Palestine

Tuesday

Tom Slater

Who cares what Ben & Jerry’s think about Israel-Palestine?

When you think of the Israel-Palestine conflict, ice cream doesn’t usually come up. But that may be about to change. Ben & Jerry’s has finally broken its silence, announcing yesterday that it will ‘end sales of our ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territory’. Perhaps in the years ahead we’ll come to see this depriving Israeli settlers of Caramel Chew Chew and Truffle Kerfuffle as some kind of tipping point. We won’t, of course, because that’s ridiculous. As is a Vermont-based over-priced ice-cream brand weighing in on far-flung conflicts. But that seems to be where we’re at now – with corporate America in general and with Ben & Jerry’s in

Friday

Stephen Daisley

The progressive imperialism of Keir Starmer’s Palestine policy

There are two ways to look at Sir Keir Starmer’s call for the Prime Minister ‘to press for a renewed international agreement to finally recognise the State of Palestine’ at the G7 summit. The first is cynical: that the intended audience was not the government benches or the international community, but the voters of Batley and Spen, currently weighing up whether to elect another Labour MP in next month’s by-election. At the 2011 census, almost one in five residents were Muslim and knowing what we know about how progressives view religious and ethnic minorities, it is not a stretch to assume Sir Keir was merely electioneering. This mindset, which sees

Sunday

Jake Wallis Simons

The problem with the New York Times’ Gaza coverage

While war raged between Israel and Gaza, the New York Times published a powerful montage of 64 minors said to have been killed in the conflict so far. Under its famous motto ‘All the news that’s fit to print’, and with the headline ‘They Were Just Children’, America’s paper of record informed us that ‘they had wanted to be doctors, artists and leaders’, and invited us to read their stories. It was impossible to look at those innocent faces without feeling deeply distressed. This was the human cost of the Israeli war machine, brought directly to your breakfast table, in a way that the vicious Turkish assault on the Kurds

Wednesday

Julie Burchill

The problem with Palestine’s showbiz supporters

One of the many reasons I hate wokers is because they indulge so shamelessly in what Bebel coined ‘the socialism of fools’ – anti-Semitism – under the convenient cover of sticking up for the Palestinians. Pretty much all socialism is for fools these days and as we see the Tories ditch misogyny, racism and austerity (Chancellor Sunak ‘Soak the rich!’ – Sir Keir Starmer ‘No!’) we have seen anti-Semitism cross the floor too. This is not the sniggering Jew-hatred of the smug Surrey golf club; this is where the pampered and resentful spawn of the bourgeoise get down to the rapper Wiley, MBE, he of the profoundly inclusive tweets like

Wednesday

Joanna Williams

School playgrounds are no place for ‘free Palestine’ protests

GCSE and A level assessments. Enforcing social distancing. Catch-up provision for pupils who fell behind during lockdown. Mental health support. Behavioural issues. Headteachers have more than enough to worry about right now. The conflict between Israel and Palestine? This one, at least, can be filed under ‘beyond my pay grade’. Or perhaps not. Should pupils be able to wear lanyards that show the Palestinian flag? Or display pro-Palestinian posters? Some see engaged teenagers exercising their right to free expression; others a stoking of racial tensions. Getting the balance right, particularly in a large, ethnically diverse school, is not straightforward. Mike Roper, headteacher at Allerton Grange school in Leeds, faced this

Monday

Stephen Daisley

Tala Halawa and the progressive media’s anti-Semitism blindspot

The tale of Tala Halawa has an ever-mounting horror to it: each sentence is more disturbing than the last. First we learn that this BBC journalist proclaimed during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war that ‘Israel is more Nazi than Hitler’ and that ‘Hitler was right’. Then we encounter her assertion that ‘ur media is controlled by ur zionist government’ and her sharing on Facebook the same image that saw MP Naz Shah suspended from the Labour Party in 2016, an image that advocates the ‘transportation’ of Israel to the United States to end ‘foreign interference’ in the Middle East. Next up is a graphic Halawa tweeted showing a child being burned

