and paper trails—to construct a comprehensive live database of temporary residents and prospective deportees, whose exit from the country can then be confirmed by exit controls.

The only thing missing, of course, is the political will to execute such a programme, for no major party seems to be really interested. Even if Canadians do go to an early election after this week’s political shake-up, it is unlikely that it will be fought over this issue. After decades of stability, Canada’s ruling class has chosen to squander its inheritance of the world’s most envied immigration policy. And as for what happens next, whether Canada ultimately goes the way of Bill Davis or Enoch Powell, we need only look to Brampton.

Modi had been angling for a moment like this since September of the year before, when he lobbied the United Nations to make 21st June “International Yoga Day”. In an address to the General Assembly, he claimed that “Yoga is an invaluable gift from our ancient tradition. Yoga embodies unity of mind and body, thought and action … a holistic approach [that] is valuable to our health and our well-being. Yoga is not just about exercise; it is a way to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and nature.”

Modi’s successful pitch for yoga at the UN contained eerie echoes of a pitch for Hinduism made by one of his heroes, the religious teacher Swami Vivekānanda, to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago back in 1893. It was a masterclass in using the language of inclusivity to make the case for a particular idea. Hinduism, declared Vivekānanda, is the “mother of all religions” and has “taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance”. To an audience consisting primarily of American Christians, familiar with Jesus’s claim that “No one comes to the Father except through me”, Vivekānanda offered a contrasting line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”

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Vivekānanda’s expansive case for Hinduism was helped by the fact that the concept itself was only around a century old by the late 1800s and remained somewhat flexible. Europeans in colonial-era India had used the term “Hindu” (derived from a Sanskrit word for the Indus River) to describe people on the subcontinent who did not belong to better-understood and apparently more clearly-defined traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Indian reformers later used the term “Hinduism” to refer to a broad system of ideas and practices that went beyond “religion” in the narrow confessional sense familiar to modern Westerners and encompassed culture, identity and, in time, a sense of national political purpose.

In the decades running up to Indian independence in 1947, there was nervousness among religious minorities — particularly Muslims — about what this might mean for the role played by Hinduism in a future independent India. The country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was among those who advocated for secularism and religious pluralism. Other forces in Indian politics, including the predecessor to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), encouraged the idea that India is fundamentally a Hindu country and that its politics and institutions ought to reflect that fact.

The vexed politics of “Hinduism” in India — religious tradition versus a more encompassing cultural or national identity — has been mirrored in the West by arguments about yoga, one of whose earliest teachers was Swami Vivekānanda during visits to the United States. Is yoga essentially religious in character? If so, is it wrong to use it purely for its health benefits or to teach it in schools that are subject to rules about the separation of church and state? And given its origins in India, is there something morally wrong or at least a little unseemly about white Westerners making money from promoting it — or even practising it at all?

Just as these anxieties appear to be ebbing in the West — though concerns remain about shallow and overly-commercialised forms of yoga — Modi has been leading the charge to reclaim yoga for Indians, and for himself in particular. It is part of a broader push to promote traditional Indian culture at home and to leverage India’s spiritual wealth abroad as a soft power asset. Modi has already made much of his country as the home of Buddhism, finding it useful when dealing with Buddhist-influenced cultures around Asia, from Vietnam to Korea.

Modi’s critics worry about what this might mean for the secular and pluralist character of their democracy. When, in his 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly, Modi described yoga as a gift from “our ancient tradition”, who exactly was the implied “we”? Indians as a whole — or the country’s large Hindu majority? Modi and the BJP are suspected of using yoga as a means of encouraging people, both at home in India and abroad, to think of those two categories as more or less one and the same. That risks reinforcing the idea that India’s Muslims, Christians and Dalits — formerly referred to as “untouchables” and historically mistreated by upper-caste Hindus — are outsiders, potentially exposing them to yet more discrimination and violence. Modi is also accused of engaging in what one commentator memorably called “om-washing”: linking yoga to everything from world peace to a healthier climate while pursuing destructive policies on these and other issues.

