The Gaza Charade By Gwynne Dyer Last month US President Donald Trump announced “a monumental step toward lasting peace and security” in Gaza. Mediators from the ‘Board of Peace’, his sketchy rival to the United Nations, had persuaded Hamas, the Palestinian armed resistance movement, to accept his ‘15-point document’ for Hamas disarmament and Israeli withdrawal […]
There are really two wars in the Middle East, and only one of them is paused. The US-Iran war has been stuck in a ragged ceasefire for more than a month, with the participants only indulging in occasional tit-for-tat strikes that Donald Trump likes to call “love taps”: fewer than five killed. Israel was part
TACO! Of course. Trump always chickens out, but it’s a feature, not a bug. If his threats aren’t working, he will generally drop them and try something else. The man has always been a real estate developer: he was born into it, and he knows no other way of interacting with the world. It’s all
Last week Israel was the first country in the world to establish diplomatic relations with Somaliland. Not Somalia, a wreck of a country on the East African coast that has been mired in civil war for the past thirty-five years, but Somaliland, a different country just north of there that has been peaceful, relatively prosperous
Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, has just asked the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, to “fully pardon” him of all three charges – bribery, fraud and breach of trust – that he has been on trial for since 2020. And the question is: why did he only ask for it now? The alleged crimes were
When a bad man does a good thing, we should honour him for it even if his motives are selfish. Donald Trump is only trying to ‘bring peace to the Middle East’ because he wants the Nobel Prize, they say. He blusters and threatens and lies. He boasts about the seven wars he claims to
Gaza: Not Quite the Final Solution By Gwynne Dyer “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas [from Qatar],” Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu told the parliamentary members of his Likud Party in 2019. They were questioning his policy of backing
Gaza: The Pantomime Ends By Gwynne Dyer The coordinated chorus of despair by Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump and their various henchpersons and flacks was quite impressive. The message was that everybody should stop hoping for a negotiated peace. Netanyahu has stared Trump down once again and the four-month pantomime
Trump: The Least Bad Outcome By Gwynne Dyer I would rather eat worms than write about the current hullabaloo on the American right over the conspiracy theories about paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his various pals and accomplices. The temptation is just to sit back and enjoy watching the MAGA revolution devour its own children, but
Where Shall We Put the Palestinians? By Gwynne Dyer Reckless people fling accusations of attempted genocide in Gaza at the Israeli coalition government and the Israel Defence Force (IDF) every day, but the scale of the operation is not remotely big enough to justify that word. IDF snipers and/or civilian American gunmen of the so-called