In the fantasy of Altneuland, the racist Dr Rabbi Geyer’s party is resoundingly “beaten in almost all the districts where it had presumed to set up candidates”. As of this morning, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s bloc is at 56 seats, with over 60% of the votes counted, while Gadi Eisenkot’s so-called Change Bloc is on 48 seats, a number expected to rise slightly as its heartlands come in. The remainder of the Knesset’s 120 seats look set to go to a pair of Arab parties.

Every Israeli has woken up knowing the existential question this projected hung Knesset, with Arab parties as kingmakers, is asking of them: what kind of democracy is Israel? But one thing is clear. This election was a referendum on Netanyahu himself, and he seems to have lost that poll. It looks like the Bibi bloc has collapsed from a 68-seat majority in the last Knesset, to a minority this morning. Early numbers suggest most Israeli voters have rejected him and his allies. We will have to wait until Thursday for final results, and these may well prove slightly different.

But either way, it is not clear this morning, despite probably losing his majority, if this removes Bibi from power. Because in the real contest here — the election to form a new government — the four-party opposition bloc itself failed to achieve a majority.

For generations, Israel has prided itself on being a multi-ethnic democracy within its 1967 borders. Around a fifth of Israeli citizens are Arabs, and their parties surged in this election. This result is a test of that. It looks like a majority of Jewish voters supported the Bibi bloc despite him likely losing his majority. That means that anti-Bibi parties will probably only have a majority in the Knesset if one combines the Change Bloc, made up of Jewish and Zionist parties, with the Arab parties. The issue is that many of the four-party leaders in the alliance have ruled working with the Arabs out.

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The upshot? Unless these leaders break their promises to reflect the electoral math, there are several ways for Bibi to survive. Should Israel truly have a hung Knesset, the country potentially faces a new election. This offers Netanyahu the opportunity to cling on in a caretaker government until then. This has happened before: in 2019 and 2020, Israel had three elections in under a year, and Bibi remained Prime Minister throughout.

The real politics begins now. For the Israeli opposition, this is not just the usual politics of tensely brokered backroom deals, but something much more fundamental. Can they truly embrace Israel’s promise of multi-ethnic democracy? The opposition has campaigned vociferously that Bibi is to blame for October 7, and remains a danger to Israel’s future. They now face a choice: form a minority government with one Arab party inside the coalition, and supported by another outside it to block Netanyahu, thus relying on Arab-Israeli politicians — or let Bibi’s rule continue by choosing to spurn them.

There is a precedent for collaboration. Before October 7, in the brief Naftali Bennett-led government of 2021-2, the Ra’am party, led by Mansour Abbas, was a member of the ruling coalition. Despite Ra’am being an Islamist-rooted party, albeit one that talks about coexistence with Jews, Netanyahu even flirted with including Abbas in a coalition of his own. But post October 7, with the Bibi bloc pointing to the fact that Ra’am has been evasive about whether or not Hamas is a terrorist organization that needs to be “destroyed”, this is a more fraught task.

To better position himself for government, Abbas has made his number two on his party list a Jewish former Israeli police chief. But it seems unlikely the Change Bloc and Ra’am alone have enough to reach the 61 seats needed to form a majority in the Knesset. They may also need to rely on the votes of the Arab Joint List, a coalition of overtly Palestinian nationalist parties, and Hadash, the old Communist party. These would not want to join any Change coalition, but have explicitly said their votes would be available to ensure a minority government could dispatch Bibi.

What Ra’am wants to see from any deal is urgent action on Arab-Israeli’s main priority: rampant organized crime, dramatically worsened during ultranationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir’s tenure as the minister who oversees the police. Abbas has put Yoav Segalovitch, the former police chief, as his number two precisely with the hope he could take over from Ben-Gvir as a bridge figure between the Jewish and the Arab public. Abbas has also signaled he would want action against racism, and a change in policy towards Israeli authorities being trigger-happy around demolishing illegally built Arab homes. Together with the Joint List, they also want investment in development for their communities and in their educational facilities.

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On the Palestinian issue, looming over everything, Ra’am’s demands are relatively muted, with Abbas avoiding the topic. The moderation of their platform is testament to the Arab sector’s growing participation in Israeli society, with rising rates of integration from university attendance to involvement in the professions, especially healthcare. Both Arab parties as a result have a small Jewish activist base, committed to fostering what they see as an incipient multi-ethnic social partnership.

Overnight, in Israel, pro-opposition voices were calling on Eisenkot to act with absolute confidence and determination, as Netanyahu surely would, to bring this Jewish-Arab partnership about. This is because very few of those supporting the Change Bloc believe that they would fare better in new elections. A confluence of factors — high Arab turnout; disorganization among the ultra-orthodox Haredi Jewish parties; the hyper-mobilization of liberal Israelis, with a Knesset-seat-or-two’s worth flying back from abroad to vote — are all unlikely to repeat.

Eisenkot’s party, too, would certainly lose seats. This time around, he ran a list of former IDF generals who entered politics to oust Netanyahu. But they, in their soldiers’ naivete and unformed expectations about honor, have been found out as not truly political enough. In this, they resemble Benny Gantz, another former officer who nonetheless went from 35 seats to dropping out of this election for lack of even minimal support. His great error was to shore up a Bibi government, as if he were another reliable general, on the promise of a turn as premier that never arrived.

This, then, is the anti-Bibi coalition’s chance. Should the results stay roughly in line as predicted, what happens next will come down to character. Does Eisenkot have it in him? Or is he, like his critics say he sounds, a flat military man, used to giving orders and the army’s square world, up against one of the world’s most ferocious political animals?

For the moment, there seems a path forward for Eisenkot to install an Arab-supported minority government, open a long-promised Commission of Inquiry to expose Netanyahu’s failures on October 7, and then potentially seek to expand his coalition through defectors from the Right, or even build a unity government with a post-Bibi Likud. This would be fragile indeed, and may not last long, but it could be decisive in ending Netanyahu’s career as he faces both a corruption trial and his failings on October 7 without the shield of government at his disposal.

If it is unclear whether the opposition can grasp the nettle, Netanyahu’s strategy going forward is obvious. On the one hand, he will try to do everything possible to delegitimize Arab parties and Arab votes, while fostering an atmosphere of hate and incitement — all to discourage the opposition from embracing the Arab parties and the votes they can offer to push him out of power. His tactic, in particular, is likely to bully and frighten opposition Right-wingers like Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman out a Jewish-Arab partnership for change.

At the same time, Bibi will try what he has done before: “unite the Zionist majority” around him in a government where he remains prime minister. He will offer to drop the extremist religious Zionist parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, detested by the opposition and sanctioned by many Western countries. Expect him to enlist Donald Trump in this effort, and claim it is necessary to restart the war on Iran. There is widespread fear among the opposition that Netanyahu, even as caretaker leader, will leap into a major new confrontation with Tehran to force the military-minded Eisenkot to line up behind him. This could scramble things politically, as IRGC rockets again start to fall.

The utmost priority for Bibi is to avoid losing power, which would entail a serious risk of jail time. This is why the Change politicians are so frightened by what he might pull on Iran: a wounded political animal is at his most dangerous. Netanyahu’s ultimate dream is to pressure enough opposition parties to agree to a unity rotation deal, where he is prime minister first — on the condition that his corruption trial is waived and he is parachuted into the presidency for his 79th birthday, in two years time, when the incumbent’s term is up. To get a deal across the line, he might rule out staying in office for longer. Netanyahu may well get there, along the way evading accountability for October 7 and everything else.

To stop him, the opposition will not only need to hope the final results stay roughly in line with what is currently predicted — but also to show unflinching conviction in itself and what Israeli democracy is supposed to be. “Perhaps you believe that that is to your immediate advantage,” prophesied Herzl through one of his liberal Zionist puppets as he defended Arab rights against the racism of Dr Rabbi Geyer. “But it is not. If you adopt that stupid, narrow-minded policy, the land will go to wrack and ruin.”

“The fairy tale,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1936, “…is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind.” You don’t need an academic to see ancient fears of predators and strangers in the woods, bundled together in stories like “Little Red Riding Hood”. But what academia can do is begin to date these narratives. This has allowed us to trace “Little Red Riding Hood”, and its close variants like “The Wolf And The Seven Kids”, back at least 2,000 years to the Eastern Mediterranean. From there, it spread through the Roman world into Europe, down the Red Sea into East Africa, and along the Silk Road to East Asia, to be told again and again, what must be millions of times a day. Modern academia can also help identify patterns: like the fact a hominid-like wild man from the Himalayan Yeti, to the Australian Yowie, to the Scandinavia troll or the Old English woodwose — exists in practically every culture.

This is eerie given what we now know. The idea that these could be the faintest of imprints of lost hominids has crept into plausibility as our understanding of humanity’s deepest past has changed. The first Neanderthal remains were only discovered in Germany in 1856, and only in the last 20 years have new remains and a revolution in genomics revolutionized our understanding of ancient humanity. The familiar graphic of humanity’s evolutionary lineage — first a chimp on all fours, before rising over his stooped hairy predecessors a man standing tall — has collapsed into a final group photo before an abrupt extinction of other hominids that left sapiens alone on Earth.

It’s now clear that we shared Earth with at least four other branches of the genus homo — with which we interbred. This startling discovery was made as recently as 2010. These were the Neanderthals in Europe; the Denisovans in Asia, only discovered in 2008 from a single finger bone, and of which only a dozen remains have since been found; and two ghost populations in Africa inferred from modeling. This revelation — that we were a wider humanity, a species with sub-species — has been accompanied by breakthroughs in archeology. This began in 2003, after yet more hominids were found in South East Asia, and which overlapped with early man. One such individual, the hobbit-sized Homo Florenesis in Indonesia, caught the world’s imagination with his diminutive size.

More to the point, these archeological developments have transformed our knowledge of Neanderthals. They were more “human” than we realized: using fire, smoking hides, distilling birch tar, wearing jewelry, ritually burying their dead, even practicing a kind of primitive dentistry — closer to many old folktales than to apes. At a distance, it would have been hard to tell them apart wearing furs and ponchos. But there were giveaways. They were a bit bigger than us, their eyes around a fifth larger under a ridged forehead, with little chin, and they were probably light skinned: unlike our own ancestors. It would have been an unsettling mirror.

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How long were we together? Paleoanthropologists divide human history between anatomically modern humans, who emerged around 300,000 years ago, and behaviorally modern humans showing signs of art, symbolic thinking and sophisticated tool-making — gradually building up over 150,000 to 50,000 years ago. Drawing on fragments and hypotheses, we can only ever date fuzzily in deep history: with margins for error spanning tens of thousands of years. But we can deduce from our anatomically modern history that we shared the world with other humanities for nine tenths of our existence.

How constant our contacts were with the African ghost populations we simply cannot say. Perhaps habitual. Maybe fleeting. But of the Eurasian humanities, this would not have been a constant contact: Neanderthals and Denisovans were occupying vast territories as yet unexplored by sapiens. But there was contact in frontier zones like the Levant, where we know that Neanderthals interbred with sapiens: both from dating our DNA, and from the burial of a 140,000-year-old half-Neanderthal child, some 90,000 years before Europe was systematically colonized by sapiens. That colonization, as caves like Grotte Mandrin in France make clear, was not a single obliterating wave — but a 12,000-year period of overlap between Neanderthals and ourselves made up of successive expeditions.

Our ancestors, then, for perhaps most of our behavioral modernity, needed to be aware of Neanderthals. But can we faintly remember them? This requires us to date their disparition. The French archeologist Ludovic Slimak writes hauntingly about the archeological record — “Neanderthals are there and then they are no longer there” — some 40,000 years ago. There is something unsettling sensing their final encounter with sapiens settling Europe sifting through tens of thousands of ancient flints. We see the Neanderthals’ distinctive tool-knapping technique: each slightly different, as if following the rock, compared to the brutal and identical sharpness of the humans, indistinguishable from the slopes of Levant to the Rhone valleys. This is what an encounter with a super intelligence looks like, and it is unnerving as we face our own at the dawn of AI.

“Neanderthals were not a civilization,” writes Slimak. “They were hundreds of civilizations collapsing like dominoes.” Never very numerous, destabilized perhaps by the ferocious temperature oscillations of the late Ice Age, Slimak believes Neanderthals were broken up into small groups and outcompeted by us in a way instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with modern colonization. Their last possible traces — not bones, but those distinctive flints — can be found in the two furthest corners of the continent: above the Arctic circle in the Urals plateau, and in the caves of Gibraltar, some 29,000 years ago. The same fate awaited the Denisovans, and perhaps the hobbits of Flores.

But do we in the faintest way in our stories remember them? This begs the question of how long can we remember anything. Here, recent research by Professor Patrick Nunn in The Edge of Memory is revelatory. Our world has changed enormously since behavioral modernity. We not only live in an empty world but a drowned world, one utterly reshaped by massive coastal flooding from the end of the Ice Age. Yet Nunn has documented 21 Aboriginal stories which recount exact locations off coastal Australia there is no way modern inhabitants could have known about. From vanished islands to marshes and land bridges — not least the one to Tasmania — these memories of what must have been sudden and shocking sea-level rises can be dated to between 7,500 to 12,000 years ago.

But we do not have to go all the way to Australia to find ancient memories. Nunn’s recent research has concentrated on the west of the British Isles, where countless examples of old Cornish, Welsh and Irish storytelling, like tales of the lost land of Lyonesse, recall vanished coastlines stretching out into the Channel and Atlantic. Our geological research has now caught up with the storytelling. These were not, as the archaeologist Osbert Crawford first suggested, the fantasies of “the dreamy Celt”. Rather, the geological record suggests a faint memory of the traumatic loss of the Ice Age coastline — with some tales being able to pinpoint bits of the Scilly Isles lost some 9,000 years ago.

Intriguingly, in the East of England, where the loss of the vast plains of Doggerland stretching towards Germany was even more dramatic, there are next to no folk tales of lost lands, despite fishermen for centuries picking up mammoth tusks and tree trunks deep out at sea. Historical genetics gives us the answer why: while the population in those western regions are largely the descendants of those living there during those cataclysmic sea-level rises, those on England’s eastern coastline were largely replaced by Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes in the Dark Ages.

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The edge of memory when it comes to events seems nowhere close to 20,000 years ago — and far short of the last traces of the Neanderthals. But there might be another explanation for our ancestors’ fascination with wild men, ogres and giants: their encounters with the fossil record. Because if you have never seen a woolly mammoth or a gigantic extinct cave bear — let alone a dinosaur — and you dig one up and try to arrange it, what comes out looks rather like a monstrous giant.