Saturday

Efraim Karsh

Hamas doesn’t want a Palestinian state

Do Hamas’s supporters in the West know what this organisation really stands for? The reality is that Hamas is no liberation movement in search of a Palestinian nation. Instead, it seeks the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic empire on its ruins. How do we know? Because senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar has said so: Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state… In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state… This is a holy land. It is not the property of the Palestinians or the Arabs. This land is the property of all Muslims in all parts of the world…

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The disinformation war continues between Israel and Hamas

The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel has started, and the gates to Gaza have opened for the international press. Now a new battle will begin over numbers and ratios. There will be calls for investigations, and endless debates about who ‘won’. Israel’s claims of precision targeting will come under scrutiny, but so too should Palestinian accounts, including claims of mass civilian deaths. At least 243 people are reported to have died in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s military action, including a reported 65 children. These figures rely on claims by the Gaza Health Authority – an unreliable body under Hamas control. The IDF says many civilian deaths are the result of

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Why do parts of Britain erupt whenever Israel defends itself?

There has been a huge amount of comment in recent days on the latest round of exchanges between Israel and the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. As usual whole slews of celebrities and other important figures on the international stage have lamented the fact that Israel has put so much effort into the defence of its own citizens. As usual these ignoramuses cry about ‘disproportionate’ death tolls. As though it would all be a lot fairer if Israel turned off the Iron Dome system for a night or two and let the increasingly sophisticated weaponry of its enemies rain down, unmolested, upon its people. But all this,

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Israel, Palestine and the EU’s humiliating attempt at diplomacy

This week, Hungary defied Brussels and refusing to back a joint EU declaration on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The bland EU statement calling for an end to the violence was underwhelming in itself – but with Hungary rejecting the bloc’s ‘one-sided’ approach, Brussels has been left embarrassed by its inability to coordinate a unanimous response to the fighting. The proposed statement from the bloc’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell read, ‘the priority is the cessation of all violence and the implementation of a ceasefire’, and said that: ‘we support the right to defence for Israel and the right to security – also for the Palestinians – and we consider that security

Paul Wood

Is the worst yet to come in the Middle East?

Beirut We can’t say yet if the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas is the start of ‘the big one’, a new Palestinian intifada, or uprising. That possibility was raised by the grandest of Middle East commentators, Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times. Friedman is sometimes mocked for his prognostications. A ‘Friedman’ is defined as six months because of his repeated statements that the ‘next six months’ would be critical for the US in Iraq, the light at the end of the tunnel visible only then. He also praised the ‘new ideas’ of Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, before it turned out that one of those new ideas

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

What’s the real reason so many people hate Israel?

Did you know that for the past three weeks Turkey has been engaged in a military assault on Iraqi Kurdistan? It’s been brutal. The Turks, who have one of the most powerful military forces on Earth, have used F-16s, F-4 Terminators and other terrifying hi-tech weaponry to pummel Kurdish positions in northern Iraq. Families have fled their homes in terror. Livelihoods have been destroyed.  ‘Every day, every night… we are being bombed. Our lands are being destroyed. We cannot grow our crops’, says a Kurdish farmer.  It’s unclear how many people have died. According to Turkey, dozens of Kurdish people, mostly militants, apparently, have been killed or captured. Have you seen

Wednesday

Bassem Eid

Hamas, not Israel, is to blame for the latest bloodshed

I was born in the Jordanian-occupied Old City in Jerusalem and lived in a UN refugee camp from 1966 until 1999. During the First Intifada, I worked for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and in 1996 I founded the Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring group. With my background in Palestinian campaigning and as a resident of East Jerusalem today, you might assume that I am against Israel’s current military actions. But this could not be further from the truth. The blame for this month’s bloodshed lies solely at the feet of Hamas. Those who wish to divert attention from Hamas’s war crimes would

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

British cops shouldn’t support Palestine – or Israel

Picture the scene. A female police officer — hi-viz police jacket, regulation black hat, facemask slipping from her nose — punches the air, proclaiming: ‘free, free Palestine!’ Her words are met with cheers from the crowd at the anti-Israel rally in central London that she was supposed to be policing. Actually, you don’t have to bother picturing the scene. Just watch the video clip below to see a perfect symbol of the toxic blend of state authoritarianism and hard-left politics that is creeping across British institutions today. After I posted the video on Twitter, the Metropolitan Police said it was ‘reviewing the footage’ and would provide an update ‘shortly’. One

