Israel

When will Britain recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel?

In less turbulent times, the disappearance of the Home Secretary would lead the television news bulletins and clear the next morning’s front pages. Yet Sajid Javid went missing on Monday with barely an eyebrow raised. The former Conservative leadership candidate travelled to Jerusalem and visited the Western Wall, the second-holiest site in Judaism and buttressing the holiest site: the Temple Mount. His pilgrimage to the destination of millennia of Jewish prayers is the first by a UK Cabinet minister in 19 years and especially noteworthy because while there he had, in the eyes of his own government, dropped off the map.  The UK does not recognise Jerusalem as the capital

Feeding the five thousand

Decks is a restaurant built on the Sea of Galilee. It is Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu’s favourite restaurant (it is occupying the sea, if you like) and it is huge: two storeys of decking (hence ‘decks’) walking into the sea where Jesus of Nazareth fed his 5,000 Biblical Corbynistas. The view is of young Jewish girls jumping up and down in unison on a disco boat. From a distance it looks like one happy creature with 800 legs. I came from the north where bluffs — once military installations — are tourist attractions with cafés. I stood on the Golan Heights and peered into Syria, and then I went to

A legend under siege

As rousing death-and-glory speeches go, it is one of the best. With a besieging Roman army only hours from storming the mountain stronghold of Masada, where 967 Jews were making their last stand in around AD 73, the rebel leader Eleazar Ben-Yair gathered the men together and called for a mass suicide. He told them: We have it in our power to die nobly and in freedom. Our fate at the break of day is certain capture; but there is still the free choice of a noble death with those we hold most dear. That way their wives would not be dishonoured by Roman soldiers, nor their children enslaved: Let

Netanyahu’s coalition fiasco leads to early elections

On Wednesday night, as observant Jews continued to count the Omer, the 49 days between the festivals of Passover and Shavout, observers of the rituals of Israeli politics began counting the days until the next Israeli election. Six weeks’ ago, Benjamin Netanyahu won his biggest electoral victory yet after a characteristically close and unscrupulous campaign. Bibi the ‘magician’ looked set for a record-breaking fifth term, and to surpass David Ben Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Netanyahu also looked likely to thwart corruption charges by demanding an indemnity law as the price of entry into his Likud-led coalition. Instead, Netanyahu failed to form the coalition he wanted by the deadline

Rod Liddle

Israel Notebook | 30 May 2019

I’m meant to be peering into a tunnel hacked out by Hamas a few hundred metres from Gaza City into Israeli territory but my attention has wandered. The air around us, above this parched, scrubby wasteland, is fecund with life. A pair of black kites are circling and below them a steppe buzzard is lumbering amidst the thermals. And is that a lappet-faced vulture? Do you know, even without my specs, I think it is. The IDF guy in charge of this facility wanders up. ‘You are interested in the birds, my frent? They too are political. The Palestinians put all their filth, their garbage, right up against the fence,

The shame of those boycotting Israel’s Eurovision Song Contest

Kobi Marimi, the 27-year-old Tel Avivian singer, picked to represent Israel at this month’s Eurovision Song Contest, can’t stop smiling: ‘I love my country. I love Tel Aviv. To know that I’m achieving a dream of mine, to be a part of Eurovision, it’s amazing in itself’, he tells me, with an earnestness that could crack the biggest Eurovision cynic. ‘But to know that I’m doing it in my country, my own city, it’s even greater than that.’ But not everyone is quite so enthusiastic about Eurovision being held in the Holy Land. While politics can’t help but creep into the contest each year, this time around feels different as the Jewish State

Benjamin Netanyahu has defied his critics again

With 97 per cent of votes counted, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks poised to secure a remarkable record fifth term. Pundits had said Israel’s election was too close to call, and in many ways it was. Both Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and its main rival, the centrist Blue and White alliance look set to gain 35 seats in the 120 seat Israeli parliament, the Knesset. But Netanyahu has a much better chance of forming a coalition with the smaller right wing and religious parties. Nothing is decided for sure yet. Most of the remaining three per cent of the votes are those of soldiers and diplomats who don’t live