In her brilliant book The First Fossil Hunters, Professor Adrienne Mayor compares fossil deposits to Ancient Greek and Roman accounts of the discoveries of gigantic bones and heroic skeletons. In so doing, she shows that these finds convinced our ancestors that there had once been a time of giants. During what she calls the “bone rush” of the 7th and 5th centuries BC, the Spartans found the massive remains of their hero Orestes while the Athenians dug up Theseus and gigantic bones attributed to Ajax in spots we can now pinpoint as rich with fossil deposits. Not only did the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius gather chambers of wonders of gigantic bones — which must have been fossils — they also gave instructions on how to bury giants’ bodies that suddenly were exposed in what we know are rich deposits.

We now know, in other words, that the temples of the ancient Mediterranean were in fact full of the kinds of tusks and bones that you might today find in the Natural History Museum. Not only is moving giant bones mentioned in the Epic Cycle about the Trojan War — where Trojan seers prophesied the Greeks could only win if they found the bones of the hero Pelops, whose giant shoulder blade they promptly dug up — there is clearly a fossilized skull, depicted as the beast of Troy, on a 6th-century BC Corinthian vase. These assumptions lingered, as a drumbeat for belief in the background, until modern archeology offered an alternative. And we have extensive evidence of this: from Herodotus and Pausnias inspecting curious bones, to Boccaccio watching Sicilian peasants dig out the skeleton of a giant in 1371, to the important paleontological discoveries made in Chinese drugstores selling “dragon bones” in the 19th century. But if our hominid stories are only fantasies from bones, why the specifics and persistence of Yetis, Yowies and wild men?

Flores in Indonesia is the island where we might find an answer. Here, on an island where apes never trod, not only have archaeologists found the hobbit-like remains of Homo Florenesis — anthropologists have also found an incredibly rich and naturalistic storytelling tradition about ape-men. There is something so specific about these tales, recalling cave burnings to smoke out very violent ape-men, that they just might be recalling some memory of living side-by-side with another species. Could this be where the edge of memory touches our lost cousins? This is especially possible when the rarity of fossilization doesn’t preclude the idea that there weren’t lingering Homo Florenesis thousands of years past the dates of their last known remains. We don’t know. Only archaeology, and time, might eventually tell.

Yet the fact these stories endure today suggests a third explanation: buried deep in the psyche. There is something uncanny about reading accounts of the Flores ape-men, with their tellers even believing they’re still out there, spotted thieving food or by field huts, found dead at the roadside or glimpsed in the higher forests. Might our minds, after so long evolving together, be so strongly wired with the pattern recognition to spot other hominids that we will hallucinate them until the end of our days? Fairies die out only to be replaced by aliens. Hominids from space, this time, not from the forests and caves. Phantom limbs, phantom siblings, still living with us forever in our stories.

Back then, as the rabbis first struggled to sum up Judaism without a Temple, in what became known as the Mishnah, they preached against the temptations of kingship and Rome. “Love work,” they said, “abhor taking high office and do not seek intimacy with the ruling power.” Today, the Mishnah’s essential portion, The Ethics of The Fathers, reads like an almost incantatory list of generations of exclusively religious Jewish leaders. Originally, it was shocking because of who it omits: the rabbis had written out of history not only King Herod, but the messianic political leaders of the three great revolts against Rome.

The truth is that when it comes to national leaders, Jews have precious few examples to go by, having not held their homeland for over 1,800 years. Which is why it is telling, in the final build up to the war on Tehran, that Benjamin Netanyahu spent time rediscovering those rulers whom the rabbis wished to forget. He has done this by reading a new book,  Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, by Professor Barry Strauss. “Well, we lost that one,” Netanyahu explained to a reporter about the work. “I think we have to win the next one.”

This is perhaps the most unintentionally revealing thing Bibi has ever said. As his war planning with Washington gathered pace, the Israeli Prime Minister was reading a book about a vast historic reversal — how, in the space of a single lifetime, Jewish royalty went from playing politics in Rome, as their people gathered privileges and respect in the imperial center, to watching helplessly as the legions burnt the Temple and carried off its Menorah, their nation marched into slavery, humiliation and exile. At its core, this is the story of King Herod and the failure of his heirs: how a combination of runaway fundamentalism and diplomatic failure doomed a highly successful people to the status of near outcasts.

You cannot understand King Herod — or the depths of Bibi’s mind — without looking again at a map of Rome. The empire in the east was different from that of the west: not the uniformly subjugated barbarian provinces of Gaul and Britannia, but a patchwork of wealthy, civilized statelets, client kingdoms and provinces. Judea was one of those kingdoms, home to the largest temple complex of the ancient world at Jerusalem. It was a city whose sanctuary was so gilded, writes the inescapable ancient historian Josephus, that in the morning it “cast a fiery light”; so white was its marble that from a distance the sanctuary looked like a mountain capped with snow.

This, moreover, was a city that had produced in the Torah a literary tradition its people believed rivaled that of the Greeks, a city whose diaspora was spread across the known world’s two empires — the Roman, stretching west to the pillars of Hercules, and the Parthian, stretching east to the Hindu Kush, each studded with Jewish trading communities paying their own tithe back to the Temple.

Strauss calls this Judea “in essence a Temple state”; it had become ungovernable by 63 BC, when its elites first appealed to Rome to adjudicate in a civil war within its failing Hasmonean monarchy. Twenty-three years later, after a period of chaos, the Roman Senate made their most promising local ally King of all Judea, then sent him back with military support to conquer his kingdom. His name was Herod.

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This king would become so hated in both the Jewish and the Christian tradition that his actual reign was blotted out. But reading Jews vs. Rome, it is easy to realize what Netanyahu might see in him. It is all about the emperor. Herod, after all, made himself a Roman politician and not just a Jewish one. To avoid the territorial designs of Cleopatra, he sought and won the support of Mark Antony. But after his patron’s demise at the hands of Octavian, known to history as Augustus, Herod had the skill to then become the first Roman emperor’s greatest loyalist.

To succeed in Roman politics, Herod Romanized himself, naming his grandson after Augustus’s favorite general Agrippa, and even becoming president of the Olympic Games. To emphasize his loyalty, he also Romanized his landscape, raising a new city called Caesarea, on the coast south of modern-day Haifa. All this would pay off, not just for him, but for his Rome-educated grandson Herod Agrippa I, who was such an impressive Roman politician that in the chaos that followed the murder of his friend Caligula he installed Claudius as emperor.

There is no way Herod’s precedent was not on Bibi’s mind as he read this book, in those months when he pursued Trump with the most outlandish flattery — a man he has named a settlement after; offered the nation’s highest honors to; and sought to speak to through every Fox and Friends or Hannity. All this as he shuns his own media at home. Bibi knows that his bilingual, Israeli-American political identity, in a country where few in its traditional political-military class speak flawless English, is the source of his power, his ability to play politics in Rome.

Because of how it ended, the very Roman power of the Herodian dynasty has been forgotten. First came Herod the Great, who renovated the Temple, but his large kingdom disintegrated almost immediately on his death. Revolts broke out everywhere against the backdrop of his sadistic divide-and-rule, culminating in the murder of his own sons. But what the empire gifted, it could also take away. The second, Romanized generation, such as Herod Antipas of Galilee who executed John the Baptist, were demoted into ruling mostly as lesser Roman-appointed “tetrarchs” or “ethnarchs” of scraps of their old kingdom.

50 years later, the now extensively Romanized third generation would enjoy a brief resurgence, when Herod the Great’s grandson Herod Agrippa I ruled as King of all Judea: but only for around three years. The fourth generation, such as Herod Agrippa II of Galilee, were demoted yet again to minor clients. They were the last to rule in the land of Israel. The Herodians’ once very real regional influence would leave no mark on history. The Jewish-Roman alliance was doomed.

This is where Strauss’s account becomes a study in failure. Successive generations of Herodians became more and more hated by their people for their Hellenized foreignness. By the end, the rulers could do nothing but hide from their subjects’ religious passions, let alone steer or hope to calm them. It meant nothing that Herod Agrippa II of Galilee ended up fighting on the same side as the Romans in the Great Revolt that began in 66 AD. Nor that his sister Berenice was the lover of General Titus. Maybe he saved Galilee, and she a few of the captives, from worse reprisals, but neither of them could save the Temple nor Judea. Their stewardship had failed. After this disaster, the dynasty continued, but not in Judea and not as Jews. King Herod’s descendants would rule as kings in Armenia and Cetis in Anatolia, or serve as Roman senators, magistrates, and even a consul or two. Yet they did all this firmly as pagans.

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Herod the Great’s heirs failed because they did not keep the zealots close enough to control them. And it is impossible, here, to read Strauss’s account and not see the signature of Bibi’s entire career: the zealots will be my zealots. For 30 years, Israel’s most American, most foreign of leaders has used fundamentalist rabbis and settlers as his auxiliaries and shields. This, in the end, is the political meaning of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. Of course, there is the cynicism, through which Netanyahu will do anything to stave off an election and avoid jail. But there is also a dark pessimism about the Jewish people that glues it all together, a sense that Netanyahu truly believes you cannot rule the Jews except when flanked by their zealots.

This was the Herodian legacy: Judea’s priests driven to hilltop villages in the Galilee, its princes pagans in the courts of Asia Minor. By the end of the Great Revolt in 70 AD, the Jews were now a people without a leadership, their temple and their monarchy in ruins. Incontinent, apocalyptic fanaticism spread like wildfire among the people. Two further revolts followed, in 115 AD and 135 AD. The result was what we would now call ethnic cleansing and genocide. Archaeological work in modern Israel has confirmed a scale of atrocity that shocked even Rome’s ancient historians. By the end of the first revolt, Titus’s slavery and butchery had reduced the population of Judea by a third. By the end of the third, by driving the Jews out of Judea and eradicating their settlements there, Hadrian had reduced it by as much as two thirds. During the second Trajan had, to quote the historian Appian, “utterly destroyed the Jewish people in Egypt”. Their doom, to a reader like Netanyahu, only confirms a conviction that the Diaspora is only safe if Israel succeeds.

In the space of a lifetime, the Jews had not only lost Jerusalem, their great spiritual city with all its treasures, but also Alexandria, their great diasporic port with all its wealth. The Jews were finished. Not as a nation, but as a great people in the ancient world. Their homeland was renamed Palestine — as the Greeks had long known it — to insult them. They were humiliatingly singled out by Rome to pay the fiscus Judaicus, a special tax to the emperor’s coffers and the city’s great temple of Jupiter, in lieu of the old tithe they had once so gladly paid their own temple. A vertiginous fall, in short, from privileges granted by Julius Caesar himself.

I don’t doubt that, reading Strauss’s book, Netanyahu imagines himself as Herod the Great: the only sound intercessor between Rome and the Jews. But there is another, unnerving reading, in which Netanyahu has got it all wrong. By betting everything on the House of Trump, is he not making the same mistake as the Herodians? From educating their children together to tying generations of friendships together, the House of Herod bet everything on the House of Augustus. But that didn’t work so well with the dynasties that came after: the cold military men of the Flavians and the Nerva-Antonines. After all,  dynasties could, and did, fall. What Judea needed, and so obviously lacked, were friends and allies across the Senate and the People of Rome.

Why the Temple was destroyed is one of the great aching questions of Judaism. In Jews vs. Rome, Strauss has attempted to answer it through politics. His own view is that disunity was key. The Jews were factionalized beyond belief, and broken into zealots and Hellenizers, fundamentalists and accommodationists, all at each other’s throats. Fractured like this, the people of Israel never stood a chance against the imperial legions.

And here too Bibi’s rule resembles that of King Herod — and not in a way that would please him. It’s not just the way he has got Trump to bully the Israeli President to grant him a pardon for his corruption trial, nor his benches of Knesset yes men and hate men. It’s also 30 years of stoking endless provocation and division. It’s the hate marches against Yitzhak Rabin, the anti-Arab rhetoric, his attempts to gut the Supreme Court, the relentless march to “baseless hatred”.

This odd phrase is what the Talmud uses to describe the political climate in ancient Israel when it seeks its own answer as to why the Temple was destroyed. And it is a term I recognize when I see Itamar Ben Gvir prancing in the Knesset with a bottle of champagne, celebrating a death penalty unique for Palestinians, as Bibi looks on and smiles.

Netanyahu thinks he is leading with the zealots close; but rather they are leading him. This is a mistake that Herod the Great did not make. Two millenniums later, it is clear that the King of Judea, in his decision to rebuild and glorify the Temple, understood, unlike most of his heirs, something fundamental about the passions of Judaism. In the soul of Israel, they are inescapable and volcanic. And a leader who seeks to be their ruler, must channel them, not follow them. Herod did so in the vast effort to rebuild the Temple. It is by its surviving Western Wall that we still pray. Netanyahu has done quite the opposite, governing by endless concessions to settler construction projects or draft-dodging Haredim. Their demands are pulling him ever closer to splitting the nation, and sparking the fury of Rome.

These are the limits to Bibi’s cynicism and pessimism. For it has no spiritual force to answer the prophetic warning of Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. Scholem warned that on the far side of so much destruction and displacement, Israel would need to withstand its own impulses and not succumb to what he called “the messianic claim which has virtually been conjured up” — by returning to the land of our ancestors. After 1,800 years, we have abruptly picked up this uncannily familiar history of zealots, client-kings and emperors. And we need to learn from it, or pay the price, once again, for fundamentalism and baseless hatred.

A war is being waged against the Jewish diaspora. It is being waged with bombs, shootings, harassment and intimidation. The attacks, and the fear of them, are a small side plot in a great Middle Eastern War. Those two men charged in London had a plan to attack a sister synagogue I sporadically attend. I feel this myself, as I push my son’s pram past the policemen at the temple gate. Yet more than fear, I feel disappointment. For if ever me and my son, or any of us who pray here, were butchered by a gunman shouting “Free Palestine”, many Western activists would equivocate, contextualize, or even say it served us right. Never mind that us diaspora Jews have no single agreed view on Gaza, the West Bank, or Benjamin Netanyahu, let alone Iran.

I am reflective of this myself. In a small synagogue, I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only person who’s had any connection to British government policymaking regarding the wars in the Middle East. As a special adviser to David Lammy when he was foreign secretary, I advised him to sanction Israeli ministers, supported his decision to recognize Palestine as a state, and was involved in a futile attempt to persuade Iran and America to make a deal.

