The White House has announced that Israel and the United Arab Emirates have agreed to sign a peace agreement which will see the two nations establish full diplomatic relations, and “the exchange of ambassadors and cooperation on a broad range of areas, including tourism, education, healthcare, trade, and security.” The agreement is the most significant diplomatic development in the Middle East since Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994 and it formalises a major regional realignment t...

When the French playwright Edmond Fleg attended Herzl’s Third Zionist Congress in Basel he marvelled at the scene. “I looked about me. What Jewish contrasts! A pale-faced Pole with high cheekbones, a German in spectacles, a Russian looking like an angel, a bearded Persian, a clean-shaven American, an Egyptian in a fez, and over there, that black phantom, towering up in his immense caftan, with his fur cap and pale curls falling from his temples.” Fleg saw the sum of Jewish exile in that room. Je...

Keir Starmer, the post-Jeremy Corbyn leader of Britain's Labour Party, acted swiftly to demote a member of Parliament who tweeted an article containing a paragraph linking Israel to the killing of George Floyd. In truth, when Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey tweeted the interview with the actress Maxine Peake in which she made the appalling and unfounded claim, Long-Bailey may have had no sinister intentions. Indeed, she may have missed the offending paragraph altogether. So common has the obsessio...

The latest US proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been predictably rejected by the Palestinian side. In fact, it was rejected before it was even tabled. Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh announced the day before the plan was released, ‘We reject it and we demand the international community not be a partner to it…’ despite not quite knowing what he was rejecting.

To be sure, it is the Palestinians who have the most to gain from securing a deal. The...

A new study released on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp has found that a quarter of French millennials haven’t heard of the Holocaust, while an earlier study of American millennials found that 66 per cent did not know what Auschwitz was.

The findings come at a time of surging anti-semitism in both countries, with incidents targeting French Jews rising by 74 per cent, while the US has seen a series of lethal attacks against Jewish gatherings and places...

The Arab-Israeli conflict traverses decades, manifests in regular wars, terrorism and endless political skirmishes in international forums. It is also a battle to establish narratives – victims and aggressors, Davids and Goliaths, oppressors and oppressed. Language and the meaning given to basic concepts form a key part of this battle. It is easy for Jewish people to establish a claim to the territory known as Judea and Samaria. The later formulation “West Bank,” coined by the Jordanians followi...

It is difficult not to savour the irony of two United States congresswomen who advocate boycotts of Israel crying foul at being denied entry into the very country they seek to erase.

Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two members of the Democratic Party’s “Squad” of neophyte congresswomen from the Party’s radical left faction, have made their names by seeking to collapse decades of bipartisan support for Israel in US politics and using America’s democratic ally in the Middle-East as a wedge issue to d...

The economic component of the Trump administration’s intensely awaited plan to achieve an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been released.

Formally titled Peace to Prosperity, the proposal contains a three-pronged program of investment and reforms to transform the Palestinian economy and society through the injection of $US50 billion ($71.8bn) of foreign investment, opportunities for ­ordinary Palestinians in employment, education, even recreation, and the establishment...

This article is based on keynote speeches delivered on Holocaust Remembrance events in Queensland on 5 May 2019.

The Holocaust ― the term given to the industrial-scale slaughter of the Jews of Europe ― is often examined in isolation. An event without precedent and without successor. Certainly, the enormity of the killing, the unsparing barbarity and cool sophistication with which it was carried out, and its genesis in the centre of enlightened Western Europe, all contribute to its uniqueness. T...

Amnesty International has unveiled a new campaign to pressure digital tourism companies such as Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and TripAdvisor to delist properties held by Israelis living in the West Bank, and calling on governments to pass legislation that would result in the total boycott of those living in Israeli settlements.

It is just the latest attack in a long war waged by Amnesty and other once-respectable human rights organisations intent on turning public opinion against Israel and bring...