Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 15

Our crazy world: Prince William’s Israel visit, Iran protests

Our crazy world: Prince William’s Israel visit, Iran protests

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired what actually happened when Prince William visited Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, as well as the accelerating protests in Iran and what these signify.

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The hurdles in front of the Trump peace plan

President Trump’s peace plan for Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, his attempt at the “deal of the century,” will apparently soon be revealed to the world.

His envoys, Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, have been making the rounds in the region to get Arab allies on board. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau has paid a visit to the King of Jordan.

No one yet knows the terms of this deal. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has refused even to talk to the United States about it and has presumptively rejected it sight unseen.

The message he has received, however, is that the days of using such rejectionism to stymie progress are over. If he won’t agree to these terms, the Israelis will have U.S. backing in doing what they need to do to safeguard their security. And the Arab world has indicated that it will raise no serious objection.

Abbas and his camp are in effect being told: “You lost. Now get over it.” So will they?

As has been clear for decades, there are no terms on which the Palestinian Arab leadership can ever accept the existence of the State of Israel.

Until now, the West didn’t believe that. It thought that if only Israel would give more, and then more again, there could be a two-state solution and an end to the conflict.

This merely demonstrated the delusion born of Western hubris that the agenda of everyone in the world is negotiable. It failed to grasp two crucial aspects of the Palestinian Arab story—one dating from the 1930s, and the other going back to the seventh century.

Consider this: Strikingly, the image Palestinian Arabs present to the world systematically appropriates for themselves characteristics of the Jewish and Zionist experience.

The Jews have been targeted for genocide and ethnic cleansing; the Palestinians claim falsely the Jews target them for genocide and ethnic cleansing. The Jews are the sole extant indigenous people of the land of Israel; the Palestinians claim falsely that they were there since time immemorial. Israel gave all Jews the right of return to Israel; the Palestinians claim they have a “right of return.” They even claim that the Palestinians are “the new Jews.”

This reflects the same characteristic in Islam itself. It claims Jewish prophets such as Moses were Islamic prophets. All God’s promises devolve onto Ishmael, not Isaac. As Osama bin Laden declared in his Letter to the American People: “It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed. … If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.”

The religious teachings of Islam hijack Jewish religious doctrines. The Talmud famously states: “Whoever destroys a single soul, he is guilty as though he had destroyed a complete world; and whoever preserves a single soul, it is as though he had preserved a whole world.”

The Koran appropriated this precept, but then qualified it with the crucial rider: “Those that make war against God and his apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be slain or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the land.”

So the Talmudic precept affirming the value of preserving human life was turned into a prescription for violence and murder against Jews and other “unbelievers.”

Islamic religious teachings are hugely more antagonistic towards the Jews than any other group. And that’s because the very foundation of Islam was bound up with the attempt to hijack Judaism itself.

Mohammed is said to have gone to war against the Jews because they refused to accept his re-interpretation of Judaism. The outcome was the eradication of the Jewish-Arab tribe called the Banu Qurayza.

Unable to break their resistance, Mohammed slaughtered them at the battle of Khybar. Which is why Khybar is the name the Iranian regime gives to some of its missiles, and why Islamists scream it as a rallying cry for the murder of Jews.

The key point that the West cannot grasp is that Palestinian rejectionism is at source a fanatical Islamic religious movement. And at source, Islam seeks to obliterate Judaism altogether by appropriating its foundational story and doctrines for its own, and radically altering them while claiming these to be authentic Judaism. As Maimonides observed in the 12th century:

“Inasmuch as the Muslims could not find a single proof in the entire Bible, not a reference or possible allusion to their prophet which they could utilise, they were compelled to accuse us, saying: ‘You have altered the text of the Torah and expunged every trace of the name of Mohammed therefrom.’ They could find nothing stronger than this ignominious argument.”

So Islam holds that Jews are imposters who must be subjugated to the true faith of Islam. Judaism itself must be suppressed and obliterated.

That’s why the Arabs in 1930s Palestine, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini, were Hitler’s Nazi legion in the Middle East. Had Hitler won the war, the Mufti and his followers would have tried to wipe out the Jews living in the land. The Nazi agenda of the genocide of the Jews fitted perfectly with the fanatical Islamic agenda of the extermination of Judaism.