But I am under no illusions: if my family had happened to pray at the Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue, where Jihad al-Shamie killed two worshippers and injured three others on our holiest day of the year, and if I had been among the fallen, I would have been “contextualized” by people who call themselves anti-Zionist. The obvious distinction — that criticism of Israel’s occupation or military conduct is legitimate, indeed necessary, but holding all Jews worldwide accountable for Israel’s actions is antisemitic and targeting them nothing less than murderous — is clearly breaking down.

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By Ben Judah

A line had been crossed where prominent, highly influential X accounts were unable to say, unequivocally, that targeting Jewish children in provincial Michigan was simply terrorism and utterly reprehensible.

The internet is now a front in this war on the diaspora. It has been since October 7. Israel has wrought destruction in Gaza, and the images are truly horrific. There is no denying that, and anyone who does so is wrong. But around them, a viral campaign has arisen, one which has moved well beyond criticism of the IDF. It has moved beyond a push for sanctions, beyond the desire for a two- or even one-state solution for peace. It has moved into a kind of annihilationist anti-Zionism that wishes to hurt Israel’s supporters wherever it can find them. And the place where this is most easily done is in the diaspora.

If you have spent any time on social media in the last two-and-a-half years you know this. You know about the explosive viral fame of the Hitler fan Nick Fuentes. Such is Fuentes’ popularity that the arch-conservative Rod Dreher has warned that at least a third of Republicans under 30 in DC are in thrall to him. Then there are the Talmud blood libels of Candace Owens, with an audience of 24 million across platforms, or Tucker Carlson, whose influence on the Republican base is such that Vice President Vance cannot bring himself to disavow him, despite the conspiracy theories he pushes out about Jewish groups to his equally huge audience.

You will have noticed, if you live online, the now ubiquitous semi-ironic Nazi-like language, from “The Goyim know” to “Goy-slop”, going mainstream. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink use of the term “the Epstein Class” by congressmen. Or the sudden omnipresence of the idea that America is a “colony of Israel”, riffs on which are now being pushed from the likes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb to Slavoj Žižek into their fandoms. Now that antisemitism goes viral with ease, you can spend your day scrolling through, non-stop denigration of Jewish history, from posts calling Hebrew a “fake language” to the claim that, according to spurious DNA evidence, Ashkenazim are “fake Jews.”

This kind of antisemitism has slipped into and radicalized anti-Israel protest and political movements across the West, in an age where the membrane between online hatred and real world violence is permeable. The culture war around the pickets outside Gail’s is reflective of something bigger. Instead of picketing its owners, Bain Capital, or any major private equity firm invested in the Israeli arms industry — which would hardly be unreasonable — anti-Zionist protestors have chosen to picket a bakery known to have an Israeli founder and stock Jewish-style challah bread.

Many in this movement are no longer pursuing accountability and action against the state of Israel — a ceasefire, sanctions, the ICC — all of which are all perfectly legitimate to push for. Instead, they are prosecuting a war on association, where any link, any sympathy, any connection to Israel, be it a founder or a baked good, is presented as immoral, even demonic. As Susan Abulhawa, a leading anti-Zionist, whose language proved too much even for Zohran Mamdani, put it on X: “I don’t give a shit if people collapse the distinction between Zionists and Jews.”

By effectively demanding total disavowal of the world’s only Jewish state, this campaign has ceased to merely be a rally for a free Palestine. Rather, it has become an offensive against the diaspora, from the high street bakery to the House of Lords. This poisoned discourse reached its nadir on 12 March, when a gunman arrived at a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, with the intention of massacring the 130 children there and at the school next door. But, I heard, the synagogue had the word “Israel” in its name. But the Jewish communal leadership had always supported Israel. But the Lebanese attacker — in fact known to be connected to Hezbollah — had lost family to Israeli bombs.

The Middle East war, of course, will end. Wars always do. The algorithm will move onto other things. And I do expect, when that happens, the intensity of the proxy diaspora war to slacken too. But I fear that now the seal has been broken. The effusion of Jew-hatred has reversed decades’ worth of declining antisemitism, as memories of the Holocaust fade, with large numbers of young Brits and Americans now dabbling in the taboo-busting “JQ.” This is online slang for asking the “Jewish Question” and exploring its florid antisemitic answers.

Their generation, then, is shaping up to be antisemitic. Over 25% of young Americans now hold unfavorable views of Jews; among older Americans, it’s just 5%. And in the UK, a fifth of students don’t want to houseshare with Jews.

There is evidence to suggest that the intensity of this spike, especially in the case of outright Holocaust deniers like Fuentes, may be driven by foreign powers using bot farms to rip into American cohesion. The war against the Diaspora is a tool of hostile actors in their wars on the West. The king of the “Groypers”, as his fans are known, has enjoyed a dramatically higher rate of early retweets of his X posts — this being the key to viral takeoff — than even Elon Musk. Yet, according to a 2025 report, 90% of the accounts boosting Fuentes’s early retweeters were fully anonymous, with roughly half of his retweeters coming from Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia. The tide may well, when the Democrats return, subside. But the ubiquity of online antisemitism will not.

There are the obvious reasons why. The wars in the Middle East will go on. The diaspora desperately needs them to stop but is powerless to stop them. They are neither Israeli citizens, nor are they listened to — with the exception of a few individuals. The bitter truth is that communities like mine are scorned by Netanyahu, who sees us as weaklings that he can ignore, destined to assimilate away. While at the same time, our lives will always be too connected to Israeli society, be it through family and spiritual ties, to ever be seen as not guilty in a radicalized anti-Zionist movement’s eyes.

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That won’t change, but the places where the Jewish diaspora lives have already done so. Cities like New York, London and Paris now have more Muslims, more Hispanics, fewer old men like Joe Biden with a war-era fondness for Jews. In both Europe and the United States, these growing minorities are more antisemitic. They are also younger, more likely to get their news online and watch foreign TV, be it Televisa or Al Jazeera. This is the mechanism by which imported prejudice gets stirred by the footage these wars export.

But a subtler change has taken place too. Every time our civilization evolves, antisemitism, like a mutating virus, changes with it: from a religious hatred in a world of faith to an ethnic hatred in a world of nation states. Each era seems to decide anew what it cannot abide about the Jews and what respect it will accord them. And every rupture in how we communicate, from the coming of the printing press to the dawn of the radio, seems to see society’s antibodies to this virus weaken.

Suspect for being too rootless and transnational in the twentieth century; now Jews are suspect for being too rooted and tribal in the twenty-first. The truth is that we no longer really live in what you could call Western civilization: an order based around historic nations, a culture based around print, a way of life still furrowed by the old faith, with a clearly defined attitude towards Jews.

Its successor is a globalized internet civilization that plays out in viral clips and has become unmoored from old certainties. This is a world where X mega-influencers like Iain Miles Cheong and Sneako are as much players as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Everything is being relitigated. This new civilization, since its litigation is occurring via ephemeral, emotive social media posts rather than by works of sustained thought, has an oral culture rather than a literary culture. By its nature, this culture rewards hatred and anger. Which, I fear as I push my pram, will not prove kind to the Jews.

I would veer into the dark alleyways of the Old City, find myself at the Western Wall, flooded with light, then turn into the tunnel-like paths of the Muslim Quarter. Here, I met with some of the more committed boys from the tougher, stricter yeshivas. We would clamber onto roofs, to find new places to see the Temple Mount. They would take me deeper into the warren, full of excitement, to their synagogues filled with song. They would pray by the tombs, speaking at dawn of David, Solomon and their lovers in the Book of Kings, as if they could see them.

Criss-crossing Jerusalem like this — its street names recalling biblical heroes, prophets and saints — is to imagine an ancient, continuous city. But this is an illusion.

The real Jerusalem, as noted by the Israeli historian Yair Wallach, is not only a capital of ancient sites but a city in which over 99% of its buildings date from after 1900. This makes Jerusalem, with its almost a million people, younger than both New York and London.

Archaeologists navigate Israel by way of mounds, tels or tells in Hebrew or Arabic, where successive civilisations lie on top of each other. Modern Jerusalem is not dissimilar. Over the past century and a half, it has been at least three very different cities: Ottoman Jerusalem, British Jerusalem and Zionist Jerusalem. Today, by contrast, we have an increasingly Haredi-Palestinian conurbation that reflects a one-state reality — a place where Israeli thinkers see either a dystopian future or signs of hope.

Arriving in Jerusalem, usually by traffic jam, is to pass red-roofed suburbs, densely packed over the wooded valleys on the hills. The land, you feel, is full. But it is hard to stress how small and remote it once was.

In 1856, my great-great grandfather’s brother Rabbi Shlomo Yahuda set off from Baghdad, to build a yeshiva in Jerusalem. He travelled for 40 days on camelback, and he was not alone. For millennia, the prayers of the Jewish people had been directed there, but only with the beginnings of secure travel, in a world of Victorian shipping lines, did it stop being an idea — and become a real, reachable place. These pious dreamers arrived in a poor town of less than 20,000 people.

Rabbi Shlomo’s Jerusalem was a walled village. Years later, his son-in-law would recall the “the desolate and forlorn state of the city” in the mid-19th century. There was nothing beyond its Ottoman walls and within them life was marked by hunger, brigands and a lack of work. Months would go by without matches.

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Though it quickly acquired a pious Jewish majority, life was dominated by Muslim notables such as the al-Husaini and the Nashashibi families. Progress was slow but steady until the turn of the century. Palestinian diarists, such as Khalil Sakakini, recall a city of cafes, photo shops and literati circles opening to the world thanks to its new railway. Yet this Ottoman Jerusalem horrified Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. It was, for him, a place of “hideous, miserable, scrambling beggary” that he fantasised about turning into an “airy, comfortable, properly sewered, brand new city around the Holy Places”.

Within two decades, British Jerusalem, formed abruptly by war, created another place entirely. No longer growing chaotically, in a way that might have come to resemble any other Middle Eastern city, the colonial authorities gave it its enduring design restrictions and its faux antique, stone-clad look. Herzl would have approved.

Rabbi Shlomo’s family tells the story of a Jewish community transformed. His grandson, David Yellin, shocked his rabbis by entering the secular Alliance Israélite Universele school. He then switched from Arabic and Yiddish to Hebrew at home and moved from the Ottoman Parliament to the Mandate’s Jewish Assembly, becoming a champion of Hebrew education. His story and Jerusalem’s was the same: secularisation.

This created a sociologically new city. Where late Ottoman Jerusalem had been a place of Ladino and mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews, the Mandate’s Jerusalem would be dominated by secular, Hebrew-speaking Jews. This was the city of novelist Amos Oz’s childhood, where Jewish immigration brought first the bookish high culture of Central Europe, then a new Hebrew University of Jerusalem co-founded by Albert Einstein, before a rush of refugees from Nazism. A city not only of refugee intellectuals such as Martin Buber, but of a growing modern middle class with cinemas and children’s clothes stores.

It was also becoming a violent city. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict truly began in Jerusalem when Arab riots and killings erupted in 1929. Their cause was a growing Jewish presence at the Western Wall, where Muslims believe Mohammed tied his steed before ascending to heaven from the mount above. Jews, many felt, had no right to it. But Palestine was transforming into a new country as Jewish refugee immigration surged.

This stirred the great Arab Revolt in 1936. Something had ruptured. Rabbi Shlomo’s grandsons paid the price. David Yellin’s son was murdered, while his cousin Abraham Shalom Yahuda found his Ottoman-era friendships powerless in the face of violence.

By now, literatis such as Khalil Sakakini who had once been exiled by the Ottomans for sheltering a Jewish immigrant, now praised violence, writing to his son after an attack on civilians: “Who would believe there are such heroes in Palestine? What a great honour it is, my Sari, to be an Arab in Palestine.”

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British Jerusalem was tense, but no warzone. It was still deeply Levantine and cosmopolitan, where the city’s Arabs, some 20-40% of its population, had its own large bourgeoisie. This made a different kind of city from the occupation-walled, isolated and fiercely Muslim Palestinian East Jerusalem of today.

This was the city of the childhood of Edward Said, where Arab merchant families like his own set the tone. These had wide horizons and occasionally socialised with and often employed Jews, such as the midwife who delivered Edward Said in 1935. It was also still a very Christian city, where being Arab was far from synonymous with being Muslim. Roughly half of the Arabs in the city were Christian like the Saids. Today, they make up less than 2%.

But from a distance, neither were the worldly Said or Yahuda families that different. Life was separate, not segregated. As late as the war, a bourgeois address book contained a few names from the other side one might call. Nor did the city have an Arab East and a Jewish West. In fact, tens of thousands of the wealthiest Arabs lived in what is now the core of elite West Jerusalem and many Jews lived in poor neighbourhoods now firmly in East Jerusalem.

In 1948, British Jerusalem ended as abruptly as it began. Its fate unfolded differently from in the rest of Palestine. Whereas great victories secured the Galilee and the Negev for Israel, causing more than half of all Palestinians to become refugees, the Zionists were defeated in Jerusalem. What happened there explains why the Jews thought it was a war of annihilation: Arab forces conquered the Old City, expelling its Jews and destroying all but one of its synagogues.

For the Arab bourgeoisie, 1948 was a war of liquidation. In the wealthy Arab Christian neighbourhoods of West Jerusalem that fell to Jewish forces, where Said grew up, these families fled amid frenzied looting. Entering the abandoned mansions, Israeli soldiers were astonished by the pianos, carpets and beautiful chandeliers.

Khalil Sakakini was one of those who lost his home and his expansive library. His left-behind volumes ended up with 40,000 other “abandoned” books in the Israeli national library. But Sakakini’s departure to Ramallah was part of something bigger. The war set in train the terminal decline of Arab Christian Jerusalem, whose numbers began to plummet as its great Levantine trading families emigrated. Edward Said ended up in Manhattan.

Barbed wire divided Jerusalem into two severed almost monoethnic cities. On one side, West Jerusalem, the new capital of Israel, but mostly in name only as the Israeli economy and army were now run from Tel Aviv. And on the other, Jordanian East Jerusalem, pointedly not the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom it was promptly annexed to.

Zionist Jerusalem began in this enclave city, now cut off from the Old City by the new border. If this Jerusalem is summed up by anyone, it is by Teddy Kolleck, its mayor of 28 years. This man is what liberal Zionism was. Wearing a long topcoat and tie, Jerusalem’s mayor often looked more like the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt or Austria’s Bruno Kreisky than an Israeli politician. This Hungarian-born protégé of David Ben-Gurion, a social-democrat with European manners, became mayor of West Jerusalem in 1965 and oversaw the Zionist project for the city after the Six Day War when the Israeli cabinet, in a swell of emotion, annexed it.

