Tensions high as Ivanka arrives in Israel
Ivanka Trump has arrived in Israel for the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, where she and her husband, Jared Kushner, will lead the American delegation to move operations from Tel Aviv. The transfer has angered Palestinian leaders. Ahead of the ceremony, an Israeli military spokesman said air strikes had destroyed a section of tunnel built by the militant group Hamas and which had been tracked for weeks before being destroyed just inside Gaza.
IVANKA TRUMP arrived in Israel yesterday for the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem hours after the Israeli defence forces destroyed a tunnel near the main pedestrian crossing of the Gaza strip.
Along with Jared Kushner, her husband, Ms Trump will lead the American delegation today to mark the decision to move US operations from Tel Aviv.
The transfer has angered Palestinian leaders, who claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.
Ahead of the ceremony, a military spokesman said air strikes had destroyed a 1km tunnel built by the militant group Hamas and which had been tracked for weeks before being destroyed just inside the Gaza fence.
“Hamas is spreading messages of its desire for a long-term ceasefire but actually digs terror tunnels into the territory of the state of Israel,” said Avigdor Liberman, Israeli defence minister, on Saturday.
“We’re not buying this bluff. We will continue, like this evening, to strike the terror infrastructure.”
The same day, the Israeli military announced the closure of the main cargo crossing along the same border after demonstrations inside the strip caused extensive damage to the crossing.
More than $9 million (£6.6 million) worth of damage was caused during Friday’s protest, including the destruction of the Kerem Shalom crossing’s main fuel and gas lines, which bring in cooking gas and diesel for hospital generators. Shortages are now imminent.
The Israeli military has long blamed Hamas for inciting violence and military response, thereby perpetuating shortages in the blockaded strip.
“Hamas continues to lead the residents of Gaza to destroy the only assistance they receive,” the army said of the damage wrought at Kerem Shalom.
Hamas said: “The Israeli bombardment of the northern Gaza strip is a miserable and failed attempt to prevent the participation of our masses in the major ‘March of Return’ and to break the siege on May 14th.”
Tensions have been growing along the Gaza border fence in the lead up to May 14, the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when the Palestinian population was forcibly moved during the creation of the state of Israel.
Since the demonstrations began on March 30, 42 Palestinians have been killed and at least another 1,800 wounded.
The State of Israel is 70 tomorrow. It declared independence on May 14 1948. On this important birthday, people naturally look, yet again, at the big questions about Zionism and the Palestinians. But there is another way to view Israel.
That declaration of independence came eight hours before the formal end of the British mandate over the area. For all its unique features, Israel is a post-colonial country. So it can be compared with the many others of that era – India, Pakistan and later much of Africa – that emerged from the British Empire. As such, Israel has been the most successful of all – the most rigorously democratic and, in recent years, one of the most prosperous. India is an astonishing democratic achievement, but remains semi chaotic. Singapore is the most efficient, but is much less free.
Israel began as socialist – an egalitarian, austere, kibbutz state, working the soil communally. Unlike most such enterprises, it stayed robustly free, (very) multi-party and mostly uncorrupt. In 1977, the Labour prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had to resign because his wife was found to have preserved an American bank account containing a mere $1,000 from his time as ambassador in Washington: this tiny infraction was considered greedy and unpatriotic.
Gradually, however, socialism failed to answer the aspirations of the people. When Benjamin Netanyahu, the present Prime Minister, was finance minister from 2003-05, he introduced a series of financial and economic liberalisations that helped to That cherise the place. Today the kibbutz country of the early days has changed to “start-up nation” – a global technological power, famous not only for its defence innovation but also for its medical research.
It is miraculous that such a famously disputatious people, drawn from so many parts of the world, have managed this. Perhaps it is because they at last gained sovereignty and know just how appalling life can be when you lack it. So they treasure what they have won.
Israel, as I say, is 70. Next week, Jeremy Corbyn is 69. In roughly the same span of years, the Labour leader has learnt sadly little.
Mr Corbyn is seen by some as a voice for the voiceless, but it seems to me that his long career is a bad by-product of the blessings of peace and prosperity that have existed in the West throughout his life. Like a permanent student, he has never been tested by truly harsh reality or had to make a life-or-death decision. He is not a trailblazer for the dispossessed but a spoilt child of capitalism.
On May 25, the Republic of Ireland will hold a referendum. The subject is abortion, which is forbidden by the Irish Constitution, but the vote takes an unusual form. The question on the ballot paper will ask: “Do you approve of the proposal to amend the Constitution contained in the undermentioned Bill?” The “undermentioned Bill” would abolish the abortion ban. The word “abortion” does not appear on the ballot.
The Constitution protects “the right to life of the unborn” and says that the state “guarantees in its laws to defend and vindicate that right”. So, in the name of modernity and “choice”, the Irish people are being asked to strike down a human right.
Ours is an age that jealously guards human rights, so this attempt to destroy one must be unique in the 21st century. Imagine voting to remove other human rights – freedom of expression, for example, or the right to marry or, come to that, the right to vote itself.
The phrase “the most vulnerable in our society” is constantly on our lips, yet many of us do not apply it to the most vulnerable of all human forms – the baby in the womb.
When we look back at the rights and freedoms that we denied to people in the past, we often feel superior. How could any decent person have permitted slavery? How could anyone have opposed votes for women? We don’t stop to answer those questions. The chief reason that such things happen is that the people in charge manage to convince themselves that some categories of human being are morally beneath them – that slave races are virtually animal, that women are inferior to men, and so on. This doesn’t look good later.
In the case of abortion, a just concern for the rights of women over their bodies has led to the unjust assertion that the babies they carry are little more than body parts. That won’t look good in the eye of posterity either. I hope Ireland does not vote to go backwards.
Ruth Wilkinson, a student leader, says that young people “voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU”. They did not. They voted underwhelmingly.
No age figures – or turnout figures within an age group – can be certain, but it seems probable that, among 18-24 year olds, 73 per cent of those voting voted Remain in the EU referendum. According to Ipsos Mori, however, only an estimated 48 per cent of that age group actually bothered to turn out. The majority of 18-24 year olds who could have voted didn’t.
Seventy-three per cent of 48 per cent is just over 35 per cent of the whole. So it seems that there was no Remain youthquake. Ms Wilkinson is probably speaking for about one third of her generation.