No doubt there will be those who regard worries over Modi’s appropriation of yoga as of no more consequence than hand-wringing in the West about wellness enthusiasts who like to greet each other with namaste gestures. Depending on your point of view, Indian soldiers performing yoga in freezing temperatures at the Siachen Glacier is either a step towards entrenching Hindu nationalism at the heart of Indian politics while provoking Pakistan — with whom India remains in dispute over sovereignty in the region — or simply a nice touch for International Yoga Day. Likewise, government bureaucrats and foreign diplomats in India taking up yoga, on Modi’s advice, may be regarded either as working on their general health or participating in a slow but steady narrowing of acceptable discourse in India.

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Time will tell just how much or little this matters for India. As Modi enters his third term as prime minister, the argument over yoga seems set to extend to schools across the country. Some BJP-led regional administrations have already sought to make it mandatory among the nation’s children, prompting objections from defenders of India’s minorities and the country’s secular constitution. A Sun Salutation — or Surya Namaskar — may strike most as an innocent sequence of yoga moves. But “Surya” is both the sun and the Hindu solar deity, rendering the sequence controversial in the eyes of some Muslim groups in India.

Those wanting to see yoga’s influence diminished in Indian politics may hope that Modi’s Olympic dream comes true. Modi wants the Games to come to India in 2036, and for yoga to be included on the list of events alongside chess, kabaddi, kho kho, squash and T20 cricket. It may well prove divisive: plenty of yoga practitioners will no doubt object to what they see on display, just as large numbers of karate fans regarded its Olympic incarnation — when Tokyo hosted a delayed Games in 2021 — as “not proper karate”. A more potent message still would be sent if things take an Australian turn. The sight of an unfortunate competitor butchering their contribution — offering an unintentionally comic twist on the downward dog to rival Raygun’s kangaroo hop — might end up harming yoga’s global reputation.

In the shorter term, there seems little prospect that Modi will retire yoga as a pawn in India’s over-heated politics. Promoting ancient glories is a cheaper and more reliable way of winning hearts and minds than promising the earth politically, whether at home or abroad. And as long as the wellness boom is with us, so too will be that sweet spot where fitness, fulfilment and wisdom coincide — seasoned, dare it be said, with a dash of the exotic, courtesy of images of the far-away or the long-ago. For all the anxieties that it seems to be causing of late, in the West and in India, nothing promises to hit that spot quite like a good sweaty hour on a yoga mat.

Today, the blockade is stronger than ever, and the American military has given up on trying to lift it. Just a fortnight ago, faced with a deterrent bolstered by zero US aircraft carriers, the Houthis managed to board a Greek-flagged oil tanker, plant some explosives, and chant “Death to America! Death to Israel!” as the vessel went up in flames. Last week, the Pentagon quietly admitted that the tanker is still on fire and now appears to be leaking oil.

This should probably be huge news: one of the most important trade routes in the world is now blocked by a rag-tag group of militants, and the US Navy has thrown its hands up in defeat and sailed away. And yet, we just don’t want to talk about it.

The reason for this seems to be fairly straightforward: more than just sharing a sense of growing embarrassment, we no longer know how to talk about what’s going on. After all, America’s Navy is supposed to be the most powerful Navy in the world. As every war film of the past two decades has insisted on reminding us, all it takes is a single aircraft carrier to force a developing nation to its knees. America might not be great at “nation-building”, but boy does it know how to bomb things until all resistance stops.

Of course, Yemen is where these narratives collide with reality. Unlike Afghanistan or Iraq, the attempts to unblock the Suez do not really represent some sort of wasteful “war of choice”, one that we can simply walk away from when we grow bored. If the blockade holds, it will mean at least two things. First, the entire world will receive dramatic evidence of the growing military and political impotence of the West, which will have real-world consequences for Western diplomacy in regions like the Pacific. Second, and possibly more importantly, the Suez Canal is one of the most important trade routes in the world, and forcing container ships to go around it will manifest itself in supply crunches and structural inflation, particularly for European economies. Europe is already contending with the dual disease of anaemic growth and an energy crisis; a blockade of a major trade route is the opposite of what we need.

This is, however, exactly what has happened, and this time around, the US clearly doesn’t know what to do. In December last year, the US Navy and US Central Command first launched Operation Prosperity Guardian, which was supposed to safeguard shipping traffic against Houthi missile strikes. In January, when this mission began faltering, it launched Operation Poseidon Archer, designed to bomb the Houthis into submission and deter them from further attacks on trade. The result has been underwhelming in the extreme: months later, Yemeni casualties have amounted to “at least” 22 dead, while the US has lost several expensive MQ-9 reaper drones to Houthi anti-air missiles and two Navy SEALs who drowned while trying to impound a shipment of rocket components bound for Yemen.

