September 2, 2019 - 1:39pm
From Israel
The air hangs hot and heavy over this Tel Aviv morning. An attack by Hezbollah on the northern border is already yesterday’s news – no one was killed. An Israeli election is a few weeks away, and minor skirmishes between Israel and her enemies is regarded, by some at least, as a way for the Netanyahu government to remind voters of the importance of their security agenda.
But the more interesting speculation here is that, over in Pakistan, Imran Khan is giving licence to the highly state-regulated Pakistani press to speculate on the recognition of the state of Israel. What was once a taboo subject is now being openly discussed. This is a bold move by Khan, not least because he has often been on the receiving end of anti-Semitic propaganda, having once been married to Jemima Goldsmith who – though a convert to Islam – had Jewish family. But undeterred, the Pakistani media has apparently been given free rein openly to discuss the subject of Israel. “Why can’t we openly debate pros cons of opening direct and overt channels of communication with the State of Israel” tweeted veteran Pakistani journalist Kamran Khan last week.
See this morning’s Haaretz:
It would be an interesting move, not least because both states have a great deal in common. Both were created from the ashes of the Second world war – Pakistan in 1947, Israel in 1948 – both from the collapse of the British empire, and both with a specific religious designation. Also, both states were born in violence and with large immigrant populations. But somewhere behind this analogy also lurks the dangerous idea that Kashmir is a bit like the West Bank, with India pushing for ‘Indian settlers’ to shift the demographics of Kashmir and Pakistan imagining a Pakistani intifada against Indian rule. Perhaps the comparison of Israel and Pakistan is not as helpful as it seems.
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SubscribeMisjudged is too weak a word to express the negative impression I have about the hs2 project. To me hs2 represents the bulldozer in the rain forest, or perhaps the conquistodors arriving at Veracruz. It is presented as a help to the locals, as a way of levelling them up, but this is just a glamour, in reality it is a clever way of extracting all the value and shipping it back home. Whether by extending the London commuter belt and wrecking local housing markets or by opening up local supply networks to cheap international competition the outcome of this type of progress is nearly always the same for both the locals and the visitors. The clue to the real intent of hs2 is seen in its direction. It does not really go north-south as is often suggested in interviews with ministers as it completely avoids the both the central and south west regions entirely. It doesn’t really help the north east or west as its route does not tend majorily in either of those directions and probably couldn’t get more equally remote from both the east region and wales if it tried.
What we are left with should probably be more accurately described as the London-North radial link draining the resources, energy and uniqueness of each of the major cities in turn back down the London.