Pro-Palestine protesters demonstrate against supply of F-35 parts to Israel
Writer and activist Sarah Goldsmith-Pascoe, 69, from Bournemouth, Dorset, said: 'I feel compelled to do everything I can to stop this horror, especially as a Jew because all of us Jews have been told a load of lies about what Israel does.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NBC News
20 hours ago
- NBC News
NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani draws criticism for ‘intifada' remarks
Zohran Mamdani, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the New York City mayoral election, drew pushback from Jewish organizations and political leaders this week after he appeared to defend the slogan 'globalize the intifada.' In an interview with The Bulwark posted Tuesday, Mamdani was asked whether the expression made him uncomfortable. In response, Mamdani said the slogan captured 'a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.' He said the U.S. Holocaust Museum had used the word 'intifada' in Arabic-language descriptions of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against Nazi Germany. Mamdani, a progressive New York State Assemblyman who has forcefully criticized the Israeli government, also addressed the rise in antisemitism since the Oct. 7 terror attack and the war in Gaza, saying anti-Jewish prejudice was 'a real issue in our city' and one that the next mayor should focus on 'tackling.' He added that he believes the city's community safety offices should increase funding for anti-hate crime measures. In a post on X on Wednesday, the Washington-based U.S. Holocaust Museum sharply condemned Mamdani's remarks: 'Exploiting the Museum and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to sanitize 'globalize the intifada' is outrageous and especially offensive to survivors. Since 1987 Jews have been attacked and murdered under its banner. All leaders must condemn its use and the abuse of history.' The U.S. Holocaust Museum did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how it had translated the Warsaw Uprising into Arabic. Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, decried the phrase on X as an 'explicit incitement to violence.' Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who is Jewish, said in a statement that the term 'intifada' is 'well understood to refer to the violence terror attacks against innocent Israeli civilians that occurred during the First and Second Intifadas.' 'If Mr. Mamdani is unwilling to heed the request of major Jewish organizations to condemn this unquestionably antisemitic phrase,' Goldman added, 'then he is unfit to lead a city with 1.3 million Jews — the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.' Mamdani has also faced criticism from some of the other candidates in the crowded Democratic primary field — including the frontrunner, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo's polling advantage has narrowed in recent weeks as Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, built momentum and nabbed a key endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. In a statement, Cuomo called on all the contenders in the race to 'denounce' Mamdani's comments and invoked recent violent attacks on Jewish people nationwide. 'At a time when we are seeing antisemitism on the rise and in fact witnessing once again violence against Jews resulting in their deaths in Washington, D.C. or their burning in Denver — we know all too well that words matter,' Cuomo said in part, referring to the killings of two Israeli Embassy employees and an attack on Israeli hostage advocates in Boulder. 'They fuel hate. They fuel murder.' The war in Gaza and the spike in antisemitism have loomed large over New York City's mayoral primary. Cuomo, 67, casts himself as a fierce defender of Israel and pitches himself to Jewish residents and ideological moderates as the obvious choice in the race. Mamdani, who has characterized Israel's conduct in Gaza as 'genocide,' gained traction partly thanks to enthusiastic support from the city's progressives. Mamdani, speaking to reporters at a press event in Harlem on Wednesday, addressed the outcry over his interview with The Bulwark and the ensuing pushback, saying in part that 'it pains me to be called an antisemite.' 'I've said at every opportunity that there is no room for antisemitism in this city, in this country. I've said that because that is something I personally believe,' Mamdani said. He broke down crying as he described the vitriol he has received as he seeks to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City. 'I get messages that say: 'The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.' I get threats on my life, on the people that I love,' Mamdani said, eyes welling up with tears. New York City's Democratic mayoral primary is on June 24. The scandal-plagued incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, won election as a Democrat in 2021, but he is not participating in the party's nominating contest. He is reportedly petitioning to run on two independent ballot lines: 'EndAntiSemitism' and 'Safe&Affordable.'