Haj Amin al Husseini is one of Mahmoud Abbas’s stated heroes. No surprise, then, that Abbas has a doctorate in Holocaust denial. No surprise that his Palestinian Authority constantly pumps out Nazi-style demonization, libels and murderous incitement against the Jews.

Into this fanatical maelstrom now strides the Trump administration with its gamble that it can appeal to the desire of ordinary Palestinian people to live in peace and plenty. Says Jared Kushner: “We will release our peace plan and the Palestinian people will actually like it because it will lead to new opportunities for them to have a much better life.”

Is this inspired or deluded? For sure, there are Palestinian Arabs who don’t sign up to Islamic fanaticism (indeed, they are victims of it) and who would accept a pragmatic accommodation with Israel. Nevertheless, Palestinian culture is a sustained program of genocidal hatred against the Jews, along with lies about Palestinian origins and identity based on attempted theft of Jewish history and identity.

This is a microcosm of the wider conundrum about the Islamic world in general. Millions of Muslims reject Islamist fanaticism and want merely to live in peace and prosperity.

But power within the Islamic world currently resides with those promulgating jihadi fanaticism. In some places such as Iran, the opportunity patently exists for the people to throw out their murderous leaders. In others, it’s far harder to see that leap being made any time soon.

The question is whether the Trump administration will prompt the Palestinian Arabs to make it. And to that question, we’ll eventually learn the answer.

Jewish News Syndicate

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Does the British government now recognise a country called Palestine?

Oh dear. Prince William appears to be under the impression that there’s a country called Palestine.

On his “apolitical” visit to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, he reportedly told the PA President Mahmoud Abbas today:

“I’m very glad our two countries work so closely together and have had success stories with education and relief work in the past…”

Of course, there is no country called Palestine. Abbas’s strategy of war against Israel is to assert that there is, not just in contradiction of the truth but in flagrant repudiation of the PA’s international legal agreements.

Accordingly, Abbas told the prince:

““Your Royal Highness Prince William, it is my honour to receive you in Palestine for your first visit.”

And now the Daily Telegraph has fallen into line by repeating the lie in its own headline:

“Duke of Cambridge meets President Abbas in first royal visit to Palestine amid promises of peace”.

No blame can accrue to Prince William for this blooper; he is a geopolitical ingenue abroad and all that he says is in accordance with his briefings by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

We know that because the British Ambassador to Israel, David Quarrey, has told us so. Responding to the controversy that developed on publication of Prince William’s itinerary, which situated the Old City of Jerusalem within what the FCO insists on calling “the Occupied Palestinian Territories” in defiance of international law, history and the truth, the ambassador said:

“All the terminology that was used in the program was consistent with years of practice by British governments. It’s consistent with British government policy.”

Does it follow, therefore, that the British government has now taken the side of the Palestinian Arabs against Israel by recognising a country called Palestine, in defiance of truth, reality and internationally binding agreements?

Anyone told Theresa May?

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The NHS at 70: time for the lethal syringe?

Next week marks the 70th anniversary of the creation of the NHS. Perhaps instead of any burnishing of moral credentials, this might be an opportunity to start thinking the unthinkable.

The NHS treats the state itself as the nation’s ultimate carer, giving it the authority to decide who should be helped to stay in this world and who should be helped prematurely out of it. It is therefore not a temple of compassion so much as a potential instrument of arbitrary and unaccountable power.

How many more scandals will it take before Britain faces the fact that the NHS is not, as its mythology proclaims, the cynosure of decency? Time now, perhaps, to administer the fatal syringe to the NHS itself.

To read my whole Times column (£), click here.

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HRH, the FCO and the big lie about Israel

One of the most startling aspects of the demonisation of Israel is the use of international law as a key weapon.

Israel represents law and justice against those who deny them. Yet it is falsely painted as fundamentally illegitimate and guilty of repeated illegality and breaches of international norms.

Defenders of Israel, including its own government, seldom push back publicly against this. False assertions by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about Israel’s illegal settlements or the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” are met with silence.

Not surprisingly, this failure to engage has led many perfectly decent people in Britain and elsewhere to believe the Big Lie that Israel is the principal rogue state in the region, if not the world.