Benjamin Netanyahu’s desperate bid to avoid election defeat

Benjamin Netanyahu, facing defeat in today’s Israeli elections, has made a final pitch to his right-wing base. Over the weekend, the Likud leader said that, if re-elected, he would apply Israeli sovereignty to both the settlement blocs and isolated communities deeper inside Judea and Samaria. ‘From my perspective, each of those settlement points is Israeli,’ he said. ‘I don’t uproot any, and I won’t transfer them to the sovereignty of the Palestinians.’  And so the final hours before an Israeli election were counted down in the traditional manner (at least since Bibi has been on the scene): the Europeans and the American left screeching ‘apartheid’, the settlers rounding up votes

Could Donald Trump unexpectedly triumph in his bid for peace in the Middle East?

Could Donald Trump win the Nobel Peace Prize? He would be following in the footsteps of his predecessor but unlike Barack Obama in 2009 his award could be for something significant: helping to bring an end to one of the world’s most intractable conflicts – the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.  It might sound implausible but Trump may have a better chance of delivering peace – or at least a non-belligerency agreement – than previous presidents, even if those chances do still remain low. Trump’s Middle East peace envoy (and ex-real estate lawyer) Jason Greenblatt, who I met recently, says that the Trump team will soon unveil their plan – the “deal of

Netanyahu’s desperate bid to cling to power

He struck at dawn, 25 years ago this week. As Jews marked Purim and Muslims Ramadan, Baruch Goldstein walked unchallenged into Yitzhak Hall in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Here the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people are buried and here Muslims worship in what they call the Ibrahimi Mosque. Surveying the Muslims praying the Fajr, Goldstein opened fire, emptying his Israeli-made Galil of three and a half magazines in two minutes, a rate of almost one round per second. When his rifle jammed on bullet number 112, the Palestinians took their chance and overpowered the gunman, beating him to death with a fire extinguisher. Twenty-nine Palestinians lay

The real racism against the Palestinians

This is a story about two people going to jail and the countries sending them there. Both are Palestinians and were sentenced on Monday in courts separated by an hour’s drive. Jamil Tamimi was sent down for 18 years at Jerusalem district court, in Israel, for the murder of British student Hannah Bladon. Bladon, a religious studies undergraduate at Birmingham university, was in Israel on an exchange programme. On Good Friday 2017, she was riding the Jerusalem light rail to church when Tamimi stabbed her seven times with a seven-inch knife. The frenzied assault stopped only when the other passengers managed to overpower him. Hannah was taken to hospital but

Amos Oz, a giant of Israeli literature and politics

In Western democracies, literature no longer matters to politics. Once, literature and politics could co-exist on the same typewriter or in the same person: George Orwell in Britain, André Malraux in France. But that was a long time ago. Still, the powers of politics remain linguistic, whether bureaucratic or rhetorical: the war criminal at his desk, the elected representative on her Twitter. Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist who died today aged 79, was living proof of the political powers of literature. In Israel, which is a Western democracy most of the time, Oz is seen as a great writer but a failed politician. In the West, he is seen as

Airbnb’s ban on Israeli settlements is shameful

So alongside being the only country that pop stars refuse to play in, and the only country whose academics are boycotted on Western campuses, and the only country whose dancers and violinists cannot perform in cities like London without gangs of people screaming them down, and the only country whose produce is routinely avoided by luvvies and liberals, now Israel is the only country that has been politically punished by holiday app cum conscience of the Twitterati, Airbnb. Airbnb has taken the extraordinary decision to stop advertising homes for rent in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It is extraordinary because Airbnb still advertises places to stay in Tibet, a