Spectator
2 days ago
- Spectator
Toppling Iran's Supreme Leader could be a mistake
Are we already seeing an ominous mission creep in Israel's blistering attack on Iran? First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's air assault was all about ending Iran's covert nuclear weapons programme, a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency declared Tehran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Then, within a few hours of launching 'one of the greatest military operations in history', Netanyahu was telling Iranians that Israel was 'clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom'. Encouraging them to 'stand up' and overthrow the 'evil and oppressive' government of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he noted that Israel had been friends with Iran since the time of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, ruler of Persia from around 559-530 bc, and liberator of the exiled Jews of Babylon. Israel, Netanyahu said, would stand with the brave Iranian people. So, as Iran faces its greatest external threat since the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, what are the prospects for regime change in Tehran and who might come next after Khamenei? Nicholas Hopton, director-general of the Middle East Association, and former British ambassador to Iran, Libya, Yemen and Qatar, is sceptical. 'It seems to me that in appealing to the Iranian people, Prime Minister Netanyahu is possibly being either disingenuous or overoptimistic in hoping that will lead to regime change, or at least a regime more palatable to Israel and the West. The one thing likely to unite sentiment within Iran is opposition to external interference, as the country's long, complicated history shows us.' In other words, faced with an Israeli air assault that is progressively more damaging and humiliating – if the US joins in with bigger bombs, it will only get worse – the long-suffering, famously resilient Iranian people may start feeling the same way about Khamenei as FDR did about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza: he 'may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch'. We would do well to consider carefully what might follow a revolutionary regime that has been in power since 1979. 'It's more likely than not that a harder-line leadership, whether it's an individual, a cleric, a secular leader or a group, would emerge, at least initially,' warns Hopton. 'Remember that the current regime was open to negotiations and engagement with the US and the West.' Who will succeed 86-year-old Khamenei? Currently the Supreme Leader is said to be holed up with his family in an underground bunker in northeastern Tehran, or far beyond, safe for now from Israel's astonishingly effective decapitating strikes – supposedly only Trump prevented a direct assassination attempt on him. Notwithstanding Netanyahu's desire to remove the head of the snake, Khamenei's poor health regularly invites predictions of his imminent demise and anxious consideration of the succession. With the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May last year, the field of potential successors has thinned distinctly in the interest of Khamenei's 55-year-old son Mojtaba. Though he is a more unknown quantity and does not have the reputation for cold-blooded brutality enjoyed by Raisi, who earned his 'Butcher of Tehran' sobriquet for his role in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988, Mojtaba is no shrinking violet. Widely seen as a hardliner, he is said to be a powerbroker with considerable influence over the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime's muscle, and of course has backing at the very top. The secretive Assembly of Experts, the body which will select Khamenei's successor, is heavy on hardliners and is thought to have been influenced in Mojtaba's favour, but this does not rule out the possibility for surprises. Mojtaba is not popular and lacks prestige. He does not have the formal religious qualifications for the role, but neither did his father back in 1989. Then, the constitution required the Supreme Leader to be a marja-e taqlid, a top-ranking Twelver Shia cleric. So that stipulation was removed, clearing the way for Khamenei's appointment. No one seriously expects that this sort of finessing and finagling will be beyond the ayatollahs when the time comes to choose the old man's successor. Mojtaba is also associated with vote-rigging during the 2009 elections, the savage suppression of the anti-government protests which followed those elections, and the embezzlement of state funds. To this extent, he appears eminently qualified to lead the revolutionary republic: a nepo baby ayatollah. Also in the frame is Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, a close aide to Khamenei, chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council and a former chief justice of Iran with blood on his hands. His staunchly anti-democratic views put him firmly within the hardliner camp. Devoted to the doctrine of Velayat-e faqih, the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, he has said that 'votes do not bestow legitimacy on the government'. Larijani prefers divine authority, as mediated by male clerics of a certain age. Reza Pahlavi, son of the last and ultimately