Israel is winning the war but it’s losing friends and may live to regret it
BATTLE STATIONS: Israeli tanks massing on the Lebanese border
Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu faced down a hostile United Nations General Assembly last week and defiantly declared: “We are winning.”
As if to prove it, the following day the Israel Defence Forces launched a blitz on the Beirut suburb of Dahieh, reducing the headquarters of Hizbullah to rubble and killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
The attack also killed 20 of the terrorist group’s senior commanders and the deputy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Yes, the Israelis are winning … the war, but not friends. Israel is out of control, behaving like the bully in the playground, lashing out indiscriminately. But this ally of the West, a legitimate democracy, a bulwark against Middle-East terrorism with a thriving economy, may come to regret it.
The world looked on horrified as, on October 7 last year, Hamas terrorists broke out of Gaza to attack Israeli communities, commit mass murder and rape and seize hostages, many of whom have still not been found, alive or dead. It was unforgivable and brought justified retribution.
Israel launched a pitiless air war on Gaza, blasting the maze of tunnels beneath hospitals, mosques and apartment blocks where the Hamas terrorists hid. Israel called them precision strikes but inevitably TV pictures of the aftermath showed bloodied and terrified children being carried from the wreckage. This too was unforgivable.
The Beirut attack followed a coup by Israel in which they remotely blew up pagers which they had rigged with explosives. The attacks killed at least 32 people and maimed or wounded 3,000. The following day they repeated the trick with walkie-talkies. Twenty were killed and at least 450 wounded – many losing eyes and hands – in this attack.
I am not a lawyer and I don’t know whether this constitutes a war crime. But it was certainly an act of terrorism that Israel would not tolerate if committed against its own citizens.
Israel is now fighting on three fronts. It has razed Gaza without managing to destroy Hamas. The entire Palestinian territory is now uninhabitable, which I believe was Israel’s intention all along.
It is pounding Lebanon, including the Hizbullah-controlled South, the capital Beirut and the fertile Bekaa Valley in the East, where Hizbullah grows drugs and wins hearts and minds by acting as a de facto social services department.
Now Israel has begun to bomb Yemen too, where the Iran-backed Houthis are lobbing occasional missiles into Israel and attacking shipping in the Red Sea.
And that is not counting the activities of Israeli troops and settlers in the West Bank, where Arabs are being driven from their land to make way for more illegal settlements.
Netanyahu leads the most Right-wing government in the history of Israel, which includes divisive figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the ultra-nationalist security minister. The Prime Minister is in power but not completely in charge.
Half the country hates him for trying to hobble the supreme court by limiting its power to overturn laws it deems unconstitutional. Many deeply disapprove of Netanyahu’s clinging to office to avoid corruption charges and the prison sentence that might follow if he were found guilty.
He cannot afford to lose the support of his cabinet or his generals, which makes him a hostage to the far Right.
Israel has been ruthless and opportunistic in exploiting its powerful ally the United States. It sensed there would be no pushback to its excesses from the lame duck President Joe Biden and it cares not at all what the UN or the rest of the world thinks.
So it continues the unfettered slaughter across the Middle-East. And each time a child is carried dead from a shattered apartment block, another family is recruited to the ranks of Israel’s implacable enemies.
A reckoning is coming.
*****
Editor Dylan Jones has looked a fish out of water ever since he took over the Evening Standard in June 2023. Not any more.
Now he’s a sleek koi carp, in his element, majestically cruising the moat of a rich man’s castle.
The unveiling last week of The London Standard, the new-look giveaway, finally made sense of Jones’s appointment. There’s not a word of news in it. It’s a magazine.
And magazines are what Jones does. He was the UK editor of GQ and also edited Arena as well as writing columns for newspapers and around 20 books.
In his introduction to “the newspaper of the greatest city in the world”, Jones calls it an “enticing package that mirrors the changing nature of your commuter and work patterns”.
Should you actually want to read some news (you pitiful dinosaur!) you will find it on the website, easy to access and with plenty of advertising, though it’s not as intrusive as it is with the Reach titles online.
Jones’s magazine contains the usual mix of showbiz interviews and lists of what movies and concerts to see, books to read and West End shows to watch. There’s also a turgid piece on the benefits and perils of Artificial Intelligence and an example of it: The late Brian Sewell’s imaginary critique of the Van Gogh show at the National Gallery.
We get bite-sized verdicts on the Labour conference, and a piece telling us that “heroin chic” is back with stick-thin models on the catwalks and all over social media.
Former Standard Editor (and Chancellor of the Exchequer) George Osborne wonders whether Rachel Reeves really cares about London and urges her to prove she does in her Budget later this month.
It’s party time on the Londoner’s Diary (when wasn’t it?) and there’s a shameless plug for the new iPhone.
It can’t have been cheap. Kate Moss is quizzed on her beauty routine and there’s a property spread – At home with Zandra Rhodes – and a single page on Boy George’s £17 million pad in Hampstead, which is available for rent. (That’ll be £65,000 a month to you, squire.)
It’s a bold, lively package, professional, imaginative and without the need for serried ranks of journalists. Jones’s boss, Evgeny Lebedev, who called time on the crippling losses the paper was suffering after Covid, must be pleased.
Time will tell whether the new formula can turn the company’s fortunes around.
*****
She was just walking along the Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, past a certain department store, when two goons in suits fell into step alongside her and said: “The Chairman of Harrods wants to see you in his office.”
The woman in question, a journalist (beyond that, I’m sworn to secrecy), was sufficiently intrigued to follow them inside and up to the office of the Cairo Creep himself, Mohamed al-Fayed.
Once there, the lecherous old pimp told her: “Come with me to Paris in my helicopter. I will treat you like royalty.”
She declined and slipped away, saying she had to get home to feed her cats. Many others did not escape his clutches so easily.
But it just goes to show: Fayed was talent-spotting from his office. I wonder if he used binoculars?
*****
“I saw six men kicking and punching the mother-in-law. My neighbour said, 'Are you going to help?' I said 'No, six should be enough.’” – Les Dawson
RICHARD DISMORE
1 October 2024
