When Israel launched a war against the Gaza Strip in August 2022, it declared that its target was the Islamic Jihad only. Indeed, neither Hamas nor the other Gaza-based groups engaged directly in the fighting. Nevertheless, the war then raised more questions than answers. Israel rarely distinguishes between one Palestinian group and another. For Tel…
There is much debate in the Israeli press regarding Itamar Ben-Gvir and his visits to al-Aqsa. Will he go, when will he go, or should he not go? Ben-Gvir is proving himself to be a shrewd politician and knows how to manipulate the press. The press, for their part, is obsessed with him. He can…
A sustained violent attack by hundreds of Jewish settlers on the Palestinian town of Huwwara last week – as well as the response of Israel’s new far-right government – has divided Jewish opinion in Israel and deeply discomfited Jews abroad. The Board of Deputies, which claims to represent Britain’s Jewish community and is usually a…
On February 20, the United Nations Security Council approved a statement, described in the media as a ‘watered-down’ version of an earlier draft resolution which would have demanded that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory.” The intrigues that led to the scrapping of what was meant to be…
If they could they would murder us all. But they want to uproot us. I say our answer is to strike at them and reaeepen our roots. We have made a series of decisions recently that in the face of international reality is not a simple one: to deepen our roots, to deepen our settlements…
Though Israel’s past wars on Gaza have often been justified by Tel Aviv as a response to Palestinian rockets or, generally, as acts of self-defense, the truth is different. Historically, Israel’s relationship with Gaza has been defined by Tel Aviv’s need to create distractions from its own fractious politics, to flex its muscles against its…