A new book sets the record straight. Israel on Trial: How International Law is being Misused to Delegitimise the State of Israel, written by two international lawyers, Matthijs de Blois and Andrew Tucker and published by the Hague Initiative for International Co-operation, comprehensively lays out both the justice of Israel’s actions and the staggering denial of international law by its tormentors.

The FCO is an egregious offender. One of its persistent falsehoods has surfaced in the official itinerary for Prince William’s visit to Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority next week. This implies that Jerusalem’s Old City and the Western Wall are in “the Occupied Palestinian Territories”.

As de Blois and Tucker make clear, the term is false. In law, the territories were never Palestinian and they are not occupied.

In 1922, the League of Nations conferred upon Britain the Mandate to facilitate the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. When Israel was finally restored as a sovereign state in 1948, it inherited those rights to all the land under the Mandate — including Jerusalem and the “West Bank”.

So when Israel took possession of east Jerusalem and the “West Bank” in 1967, “it was taking physical possession of territory that — as a matter of law — already belonged to Israel”.

The authors go on: “The law of occupation makes no sense, and has no application… when there is no sovereign power that is ‘ousted’ from the territory.” There was no sovereign power to which, in 1967, the West Bank and east Jerusalem belonged. So under international law there is no occupation.

As for the Israeli settlements, these aren’t illegal either. The requirement for Britain to enable the “close settlement” of Jews throughout the Mandate territories, including the “West Bank” and Jerusalem, has never been abrogated. The argument that the settlements are in breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention rests on a false and perverse reading of that convention. And so on.

Given all this, one might well ask why the British government sticks to these fictions of Israeli illegality. After all, Theresa May is sympathetic to Israel.

Earlier this week, the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, condemned the UN Human Rights Council for its institutionalised anti-Israel behaviour.

One principal reason is surely that the UK is part of a European progressive order for which international law is the expression of its ideology, elements of which are inimical to the security and even the existence of the state of Israel.

Out of the carnage of two world wars grew the core progressive belief: that the western nation state is the source of nationalism, prejudice and aggression, and so any war in its own defence is by definition unjustified.

In place of the nation state should come a new international order based on transnational institutions and laws representing the brotherhood of man: the UN, EU, international law and human rights law.

War must be replaced by law through negotiation, conflict resolution, peace processes. There can be no victory or defeat. Questions of right and wrong, who is the aggressor and who the victim, are irrelevant. In a fight between God and the devil, western progressives would split the difference and call that a triumph.

So the fact that Palestinian identity is a fiction invented solely to destroy the Jewish claim to Israel is ignored. The evidence that international law upholds Israeli actions is dismissed. The way the UN and international law have been hijacked to destroy Israel is denied.

In Mandatory Palestine, Britain betrayed its legal obligations to the Jews. The FCO has a history of Arabism and antisemitism. Progressive transnationalism seems to have allowed it to progress from all that straight into lawfare against Israel without even passing “Go.”

Jewish Chronicle

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Our crazy world: crying children, Trump peace plan, Prince William visit

Our crazy world: crying children, Trump peace plan, Prince William visit

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the row over the “crying migrant children” at the Mexico/US border; whether the supposedly mould-breaking new Trump Middle East peace plan will turn out to be anything other than more out of the same old useless US Middle East peace plan mould; and the significance of Prince William’s trip to the Middle East, the first official visit to Israel ever by a member of the British Royal Family.

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Crying children, cartoon monster and liberal fascism

You really do have to rub your eyes very hard indeed at the grotesque hypocrisy, distortion and unhinged hatred that have erupted in reaction to the “crying migrant children” at the Mexican/American border.

It has even given rise to abuse of the memory of the Holocaust.

More than 2,500 migrant children from Latin America have been separated at the Mexican border from their parents (or other adults accompanying them) who were arrested after trying to immigrate illegally into the US.

Amidst distressing recordings of small migrant children crying, the people who have accused President Trump of wilful cruelty are posing as being motivated by compassionate concern for the children’s welfare.

Nothing could be further from the truth. They were using these children’s plight to attack Trump.

For sure, separating children from their parents is horrible and something that shouldn’t happen unless absolutely unavoidable. But these critics are not concerned about the welfare of these children.