At first glance, the low casualties would suggest a simple lack of American will; the problem, many would say, is that the US is simply playing with the kid gloves on. But this isn’t really the case. The US has, to the best of its ability, attempted to accurately identify and target Houthi weaponry and launch sites inside Yemen, but there’s just one problem: it can’t. In this era of drone warfare, mobile launch platforms, and advanced tunnelling infrastructure, the US simply lacks the ability to identify and blow up the majority of drones or missiles before they are launched. This problem is not exactly new, either: “Scud-hunting” was problematic enough during the first Gulf War, and Scud launchers were huge, lumbering things. Today, with the new drone and missile technology, finding a drone launch platform inside a mountain range is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

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And there’s a more obvious problem, too: the drones are cheap, and American interceptor missiles and precision guided bombs are extremely expensive. Added to this, the way in which these bombs are delivered — manned jet aircraft — adds another layer of expense, because jet fighters can cost upwards of $100 million in flyaway cost, and far more when pilot training (at least $10 million for basic competency), maintenance and infrastructure are factored in. In other words, the more America fights the Houthis, the more they will lose.

Underlying this strategy is what could be called a modernised approach to Second World War-era practices. Today, the planes are faster, the aircraft carriers are bigger and use nuclear propulsion, and the destroyers are outfitted with missiles rather than guns — but the rationale behind their deployment is entirely backward-looking. The use of manned aircraft for long-distance bombing once had a central role because there was no alternative; if you wanted a big ball of explosives to land accurately via the air, a human had to be up there to guide it. That, of course, is no longer the case, and yet a combination of prestige, complacency and the absence of a functioning industrial base all conspire to make the US military increasingly irrelevant.

The result of this can now be witnessed in the Red Sea. If the US Navy cannot even lift a blockade by Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, the idea of lifting a blockade around Taiwan is a complete fantasy. If the US cannot compete with the arms production of Iran, then the notion of somehow out-competing China should be put to bed immediately.

But this is also why the Red Sea defeat will be met with silence. More than any other conflict raging today, it highlights the crisis within the West’s military organisation, as well as the fact that there is no real way to fix it. To admit our powerlessness is to admit that the era of Western hegemony is already over. Faced with little alternative, we will continue to let the Houthis blow up our ships — and then pretend that none of it really matters.

The truth, however, is that the Kursk incursion does not fundamentally alter the reality on the ground: this conflict is one of attrition, which, in the long run, still favours the larger power over the smaller. Rather than celebrate, then, Kyiv’s allies, in particular the United States, would be wise to use this turn of fortune as pretext to pressure both sides into seeking an end to the war — the better for Washington to be able to pursue its own larger strategic interests.

But how might it achieve this? Whether Democrat or Republican, the incoming administration will preside over a four-year period which could see the return of peace in Europe and the opportunity to shape the terms of a settlement with the Kremlin. Given intensifying competition with China and the unthinkable consequences entailed by an American defeat, US leadership would be remiss if it did not treat this eventuality as a cue to shift the balance of power. Or, as the prescient John J. Mearsheimer explained in 2022: “If you live in a world where there are three great powers — China, Russia, and the United States — and one of those great powers, China, is a peer competitor, what you want to do if you’re the United States is have Russia on your side of the ledger.”

Such a scenario would recall the foreign policies of two past presidents. First, it would represent a “reverse Nixon” in which Washington tries to cleave Russia away from China as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger cleaved Maoist China from the Soviet Union; and second, an attempt to enact a far more successful version of Barack Obama’s ill-fated Russia Reset. This time, however, the stakes are higher and the circumstances much more difficult than both scenarios, given the strong alliance between Russia and China. Yet insights from history can always be adapted to forge a fitting strategy for the current situation: the question is how?