Kolleck’s beautified Jerusalem is what many of Israel’s supporters imagine the country still is. But neither his city, nor his kind of Zionism, still truly exists. Demographically and sociologically, his Jerusalem has disappeared. Kolleck’s was a Left-leaning and secular Jewish Jerusalem, where ultra-orthodox Hareidim and Palestinians were a small minority. Its politics was dominated by the Israeli Labour Party, running the municipality alone.

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This city no longer exists because Jerusalem, like Israel, is different from the West: it has grown more religious. By Kolleck’s death in 2007, it was evident that the post-1967 Zionist project for Jerusalem had failed. Despite the airy beauty of his Hezlian promenades, the city was neither united, internationally recognised, nor calm. And for all of Kolleck’s pride in his enlightened occupation, the policy of administering the Palestinians of East Jerusalem as “residents” without automatic citizenship had failed. The second intifada had begun with riots in their areas.

A cascade of suicide bombings reflected a broader defeat. Israel’s policy to maintain a decisive Jewish majority had failed. Demographically, the Palestinian population had soared, from 25% in 1967 to over 30%, not only despite great efforts to attract Jews to the city but the construction of 10 large neighbourhoods over the Green Line, the size of small cities elsewhere in Israel. In response, the Palestinians clung to their slum-like neighbourhoods — trapped by the occupation.

At the time of Kolleck’s death, more than a third of Jerusalem’s population were Haredi. Kolleck’s old mentor, Ben-Gurion, in the deals he struck to exempt the ultra-orthodox from mandatory military service, had viewed them as a fragment of a lost world that would fade away. Instead, their numbers and power surged. Zionism found itself facing a problem it had failed to address: the extreme difficulty of making a cohesive or functional nation with Jews.

Today, this unease is not only mirrored in the Israeli press, but in its television shows. The nostalgia for a vanished, Levantine, cosmopolitan Jerusalem, of Arab gentleman and British officers, can be found in The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, which tells the story of a Sephardic family in the Old City. And to understand the Jerusalem that replaced it, we have Shtisel, a family drama set in the city’s Haredi world. Both befuddled leads are played by the same secular Tel Avivian actor, Michael Aloni, as if he is exploring both the city’s uncanny past and uncomfortable future.

In different ways, both confirm that the old Zionist Jerusalem is gone. Secular Israeli hegemony is over: the city is now 40% Palestinian, 35% percent Haredi and only a minority secular. Teddy Kolleck could never be elected here, in this Haredi-Likud bastion. But neither would Edward Said recognise it. Once associated with a certain refinement, Jerusalem is now the poorest city in Israel, where almost 40% of residents live below the poverty line, double the national average. It has gone from being a place secular Jews aspired to, to being a place they leave. Rabbi Shlomo’s walled-village has vanished and many of his secular descendants have left the city.

Nowhere do you feel the nature of today’s Jerusalem — a mostly Haredi-Palestinian conurbation — than trying to reach Ramallah by bus, when on the other side of the wall, the urban area, here tightly packed concrete, just continues. There were less than 350,000 people living in this land in the mid-19th century. Today there are roughly 14.5 million. In 40 years, there will be 30 million.

High-tech, secular Tel Aviv is the face Israel projects to the world, yet Jerusalem remains its true face. Not only the country’s biggest city but the one that reflects the state of the land. In “the bubble” of Tel Aviv, there are neither Haredim nor the occupation — whereas in Jerusalem, you feel them every day. More than this, though, it is the only place where Israelis and occupied Palestinians live together. This makes Jerusalem the inescapable site of its future.

The debate over what this might look like has been playing out in the pages of the country’s liberal newspaper Haaretz, where “Why I’m leaving Jerusalem” is the equivalent of the New York Times’s “Why I’m leaving New York” column. The writer Chaim Levinson, for instance, sees Israel’s future dystopia in Jerusalem’s present. The city, he writes, once had DJs, alternative nights, notable restaurants and intellectuals. Now, it is “poor, ugly, boring, bereft of hope and a future”. For Levinson, Jerusalem’s drab and dirty Haredi neighbourhoods, where only synagogues and religious schools matter, is a foretaste of a failed start-up nation, sinking into Haredi poverty and fundamentalism. A place of fanatics trying to start a war over the Temple Mount.

This is not the view of Nir Hasson, for whom there is a “quiet revolution” underway in the city. From the corridors of the Hebrew University and David Yellin college to the wards and operating theatres of Hadassah hospital, life has become desegregated. The walls have fallen down. Palestinians from East Jerusalem are studying or working alongside Jews.

For Hasson, then, Israel’s shoots of hope can be found in Jerusalem. Instead of increasing religious coercion, there are now more restaurants and shops open than ever before in the city on Shabbat. Instead of seeing the Haredim in black and white, Hasson believes that the growing population is becoming more complicated and consumerist and many are secularising — which detailed demographic research in fact confirms. For him, Jerusalem shows coexistence is not a lost cause. Both Haredim and Palestinians are becoming “Israelised” — but in a way that does not conform to Zionism.

Jerusalem is both of these cities. But there are extremists trying to tip the scales, with some 3,000 settler-like activists, embedding around the Holy Basin, trying to bend the arc of the conflict towards conflagration.

Night after night in the Old City, I came to see it differently. It wasn’t the theme park for which tourists mistook it. This place was a chessboard of control — a battlefield of scuffles and brawls, title-deeds and court cases — where the kippah-wearing boy handing out tea under a camp light on the road to the Damascus Gate all night long was really a look out; where the new mezuzah, affixed to the door post on another Palestinian house these groups had purchased, was another blue dot on the board “reclaimed” for Israel.

This speaks to a growing seam of fundamentalism in Judaism — yearning for the Temple Mount. In 1967, the nation’s Rabbinate reaffirmed an ancient ban on Jews ascending lest they desecrate the ruins of the temple and Jewish prayer was formally discouraged by officials. But this is no longer a liberal Zionist Jerusalem. Today, a growing number of Jews are now visiting and praying at the site.

As Jewish extremists have focused on the mount, so have Palestinians. Over the past few years, a pattern has emerged of Arab rioters, fearful of half-imagined Jewish plans to erect their Third Temple, barricading themself in the Al-Aqsa Mosque only to be stormed by Israeli police. This, for Hamas, is central. Al Aqsa is at the heart of their message, ambitions and ideology. The war launched on October 7 was launched in the name of saving it.

Jerusalem is where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began. The city today is where either a much darker one could start, or where it could end. That the streets of Jerusalem are still quiet after months of devastation is revealing. If there is any hope, it is that Arabs and Jews — in hospitals, malls and in offices — continue to work side by side. Normal people can turn, before their politicians, against violence.

On a winter’s night in 1920, Abraham Shalom Yahuda, the grandson of Rabbi Shlomo Yahuda who reached the holy city by caravan, gave a speech in the highest, most ornate, literary form of his native Arabic. Introduced by the city’s Palestinian mayor as a son of one of the most esteemed families in the city, his subject was the legacy of Jewish-Arab coexistence in Muslim Spain. A better future was only possible, said Yahuda, “when the spirit of tolerance and freedom that prevailed in the golden age of Arab thought in Al-Andalus will return”. At the time, he was dismissed by nationalists of all sides. But for me, he was the true realist. And only the people of Jerusalem — by wanting it — can open the way.

Today, it is the sealed-off seat of the Palestinian Authority, and the only part you can see from the road is a mausoleum. Cubic, like the Kaaba in Mecca but in Jerusalem stone, this is Yasser Arafat’s tomb. Framed by glass, water and an honour guard, it is unremarkable for a Middle Eastern leader. Apart from one thing: the constant reminders, from the signs or guides, that this mausoleum is temporary. The entire edifice, facing Jerusalem, is built on train tracks, a symbolic reference to what is hoped will be Palestine’s eventual liberation and Arafat’s reburial on the holy mount.

This mausoleum was opened in 2007 by his successor Mahmoud Abbas, the second President of his half-state, the Palestinian Authority, and the fourth secretary of his movement, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Solemn, even surly, Abbas swore to the crowds that day that “we will continue the path of the martyred President Yasser Arafat to be reburied in Jerusalem, which he loved…”        

But despite the commonality of their aims, the contrast between how the two ran the Mukataa could not be greater. Arafat withered away in his besieged basement bunker between cans of gasoline and AK-47s, his intifada in ruins. Abbas, in his political twilight, uses it to greet a non-stop delegation of diplomats and NGOs. His Ramallah is uneasy, but MacBooks still open in its cafés, while Gaza is in ruins. Such disparity speaks to the biggest question in Palestinian politics. Is the way forward, as Arafat finally decided, one of violence — or that of Abbas, one of negotiation? 

Initially, they had offered the same answer. When Abbas, a refugee from Galilee, first met Arafat in Qatar in 1961, the two were of one mind about revolutionary struggle: neither relying on Arab patrons nor swallowing their ideologies, the Palestinians themselves had to become the main force of their liberation. The museum in the Mukataa documents what happened next. Fatah, their party, entered the refugee camps, slowly at first, then rapidly as posters announced the resistance’s arrival. Despite the huge Arab defeats of 1967 and 1973, a myth emerged: that out of shame came honour, thanks to the PLO campaign, forcing Israel to accept it had to negotiate with the Palestinians themselves.

In 2000, as President Clinton fretted about his legacy and convened the fateful Camp David summit between the parties, it seemed to Western diplomats as if Arafat and Abbas had almost won. Exiled to Tunis, after Ariel Sharon expelled the PLO from Lebanon, the legitimacy they had gathered and the revolt they had inspired in the First Intifada meant Israel had not only negotiated with them, but brought them back to run Gaza and the main towns of the West Bank. Arafat had triumphed in rebellion; Abbas, the architect of the secret talks and the Oslo Process, in negotiation. All they needed to do was sign on the dotted line.

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But this was not how it looked to many Palestinian intellectuals, who feared the PLO had fallen into a trap. In New York, Edward Said denounced the Oslo Accords as “an instrument of Arab surrender”. In the territories themselves, the corruption and oppression the Mukataa was seen to personify meant Arafat was increasingly seen as a dictator rather than a defender. The Islamist Hamas started to gain on the nationalist Fatah, launching its own terror campaign to derail the peace process. Unrest stirred.

Recollections differ about what happened at Camp David. Israeli and American diplomats believe they presented a generous final offer to the Palestinian team, which Arafat vetoed, instead resorting to violence from the Mukataa. Palestinian negotiators such as Ghaif al-Omari claim that nothing approaching final terms were presented, with Arafat undecided and his team fissured between old and young. In this telling, Abbas and Ahmed Querei, the elders, became intransigent, suspicious that the juniors, such as Mohammed Dahlan, were trying to seal a deal and take the credit. 

What is clear, however, is that in that moment of compromise, Arafat became obsessed with Jerusalem, insisting that Israel had no rights to the holy mount, as King Solomon’s Temple was in Nablus. He rejected Clinton’s essential proposal: that everything above ground (both Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock) would be Palestinian, while everything below ground and the Wailing Wall would be Israeli.

His motivation is a matter of speculation. Was it the four years that Arafat spent in the Old City, living in the Israeli-bulldozed medieval warren of the Murghabi district under the golden glint of the Haram al-Sharif? Or a sense that, if he failed to liberate the third holiest site in Islam, he would always be viewed as a compromiser and not Saladin? Or, as Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian politician and negotiator at Camp David, believed, was it a moral claim — that Arafat simply could not accept Israel had any right to it? 

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The truth is that, whatever thoughts there were beneath his keffiyeh, there was nothing remarkable about Arafat’s refusal to compromise. So central is the Temple Mount to Judaism that it is often overlooked how important what they call the Haram al-Sharif is for Palestinians, a people whose very essence of nationhood is bound to the idea of being the defenders of Al-Aqsa. But this intransigence shocked and infuriated the US President. “You are leading your people and the region to catastrophe,” a frustrated Clinton is said to have exclaimed.

Camp David failed in July. That autumn, protesting Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s willingness to trade it for peace, Arafat’s old enemy Ariel Sharon chose to visit what he called the Temple Mount. Rioting erupted. And very soon it was apparent these were more than days of rage. Even now, Palestinian officials remain divided about how the intifada truly exploded. One side stresses that Arafat was being overtaken by events — the visit of Sharon, the sudden riots, spontaneous lynching — and decided to go along with it, thinking a bit of violence would mean better terms, while others see him as more forcefully encouraging it once it began.

The reality, however, hardly mattered, given Arafat would soon decide to fight the intifada from the Mukataa. Instead of forcing a return to the negotiating table, his soldiers, such as Marwan Barghouti’s Tanzim and the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, were soon launching suicide bombings inside Israel. First quietly then loudly, Abbas opposed this — viewing the war as a disaster for Palestine.

Dying in his bunker, Arafat was consumed with the idea that King Solomon’s Kingdom was never in Palestine, but in Yemen. By 2003, it was obvious he had dug his political tomb. Yet few recognised he had also buried the Palestinian state for a generation, trapping the West Bank in the kind of “joint-rule” hawkish Israeli strategists always wanted. Nor was it clear that, by personifying the Palestinian resistance, only Arafat could have made peace.

You do not have to visit the walls of the Mukataa to realise that Abbas is the inheritor of Arafat’s tomb. That Abbas, the man who heroically denounced violence amid the disaster of the intifada and worked to end it with Israel and the United States, has not been able to escape his legacy. This applies both to Palestine’s territory and its expansion. After all, Abbas is unable to agree a new proposal, because he knows that, unlike Arafat, he has had no legitimacy to sign one. Those by his side in 2005 remember a man overwhelmed, bunkering down. 

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And yet, there is a strand of continuity in the politics of Abbas, stretching back to the heady days of the PLO in Lebanon. From the mid-Seventies, Palestinian politics were divided between rationalists, who saw the future involving some kind of accommodation with Israel, and radicals, who would accept none. Arafat flitted and played with the two. But Abbas was squarely rationalist.

This remains true to this day. Rationally, he knows he never had the power to lead a successful intifada against Israel. Rationally, he knows he has never had the legitimacy to sign a peace accord, whose compromises vast swathes of the nation would see as a betrayal. And rationally, ever since he lost Gaza to Hamas in 2007, he has decided that the best course of action is to simply hold on. 