For here’s what the media and other critics have simply ignored. Far worse than the plight of these 2,000+ accompanied children separated at the border is what has happened to the 10,000+ unaccompanied children sent to the US by their parents – this despite the appalling risks of abuse, attack and other dangers to which these parents are exposing them by sending them to breach the border alone.

A a border patrolman explains on this clip to a staggeringly ill-informed CNN interviewer, he and his colleagues are encountering unaccompanied illegal migrant children who have been subjected to appalling experiences on their journey: 12 year-old girls equipped with birth control pills by their parents who know they are likely to be raped en route; a four year-old girl travelling alone with her parents’ phone number merely written on her shirt; a nine year-old unaccompanied boy who dropped dead in front of the horrified officers from heatstroke.

Yet there’s been not a peep of concern about the plight of those children. No-one even mentions them – because the people responsible for this serial child abuse are the children’s own parents. And the whole point of the uproar is to hammer Donald Trump.

So he’s accused of cruelty to the 2,000+ separated from their parents at the border. What’s more, he’s accused of causing this distress deliberately. Watch the CNN interviewer in the clip (around eight minutes in) claim there is no law that requires children to be separated from their parents and it’s simply Trump’s policy to do so! She appears not even to know that in 1997 a legal decree known as the Flores settlement banned the detention of children for more than 20 days – and that, unlike people arriving from Mexico itself, the people now trying to migrate from other Latin American countries pose more complications and take much longer to process.

It is because of the Flores settlement that the children are taken away from their parents — as happens to all children if their parents commit any crime for which they are incarcerated – as a more humane option than locking them up. Until now the only alternative, if these families are to be kept together, has been to disregard immigration law and allow them to disappear into America.

So what the vacuous CNN Trump-basher couldn’t get her head around was that the difference over the past few months was not that Trump decided to be cruel to migrant children because he’s an evil heartless bigot, but that he decided to enforce the law.

Clearly this was done in a ham-fisted way. Either he or Congress should have ensured that what’s belatedly happening now in the wake of the furore – the construction of family detention facilities – should have happened before he embarked upon “zero tolerance” of immigration law-breaking.

The bottom line, though, is that Trump is attempting to enforce immigration law for the first time in years – and thus keep his promise that he would do so to those who voted for him.

And this is really why the Democrats are enraged: because to them, immigration law should be broken. They don’t support the security and integrity of America. They think America’s national borders are fundamentally oppressive to people wanting to migrate to the US from poor countries. They think America is fundamentally racist because it is fundamentally white and therefore has to open its borders to all comers from non-white countries.

Grotesquely, they even created “sanctuary cities” to provide “sanctuary” for immigration law-breakers who would be able to do so there with impunity. For the increasingly ill-named Democrats, the rule of law is a positive impediment to their goal of transforming American society altogether. Even without the separated children, anyone who wants to uphold immigration law and border controls and defend the security and integrity of the nation against mass uncontrolled immigration is damned as a bigot, racist and xenophobe.

So the “crying children” separated from their parents have been cynically used as a weapon to paint Tump as an absolute monster. And my goodness, just look at how this has been done – with hysterical overreaction, bullying and incitement, wicked decontextualisation and selective reporting and outright lies.

Yes, some of those children were undoubtedly distressed – although in some cases we don’t know whether they were crying because they were being separated or because they were upset about other stuff. Either way, no-one wants to see distressed children. But some of these stories were simply lies.

The now infamous cover of Time magazine, showing a sobbing Honduran toddler being confronted by the looming figure of President Trump, was a lie: as the child’s father subsequently told the press, the little girl had not been separated from her mother, who was falsely claiming asylum, at all.

Unhinged regardless by this apparent proof positive of the monstrous character of their cartoon villain, Trump’s enemies have instead revealed themselves to be in a very dark place indeed.

Peter Fonda tweeted “We should rip Barron [Trump] from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with paedophiles”. Referring to the Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielson with an obscenity, Fonda also tweeted that she should be “pilloried in Lafayette Square naked and whipped by passers-by while being filmed for posterity”.

Nielson was  forced out of a Mexican restaurant by activists shouting “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace!” And in another restaurant, the White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave.

