1 March 2023 Israeli Pogrom By Gwynne Dyer The dictionary definition of ‘pogrom’ is “an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” So there is something deeply strange about hearing ‘pogrom’ used in Hebrew to describe …
7 August 2022 Israel, Gaza and ‘Strategic Proportionalism’ By Gwynne Dyer There may be a truce in the latest lopsided war in Gaza by the time you read this, but it looks a lot like the previous ones in 2008, 2014 and 2021: the Israelis arrest or kill some leaders of the Palestinian resistance movements …
22 June 2022 Israel: It’s All About Bibi By Gwynne Dyer There was a rare moment of grace in Israeli politics last Monday, as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid announced they would dissolve their extraordinary coalition and pitched Israel into its fifth election in three and a half years. The coalition …
17 May 21 “We didn’t want this conflict, but now that it’s started it has to end with a sustained period of quiet,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. “That can only be achieved by Israel taking out Hamas – their military structure, their command and control.” Or, as the Israeli …
‘Mowing the Grass’: Last Round for Israel’s Strategy Read More »
12 May 2021 ‘Objective allies’ generally don’t even talk to each other. They don’t have common values, their ultimate goals may be completely incompatible, they often hate each other. But they share some intermediate goal, and are clever enough to realise they can both get what they want by acting together in certain ways. Sometimes …
When all is lost, entire communities sometimes engage in suicidal gestures. It happened as recently as 1906 in Bali, when the local royal family and thousands of their followers, knowing they could not defeat the Dutch conquerors, dressed in their best finery and walked straight into the Dutch gunfire. Thousands were killed. It has been …
“They began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over,” as Lewis Carrol put it in Alice in Wonderland. He was describing the Caucus Race, but it sounds quite a lot like the Gaza War, doesn’t it? What’s different is …
You can see why Hamas doesn’t want a cease-fire in Gaza yet. It is continuing the fight in the hope that international outrage at the huge loss of people being killed by Israel’s massive firepower will somehow, eventually, force Israel to give it what it wants. Hamas would be quite willing to give up firing …
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, said something cryptic last Friday, shortly after the Israelis began their latest round of attacks on the Gaza Strip. Condemning Hamas’s conditions for accepting a ceasefire as “exaggerated and unnecessary,” he offered his condolences “to the families of the martyrs in Gaza who are fuel to those …
5 November 2012 The One-State Solution By Gwynne Dyer “Everybody knows how this will end,” wrote Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s best-known journalists, in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot recently. “There will be a bi-national (state).” The “two-state solution” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dead; long live the “one-state solution.” The two-state solution, promised by the …