This logic has turned the Mukataa from what was once a symbol of revolution into a symbol of an authoritarian Arab regime in miniature: a system tied together by corruption, where no elections have been held since 2005. Fatah, in turn, is now widely derided as an empty card-carrying shell — like the Ba’ath party in Syria or the old Eastern bloc. Across the West Bank, the system is largely outright despised.

Abbas, in his twilight, has never been weaker but also never more central. At night in Ramallah, there are protests, but things are still quiet. At night in Gaza, there is the thunder of bombs. Never in Palestinian history has the contrast between violence and negotiation been so stark. No longer between Abbas and Arafat, the contrast is between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. This appears hard to see from a distance, but October 7 was the start of a new war for Jerusalem, launched “in defence of the Al-Aqsa mosque”. Named “Operation Al Aqsa Floods”, Hamas’s massacre was only the latest offensive in what they see as an unending one, to stop the Jews “erecting their alleged temple on the ruins of the shrine of our Prophet Mohammed”.   

Hamas sought, on October 7, not only to start a war with Israel but to detonate the West Bank. Their leaders dreamed that with mass hostage-taking they could bring Israeli society to its knees and force the release of all Palestinian prisoners — grabbing in one jubilant swoop the ownership of the Palestinian cause from the PLO. Opinion is divided among Palestinian analysts over their successes. All agree Hamas’s popularity is soaring in the West Bank, with crowds chanting its slogans even in the heart of Ramallah. But opinions differ over whether or not tensions in the West Bank actually threaten the Mukataa. 

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Abbas’s response has mostly been silent. Rationally, he believes the best strategy is to avoid tempting a possible intifada or Israeli action against him. But behind this muted response to the bloodshed, the Mukataa believe that Hamas has led the Palestinian people — with the destruction of Gaza City and now Khan Younis — into the greatest disaster of their history since 1948. Massacres are not new to the land, but never before has a city been levelled in the entire conflict. “Hamas entered a battle and the result was the complete destruction of Gaza. To blindly follow slogans to satisfy an illusion and the result is the destruction of the Palestinian people.” These were the words of Abbas a decade ago, but they could have been said yesterday. “I am responsible for the people and I will not allow their destruction to happen again.”

This is the crux of Palestinian politics. Hamas believes only violence can force the liberation of Al-Aqsa. Abbas believes only negotiations and the international community can. Hamas sees him as a corrupt collaborator. Abbas sees himself as protecting his people from what Gazans call the Israeli “monster” and guarding the mechanism that will eventually deliver a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, Western and Arab diplomats have come to see him as an intransigent obstacle to any progress towards a “two-state solution”. The tragedy, however, is that with the Palestinian people now so divided, the only man who could have made peace on behalf of all of them is buried in the Mukataa.   

The cultural capital of the Levant, this Beirut styled itself as a home to great merchant families of the Middle East. In the Twenties, it had welcomed the Armenians, the refugees from Enver Pasha’s First World War genocide. In the Forties, it had accepted the Palestinians — not only penniless Galilee peasants but Jaffa intellectuals and Jerusalem landowners — who had either fled or were expelled by David Ben-Gurion’s armies in 1948.

But not only them. Cosmopolitan Beirut was the only Arab city that saw its Jewish population grow after the establishment of the state of Israel, as pogroms, persecutions and expulsion drove the ancient Jewish communities of Cairo, Alexandria, Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad into exile. Freewheeling Beirut, with its champagne bars and singers, was for thousands of Middle Eastern Jews preferable to rationed, socialist and besieged Israel. It was more familiar.

This city snags on my family tree. It was this Beirut, at its very start in the late 19th century, which drew my great-great-great grandfather, Avraham Sassoon, from Aleppo. And it was here, in the 1910s, where his son, Moise Abraham Sassoon, chose to build a synagogue. He named it in honour of his father, Magen Avraham — or the Shield of Abraham.

That city was lost in the civil war that broke out in 1975. One of its most enduring images became the ruins of the Holiday Inn, as militias battled their way through the hotel district. The Jewish quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil emptied almost in its entirety. In my great-grandmother’s files are clippings, notes and desperate appeals for money sent to London from those that remained. But these also abruptly stopped around the time the synagogue itself was destroyed in the Israeli invasion in 1982, having been used as a Palestinian position.

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In 2007, I visited these ruins, just a year after Israel had struck Hezbollah, demolishing whole streets in their stronghold of Dahieh. Locked-up, its roof caved in, I didn’t climb in for fear of booby-traps, but through the window I could make out faded Palestinian militia posters and what looked like ancient iodine capsules from their wounded.

This is the Lebanon we know today: a country synonymous with civil war, corruption and terrorism, its former glamour buried beneath the rise of Hezbollah, state failure and financial crisis. Breakdowns, from sewage to electricity to the central bank, have left every family fending for themselves. In 2020, when an ammonium nitrate explosion ripped through the port of Beirut, killing over 200 people and making over 300,000 homeless, it reeked of corruption, negligence and official fecklessness.

This has left Hezbollah the only functioning institution in the country — one which happens to be totally committed to ensuring the state does not function in turn. More than a state-within-a-state, the Iran-sponsored actor runs its own army and conducts its own foreign policy. Millions of Lebanese hang on its leader Hassan Nasrallah’s every word: only he will tell them if there is to be war with Israel.

The idea that these lands are tied together is an old one. The Bible twice recounts the borders of the Promised Land as extending from the mountains of northern Lebanon to the edge of the Negev. Even though the Israelites never conquered or even settled these lands, these mountains of cedars and Phoenician cities were seen as part of Canaan. Centuries later, the Crusaders thought so too. Across their Kingdom of Jerusalem, mostly modern-day Israel, and their County of Tripoli, roughly modern-day Lebanon, the tombs of knights recounted their deaths: “en Terre Promise”.

The Ottomans likewise saw these lands as bound. In the late 19th century until the empire’s demise, the vilayet of Beirut stretched from coastal Syria to south of Nablus. Then their fates diverged. Palestine became a British Mandate, to be a “Jewish National Home”; north of this was assigned to be French mandate territory.

Everyone in Damascus with a sense of history tells a story about how, when the French High Commissioner for the Levant, General Henri Gouraud, entered Damascus, he kicked the tomb of Saladin, before saying: “We’re back.” In reality, it was probably a deputy, but it captures something of the French attitude to Lebanon: not as explicitly as what Earl Balfour had wanted to the south, General Gouraud saw this new mandate as a national home for Middle Eastern Christians, led by its Maronite Catholics

These Christians, however, wanted Greater Lebanon. In an uncanny parallel to how Israel would think after the Six Days War some 50 years later, the Maronite Patriarch at Versailles set out demands for mostly Shia territories to the south, north and east of the old Ottoman district of Mount Lebanon — despite the fact that this expanded state would not, unlike this smaller enclave, have a clear Christian majority. This fateful choice set the stage for Lebanon’s crisis and decline decades later, as this narrow order would be overturned first by the Sunni Lebanese, then the Shia Lebanese with Hezbollah.

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The parallel to Israel has never been lost on the country’s intellectuals and generals. Pre-1967 Israel was a state with a clear Jewish majority and unarguably a democracy. Today’s greater Israel, thanks to the occupation, administers a territory where there is similarly no clear Jewish majority. Not only Israel’s troubles but its state dysfunction stem from this point. For decades, it has been repeated that Israel must choose between being a Jewish state or a democracy. But there is a third risk: that the mess could eventually prove inextricable, ungovernable and foment internal conflict. In other words, a fate rather like Greater Lebanon.

The legacies of both British and French mandates eventually set the stage for the Lebanese civil war: not only had a narrow, Christian, even Maronite-run Lebanon proved unsustainable, but the mass influx of Palestinians in 1948, whose leaders would turn the south of the country into a revenge base to attack Israel, had permanently destabilised it. As Christian militias fought Palestinian, Arabist and leftist ones, Syria intervened, then Israel, with Ariel Sharon besieging Beirut in alliance with Phalangist militias to rout out Yassar Arafat. Civil wars within civil wars erupted within sects and alliances. The bloodshed didn’t stop until 1990.

Without realising it, in those first years after the war, Israel was tying its future to Lebanon, when it deported the leadership of Hamas to the latter’s south, which it then controlled. The Lebanese authorities refused to let them travel further than the valley of Marj al-Zohour. This is where they got to know the Shia movement that had emerged alone from the civil war with the right to keep its militia — Hezbollah. The alliance we see today was born here, in this rocky valley of wildflowers.

***

In 2007, I found myself in Dahieh, looking at Hezbollah’s victory exhibition of fluttering flags and captured Israeli equipment. Inside their office hung portraits of the Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and maps of occupied Palestine. Now I realise this “victory” — which allowed Hezbollah to cement its grip on Lebanon — is exactly what Hamas was seeking to emulate on October 7: a victory that would allow it to claim complete ownership of the Palestinian cause.

Today, when Hassan Nasrallah is photographed meeting the Iranian foreign minister in Beirut, underneath portraits of the ruling Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his predecessor Khomenei, there is no way to know this is in Lebanon, except for the cedar flag tucked behind him. That summer, when I peered into those ruins, there were still hopes that the second Lebanon that emerged out of the civil war could find its feet. But it was already too late.

Through Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, which it launched at a moment when it was under pressure to join the reconciliation process, it had made clear its militias would control the questions of war and peace. And then through countless refusals and blocking measures, it steadily paralysed the nation’s power sharing institutions.

In this, it found a loyal ally — corruption. As the paralysed state withered away, politicians of all backgrounds feasted on its remains. By 2019, the country had been left with no genuinely functioning institution apart from Hezbollah. One after the other these failed until the Central Bank was exposed as having engaged in financial engineering, prompting a 90% devaluation.

The scenes that followed — mile-long queues for fuel, hospitals in crisis and power outages — were the backdrop to the 2020 explosion. For a few weeks, symbolised briefly in a dramatic visit by President Macron, it seemed that public anger might force a change. Then it was lost, and all that remained was a simple question: is the political system completely broken — or is it just the players?

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Today, some insist that the confessional system — a Maronite President, a Sunni Prime Minister, a Shia Speaker of Parliament, with parliamentary seats split between religions — no longer functions and needs to be replaced with federalisation, with each sect running its own enclave. Others claim there is no alternative to the current system, meaning the problem is really with the politicians. Like those south of the border furiously debating abstract one- or two-state “solutions”, there is an odd symmetry here.

The entire Levant feels stuck. The Lebanese, the Israelis and the Palestinians have been cornered by the same actors. The first is Iran, building up Hezbollah, to the point it is essentially a state, and Hamas, until it could strike deep inside Israel. The second are a caste of tribal politicians who, when they are not fanatics, are fantastically short-sighted or corrupt.

As Israel spiralled into four elections in five years, culminating in an attempted judicial coup that split society along secular and religious lines, it became clear that these are two nations with conjoined fates. Israeli politics, despite its classic electoral system, has deep resemblances to Lebanon’s confessional politics, with secular, settler, ultra-Orthodox and Arab parties all competing for resources for their “sector”. Former President Reuven Rivlin is more explicit, once referring to them as Israeli “tribes” — with their own towns, parties and corners of the country.

The civil strife that so weakened Israel before October 7 came from Netanyahu pitting these “tribes” against each other. In other words, he did the most dangerous thing you can do in Levantine politics. In the months before the Hamas massacres, the Israeli press was full of warnings of “civil war”, as commentators feared just how “Lebanese” the clash over the judiciary could get. My fear was that Israeli politics would become a sequence of “rioting” tribes, with Haredim refusing to serve in the army and settlers refusing orders in the West Bank. Not the Lebanese frontlines of the Seventies, but its paralysed present beckoned.

Both Israel and Lebanon’s failed politics conspired to give Hamas and Hezbollah their chance on October 7, opening up the prospect of a much wider war. If this does happen, the fate of Gaza, Tel Aviv and Beirut will again be shared — this time in even greater destruction. Hezbollah, with 150,000 rockets, can overpower Israel’s Iron Dome, leading to the kind of destruction its cities have been spared. Meanwhile, Israel’s retaliation, which officials warn would “destroy Lebanon”, could turn parts of it into Gaza.

The last time I stood at the Lebanese border, from the south, I was struck by how the same trees and hills just continued, unperturbed. I have often fantasised about what it would be like to drive north from Israel, past the Roman temples, Crusader castles, and the sites of recent wars to visit Beirut — my own private fantasy of peace. I used to feel sure I would do it one day. Today, I am not so sure.

In the darkness, you can’t quite make out the titans of Wall Street, the Chinese billionaires, the European ministers and asset managers, or the Russian diplomats with their flag friendship pins. But you can feel them and the new world order that MBS is trying to build — centred around Saudi and him. The Kingdom, flush from the energy war between Russia and the West, has never had so much money to spend. Nor has it ever been such a hub of diplomacy as Russia, China and America court it for their superpower ends. As a result, you might catch sight of the New York billionaire Stephen Schwarzman in a suit and trainers, or a tired looking Jared Kushner; perhaps you’ll see the former French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian off to the booth of his Saudi project, or George Osborne could give you a long suspicious look across the room.

Launched in 2017 to promote the Kingdom to the world, the Financial Investment Initiative Summit, or FII, became infamous a year later after the murder of Jamal Khassogi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post contributor, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — the CIA says on the orders of the Crown Prince. In the fallout, scores of billionaires, tech companies, media giants, super corporations and Western officials pulled out. But “Davos in the Desert” is the perfect yardstick to see how little this murder really mattered for the West. Now it seems everyone is back at an event that is bigger than ever. In a tense air of unreality.

The Who’s Who of the speakers is a testament to the emptiness of Joe Biden’s pledge after Khassogi to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”. The power surge of money and influence towards the Kingdom had made Riyadh indispensable. Not only for US diplomats struggling with Gaza, Ukraine and a combative China. But for Western companies for whom the flush Gulf has become a critical source of capital. Even Net Zero is helping MBS — at first that is — as oil gets more expensive to extract the share of it being produced in the countries that can do it cheapest will soar. With this backdrop, the TED-style talk by Jacques Attali, a French socialist politico turned global rolodex consultant — “Is Democracy In Peril?” — felt a bit too on the nose.

FII is a showcase for the Saudi surge. But the first thing that strikes you about Riyadh when you arrive, is how little it looks like the global megapolis that MBS wants it to be. Instead, driving out of the desert, into this seven-million-strong city that feels in so many ways it shouldn’t be here — you see miles and miles of scruffy square houses, the colour of sand, crammed close together with tiny windows. A city dissected by eight-lane freeways lined with squat, unimpressive blocks. It looks nothing like Dubai. The professional expats compare it to Abu Dhabi 20 years ago. And if you arrived clueless and somebody told you this was by some metrics the capital of the most cash rich society that had ever existed, you would struggle to believe them.