Previously anonymous US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have been outed on social media and threatened. A Twitter account promoting “Occupy Wall Street” posted an infographic glamorising the murder of ICE agents for its more than 200,000 followers.

A Florida man was locked up after he allegedly threatened to murder the children of a Republican congressman, saying: “If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids”. And so on and disgustingly, terrifyingly on.

Forced by the uproar to sign an executive order ending the separation of migrant children from their families (an order which itself may not survive scrutiny by the courts) a furious President behaved in character (alas) and lashed out. He tweeted: “Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country…”

He should not have said “infest”, a word one uses about insects or vermin. It’s typical of Trump’s lazy and offensive use of language which, from the mouth of a US President, demonstrates inexcusable sloppiness.

But those who have leapt upon his use of this word as further proof that he regards immigrants as “dehumanised” have remained strangely silent over France’s President Macron likening “populist” political parties to “leprosy” rising across Europe. Those who have objected to Trump “dehumanising” migrants don’t object, it seems, to likening millions of European voters to a disease. And that’s because they too think of such parties and their voters in precisely these terms, as demonstrated by their own repeated dehumanisation of such people as “rabid”.

Worse still, the separation of 2,500+ illegal migrant children at the Mexican/US border is being likened to the Holocaust. General Michael Hayden, the former NSA director, tweeted a picture of Auschwitz with the legend: “Other governments have separated mothers and children”.

Last week, Vanity Fair published the claim of an anonymous “outside White House adviser” that Trump’s speech-writer and aide Stephen Miller “actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border. He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on He’s Waffen-SS.”

Miller is a Jew. But for Vanity Fair, it seems, even a Jew must be a Nazi if he’s associated with Donald Trump.

How can one view all this other than as a wholesale departure on the left not just from decency but from reason itself?

Worse yet, there are even some Jews who are parroting the same analogy between America’s separation of migrant families and the Holocaust. This really is beyond jaw-dropping: the comparison between the temporary separation of children from their parents – however ill-judged or unpleasant a policy – in the interests of upholding the law in a democratic society whose core civic value is the rule of law, and the Nazi genocide – simply because this too involved the separation of children from their families. If these commentators really do believe –as they suggest – that separation of families is the first step to the gas chambers, then they are not only unhinged by their hatred of Trump but have revealed their own shockingly shallow and facile grasp of the Holocaust itself.

These same commentators vilify all in Britain who voted for Brexit, along with Europe’s burgeoning “populist” parties and their voters – simply because they want to uphold the rule of law, national security and border control and managed, limited immigration – in the same terms: as racists, bigots, xenophobes and incipient Nazis.

The boot’s on the other foot. This is liberal fascism.

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Prince William comes to Israel under a Foreign Office cloud

Next week the second in line to the British throne, Prince William, will make the first ever official visit to the State of Israel by a member of the Royal Family.

The royals are merely the servants of the British government. Until now, the notoriously anti-Israel Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has refused to permit an official visit to Israel by a member of the Royal Family out of concern for Arab anger.

Whether it has now softened its stance or been overruled by Prime Minister Theresa May is unclear. The fact remains that Prince William will be visiting Yad Vashem, meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, looking at start-ups in Tel Aviv and at Arab/Israeli youth programs in Jaffa, and so on.

His trip is supposed to be resolutely apolitical. Fat chance! His own itinerary released by his Kensington Palace office has already raised eyebrows.

After visiting Jordan and Israel, it says he will spend time in “the Occupied Palestinian Territories” – the FCO’s term – within which he will be briefed on Jerusalem’s Old City and the Mount of Olives.

Worse still, according to some unofficial reports, part of his trip to the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” will include visits to the Western Wall and Temple Mount.

This appears to be an all-too political FCO insult. For it goes even further than Britain’s still-obdurate refusal to accept that any part of Jerusalem is within Israel. It implies that the Old City, the place at the very heart of the Jews’ ancient national kingdom and including the holiest sites in Judaism, instead rightfully belongs to the “Palestinians” and is illegitimately “occupied” by Israel.

The issue here is not just the territorial status of the Old City. Contrary to the FCO’s formulation, there are no “occupied Palestinian territories.” That’s because there never were any Palestinian territories, and there is no “occupation.”