Monday

Steven Barrett

Barristers should stay out of the Israeli-Palestine conflict

The world of barristers had something of a minor civil war at the weekend. The cause? The lesser known ‘Bar Human Rights Committee of England & Wales’ (BHRC), decided to weigh in on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. In a letter to the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, the BHRC called on ‘the UK Government to urge Israel, its friend and ally, to cease all violations of its obligations and responsibilities as an occupying power immediately, including its assault on Gaza’. It said: ‘We urge the Government to issue a statement of unambiguous support for an independent investigation into alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory by the ICC’ Who needs or

Saturday

Arieh Kovler

Inside Israel’s Iron Dome

A dramatic photo from the Gaza strip taken in the early hours of Friday morning looks like something out of a Marvel film. On the right, rockets fly from Gaza. The gentle trajectory of their parabolic curves shouldn’t fool anyone: these are unguided explosives travelling at hundreds of miles an hour towards an Israeli town. On the left, each one snaking a unique, winding path, interceptors from Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system shoot up to meet the missiles. In 2001, when Hamas started firing rockets from Gaza into Israel (and, at that time, the still-extant Israeli settlements in Gaza), the terrorist organisation introduced a new weapon that would change the strategic picture

Friday

Stephen Daisley

Don’t compare Israel to Hamas

No, not this time, Boris. The Prime Minister’s ‘both sides’ response to the terrorist attacks on Israel underscores how Western political elites — left, right and centre — lose all critical reasoning when it comes to one tiny strip of land in the Middle East. Israel is under assault from Hamas, the Islamist mafia that runs Gaza like 19th-century Sicily. This follows tensions over the policing of holy sites during Ramadan; a spate of violent street incidents between Israelis and Palestinians; marching and incitement by the Israeli far-right; Palestinian rioting in Jerusalem; and Arab-Israeli rioting outside the capital. There has also been unrest ahead of a court ruling on property

Thursday

Limor Simhony Philpott

The battle the Israeli Defense Force can’t win

The hostilities between Israel and Gaza caught Netanyahu’s government by surprise. What started as a local demonstration by Palestinians against ongoing efforts to evict them quickly escalated into violent clashes with a heavy-handed Israeli police. Hamas then demanded Israel remove its forces from the area, including the nearby Al-Aqsa mosque, or face reprisals. When they didn’t, the terror group retaliated by firing rockets into Jerusalem. This was on Monday. By Wednesday there had been fierce exchanges of fire between both sides. Hamas fired over 1,500 rockets towards Israeli cities and towns. Despite Israel’s impressive Iron Dome anti-missile system and widely available shelters, over 200 Israelis have been injured and seven

Anshel Pfeffer

Palestinians in Jerusalem live in a strange limbo

Jerusalem Thomas Friedman has a lot to answer for. The New York Times’s oracle has ruined, through overuse in his columns, the best source of local knowledge for journalists: the cab driver. No other hack can now quote his driver for fear of colleagues’ ridicule. Which is a pity, because the cab drivers in Jerusalem are those rare creatures who not only regularly cross between the three deeply divided cities — Zionist Jerusalem, ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem and Palestinian Jerusalem — but also converse freely with the denizens of all three. I wouldn’t be caught dead, of course, committing the cliché of quoting my driver, which was lucky because the one who

Wednesday

Arieh Kovler

Israel’s worrying descent into violence

I didn’t hear the boom on Monday night. I didn’t hear the siren either, due to some loud renovations. Sitting at my desk in the bomb shelter in my flat that doubles as a home office, I found out we were under rocket attack by reading about it on Twitter. With the blast door and inch-thick steel window plate closed, I waited for the all-clear. A few minutes later, minor damage was reported to a house just outside Jerusalem, hit by shrapnel from a rocket that flew 40 miles from Gaza. Others were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-rocket system. A dramatic end to Jerusalem Day, when Israel celebrates the