You can spend a week here and still fail to find your bearings at night, in this low-rise world glowing orange from the street lamps. Then you notice the construction sites: miles and miles of hoardings, blocking off mega sites announcing giga projects about to transform it. There’s King Salman Park, which when it is finished will be seven times bigger than Hyde Park. Then there’s the Mukaab, the square shaped skyscraper, the height and width of 20 Empire State Buildings. Neither exists yet — apart from in the futurist dreams and commands of MBS. Both projects, along with Neom and the Line, the 110 km long linear city crossing the desert for nine million people, and the skyscrapers of New Muraaba all have their stalls at “Davos in the Desert”.

Everyone’s feeds are full of charred Israeli babies, exploding homes in Gaza or the tieless Iranian foreign minister threatening America with hell. But in the King Abdul Aziz International Conference Center — which is like what AI might generate if you asked for Versailles but make it a little Arab — the panels are very much “don’t mention the war”. Things looked so different four days before Hamas attacked. Not only was an Israeli minister seen publicly in Riyadh for the first time ever, he also joined a Jewish prayer service with a new Torah scroll dedicated to the Saudi King. This was widely interpreted as a key step towards an almost inevitable normalisation between the two countries. A stunning development in and of itself for a country that until recently banned Judaism from being practised, and in 1973 led an Arab oil embargo on Israel’s Western allies to punish them for supporting the Jewish state.

But money isn’t security. You have to leave Riyadh to see how vulnerable it really is: the pipelines bringing desalinated water from the coast, which could so easily be knocked out, or the oil infrastructure, which was partially disabled by Iranian proxy drones in 2019. This is why behind the PowerPoints and the panels MBS has been telephoning everyone he can to try to stop the Israel-Hamas war from spreading into what could easily become a full-blown war between Iran and the United States fought right over the Gulf. You can keep the war out of the convention centre, but you can’t keep Saudi Arabia out of the Middle East. And nobody knows this better than MBS.

Saudi Arabia has always been an ideological state. Its very beginnings are in a pact between the Al Sauds and the puritanical Wahhabi movement, whose strict vision of Islam has for generations been what people associate with the Kingdom. But under MBS it has suddenly pivoted. Pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism are the old politics of failure for the Crown Prince. This, he thinks, has left Saudi 20 development years behind the Emirates. And this is why he is forcing his Kingdom into a phase of nationalism and neoliberalism. Those for MBS are the new politics of success. Not only the path to Saudi survival after oil — but into turning Riyadh into a super Dubai and the Kingdom into a Saudi superpower.

MBS wants a modern economy as quickly as possible. This is why he wanted normalisation with Israel and has normalised with Iran: because there is no chance of economic success in a Middle East mired in constant war. The plan is Vision 2030 and the FII summit, just over the road from the Ritz-Carlton where MBS imprisoned half the ruling class at the start of his rule, is what he wants it to look like. Music, previously banned, is softly playing. Women, previously segregated and forced to be fully covered are everywhere — working — with very few face veils and many without a headscarf at all. The light glints off glamorous designer sequinned abayas by the coffee. Princesses used to Knightsbridge are finally doing business at home. This is Saudi Arabia seven years after MBS castrated the morality police. But make no mistake: this is still a country where you can be beheaded for a tweet. The paradox is his Kingdom has never been more liberal or more dictatorial.

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To understand MBS, you need to understand his childhood. This is what unlocked a will to power that saw him, improbably, steer himself and then his father into the line of succession. Saudi rulers are not hereditary, they emerge from the clan, which makes his rise less like King Charles assuming power, and more like Cromwell seizing it.

Nothing much was expected of the seventh son of Salman, the 25th son of Ibn Saud. Obsessed by fast food and computer games, he was a typical lethargic princeling until he was handed a horrifying revelation at the age of 15: his father, despite being the governor of Riyadh, had not build a serious fortune and was perilously indebted to businessmen. Instead of making billions like their cousins, the family was living off a gigantic welfare check from the Saudi treasury — which often came too late — leaving the servants unpaid for months at a time.

Panicking at the implications of this — of drifting further and further from the centre of power and into princely poverty — he amassed cash, by selling gold coins he was given by King Fahd.  He then started trading, became obsessed with stocks and swiftly went broke. Only then did he work out that, with his name, he could simply phone up people and demand money before trying to build his own businesses. Staying in Saudi, unlike his Westernised cousins, he rose like this in Riyadh.

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This, writ large, is also the state of the Kingdom. MBS’s family has failed to invest the greatest fortune in human history. So, using Saudi Arabia’s giant sovereign wealth fund, which is behind FII, he is trying to do at enormous scale what he did with King Fahd’s coins: buying up, through stakes in foreign companies, the profits of the world and investing them in what he thinks is a new economy.

There is a saying in the Middle East: seize opportunities for they pass like clouds. And MBS knows as electric cars and batteries take off he is running out of time.

He is desperate for a new Kingdom. Social reforms, such as finally letting women drive or travel alone without a male guardian are real and, for millennials who make up the majority of his subjects, he is not only genuinely popular but has made their lives freer. One of the world’s great liberalisations is being led by one of its greatest autocrats.An impetuous 38-year-old determined to govern alone — with all the risks that entails.

This is the discussion you end up having, discreetly that is, over and over again in the Kingdom. Who is MBS? For the optimists, he is a Saudi Atatürk or Peter the Great, the latest Arabian incarnation of the Westernising dictator. For the pessimists, they see the smile of Saddam Hussein — pointing to the dismemberment of Jamal Khassogi and his strange facial tics. Few at FII seemed to believe that the linear city in Neom would ever actually exist. What the critics see is not a new economy — but building-crazed megalomania that will leave only ruins.

Billions and billions can silence these questions. Because being in Saudi Arabia feels like being on another planet, where the normal rules of politics are suspended by oil. A futuristic but also medieval world with no need for democracy. Even in Russia, or China, there is a system, a bureaucracy, and institutions, however frightful, that matters in politics. Here there really is a royal court, an absolute monarchy and one family — the richest ever to exist — that owns the country.

And what is happening now is the result of long running fights within that family over whether the Kingdom should choose Islamism or nationalism. Whether or not it should change or stay the same. And, fundamentally, should it be open or closed? The construction pits and the PowerPoints are the decisive victory of one side. The panic in the pace is that, as the world decarbonises, it has started too late: Saudi only has a few decades of oil wealth left until this planet is pulled back to earth. But will it crash or land safely? Will there be splendour or ruins in Riyadh? The answer now hangs on who MBS really is. Because he has ensured nobody else will have a say.

On the Sabbath, we are supposed to rest, and we did not have our phones. But when we got there, the dark faces were not those of a holiday, and we started to suspect that, somehow, things had got a lot worse.

“Have you seen what’s happening?” someone said. There were dozens dead, maybe more. And they were still dying.

We blessed the Torah. Like always, we read from it. And we said a prayer to remember my grandmother. And then, at the time it always is, it was the time for the sermon.

“For those of you that don’t already know,” said the Rabbi. “Israel is under attack. There are over a hundred dead.”

At that moment, a thought came, like a scream from somewhere inside me. A sharp stab.

How many times have I sat here, in the midst of our songs, of our togetherness, and heard them announce something similar? How many times have I heard the Rabbi say those words, “Our brothers and sisters have been killed”? In terror attacks in Israel, in America, in France, in Germany, in Tunisia — it goes on. It goes on too long.

I tried to remember, as the Rabbi was speaking, but I lost count. It seemed like only yesterday that the Rabbi said a prayer for Pittsburgh, 11 dead, a blessing for the Hypercacher, five dead. Because, really, it was only yesterday. The Rabbi was still speaking, but I could no longer hear him.

My wife and I are expecting a child in January. And so frightened am I, that he may not be born; that if we dare to settle on a name, as our hardwired old superstitions go, the Angel of Death may find him. I hadn’t wanted, or really I hadn’t dared, to imagine what the whole course of his life might look like.

And at that moment I did.

All my life, I have wanted a Jewish child. All my life, I have felt it my highest calling. My ultimate purpose. That I should pass this on. But in that moment, full of the fear of fatherhood, in the confusion and pain and elation of letting go of an old life, there was now something else: the knowledge that he could be killed as a Jew. That the thing I had most wanted for him, or needed from him — to be Jewish — could hurt him, harm him, could even kill him. Like the dead babies I didn’t yet know about.

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The Rabbi switched for a short moment to a verse in Hebrew. And my eyes drifted to the corner where my grandmother used to sit on holidays. She’s been dead for almost 13 years but I always see her there. She was a Holocaust survivor. And I remember when I used to think pogroms belonged to her world. Not to mine.

Ever since we first started praying for “our brothers and sisters” killed in France, not just in the Middle East, and certainly since we started doing it for those in America, the knowledge it could happen anywhere has, attack after attack, woven itself into our lives as Jews. It’s always there. In the back of my mind. That the places we pray, or the places we go, are the places where something could happen. I remember thinking pogroms could never happen inside Israel. I remember last week.

Sitting there, I realised it’s not my own enormous failings, or worries about money, or all the usual stuff that frightens me about being a father. It’s also the knowledge that I am bringing a Jewish soul into a world where not even the greatness of America, the principles of Europe or the soldiers of Israel can make this promise: that your children will not be killed as Jews.

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“This time,” said the Rabbi, “is set aside for our rejoicing, as it is written in our Torah. These festivals are for our happiness, even now at the time of our sadness. And so let it still be there, even today. Let it be a sad happiness… that we are together, that we are still here… and that we are Israel.”

I know this pattern almost by heart. The prayers we say after the sermon. The songs when I know it’s almost done. And then, like any other time, we left the sanctuary to say the blessing over snacks. It’s a particular kind of recognition you have with the people you pray with. You might never have more than nodded at them. But their faces are part of the furniture of your life.

None of us had our phones, at least openly. None of us knew that more than 1,200 Israelis were dead or about to die. This was the crescendo of the worst massacre of our kind since the Holocaust — but we smiled, said a few how-are-yous and ate the cookies. None of us knew how many people we would be texting to see if they were safe, in our own families, among our relatives, or our friends. We didn’t know that what was happening, right then, at the festival, in the kibbutzim, would chase us, in some way or another, for the rest of our lives. We only knew we were there together. In that sad happiness — that we were Jews.

What began as a trickle in the early 2000s had, by 2011, become a flood, when, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, tens of thousands of migrants arrived on the island. Lampedusa very quickly came to represent a sort of inverse Ellis Island: the unwanted arriving in a country from which millions had once left. So much so that Pope Francis chose to visit it in 2013 to show solidarity with the arrivals. Ten years ago, a Libyan fishing boat carrying more than 500 people sank off its coast. Last month, more than 12,000 migrants, twice the island’s population, arrived by sea. The decade has felt, to Lampedusa’s inhabitants, like a new chapter in history.

But how different is this chapter? In France, Germany or Italy, footage, often from Lampedusa, plays in the news studios.  There is a pattern to what happens next. The host then introduces his guests. After casting them as the Right and the Left, the pundits will then be pitted against each other, to answer a simple question: what does this migration mean?

Their answers are often the same. For those on the Right, the migration flows are a historical break — in their scale, nature and intensity. They require “Fortress Europe”. For those on the Left, they are nothing of the sort, but part of a long history — both colonial or gastarbeiter. It is fundamentally more of the same, requiring, if not open, then flexible borders.

A historical lens is more rewarding. It was in the early Seventies that the British literary critic John Berger understood that Europe was being remade by immigrant labour. Together with Jean Mohr, he wrote A Seventh Man, a psychological portrait of a gastarbeiter in continental north-western Europe. The title itself reflects the importance that migrants already had in the European economy: even then, one in every seven manual labourers in Germany was born abroad.

The first striking difference is the process itself. Berger’s migrants were recruited by government agencies — Germans seeking Turks — with their transport organised from the fringes of Europe to its centre. Control not chaos. The European state was in the driving seat. That is not how it feels in Lampedusa: here, the migrants themselves have driven the migration. The work of countless individuals — the officials call them smugglers — who have built up the routes. The European state feels as confused and powerless as to Berger it seemed strong.

But it is the different nature of the migrants that is most striking. Berger’s reporting led him to build an everyman in 1975 that is more reminiscent of a rural-to-urban migrant in 1875 than a passenger through Lampedusa in 2023. His subjects are uneducated rural men — from the village, clueless about the city, without words, politics or a worldview that will help them navigate their destinations.

Reading A Seventh Man and comparing it with my own recent reporting, I was struck first by the huge continuity in the scale of the migrant economy. Already, according to the statistics in Berger’s dispatch, some 25% of industrial workers in France, Switzerland and Belgium were foreigners. But then I was hit by the psychological difference. Because the hundreds of migrants I interviewed were not village boys.

If I were to construct, as Berger did, an everyman, a Lampedusa Man, he would come from the lower middle class that has emerged in Africa and Asia. They almost always speak some English. They have WhatsApp, a Facebook account and a smartphone — though they might have traded it on the way. They were born in the city. They have grown up watching Friends and The Simpsons. And they certainly have a politics: both a keen sense of their country’s exploitation at the hands of the West, but also a longing for the freedom they believe only Western institutions can guarantee them. The same applies whether or not they are refugees.

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Our divine monarchy is finished

By Ben Judah

Unlike the men Berger and Bohr painstakingly photographed, there is no expectation, or even myth, of return. Those young men, in 1975, talked of feeling ripped from their natural environments — a premodern Turkish or Portuguese village. For the young man arriving on Lampedusa, it feels rather different. This 20-something Nigerian or Egyptian is as much a product of the internet as his European counterpart; entering the developed world is partially a homecoming.

Yet his destination is as changed by the internet as himself. The journey’s end of Berger’s everyman was the Fordist factory, and he liberally quotes Marx, Engels and the unvarnished words of Henry Ford himself to describe their conditions. The point Berger was making would have been obvious to his readers. The fundamental conditions of the industrial working class had not changed much since the late-19th century. They were still the proletariat, but of a different nationality.

This is not how our Lampedusa Man has come to experience Europe. Now, a few years on from his arrival in Paris or Berlin, he is to be found cycling for Deliveroo or delivering for Amazon. He has no foreman; there are no line workers; there is no weekly dance. He is alone, inhabiting a technological structure he cannot see and does not understand.