Most obviously, a negotiated settlement in the form of an armistice — akin to that which ended the Korean War, in which the fighting ceased without definitive recognition of the belligerent’s competing territorial claims — may serve as an expedient conclusion to the war. The two sides could be made to return to something close to pre-2022 ante, which would regrettably allow continuing Russian control over Crimea and rule out the prospect of Nato membership for Kyiv, yet would preserve the existence of a sizeable and sovereign Ukrainian state. Such an outcome would please no one, but at the very least Putin’s ambition of conquering the whole of Ukraine would have been thwarted. There is also a parallel here with Nixon’s strategy when the Republic of China on Taiwan, formerly a key ally, had to be relegated in importance, as Ukraine may soon be, before the larger strategic goal of courting Beijing.

But will this be enough? After all, the US must prepare for the prospect of a long reset, one that will take more than just pressing a shiny button, as Hillary Clinton seemed to want to do, or even more than a future president’s visit to the Kremlin to shake hands with Putin, as with Nixon and Mao. This is because, as noted, unlike in 1972, when ideological differences in the Sino-Soviet Split kept the two communist giants apart, Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China are today in the midst of a so-called “partnership without limits”, which had been declared at a meeting between the two in early 2022. Just as the Biden administration has attempted to characterise the current geopolitical situation as a confrontation between democracies and autocracies, so too have Putin and Xi christened their bond as a bulwark against Western liberal hegemony.

In other words, anti-Americanism is the glue that holds their informal alliance together; yet take that particular element out of the equation and the picture of Sino-Russian friendship begins to look a lot more uncertain. This is because Russia and China are not natural allies and there are a number of vulnerabilities underlying their relationship that an intelligent American geostrategy can exploit:

To begin with, a longstanding sense of mistrust has persisted between these very distinct civilisations with sparse people-to-people ties, who are separated from each other by a vast 2,568-mile militarised border. There is also the aspect of ressentiment that arises out of any asymmetrical relationship: Russia, previously the dominant partner, has been relegated to junior status, and is now far more dependent on China for investment than the other way around. Even as Moscow leans into integration with China as a way to make up for lost Western trade, Chinese interest in Russia’s natural gas and industrial inputs is belied by Beijing’s strategy of diversifying energy and resource markets, such as through large investments in renewables. Unsurprisingly, Chinese investment in Russian pipeline projects in Siberia has fallen short of expectations. China also relied on Russia for its cheap weapons exports but has since become self-sufficient with the maturation of its own arms industries.

Meanwhile, resource-rich Central Asia has also seen expansion of Chinese presence, through Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which would link the landlocked former Soviet republics there into a broader Chinese-dominated trade order. Russia officially supports this and Putin has been a major presence at BRI summits, yet Moscow has struggled to sustain its own integration efforts with the Eurasian Economic Union, which has flailed since its launch in 2015 as a vehicle for the reassertion of Russian influence in an area it still sees as its sphere of influence.

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A new American strategy toward Russia for the latter half of the 2020s and beyond would seize on these weak spots in Sino-Russian relations. It would call for the progressive lifting of sanctions and gradual reintegration of Russia into Western trade, finance, and energy markets, alongside channelling Western capital into Russia to address its critical investment gaps in technology and infrastructure.

This is, of course, easier said than done. While Russian elites will only be too happy to be allowed back into the West’s banks and luxury shopping malls, the Russian state, whether under an ageing Putin or his successor, will likely be far more cautious, if not wary; Moscow will no doubt try to play off the Americans and Chinese against each other while benefiting from the largesse of both.

This will call for strategic patience on the part of Washington, which should aim to manage the residual tensions between the Kremlin and European allies, while encouraging Moscow to begin to assert itself against China in Central Asia. The US can also aim to integrate Russia with the bloc of Indo-Pacific states it is assembling — by, for instance, brokering deals and securing new customers for Russian energy and arms among the rising Indo-Pacific powers, whose defence capabilities the US is already looking to bolster as a counter to China’s growing military might.

A renewed Russo-American entente, however, would be most fruitful in a region that will only become more important in the decades ahead, namely the Arctic, where receding ice coverage will open new zones for shipping and resource exploration. China and Russia have worked towards the establishment of a “Polar Silk Road” which would give Beijing a presence in the polar north, where otherwise it would have none. The US should aggressively try to head off this possibility by making it a paramount strategic goal to ensure a “China-free Arctic”. It can only do this, however, if it can eventually convince the Russians to substitute Chinese for Western capital and technical assistance as a means of developing this vast untapped frontier. The best-case scenario would be to have an Arctic maritime trade region, managed exclusively by Russia and the Western Arctic powers, to bypass China’s BRI, through which certain resources and goods can be traded across continents without touching Chinese-controlled infrastructure.