The lands now constituting Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza were occupied by the Ottoman Empire and then administered by Britain under the Palestine Mandate. After the 1948 Arab war of extermination against the new State of Israel, the area beyond the cease-fire lines, including east Jerusalem and the “West Bank”, was illegally occupied by Jordan.

In a new book, Israel on Trial: How International Law is being Misused to Delegitimize the State of Israel, two international lawyers, Matthijs de Blois and Andrew Tucker, write that the assumption that these territories “belonged” to the Palestinian Arabs before Israel conquered them in 1967 is backed by neither law nor facts.

In 1922, the League of Nations conferred upon Britain the mandate to facilitate the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

When Israel was finally restored as a sovereign state in 1948, it inherited those rights to all of the land under the mandate – including Jerusalem and the “West Bank.”

So when Israel took possession of east Jerusalem and the “West Bank” in 1967, “it was taking physical possession of territory that – as a matter of law – already belonged to Israel.”

The authors go on: “The law of occupation makes no sense, and has no application… when there is no sovereign power that is ‘ousted’ from the territory.” In 1967, there was no sovereign power to which the “West Bank” and east Jerusalem belonged. So under international law there is no occupation.

So why does Britain’s FCO continue to propagate these inflammatory falsehoods? Britain behaved appallingly in mandatory Palestine by betraying its obligations to the Jews. The FCO has a history of antisemitism amongst its “Camel Corps” which always identified Britain’s interests with the Arab world. And today the British government is mindful of the hostility to Israel amongst the UK’s growing Muslim community.

Thus much is well known or obvious. However, Mrs. May is a genuine friend of Israel and the Jewish people.

Last year in the House of Commons she condemned the ban on Israeli travelers entering Arab countries. This week her Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, condemned the UN Human Rights Council for discriminating against Israel and threatened to vote against all resolutions under its Agenda Item 7, a permanent fixture exclusively devoted to discussing rights abuses in the “West Bank” and Gaza.

And in the wake of Jewish community outrage over Hezbollah flags flying in London earlier this month as a result of a legal loophole legitimizing the paramilitary organization’s “political wing,” Home Secretary Sajid Javid has indicated that he intends to ban the group in its entirety.

Nevertheless, May’s government voted against Israel at the UN over settlements; has refused to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in the wake of the US embassy move; and continues to support the shocking Iran nuclear deal contrary to US President Donald Trump’s renewal of sanctions against the Iranian regime.

So how should we make sense of these conflicting signals? It may be that a struggle is taking place in government between pro-Israel ministers and the FCO’s Israel-bashers.

The FCO is institutionally programmed in favor of the trans-national ideology to which Israel is an impediment. Embodying post-imperial demoralization, the FCO thus embraces the idea that the western nation-state is responsible for oppressing the developing world, including the Palestinians who must therefore be championed.

It venerates transnational institutions such as the UN, EU and international human rights law – all of which, rooted as they are in disdain for western cultural identity and sovereignty, are also deeply hostile to Israel and favor the appeasement of evil regimes.

The FCO has thus moved seamlessly from colonial hatred of the Jewish state to anti-colonial hatred of the Jewish state. And of course, it goes without saying that it views President Trump – who is committed to defending Israel and upholding western cultural norms and national integrity in America – as a madman to be scorned, vilified and ignored.

It does so, however, at Britain’s peril. For especially after Brexit, Britain will need the US more than ever. But why would Trump, of all people, give Britain the time of day if he thinks it is no longer to be counted as an ally in the defense of Israel and the free world against genocidal psychopaths and their self-hating western facilitators?

Prince William’s visit to Israel may be a sign that at least some in the British government are now beginning to get this, whatever the royal visitor’s itinerary may say.

Jerusalem Post

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How the Question Time bear-pit changed me

As a regular panellist over the years on BBC TV’s Question Time, I’m sorry to see that David Dimbleby is stepping down from the show after a mere quarter-century in the chair.

He says he wants to return to his first love, reporting. Maybe so. Or maybe he’s just had enough of the trivialisation of the show that he has anchored for so long. Nowadays there’s almost invariably at least one comedian among the five-strong panel — and that’s just the politicians.