Berger spends much of his book castigating the trade unions for not extending solidarity to the gastarbeiters. This can only be read with a certain sadness today. The shoulder-to-shoulder life of the urban working class that Marx would have recognised — full of weak ties woven across the city and Christmas cards for the milkman — no longer exists. For Lampedusa Man, his experience of the city is provided by an app, which becomes more and more enraged as it hurries him to a door that eventually opens to no eye contact.

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Hard truths about Britain's immigration crisis

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Above all this hangs Europe’s shifting geopolitics. It is true that, 50 years ago, there were already 11 million migrants in north-western Europe. It is also true that the migrant and his life have changed utterly. But the deeper change is about Europe’s position in the world.

When John Berger wrote A Seventh Man, he did so at the start of a revolution in public and political concern for human rights. This was part of a bigger trend, as the struggle for human rights around the world replaced class or national struggle as the great cause of a Western Left-liberals.

The same decade would see the breakthrough of Amnesty International, the organisation’s membership leaping from 15,000 in 1969 to 200,000 by the end of the Seventies. It saw both the group and the Soviet dissident Andrey Sakharov awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The two were intertwined: as political incentives to push human rights in the Soviet Union grew, it dovetailed with a growing public campaign which ended up reinforcing Western geopolitics. It drove an increasing radicalism in call and response, between the public and politicians, which fuelled interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and, of course, Libya.

Ten years on, Lampedusa confirms that this historical era is over; that the prioritisation of human rights and the priorities of European politicians no longer align. The recent visit of European Commission chief Ursula Von Der Leyen with the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stands in stark contrast with that of Pope Francis a decade ago. Their visit was part of a wider flurry of Mediterranean diplomacy with Tunisia — a neat distillation of a new geopolitics which has turned democracy on its head to try and curb migration.

Visiting Tunisia, European leaders have dangled more than €1 billion to support the increasingly autocratic leader Kais Saied, who, facing immigration pressure himself, has embraced anti-black rhetoric about “hordes” and “the Great Replacement” — supposedly of Arabs by Africans. This is a sharp shift from 2011, when European leaders welcomed a revolution in Tunisia and joined a US-led intervention in Libya. Today they are buttressing authoritarians. Where they once welcomed European pressure on North African autocrats, human-rights NGOs now decry Europe’s partnership with a regime which has practised desert “push backs”.

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How American Jews lost themselves

By Ben Judah

Even so, it seems likely EU governments will be forced to hand over more money, as their voters demand hard borders and Africa’s population soars. It is easy, for instance, to imagine Meloni and Le Pen’s recent call for “a naval blockade” being succeeded by a demand for boots on the ground to enforce what North African border guards have promised.

But this is not the only way the pressure to disconnect human rights from foreign policy will grow. When it comes to China, in order to compete for influence, Western governments led by the US are also downgrading human rights. Consider Equatorial Guinea, led by the notorious Obiang kleptocracy, where, in order to prevent the installation of a Chinese Naval base, the Biden administration was forced to send a senior National Security Council aide to deliver gifts for its leaders, including a silver platter, with the US national deal. The same pattern can be seen from India and Turkey to the Philippines.

Meanwhile, decarbonisation, the geopolitical implications of which have yet to be fully understood, entails a whole new set of relationships in which Europe will be compelled to talk less about human rights. Essentially, pursuing Net Zero requires a global mining revolution for critical raw materials such as lithium and cobalt — and Europe, it appears, is poorly endowed in these. To ensure regular supplies, it will be forced to downgrade human rights while forming a whole set of new ties with emerging mining states from Indonesia to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There is, therefore, nothing inevitable about the centring of human rights in Europe. They didn’t precede our current era, nor will they succeed it. Perhaps, as we think of the rocky coves of Lampedusa, and the growing indifference to the thousands that land there, or who die trying, it is not a question of whether we will fail to see them in the future. Lampedusa is telling us we are already close to blind.

There was something different about Elizabeth II. Millions treated her with a hint of the divine right of kings, a woman who lived above interviews, who loomed over her own society mysteriously, with more in common with Franz Josef or the Romanovs than her own son.

This is the end of that story. The remaining royals of Europe are anachronisms, whether they are beloved or not; whether they are effective at their constitutional roles or not. This is the end of something which began on Christmas Day in 508, with the baptism of Clovis, which was the true start of sacral European Kingship. The story of a once Germanic warrior aristocracy that conquered and ruled Europe for over a thousand years, after the barbarian invasions that finished off the Roman Empire. Their demise from Paris to St Petersburg — as a sociology, as a political faith, as a simple fact — has been the story of modernity.

This end was first noted by the Bavarian nobleman Count Albrecht von Monteglas in 1917, when he decried that the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, with a thousand-year history, changed its name to the pedestrian Windsor “for a mere war,” the true age of European monarchy was over. The democratic age had arrived. That great flattening force seen so clearly by de Tocqueville in America, had come home to the old world meaning — not even a Hapsburg, let alone a Hohenzollern, even a Windsor — would serve without the implicit consent of the governed.

Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now? Looking at him, I can’t shake the feeling that he is just a West Londoner. Not a unicorn on his crest.

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The Russia we have lost

By Ben Judah

You don’t need tabulating political scientists to understand the British and their Queen. You need European psychoanalysts: Freud, Jung, Fromm. You need to understand the subliminal, the subconscious and the immense recesses of antiquity that haunt our psyches. It is here where monarchy draws its power. From the moment it was announced to her in Kenya, through her coronation as Queen of countries including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa, across a lifetime of the last post being sounded, over the by then mostly African Empire, that still existed when her reign began — she never stopped pretending. And for her, we never stopped pretending, either.

We pretended with her and for her — that the Commonwealth was real, that there was love and affection for her, or for us, in countries we’d conquered and lost, that we were still a great power. And if not an empire, then she ruled its heir. That her first minister was the equal of the men she received in what even the Kennedys realised was not splendour, but more a dowdy country hotel called Buckingham Palace. It could be beautiful, it could be felt, all this, but it wasn’t real. We all know a first principle of psychology is not to fantasise, but to accept who you really are.

As she aged, shrinking into her clothes, it became clear there wasn’t enough there, behind the insignia of government, to hold us up in the world.  The factories, the mines, the shipyards, the discoveries that powered the rule of Queen Victoria — we simply no longer had enough of them. The carpet has long been threadbare. The draught could now be felt in the house. This funeral is the last great pretence. The last funeral for a British world power. The world’s leaders will never gather like this in Westminster Abbey again. The crowds will not flock to London, let alone Edinburgh, like this again.

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The truth about Elizabeth's empire

By Remi Adekoya

This is third stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional. His great poem warning, amid the jingoism of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, that this empire too would go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. This is the moment — “that all our pomp of yesterday” — is buried with that tiny body. The trumpets and the ensigns remain, but as folklore, and hardly as anything more.

If Kipling were alive today, he might walk the Royal Mile, in Edinburgh, and see tourists, not mourners. He would stop outside Buckingham Palace and note the mawkishness of the Paddington Bears; the flowers wilting in their cellophane. None of this has the Christian certainty of Elizabeth’s Coronation, it has all the hallmarks the post-Anglican way we mourn now. How we festoon grief with lilies, postcards and teddies.

He wouldn’t be able to write — “God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far flung battle line” — even as a lament, or a prayer. The gap between his world, Churchill’s world, the Queen’s world, and our own is more than a matter of years. The threads that bound Church, Crown and Country into “Onwards Christian Soldiers” are gone. That was a Christian empire. There is only spectacle left.

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Who can rule Britain now?

By Mary Harrington

Elizabeth II was believable: because she believed. The last European monarch to believe her role was a divine calling. Today the old religion is not felt, even by the King, so uncomfortable — a scholar of Islam, a guest at al-Hazar, a patron of Jewish charities — at being Defender of the Faith. Charles could only bring himself to say, in his first address to the nation, that his faith was “rooted in the Church of England,” like he had long outgrown it. 

The King is not a stupid man. “Big Ears” of the tabloid press has spent his life knowing there is nothing sacred about him. That nobody reveres him. Every charity, every interview, has been proving Count Albrecht von Monteglas’s point. This is not what he called “the true Royal tradition” but an institution that knows it must constantly fight to keep its popularity afloat in the polls. A permanent referendum. Charles III could never rule like a true Hanoverian: his appetites or insanities, easily justified to the public as simply the divine order.

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The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

The earliest known direct male ancestor of King Charles is Theodoric I of Wettin, a Germanic warlord, at the edge of the dark ages. His family tree includes Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in Rome. It includes Hugh Capet, who turned his dynasty from the Duke of the Franks, into the Kings of France. And, of course, Henry VIII, Charles I and Charles II. All the way through this story his ancestors have tried to weld what was sacred at the time to their crown.

Only with such a long view does it become obvious what Charles has spent a lifetime doing. By trying to be the King of, every craft, every field, every hedgerow — the voice of the planet — he is trying to channel that one thing we still all still treasure. Our ailing world. It is actually a question about us: whether he succeeds in making us believe. But whatever we come to feel for him or respect him — it will not be the hymn book reverence Kipling would recognise.

In the late 2000s, we drifting twenty somethings took our freedom for granted. You might have a friend doing something unclear in Shanghai. Somebody else appeared to be rather bored learning Arabic in Aleppo. You could go to any of these places. Never realising we were living in a low-key golden era: a time when things were more or less open and alright. 

It felt so easy. We went so casually to these places. Now, never again will we spend long afternoons smoking in the French Institute moaning how dull it is in Damascus. Or get drunk in the hutongs by the Drum Tower in Beijing talking big money dreams and see Hong Kong for the first time and think — I could live here forever. We might go back there, someday, and stroll, like we did, through Aleksandrovsky Sad. But never will the ground feel solid beneath our feet.

Because that Moscow I knew — nocturnal, daring, drunk — has finally been destroyed completely. Since we watched him — there’s only been one “him” in Moscow for a very long time — declare “a special military operation”  at 5:45 in the morning. Half of those characters I used to drink with were all WhatsApping in shock: He’s actually done it. Now we are watching a map turn from one country’s colours to another. It’s so horrifyingly simple. It’s happened so many times. And even tweeting that what he’s doing in Ukraine is a war could mean fifteen years in prison. But then: even with all those MAs in Russian Studies we couldn’t conceive of it.

Minute by minute the collapse of Russian capitalism is coming through in Telegram alerts. Apple leaves Russia, Netflix suspends operations, so has Louis Vuitton, brand after brand after brand pulling out until, even though my job is to analyse this stuff, I can barely make sense of the sanctions and capital controls that have cut Russia off from the world. And somehow I’ve ended up at a think-tank Kremlin labelled an “undesirable organisation” and that means I can’t even phone half the people I want to because I’m nervous what it might mean for them. Russia has gone through the looking glass and I can only see my time there like Stefan Zweig. A world of yesterday. 

Now, a decade of obsessions make sense. Vladikavkaz. Vladivostok. I would look at these places on that incredible map and know I had to get there. I’ve often wondered why I let that emotion carry me for so long but only now, belatedly, do I realise I was running out of time. I kept on going back to this spot in the Urals, pulled by some force, shuttling on the platskart wagon onwards to Siberia, to stop at this monument, the obelisk on the Europe-Asia border.

I kept wanting to stand there, each time I went east, at this point in the forests. Almost like a premonition. I’d read a story (I didn’t even care whether or not it was true) in a history book that grabbed me. It was about the Decembrists, those officers, exposed to Europe and the enlightenment, in the afterglow of the Napoleonic War, who rose up in St Petersburg for something like a constitutional monarchy. It was a moment Russia could have turned — who knows who she would have been had they succeeded — but of course, she didn’t. And they were exiled, so many of them with everything they had to give, to Siberia. They had stopped here: by the cross on the continental border and wept. Knowing they would never see Europe again. 

Now people can barely even get there. Friends are booking flights to Tashkent. The FSB are interrogating them at the border. Others are panicking; there are hardly any flights left: they’re all booked up, everything’s grounded, sanctions have closed allied airspace in every direction. And these are same people, the same generation, who only ten years ago, were marching happily through Moscow, raising money and fighting corruption, only to dash their heads, just as the Decembrists had, when it frightened Him, when it enraged Him, when He turned out not to be this pathetic topless clown — he was Gollum in all of the memes — but truly a beast. Those were the protests that set it in motion: the squeezing of freedom, the arrests, the filetting of journalists, until now we have this.

Why did I refuse to see it at the Tretyakov Gallery? The whole of Russian history is laid out in wall-sized gold rimmed portraits of autocrats: Nicholas I to Joseph Stalin. Each saying: there is something both very fragile but very durable about repression in this state. Something undying about the spooling “organs” as you say in Russian: security forces with shifting names like the Cheka, NKVD, KGB — who have always supported these tyrants, more or less, since they were founded as the Oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible for the task. Men just like him.     

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The Magic Mountain will consume you

By Ben Judah

Millennials were Putin’s Decembrists. Back in 2011, young Moscow crackled with a kind of giddy excitement that it was happening — that this generation, if it just tweeted, if it just Facebooked and posted enough — could topple Him. This energy that youth, technology, the world as it was and was becoming — would simply prevail. Because who was He really? Just some squinting little bureaucrat in a pinch. Alexei Navalny, he looked so young, he was far away from prison, yelling at the big protest on Prospekt Sakharova, flanked by liberal celebrities screaming: “Rossiya Budet Svobodna” — Russia will be Free. I believed him. 

What is Russia’s future? I must have asked everyone, every EU think-tanker, every sallow faced-Western diplomat I met in Moscow the same question. Like it was the only one that mattered. The answers came in a hundred and one theories, not one of them, it pains me to say, as mad and dark and pornographic as where we are now in Ukraine. I was swamped with academic gibberish such as “competitive authoritarianism” or “mimetic institutions”. They didn’t say that Napoleon is always with us, that in every generation, there’s a leader who has grabbed such control over his society, whose mind is so set on glory, he has to invade somewhere. Like it’s a role coded into the human species in some way we’ll never understand.

Instead, I was told Russia was a “BRIC” or a “normal middle income country” and now all I see is the absolute intellectual poverty of looking at things only in data sets. We should have listened to the one thing — in that language of Fyodor Dostoevsky — that Russian culture has always revered as holding that gift of vision. That is to the prophetic power of art. 

The writer Vladimir Sorokin, with his long, flowing grey hair, was one of the first people who “knew”. He was woken up one morning to be told, His creepy but still little comic youth movement, were chucking his books into a giant toilet. One placed right outside the Bolshoi Theatre. Then they started harassing him. A strange woman came to his house saying she’d got an order to fit his windows with prison bars. The doorbell rang and there was a sack of his books: each stamped porn. Then the prosecutor called. They’d opened a case against him, this satirical novelist, who’d written these weird, funny scenes, about a Stalin clone fucking a Khrushchev one — for pornography. 