despised shah, is also on manoeuvres, arguing that the end of the revolutionary regime is nigh. His candidacy – reports say he is 'not necessarily' looking for the restoration of the monarchy – has a tone-deaf shamelessness that is briefly entertaining, but the less said about him the better. He reminds me of the late Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, the charming, self-styled Crown Prince of Iraq who popped up in Baghdad in 2004 and did the rounds, claiming to be the legitimate heir to a nonexistent throne. Of course, Netanyahu's encouragement of a popular uprising may be bluster, but there is still no doubting the seriousness of this moment for Tehran in terms of regime survival. Ali Ansari, a professor of Middle East history at St Andrews, reckons Netanyahu's tilt at toppling Iran's leadership brings enormous risks and dangers. 'To be blunt, declaring 'regime change' as one of your goals makes the current campaign hostage to fortune and potentially open-ended. There is likely to be a reckoning for the regime, but this is only likely to happen once the conflict is over and the dust has settled – and not as a response to Netanyahu.' What other clues are there to help assess the likelihood and desirability of a new leadership emerging in Tehran? History lessons can be boring because they distract from more exciting things like wars, but let us dwell for a moment on some recent western interventions. They might suggest that we should be careful what we wish for. Let's start with Afghanistan. In 2001, a US-led alliance swiftly removed the Taliban because they had been hosting al-Qaeda, the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks. That was the easy bit – and don't forget that Iran offered to assist the US in that mission. But then there was a bit of mission creep and we decided it would be nice to have a western-friendly government in Kabul. Cue 20 years of nation-building and a procession of puppet presidents, some – such as Hamid Karzai in his striped silk chapan coats and jaunty karakul hats – highly photogenic and adept at conning gullible western leaders. In rushed the international advisors on gender, good governance, human rights, anti-corruption, counter narcotics, security sector reform, agronomy, communications, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. But the 'governments' we propped up turned out to be little more than kleptocratic mayoralties in Kabul, the Taliban never gave up, and eventually we pulled the plug. Since 2021, the mullahs have been back in charge, waging war on women and girls and cracking down on anything resembling dissent with arbitrary arrests, detention, torture, amputation and extrajudicial executions. Job done. Next, Iraq. In 2003, as we charged into war with Saddam Hussein, we were told that Iraqis couldn't end up with a regime worse than that of the Butcher of Baghdad. So in we went and ousted him, only to hand the country over, first, to spectacularly venal Shia governments and the murderous terrorists of al-Qaeda – which hadn't existed in Iraq before the invasion – next to Daesh, leaders of the short-lived 'caliphate', and ultimately to Iran, the West's most potent adversary in the Middle East. Mission accomplished. Roll on to Libya, 2011. Same script, different cast, this time featuring Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama, America 'leading from behind', i.e. not leading. In came the British and French jets, out went Gaddafi, dead in a ditch with a bayonet up his bottom, and then it was a case of civil war, warlords, militias, atrocities, and not much liberal democracy if we're going to be really picky about it. The civil war is still raging 14 years later. To this hapless trio of western campaigns, we might add the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2015. That was also meant to be a lightning strike, to decapitate the Houthi leadership, but it hasn't gone as well as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now Riyadh's de facto leader, assured everyone it would. The civil war continues. All of which is to suggest that when leaders launch ambitious military interventions and dangle the tantalising, headline-grabbing prize of regime change before us, a smidgen of caution is advisable. As for those hoping for a sudden outbreak of liberal democracy in Iran – or post-Assad Syria for that matter – Charles Gammell, a former Foreign Office official and Iran expert, has a stark warning. Given that the ayatollahs have already driven the opposition abroad, underground or into their graves, he doubts there are many suitable candidates left. 'The patterns of repression, corruption and vice that we saw under the Pahlavi regime have simply been repeated – on steroids – by the Islamic Republic, and there is every chance that the psychological wounds inflicted by Khamenei and his ilk would produce an anti-western, anti-liberal and repressive post-Islamic Republic Iran. Beware those who promise the sunlit uplands of liberal democracy.' Netanyahu referenced Cyrus the Great when launching a war that will define his legacy. The mullahs will be hoping he proves more like Darius I and Xerxes I. Both kings mounted audacious campaigns beyond their borders, only to find their well-laid plans doomed to defeat, destruction and nemesis.