I have come to realise that the audience to keep in mind is not in the studio but the millions who are watching at home. Yes, it’s a bear-pit, but the audience on the sofa is often rooting for the bear.

You can read my whole Times column (£) here.

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The Legacy: Q&A with Deborah Kalb

I was kindly invited to answer some questions about my novel, The Legacy, for Deborah Kalb’s literary website. You can access the Q&A here or read the text below.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Legacy, and for your character Russell?

A: A number of things came together in my mind to create the novel, and I can’t really recall which came first. Certainly, my father’s death in 1998 had a lot to do with it. I was bereft when he died, not least because there were unresolved issues which could now never be explained and put to rest.

So an important part of the novel was the exploration of this vortex of mourning and grief, anger and regret, and the attempt to bring about some kind of resolution.

I think the character of Russell sprang directly from this; he emerged in my mind and then drove the story forward. Over the years, I’ve known a number of Russells – and they have all been men – whose profound ambivalence towards their Jewish identity is inextricably wrapped up with embarrassment or anger or other negative feelings towards their families.

And Russell inhabits a world I know very well – the world of the media, brittle and shallow and merciless towards anyone who doesn’t fit its own ideological template.

Years ago, I knew someone who had stumbled upon a medieval manuscript and that experience lodged in my mind. I also read a book about a particularly dreadful event that occurred in Holocaust Europe and which made an enormous impression on me.

Once I had written my own “medieval manuscript” for the novel, the rest of the story, including the mystery that it represents, gradually fell into place. And it became obvious to me that the journey upon which Russell embarks despite himself would take him into the territory I know so well: the deep ambivalence and discomfort of British Jews with their identity, and the persistent antisemitism of British society.

Q: What kind of research did you need to do to write the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

A: I did a lot of research for this novel. Although it is fiction, two incidents central to the plot actually took place. So I was anxious to ensure that I represented these as accurately and as fairly as I could. As I have already said, I had previously read about one of these incidents; and I then read everything else I could find on that topic.

On the daily life of Jews in medieval Britain, though, I had to do a lot of digging because sources were few and far between. There was more written about Jews in medieval Europe than in Britain, but since at that time Jews had flowed from Europe into Britain the European sources provided some useful detail.

Although I wasn’t surprised, I was still shocked to discover the unspeakable barbarism with which Jews had been treated in medieval Britain (as well as in Europe, of course, during the Crusades).

It confirmed me in what is a key theme of the novel: the ultimately unfathomable continuity of antisemitism through the ages – the way in which it morphed from theological antisemitism under medieval Christianity, through racial antisemitism under the Nazis to its current manifestation as ideological antisemitism in left-wing dogma.

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

A: When I started writing it, I certainly didn’t know how it would end. Indeed, I changed various elements in the narrative several times. The characters and plot started to develop in ways I had not anticipated when I started but which seemed entirely appropriate as I continued to write.

My first draft, though, ended the narrative far too early: I realised I had left too many threads dangling in the air, and so several further chapters then followed before I finally called a halt. And now readers tell me they want to find out what happens next to Russell and his daughter and will I please write a sequel!

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Well, despite what I have just said I am not writing a sequel. I have started work on a new novel, but it will be very different from The Legacy. More than that I cannot divulge – but I do hope I’ll be able to write it rather faster than The Legacy, which took forever!

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’d like say a bit more about what I was trying to do in The Legacy. I wanted to look at what motivates people to behave in certain ways – to get under the skin of both the antisemite and the Jew who despises the Jewish part of himself.

I wanted to show that life is all about change and growth and that we are all capable of escaping from the traps we create for ourselves, even though fate may have to give us a kicking before we do so.

I wanted to show that we all need to know what we are, to anchor ourselves in a cultural identity and to feel we belong. And I wanted to show that things are often not what they seem to be, that to avoid pain we sometimes create fantasies in which we hide, including denying our identity; but history lays claim to us regardless, and in one way or another we need to make our peace with it.

People who have read The Legacy tell me how strongly they identified with it, how they laughed and cried over it and how they couldn’t stop turning the pages. I didn’t believe I could ever write a novel. I can’t tell you how much that reaction means to me.

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