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By Will Lloyd

Then something came over him like a fugue state. He got in the car, with his wife, and they drove north, out of Moscow, out of Russia, until they were in Estonia, in the woods. And then after that he wrote. It was like a trance. Like he was vomiting bile. It had taken him five years to write a novel and this one had come in one month. Published in 2006. 

I read it around then on one of those trains, The Day Of The Oprichnik, those swamps and forests, flashing past on a visa run: my mind half seeing tanks that had been there in the second war world between the birch trees. In this book, The Tsar, at last, has been restored. The country walled off behind a Great Russian Wall: only pipelines sticking out of it. It’s this latter-day Opritchnik’s hours: this fured agent hard at work murdering a boyar, gang raping his wife, then visiting a clairvoyant in the name of The Tsar. One day in 2028. But it’s a fake Empire: utterly dependent on China. Their characters have crept onto everything and even the Tsarina makes sure to educate her son in Mandarin.

I put this book down but it never left me. A feeling like I had seen the future. And now — its pieces falling hour by hour — everyone I know in Moscow is living in it. I don’t know for how long.

Even paying for it at a second-hand bookstore near Columbia gave me pause. It’s huge, I thought, as the cashier frantically wiped it down (we didn’t wear masks at this point.) I’m never going to read this. I’m not one of those bores who reads colossal, painful tomes just to feel educated. Why would I do that to myself, just as everything I really enjoyed — bars, friends, flights — had suddenly been taken away from me? On the drive out of the city it kept nagging me. As the world was ending and there were a million new things to process, why did I rush out to buy a Weimar novelist?

For the first weeks in Massachusetts, I sat in the spare room and read tweets and The Magic Mountain. I took screenshots of the death toll: 100 Americans dead from the novel coronavirus, 1,000 Americans, 10,000 Americans. Around 100,000, I gave up. Never quite letting go of my phone, I drifted in and out of the 796-page novel. Der Zauberberg, in German, is about a man called Hans Castorp who spends seven years in a sanatorium, without really doing very much, on the eve of the First World War. It is a strange thing — a Zeitroman or “time-novel” — about the dissolution of time both in the passing of an age and in the loss of one man’s ability to experience its flow in the way he’s used to.

I didn’t enjoy it. I was consumed by it. I was so used to doing the consuming, quickly and easily — Netflix, Sally Rooney — that being consumed was an uncomfortable, odd, experience. I almost couldn’t read it: I’d become so used to skim-reading feeds — and so used to the kind of extractive get-to-the-point reading of novels with nut graph-like points about what they are supposed to represent — that I’d forgotten the experience of a totalising work of art.

For weeks, I felt like I, too, was locked in the sanatorium where people carried little pulmonary x-ray cards around in their pockets and met for splendid dinners in the hall. It was almost too much: the endless arguments between Naphtha and Settembrini — the Polish Jew-turned-Jesuit-turned-Marxist totalitarian and the blinkered Italian libertarian rationalist — seemed to echo too loudly the argument going on around me. “Zero Covid” or let it rip? The whole world had turned into a hospital, in which we were all dwarfed by a figure like Mann’s gargantuan Dutch colonialist, Mynheer Peeperkorn: Donald Trump.

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Covid isn't the end

By Niall Gooch

But as I read The Magic Mountain, there was something I didn’t quite understand: how can three weeks have turned into seven years up there — just like that? Why doesn’t Hans Castorp want to come down from the sickbay? In the meantime, I was still panic-scrolling. There was still drama in the air. Things weren’t as slow as they were going to get.

Then we went back to New York. It was around then that I lost my sense of time. For weeks on end, my routine was so simple it seemed to go on forever and then disappear in seconds. I’m looking at the blank weeks of my iCalendar and I remember what I was doing: working in the morning, running in the afternoon, binging The Bureau in the evening — but I can’t remember any of those days distinctly. They’ve become one totalising moment — like Mann’s routine in the sanatorium.

At first Hans Castorp stops carrying his pocket watch. Finally he forgets his own age. “Where uniformity reigns, movement from point to point is no longer movement; and where movement is no longer movement, there is no time,” warns the narrator.

Looking back now, I can only sort my memories into my obsessions: 5Ks, wine, Mastering Spice by Lior Sercazz, the Peloton app, online diplomacy. My notes from that time are completely circular: without time my head, like Castorp’s, looped in on itself in increasingly futile fancies. I seem hardly to have realised, like everyone on the mountain, that this period of paralysis was not a blip. It was a glimpse of a future in which we live online.

It was a year without markers, in which I felt like just another of the sanatorium’s patients lying half-frozen in their camel-hair blankets on the same balconies day after day. The regular patter of holidays, birthdays, office get-togethers, occasional synagogue services and trips back to England for the Christmas holidays was wiped clean. Can any of us really remember the things we did on Zoom?

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Zoom takes away a piece of our souls

By Giles Fraser

I do remember walking in Greenwich Village with everything shut, thinking: this isn’t New York, this is a place that used to be New York. But try as I might, I can’t place the date. I know I was crossing Sixth Avenue in the rain when I suddenly froze: there are no cars, there are no people, there’s nobody here — I stood in the middle of the road and for five seconds I closed my eyes. Those crowds, that thundering traffic, those people yelling — “Get outta da way buddy!” They felt as distant, then, as a dream.

That was the mountain. But which is harder: being on it, or coming down from it? Because when — exactly, again, I can’t really tell you — I found myself on the Subway to the mass vaccination centre somewhere out in the Bronx, I suddenly found myself full of regret. I can’t believe it’s over so soon. I’ll never be able to read or write so peacefully again. You were outside time — inhabiting Eliot’s heavenly “still point of the turning world” — and you squandered it roleplaying as Gran Colombia in a 22-player board game run through Slack instead of writing the novel you always fantasised was there inside you. It lasted only a few seconds: I was scared to come down. I wanted to stay safe in the sanatorium forever. It turns out I was not the only one.

Flights, parties, distinct memories of different days. By the summer they had crept back. And it was then that I got another nagging feeling about The Magic Mountain. That I had to re-read it. But, my normal sense of time restored — constant inputs, activities, lots of different situations coming and going very quickly requiring very different bits of my brain — I couldn’t.

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How American Jews lost themselves

By Ben Judah

It’s almost a hundred years since The Magic Mountain first appeared. This isn’t the kind of book that, I think, can be written anymore. It is slow and enormous because it wants to teach you something you can only learn in something slow and enormous. Internet people like you and me don’t think and consume like that anymore. I’m not sure it’s possible for people who primarily communicate on WhatsApp or argue on Twitter to sink into something that is more like a gigantic symphony (you have to listen carefully) than a straight book. Trying and failing to re-read Thomas Mann, taught me that the reason we are so frustrated with these kinds of novels is we don’t experience time in the way their original readers once did. Our minds can’t stay still, in one place, for an hour — let alone a week. The Magic Mountain, in ordinary times, could only ever be a struggle.

But lockdown allowed me — allowed many of us — to feel time the way it felt a hundred years ago. It allowed me to read slowly, scene by scene, through the sanatorium, some of which I didn’t understand; some of which — the snow, the seance, the young women that takes him smiling into the cemetery — left me tingling with that feeling that made me fall in love with books in the first place. This is it — that magic thing you can do with them, that no other art form can replicate, and that, perhaps for only a brief time, I was able to summon the ability to truly sense again.

Now the difference between us is, of course, that I work at a think tank mostly dealing with policy responses to offshore finance and he’s one of the most lauded young — I think he can still pull that one off, at 40 — Jewish writers in America. But that’s not what we are here to discuss. It’s his new book The Netanyahus: An Account Of A Minor And Ultimately Even Negligible Episode In The History Of A Very Famous Family.

Upstate New York: there’s snow, an unreformed, old fashioned university and virtually no Jews and here Ruben Blum is making his unhappy way as a Jewish historian — but not, as Cohen keeps on pointing out, nod-nod, wink-wink, as a historian of the Jews. It’s the Sixties. The kind of golf club anti-Semitism that saw a “Jew Quota” put on Harvard is still widespread. Through a series of not particularly funny pastiches of David Lodge, Kingsley Amis and Vladimir Nabokov’s wonderful Pnin, poor old Rube swills around pathetically.

The drama kicks in when he’s informed “one of his own” — a Jewish historian and a historian of the Jews — is on his way from Israel for an interview. Would he take care of him? This is where the novel gets interesting. A letter — so well written I thought about it for days — arrives from a certain Dr Prof Peretz Levavi at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem warning Blum that this man, Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, is a rancid, ideological, venomous ultranationalist. Reject him at all costs. And then crashing into his life come Mr and Mrs Netanyahu and their three sons — Yoni, Bibi, Iddo — for a train wreck interview that leaves Rube feeling like the smallest Jew in the world.

It won’t come as a great reveal to learn that something like this really happened. The Netanyahu, little Bibi, who went on to become Prime Minister, really had a father called Ben-Zion who was a brooding, intellectually menacing historian, obsessed with proving that the conversos — Jews who converted to Christianity in medieval Spain and were the victims of the Inquisition — were really sincere converts. And that by racialising them in order to persecute them — by his theory so as to weaken their patrons, the nobility, in the class politics of the day — the Spanish Crown created a world where you could never stop being Jewish. His whole work really a warning to the Diaspora there was no point even trying: you can become a Communist, you can become a Nazi, you can burn an Israeli flag in Time Square — the Inquisition will always come for you.

Ben-Zion’s theories have been called ideological projection. But his impact on the way the Jews would come to see the world was not academic. Small, malevolent, with strangely shaped ears; having felt his Right-wing politics pushed him into American exile when labour Zionists ran the show back in Israel; Ben-Zion really did loom over his son who has ruled Israel for a fifth of his existence, warning that — “Jewish history is the history of Holocausts.” And of course he really was handled by an American Jew, who happened to be Cohen’s friend Harold Bloom, the vaunted literary critic and self-vaunted defender of the Western Canon, when he came to Cornell for his interview.

These clashing ways of Jewishness meeting needed — no, required — a novel. But I feel very torn about the result. It manages to both be the Jewish American novel I’ve been waiting for and a huge disappointment. The most interesting and the most predictable piece of fiction I’ve picked up in a while. The book with the most mediocre windup and the most fantastic — really fantastic — ending I’ve read all year. The often annoying campus comedy is marbled with totally fascinating reflections on Jewish history that merited — I think I counted five — essays on their own. But Cohen the critic, the intellectual, is too distracted trying to be funny.

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Jewish privilege is a myth

By Giles Fraser

This is why I admire Joshua Cohen. It’s been obvious ever since David Remnick (what greater arbiter of bien pensant taste has there ever been than his New Yorker?) left dinner with Ben-Zion Netanyahu in the Old City in 1998 gasping about his outrageously reactionary table talk that there was a brilliant novel here in the encounter — the confrontation — between this avatar of Zionist Israel and one of the Upper West Side. But until Cohen, no American Jew, realised or dared. Instead, the Jewish novels of the last 20 years — think Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated to Nicole Krauss’s Great House — has given us Holocaust pedagogy. Entertaining us, in the third generation, with the comforts of trauma and loss. It’s the opposite of challenging Jewish readers. In fact it’s more like a warm bath. But here’s the thing: I loved those novels as novels from page one. 

The Netanyahus, on the other hand, was one of those highly irritating novels: so interesting I couldn’t stop reading it, without ever being sure I was actually enjoying it. As a kosher smorgasbord of ideas it is wonderful: a car journey to the Catskills’ worth of fun arguments. As a piece of fiction — until the very last, brilliant chapter — it didn’t do it for me. The problem isn’t Ben-Zion: everything about him is fantastically conjured. The problem is Rube, his wife Edith and the whole family of caricatures set up in opposition. This makes the novel mostly a drag. You hardly care when the Netanyahus fuck up their life.

I think these thinly drawn characters — the unassuming, uninsightful Rube Blum, next to the incredible, unforgettable, Ben-Zion Netanyahu — takes us back to Cohen’s obsessions, and mine. We’re not really obsessed with Jews. We’re obsessed with dead Jews or we’re obsessed with Israelis. The way The Netanyahus seems to rush through its plot, ticking off what we are supposed to know about American Jews — father worked in the rag trade, tick, daughter wants a nose job, tick — to get to Ben-Zion reflects something much deeper. Wherever the energy is in American Jewish letters right now — from the anti-Zionist polemics in Jewish Currents to the anti-anti-Zionists polemics in Tablet — it is about Israel. Wherever the crazes are — Fauda, the secret missions of the IDF, Shtisel, the secret lives of ultra-orthodox Jerusalem — it is not about us as American, as Diaspora Jews, but them.

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I sometimes marvel, on nights out in Brooklyn, that friends on the new Jewish Left know more about whatever crimes the Israeli army are committing at whatever checkpoints than my cousins who actually refused to serve in the IDF. I meet colleagues in DC who are more militant and seemingly intransigently up-to-date on the security situation in Gaza than my relatives who actually occupied it. It’s almost like we’ve lost interest in ourselves, out here, in America, as a culture. That the Big Jewish Novelists, who decorate Cohen’s endorsement page, have taken to writing about Israel reflects something bigger. That after the big joke in Curb Your Enthusiasm got old — that being Jewish in America after assimilation meant nothing but cringe — there was nothing left to say.

Roth. Malamud. Bellow. They were fascinated by Jews as Americans — it was a constant exploration for them — in a way that Rube feels like homework both for Cohen and for the reader, until we get to Ben-Zion and the good stuff. Maybe those novels of the immigrant experience can’t be written by people like us anymore. Perhaps they can only be written by Mexican-American or Asian-American writers and we should stop trying. We’re just too much a part of the furniture. The elite, the professions, feel if anything WASP-Jewish here in the North East, which is actually a pretty good description of most of our parents or our own relationships after this many generations in the New World. Our Rubes are lifeless. Fake.

We are bored of ourselves. Ben Gurion and Gold Meir. Ben-Zion and Bibi. These are some of the greatest characters in the Jewish story for centuries — if we want political drama like this we might have to go back to the Book of Judges. Israel is a country whose fate is still so precarious, its life so fantastical, or if you look at it from the other side, so cruel. And here we are, in America, in our Think Tanks, Mid Level Media Jobs or MFA-track writing careers: leading some of the most undramatic and tedious Jewish lives of all time. How could we ever write about something else?