UN commissioner: “Gazans could start dying of hunger”
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), was two days back from the city of Rafah in southern Gaza...
View ArticleWhat the left gets wrong about Gaza and “decolonisation”
When left-wing critics of Israel characterise what it is doing in Gaza as genocide, they are often accused of inverting the true relationship: Israel is just defending itself while Hamas plans an...
View Article“They want monsters”
Tareq Ghazzawi was trying to get to his home in Khirbet Qalqas, near Hebron in the West Bank, when he was shot in the leg by Israeli soldiers. The tense moments before the soldiers shot him on 5...
View Article“They kill anything that moves”
Eight days into the new year, the war in Gaza has only intensified. Nearly 23,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, and most of the...
View ArticleDavid Cameron is cornered by MPs over Gaza
“He’s a class act,” one grinning Tory MP effused when I asked for their two cents on David Cameron ahead of his first interrogation by MPs since being appointed Foreign Secretary. Rishi Sunak’s...
View ArticleThe chaos of Israel’s postwar plan
Hamas gave no impression of having thought through the implications of the vicious attacks on 7 October, other than to force the plight of the Palestinians back on to the international agenda, and...
View ArticleThe risk of a wider Middle East war is growing
Did anyone believe the start of a new year would bring respite for Palestinians or Israelis? At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, more than 20 rockets were fired at south and central Israel...
View Article“It’s too late for the Jewish state”
In the second part of their two-part conversation, the New Statesman’s Bruno Maçães and the Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy discuss what it will take to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian...
View ArticleThe Red Sea’s escalation equation
The longer the Gaza War goes on the greater the concern that it will escalate into something much larger. Iran is being watched most closely because it orchestrates the “axis of resistance” of which...
View ArticleHow Israel’s war spread to the Red Sea
I met Mohammed Ali al-Houthi for the first time during a Saudi bombing raid in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. He is a thick-set, noisy man, who laughs a lot, not always humorously, and that day he was...
View ArticleThe era of easy peace is over
In the early 1990s, following the end of the Cold War, the US president George HW Bush hailed the “peace dividend” that the West would reap. The demise of the Soviet Union, he said, would allow...
View ArticleThe slipperiness of ceasefire
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on 7 November 2023. On 22 January 2024 , Israel proposed a two-month pause in fighting. This is part of a multi-phase deal that would include the...
View ArticleFormer Israeli prime minister: “Time to stop the war”
Ehud Olmert was the prime minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009. He directly precedes the long reign of Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli politics. A former member of Likud, he left the party together...
View ArticleThe fractured reality of Israel’s war in Gaza
There has been little joy in Israel or Palestine in recent months, but on 28 January there were scenes of jubilation in Jerusalem. Dancing and waving Israeli flags, hundreds of religious Zionists sang...
View ArticleHard choices in an illiberal world
Even before he was elected, US president Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisers claimed to champion a “rules-based”, “liberal” “international order”. Indeed, Biden’s presidency has been a rolling...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s lost voters
Joe Biden has a Gaza problem. The president is facing a backlash from pro-Palestinian activists who have swarmed campaign stops and sometimes shouted him down at abortion rights rallies, auto worker...
View ArticleThe failures of Joe Biden’s foreign policy
As the US secretary of state Antony Blinken wraps up his fifth trip to the Middle East since 7 October, the Biden administration has yet to articulate a comprehensive US strategy for regional peace and...
View ArticleThis heart flies two flags
I am a Zionist, and so I am a Palestinian nationalist. These identities are not inconsistent: they are mutually dependent. Jewish history (the agonies and beauties of which I absorbed through...
View ArticleAlastair Campbell is still wrong about Gaza
The Labour Party is in a panic, and not just about that abandoned £28bn green pledge. A poll this week found that 43 per cent of British Muslims intend to vote Labour at the next election, down from 86...
View ArticleJohn Mearsheimer: “The Israel lobby is as powerful as ever”
Gavin Jacobson: Let’s start with Ukraine. What do you make of the European Union’s €50bn aid package to Kyiv? Will that make a material difference to the war against Russia? John Mearsheimer: No, I...
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