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At a time of severe tension between Russia and the West, such projections may seem fantastical. But stranger things have happened: China’s transition from the most fanatically anti-American power to Washington’s partner was Nixon’s great feat, and the next president can start to do the same with Russia. With his expressed desire for mending ties with Moscow, Donald Trump would seem best suited to enact such a policy, but a Harris-led reproachment would actually embody the analogy better, since it was the dramatic turnaround after years as a Cold War hawk that made Nixon’s gambit such a political masterstroke: “Only Nixon can go to China,” as the saying went. One wonders if Kamala Harris can pull off a comparable pivot.

Only now, Americans will have to forgo the liberal triumphalism that proved to be so naïve in the recent past. Russia will likely persist as a distinct world civilisation and must be treated as such, even if it means countenancing its perennially illiberal forms of government. For the question of the next half-century will not be whether American political norms shall triumph over the earth, but whether America itself can survive this coming era of great power competition; and in this race, values must give way to interests and woolly-headed idealism to the coldest realism.

Yet today we are lurching towards a society where sexual intimacy and family life are being undermined at the most basic levels. The impact can be seen in shifting dating patterns and declining rates of marriage, family formation and childbirth. And this is no longer a Western disease; a majority of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level; by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to experience population decline.

To some extent, the roots of this war between the sexes is economic, exacerbated by the global “cost-of-living” crisis stemming from house price increases relative to incomes, higher energy and food costs. With hopes of a steady career and home ownership fading, many young people now choose to, or are forced to, adopt a lifestyle incompatible with marriage and family. 

This is most evidenced in the West by the rapid shift away from not only family but heterosexual engagement overall. But in East Asia, the breakdown in male-female relations is if anything, starker. In Japan, for instance, the harbinger of modern Asian demographics, one in four people in their twenties and thirties are virgins. Indeed, the Japanese even have a term — herbivores — for the passive, desexed generation of young men.

So too with China, which, despite once being renowned for its strong familial culture, is now home to 200 million unmarried adults. Once virtually unimaginable, the proportion of adults aged 17-36 living alone in China has risen to nearly 70%. Marriage and childbirth, notes one Chinese Gen Z, have become “almost synonymous with the stress of life for us young people”.

And this does not simply represent a demographic crisis — but inevitably a political one too. We cannot know the political implications of the current war of the sexes in societies such as China and Russia, where civic life is strictly controlled. But in the US, new fractures are becoming more pronounced. Most obviously, women, particularly single women, now provide the base for progressive politics. Similarly in Canada, according to a 2020 poll, women favoured the Liberals by two to one while men slightly tilted to the conservatives. 

Now, the existence of a political gender gap is nothing new — but, according to recent Gallup surveys, it is now five times bigger than in 2000. Survey data has found that from 1999 to 2013, about three in ten women aged 18 to 29 consistently identified as liberal but rose to 40% in 2023. And crucially, Gallup interprets these changes as “stronger-than-average pro-liberal shifts”, particularly in elite colleges. 

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In sharp contrast, an increasing proportion of men, particularly in the working class, are embracing Right-wing causes. Just like their American counterparts, who are increasingly supportive of Donald Trump, European men under 30, are also shifting to the Right. Meanwhile, in Korea, the Right-wing shift among young males was sufficient enough to put a Right-wing “anti-feminist” into the Presidency. 

Likewise, a post-sexual society in the West will not be a pretty picture. For one thing, the breakdown of sex relations undermines the traditional focus on long-term wealth creation within families. Married people, for example, aided by the mingling of spousal resources, account for 77% of all US homeowners. But when society no longer places the same value on such a traditional focus, calls for government assistance can be irresistible.

Rather than seek to bolster the prospects for young families, there are growing calls to expand such things as rent subsidies or direct transfers. At a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, speaking to over 10,000 supporters, Kamala Harris pledged to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases”. This latest statement mirrors her earlier position before Biden withdrawal where Harris shared on X her belief that “Every American deserves affordable housing”. This refers to the Biden administration’s call to cap rent increases by 5% on landlords with 50 or more rental units or risk losing federal tax breaks. She has also called for Medicare for all, essentially replacing employer-based healthcare , until she decided to backtrack from this unpopular stance.