Life in Israel under the shadow of Hamas’s rockets

Midway through coffee a soldier came running in. ‘Tzeva adom!’ ‘Red colour!’ Cups clattered, chairs shrieked across slate floor. There is a calm exodus to an improvised bomb shelter — the cafe’s concrete reinforced bathroom. Soldiers at the front, paramedics behind, civilians at the back. Two dozen faces are lit by the insistent flashes of Red Alert, an app that warns of incoming fire. The foreigners quip nervously, the locals tut at the inconvenience. After a few minutes, the all clear is given and diners return to their lunch. It is 1.02pm and another rocket has just hit Israel.  We are at Yad Mordechai junction, four kilometres from the 1949

The progressive West must stop fetishising Palestinian extremists

He is bare-chested, muscular and not unattractive. A Palestinian flag blazes in one hand, a slingshot is strained taut in the other. All around him is smoke and press photographers. Aed Abu Amro, a 20-year-old Gazan, is rioting on the boundary between the Hamas-run statelet and Israel’s southern frontier. The terrorist organisation has been fomenting disorder there for months now, a function of its viral victims strategy: provoke the Israel Defence Forces into retaliating and let images of dead Palestinians zip their way onto every smartphone on the planet. If only Hamas put that kind of ingenuity into governing, Gaza might not have a 44 per cent unemployment rate. As

No, John McDonnell’s accusations of genocide against Palestinians are not ‘justifiable’

The Labour Party’s war on the Jews grows more lunatic by the day. The Daily Telegraph reports that shadow chancellor John McDonnell gave a speech in 2012 in which he accused Israel of attempting a genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. According to the journalist responsible for the story, when Labour was contacted for a comment a party spokesman defended McDonnell’s charge as justifiable. The real story here is not that John McDonnell believes the Jewish state is engaged in the destruction of another people but that a Labour Party spokesperson, instead of saying ‘FFS, let me get back to you’, agreed with this assessment. Presented with McDonnell’s outrageous

Israel’s nation state law backlash is what Netanyahu wanted

One of the joys of a world seized by identity politics is that everyone wants to let you know their self-identification: Israel identifies as a Jewish state and has passed a Basic Law explicitly saying so.  The law is, as a millennial might say, problematic, even if most of it is uncontroversial. It defines the name, flag, emblem and anthem of the state. The Hebrew calendar will still be the official calendar and Yom Ha’atzmaut will continue to be the annual national holiday. Jews will go on having the right to observe Saturday as their day of rest and non-Jews to observe their day of rest. Clause five recommits the state to promoting

Benjamin Netanyahu: Arab countries know that Iran wants to conquer them all

Bibi Netanyahu was in London this month after meeting Angela Merkel, Emanuel Macron and Theresa May, the leaders of the three European countries which had committed most to President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Before he flew back to Israel he came to a crowded public meeting at Policy Exchange, whose director, Dean Godson, had asked me to talk with him. I asked him first what he had told the Europeans, who had reacted badly to President Trump’s unilateral action on Iran. ‘Well I’ll tell you what I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell them to pull out of the Iran agreement – because I think it’s effectively defunct. The

Why won’t the Tories take a stand against Hezbollah?

On Sunday, thousands of demonstrators will gather outside the Saudi Arabian embassy in London for the annual al-Quds Day march. From there, they will proceed through the capital chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – which is to say, the State of Israel will be destroyed. Alongside the Palestinian tricolour, many will be waving another flag: the banner of Hezbollah.  In doing so, none of them will be breaking the law. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation with a bloody rap sheet but the UK Government only proscribes its paramilitary wing, not the group as a whole. As such, the Hezbollah flag, which depicts an assault

James Delingpole

Unholy land

‘The rule in our household is: if a TV series hasn’t got subtitles, it’s not worth watching,’ a friend told me the other day. Once this approach would have been both extremely limiting and insufferably pompous. In the era of Netflix and Amazon Prime, though, it makes a lot of sense. There’s something about English-speaking TV — especially if it’s made in the US — that tends towards disappointment. Obviously there have been exceptions: The Sopranos; Band of Brothers; Breaking Bad; Game of Thrones. But too often, what’s missing is that shard of ice in the creative heart that drama needs if it’s to be truly exceptional. American drama is