New Statesman
2 days ago
- New Statesman
Living by the sword
'T his will go down in history,' said Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his wartime press conference on 16 June. 'What we're saying today, I must say – as a son of a historian,' he continued, 'will go down not only in the annals of our nation, but also in the history of humanity.' Netanyahu's mention of his historian father was not a meaningless aside, but the reflection of the deep influence that his father's ideology, conceptions of Jewishness and world history, and ideas about power and powerlessness, continue to exert over his decision-making. Indeed, Israel's current war against Iran owes it shape, at least in part, to Netanyahu the elder's world-view, to which the son has always seen himself as faithful. Netanyahu is not a religious man. He does not observe the Sabbath or follow a strict kosher diet. Perhaps he does not believe in God. But he does believe in history – that the history of Jews has its own course and logic (perpetual, existential danger), and that Jews are meant to serve as an example to the Judaeo-Christian West (as a healthy nation willing to fight and die for its sovereignty). He did not merely come to these ideas on his own. He inherited them. Benzion Netanyahu, who died in 2012 aged 102, was a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition and, no less significant, an uncompromising right-wing ideologue. As a young man he served as secretary to Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, the charismatic leader of the militant but secular Revisionist Zionists, whose adherents hoped to claim both sides of the Jordan River for a Jewish state. Some within the Revisionist ranks drew inspiration from the authoritarian Sanacja movement of Piłsudski's interwar Poland and the Blackshirts of Mussolini's fascist Italy. In his best-known historical work, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, Benzion Netanyahu controversially claimed that the Inquisition was not only, or even primarily, aimed at rooting out vestigial Jewish observance among the Marranos (Jews whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Christianity), but constituted the invention of the racial anti-Semitism that would reach its exterminationist terminus under Nazism. Born under tsarist rule in today's Poland, Benzion possessed a dark and pessimistic view of the world and the place of the Jews within it. 'Jewish history,' he once told the New Yorker editor David Remnick, 'is in large measure a history of holocausts.' Benjamin Netanyahu, the family's middle child, has made this catastrophic world-view his own. He has also largely adhered to his father's ideological legacy. In the early 1990s, he rose to national political prominence as the fresh face of the right-wing Likud Party and opponent of the Oslo Accords and the dovish Yitzhak Rabin's Labor-led government. For nearly his entire political career, Netanyahu has aimed to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Indeed, it has been one of the central animating goals of his life. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But while Netanyahu is a territorial-maximalist, he is not a messianist. The radical, religious West Bank settlers, with whom Netanyahu has found common cause, believe that the Palestinian dilemma can be solved (or eliminated) through an apocalyptic conflagration that would lead to the expulsion of the Palestinians from all the territory under Israel's control and end, they hope, with the dawning of the Messianic Age. Lately, Netanyahu has embraced some of the religious right's rhetoric: the idea of 'transferring' Palestinians out of Gaza; referring to Hamas as 'Amalek', after the biblical Israelites' enemy, whom they are told by God to wipe out. But this reflects domestic realpolitik more than genuine conviction. Instead, Netanyahu has tended towards a kind of brutal realism. Rather than the settlers' preference for a 'decisive' eschatological rupture, his preferred approach is an indefinite and, if necessary, eternal war of attrition. 'I am asked if we will live forever by the sword,' Netanyahu once said in 2015. His answer is 'yes'. He does not consider the Palestinians a real people deserving of national self-determination. He remains convinced that, after enough oppression, devastation, punishment and humiliation, they will surrender their dreams of freedom, and if not, that they can be subjugated in perpetuity. It is this logic that, in part, accounts for the way Israel's criminal destruction of Gaza has been executed – and why Netanyahu has refused any postwar arrangement that would allow for independent Palestinian self-governance. In his 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu sketched out his theory of machtpolitik, which has guided his successive administrations for more than 15 years. And while in the realm of domestic politics Netanyahu is known for his flagrant mendacity, when it comes to geopolitics, he has been rather more consistent. According to his strategic vision, military might is the only guarantee of security. 'The only peace that will endure in the region,' he writes, 'is the peace of deterrence.' There is, in other words, no such thing as real peace; there is only preparation for the next round of fighting. Or as he put it, 'ending the state of war is a must, but that will not end the possibility of a future war'. For Netanyahu, Israel's only way to guarantee its survival is to maintain overwhelming military supremacy such that it can threaten any potential rival with outright defeat. Weakness, it follows, is an existential threat. 