For many, the idea of family solidarity has all but disappeared as a primary source of support. Rather than being progressive, as is often suggested, the sexual war and the decline of familialism seem likely to accelerate societal decline, mirroring the plague-cursed Medieval period when as much as 15% of the population was estimated to have been permanently celibate and when classical values about the primacy of family tended to fade before theological concerns. As Richard Reeves has noted: “You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects.” 

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The future, it seems, will belong to those largely disconnected individuals who somehow find a way to negotiate what the US Surgeon General has described as an epidemic of loneliness. Already by 2020, 28% of all occupied homes in the US were one-person households, up from just 8% in 1940. Three years later, Pew found that 10% of Americans had no close friends. 

But this is not just an American tragedy. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and now China are evolving similarly. In Japan, the number of people living alone is expected to reach 40% of the whole population by 2040. Already, there are estimated to be 4,000 “lonely deaths” in Japan every week. 

Changes in sexual relations are of course inevitable and, in some ways, liberating for individuals. But on a mass basis, the sexual war represents a critical civilisational challenge. As one seminal study from Singapore has noted, family buttresses not just society but serves as “the primary source of emotional, economic and financial support” for individuals and as the best way to “protect society from the negative fallouts” of a competitive economy. Without a strong family structure, individuals can be cast adrift, looking to material pleasures, government aid and virtual worlds for comfort.

If not addressed, the decline in sexual relations suggests a very dystopian future, in which only the elderly population grows, while children and families become rarer and more stressed. Governments — whether in America, France, Japan or Scandinavia — have not found an effective way to slow this process. That may be because this is more a matter of spirit, than just incentives. What is needed is nothing less than a rediscovery of romantic love and embracing the value of nurturing offspring. Freud may have exposed the seamy side of family life, but he still understands that it stands at the centre of any successful human civilisation.  

Why have Japan’s postwar prime ministers found it so hard to cling to power? One of the biggest reasons is Japan’s failure, since the end of the American Occupation (1945–52), to become a true multi-party democracy. The early years of the Occupation helped restore democracy to Japan after years of militarism. New parties formed and women voted for the first time. But a strong showing by Japan’s socialists and communists worried those in the United States who hoped to turn Japan into a profitable trading partner and dependable Cold War ally. Left-wing success concerned Japanese businesses, too, many of which leant their support to new conservative parties such as the Nihon Jiyūtō (Japan Liberal Party) and to the merger of conservatives in 1955 that created today’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

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But America’s interest in supporting anti-communist forces around the world did more than provide a boost for big business in Japan. It ended up creating space in postwar Japanese politics for wartime figures who might otherwise have lived out their days in quiet retirement (or, in some cases, prison). Government bureaucrats managed to hang on to their jobs because the Occupation authorities regarded them as essential to running postwar Japan: senior figures were required only to take a fitness for office test — dubbed the “Paradise Exam” because unlimited time was provided for its completion, alongside tea and cigarettes. Even the notorious ultranationalist and gangster Kodama Yoshio earned himself a second act. He had worked as a fixer in China and Manchuria during the war, building up a multi-million-dollar fortune by running a network that provided intelligence and raw materials like radium and nickel for clients including the Imperial Japanese Navy. Imprisoned in 1946, he was released two years later when America’s intelligence agencies realised how valuable his skills and contacts might be.

Kodama was a man who liked to plan ahead. Before his arrest, he handed over some of his wealth in diamonds and platinum to a friend in the Japan Liberal Party, thereby purchasing himself a place in postwar conservatism. Then, while in jail, he spent time with Kishi Nobusuke, the highest-ranking bureaucrat in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, and Tanaka Kakuei, an up-and-coming politician who had been caught taking bribes. Both men were future prime ministers of Japan and both would go on to benefit from Kodama’s underworld connections. Once out of prison, Kodama played a role behind the scenes, together with the CIA, in launching the LDP. Kishi joined the party after his own American backers helped to secure his release from prison. He became prime minister in 1957 and welcomed Tanaka into his first Cabinet post that same year. The price of admittance was a backpack stuffed with three-million yen in cash. Three years later, when Kishi found himself facing popular unrest over the renewal of Japan’s controversial security treaty with the United States, Kodama rustled up some violent men to attack and intimidate the crowds of protestors.

