5 July 2023 Israel: Mowing the Lawn Again, but with Malice Aforethought By Gwynne Dyer The two-day Israeli military incursion into the Palestinian city of Jenin in the northern West Bank (12 Palestinians killed, one Israeli dead) seems at first glance like just another example of ‘mowing the lawn’. That’s what the Israeli Defence Forces …
Israel: Mowing the Lawn Again, but with Malice Aforethought Read More »
29 March 2023 Israel: The Fascists and the Fanatics By Gwynne Dyer Imagine that Donald Trump had been the president of the United States, in office and out and in and out and in yet again, for more than half of the past 25 years. What would the US look like today? Well, that’s about …
20 February 2023 Ukraine War and International Law By Gwynne Dyer Just before the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Friday, 24 February), France’s President Emmanuel Macron declared that he wanted to see Russia “defeated, but not crushed.” That is a very fine distinction, but an important one. Macron is seen as ‘soft’ …
6 December 2021 The Nuclear Deal is Dead! Long Live Deterrence! By Gwynne Dyer “We reviewed the proposals … carefully and thoroughly and concluded that Iran violated almost all compromises found previously in months of hard negotiations,” said the German Foreign Ministry spokesperson on Sunday. As a funeral oration, it lacked in elegance, but it …
2 October 2021 Destroy the Whistle-Blowers! By Gwynne Dyer A long time ago now I was asked to do a television series about the world’s intelligence services – and I turned it down flat. My main reason was a feeling that there was less to the whole intelligence world than met the eye, and the …
17 August 2021 The footage on Monday of a giant USAF transport taking off from Kabul airport with desperate Afghans clinging to its fuselage – and then dropping off – will find a place alongside the iconic shot of Americans queueing for the last helicopter on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in …
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 …
21 Mar 2021 Netanyahu’s Endless Quest Israelis will vote in their fourth election in two years on Tuesday, but there is already talk of a fifth election later this year. They will just have to go on voting until they get it right. ‘Getting it right’, in this context, is electing a stable coalition government …
24 February 2021 To those who obsessively followed the Covid websites over the past eleven months (including me, I must admit), one thing demanded an explanation above all: why were the worst death rates-per-million in the richest, most developed countries, and in the United States and the United Kingdom most of all? Bits of the …