'If you lack the power to protect yourself,' Netanyahu writes, 'it is unlikely that in the absence of a compelling interest anyone else will be willing to do it for you.' It is here that echoes of his father's world-view can also be heard: the experience of the Jewish people in the 20th century – specifically, the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust – is taken as proof that defencelessness is a death sentence while sympathy is much less an insurance policy than the force of arms. The world stood by idly when the Nazis sent Europe's Jews to the gas chambers; there is no reason to expect that, were the Jewish state to find its survival jeopardised, the world would act differently this time. Such a view is widely shared in Israel and has been almost since its establishment. It was a pillar of Israeli defence strategy many years before Netanyahu came to power. It is the reason why Israel sought nuclear weapons of its own, and why it has acted unilaterally on many occasions to destroy the military capabilities of other states it sees as threats to its survival. In 1981, for instance, Israeli fighter jets destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor located deep in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The success of the operation gave rise to 'the Begin Doctrine' – after the prime minister Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky's successor as leader of the Revisionist movement, who authorised the strike (and who came to power in 1977 in Israel's first transition of power from left to right). Begin vowed that in the future Israel would carry out pre-emptive attacks to stop any enemy state from gaining nuclear capabilities. In 2007, under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israeli warplanes bombed a suspected nuclear reactor in Bashar al-Assad's Syria. Israeli leaders have warned for years that Iran was next on the list. In 2012, Netanyahu appeared before the United Nations General Assembly and brandished a cartoon to illustrate his claim that Iran's enrichment levels were approaching those necessary for a nuclear weapon. Over the subsequent decade, Netanyahu warned many times that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute an unacceptable threat to Israel, and that he would take action to eliminate it. Iran, for its part, has long claimed that it does not seek to possess nuclear weapons, notwithstanding its leadership's repeated, lurid promises to destroy the Jewish state. That an Israeli strike did not occur in years past owed much to dissent within Israel's military establishment, about whether Israel itself possessed the capabilities to take down Iran's nuclear programme on its own and whether it could withstand a potential Iranian counter-attack. Netanyahu has gambled his legacy on Israel's current war against Iran. He has said more than once that he hopes to be remembered as the 'protector of Israel'. And while the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023 cast doubt on his claim to be Mr Security, it is clearly his hope that by destroying Iran's nuclear programme and, as he has not so subtly hinted, toppling the Islamic Republic's regime, he will restore his flagging domestic reputation and rewrite his place in history, masking with a stunning military operation the deadly, colossal intelligence and operational failure that preceded it almost two years earlier. Still, for Netanyahu, and indeed for many Israelis, what is at stake is much more than that – nothing less than the shape of the post-Cold War order. It has long been both Netanyahu's conviction and policy goal that Israel's integration and normalisation into the Middle East can be achieved without granting the Palestinians a state. Successive Netanyahu administrations have pursued the de-Arabisation and isolation of the Palestinian national cause, perhaps most spectacularly in the form of the Abraham Accords, brokered by the US in 2020, which Netanyahu believes even Saudi Arabia could one day join. Iran, through support for its proxies – in particular, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah – has constituted the most significant obstacle to this vision of removing the Palestinian issue from the global agenda, as well as the last standing substantial military rival to Israel's armed forces in the region. By taking down the Islamic Republic, or at least its nuclear programme, Netanyahu hopes not only to eliminate a threat he perceives as existential, but also to realise his long-held geopolitical fantasy. Yet the ongoing attempt to do so could just as well result in catastrophe – for the region and perhaps the world. At the time of writing, it is too early to know where the balance of power will lie after the last bomb is dropped and the final missile fired. The paradox of Netanyahu's perpetual struggle for Israel's security is that, in practice, it has meant that Israelis live under near-constant threat. For Palestinians it has meant decades of military occupation and, since 7 October, utter devastation, war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu's dream of a new Middle East – devoid of any military rival, absent any prospect of Palestinian self-determination – has only brought more death. [See also: Ideas for Keir] Related