The upside of the LDP’s connections with big business, civil servants and allies in the United States was that the party was able to co-ordinate a remarkable return to prosperity for Japan across the Sixties and Seventies. But this in itself caused problems. The LDP came to dominate Japanese politics so thoroughly — it has rarely been out of power from 1955 to the present day — that the most important policy debates tended to take place not between rival political parties with strong grassroots support but between factions within the LDP whose influence was built on pork-barrel politics. Tanaka Kakuei became perhaps the greatest player of this game. There is no denying his achievements in office, not least a bridge-building visit to Mao Zedong in Beijing; the two men shared rustic roots, and bonded over talk of Buddhism, Confucianism and incense. But the Japanese were shocked by revelations that Tanaka was involved in bribe-taking from American aerospace manufacturer Lockheed to persuade All Nippon Airways and Japan’s defence agency to choose its aircraft over those of its rivals. Helping behind the scenes to move cardboard boxes stuffed with Lockheed cash was one Kodama Yoshio.

Tanaka was forced to resign in 1974, but it did not mean the end of his political career. In Japan’s system, the most powerful people often operate from behind the scenes, as Tanaka now did. He continued effectively to run Japan from a lavish mansion in Tokyo, meeting with aspiring new members of his LDP faction and handing out “bullets”: parcels of tightly-packed banknotes worth 100 million yen each, wrapped discreetly in traditional Japanese cloth. His protege Kanemaru Shin worked in much the same way, until he fell from his senior LDP position in 1992 after being implicated in a bribery scandal involving a delivery company and the Inagawa-kai yakuza group. A raid on Kanemaru’s Tokyo apartment uncovered $50 million in cash, bonds and gold bars, hidden away in wardrobes and desk drawers. Kanemaru — nickname: “The Don” — died before justice could be done, but not before sharing a last word with an astonished and aggrieved Japanese public. “My political philosophy,” he declared, “is to have some appreciation for a person who saves a drowning child in a river, even if that person happens to belong to a crime syndicate.”

Japan’s “lost decades” of economic growth, from the Nineties to now, has eroded the dominance of the LDP and tempered the scale of political corruption. But both remain prominent themes, alongside the failure of opposition parties to mount effective and long-lasting challenges to the LDP. The scandal that has helped to cut Kishida Fumio’s premiership short involves 85 LDP lawmakers who have been accused of channelling profits from the sale of tickets to party gatherings into slush funds, to the tune of more than £3 million. Small change, compared with decades past. But a good many disillusioned Japanese long ago turned to local politics and civic activism via non-profits and the courts to get things done instead. A powerful example of this approach has been the attempt to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples. National politicians are divided on the issue, but campaigners have succeeded in persuading local administrations to offer them official status, along with a number of district courts.

LDP leaders have also struggled, in recent years, to tackle a demographic crisis at home — an ageing and declining population — alongside an uncertainty of purpose abroad. Not everyone in Japan approved of Abe Shinzo’s vision of a more robust Japan, making a “proactive contribution to peace” in its region and internationally. But greater defence spending does seem to make sense in light of China’s rise and doubts over America’s commitment to Japan’s security. The problem is how to pay for it while tax receipts dwindle and the cost of living continues to rise. Added to all this is anger among the Japanese public about politicians’ links to the Unification Church, which came to light after the assassination of Shinzo Abe in 2022. Here again, history looms large. Back in the Sixties, Abe’s grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, cultivated links with the Church’s founder Sun Myung Moon, a strong anti-communist.

It is possible that when the time comes, in September, for the LDP to elect its next leader, Japan may get its first female prime minister. Takaichi Sanae — once the drummer in a heavy metal band and now a hawkish Minister for Economic Security — is one to watch, as is Kamikawa Yōko. Both may struggle, however, to garner the level of behind-the-scenes support that has always been needed to win this contest. If a woman does succeed in taking the top job, then Japanese politics will no doubt enjoy a much-needed boost, both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, the holy grail of Japanese politics, a functioning multi-party system reasonably free from the wheeler-dealing of the past, appears for now to be out of reach.