Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2022. © Richard Kemp

As Russian forces continued to build along the Ukrainian border last month, Netflix released one of its most popular movies to date – Munich: The Edge of War. The film is set in 1938 as German troops prepare to attack the Sudetenland while Chamberlain and other European leaders negotiate away Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty. Today, it’s almost as if President Macron is reading from Chamberlain’s script. Since his meeting last week with Putin, he’s been pressing Ukraine to implement the Minsk accords, brokered by France and Germany in 2015 as Russian forces and their proxies fought in eastern Ukraine.

The imposition of the Minsk accords would see an end to Kyiv’s sovereignty. They would give Russia a say in running the country and its foreign policy and hand seats in parliament to Moscow’s proxies. A few days ago Putin made clear exactly what he wants, telling Ukraine, with undertones of rape: ‘Like it or not, you’ll have to tolerate it, my beauty.’

It is extraordinary that Macron, whose country now holds the EU Council presidency, should entertain such gunpoint bartering of a democratic nation’s integrity. He has a track record of failed conciliations with Russia and has recently suggested there is ‘legitimacy’ in the Kremlin’s concerns over a putative threat from Nato. It must be obvious to him that Putin will not be mollified by such appeasement and that even if President Zelenskiy were to accede to Minsk it would not end there. But Macron has elections in April and perhaps believes that a Chamberlain style proclamation of peace for our time might secure victory for him.

Germany too has looked happy to go along with this ‘grand bargain’. That is no surprise from a government that has blocked another Nato member from supplying defensive arms to Kyiv and is desperate to placate Putin, having allowed an increasing dependence on Russian energy supplies. The Nordstream 2 gas pipeline is designed to bypass Ukraine, removing the only bargaining chip against Russia in Kyiv’s Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2022. © Richard Kemp

On a visit to Washington last week, I was struck by the consistent admiration for Britain’s stance on Ukraine from government officials and think tank leaders alike. Many admitted to previous concerns about the implications of Brexit on European security, due to the misplaced perception that it would herald an era of isolation. The same concern had been shared in many European capitals and featured prominently throughout the Remain campaign.

For our friends on the continent, that worry has now been supplanted by the fear that Britain is taking too strong a role in collective European security, exposing their own disunity and equivocation. There is a sense that we are undermining the Franco-German cartel by strengthening the more hardline security approach of Holland, Poland and the Baltic states.

The reality is that the Franco-German axis does not work when it comes to security. And while the governments in Berlin and Paris may not be ready to accept this view, Washington’s foreign policy establishment is rapidly coming to the same conclusion. The axis’s inadequacy is best demonstrated by the Normandy Format – a grouping of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine, established in the wake of Russian aggression in Crimea to discuss the way forward – which has clearly failed to deter Putin.

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, recently caused consternation by calling for a separate EU dialogue with Russia that some feared might impair Nato’s diplomatic efforts. If he thinks alienating Washington is the best route to the EU strategic autonomy he desires then he is making a very dangerous mistake.

Closer to home, his attempts to deal with Putin have helped drive an east-west divide within the EU, with Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania despairing of his approach. They sit directly in the face of Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 22 February 2022. © Richard Kemp

The latest grotesque exhibition of anti-Israel vitriol among NGOs is this week’s publication of a report by Amnesty International that recycles tired, repeatedly disproven yet deliberately provocative antisemitic tropes and accusations of racism. This from an organization that was itself last year branded as ‘systemically racist’.

The title of the report, ‘Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and crime against humanity’, is not only a blatant and unsubstantiated lie but also an insult to black South Africans who suffered so horrifically under a genuinely apartheid regime. Few will read this 200+ page diatribe of falsehoods, distortions and half-truths, but many will see and absorb its title, which has already been plastered greedily across left-leaning newspapers and disseminated to millions in social media. The BBC, for example, trumpeted ‘Israel’s policies against Palestinians amount to apartheid’ in an online article, giving full weight to Amnesty’s claims, quoting several people who support them, but allowing only the briefest opposing view from the Israeli government at the end.

What is provoking NGOs such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, who published a similar discredited report last year, to ever-greater excesses of anti-Israel propaganda? Why has the United Nations General Assembly just approved an unprecedented permanent commission of inquiry into Israel by the UN Human Rights Council? The problem for these anti-Israel lobbies is that things are not going their way. Tactically, their over-arching intent to drag Israelis into the dock at The Hague seems to be faltering, with a seemingly less enthusiastic Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. Strategically, far from the desired retrenchment and eventual termination of the Jewish state, it is getting stronger and stronger with increasing global diplomatic and economic outreach; and there has been an abject Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 7 January 2022. © Richard Kemp

Last month the UN General Assembly re-affirmed its implacable hostility to one of its own member states. It voted overwhelmingly — 125-8, with 34 abstentions — to fund an unprecedented permanent Human Rights Council (UNHRC) commission of inquiry (COI) into allegations of war crimes and human rights abuse by Israel. Taxpayers’ funds will pay an eyewatering $5.5 million budget in the first year alone, well over twice that of the UNHRC commission investigating the Syrian civil war.

Since its creation in 2006, the council has established 32 inquiries, nine of which — one-third — have focused entirely on Israel. But this latest COI is the first open-ended inquiry it has set up. It has no time-limit and no restriction on its scope. The US voted against the move, saying it ‘perpetuates a practice of unfairly singling out Israel in the UN’. Among the abstainers was Australia, whose representative said, with characteristic plain-speaking: ‘We oppose anti-Israel bias.’

As the US, Australia and others fear, it is inevitable that Israel will be falsely pronounced guilty of the ‘systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity’ that the COI says it will probe.

I understand the COI plans to explicitly brand Israel an ‘apartheid state’. This lie will be taken up across the world, fuelling antisemitic hatred against Jews everywhere. It will contribute to what Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid described this week as an imminent debate ‘unprecedented in its venom, or in its radioactivity, around the words, “Israel as an apartheid state”.’

The lie of ‘Israeli apartheid’ was dreamt up in Moscow during the Cold War and driven home by a relentless Soviet propaganda campaign until it took hold in the UN and across the Middle East and the West. This included the repeated comparison of Israel with South Africa in the Soviet media and in books such as ‘Zionism and Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 2 January 2022. © Richard Kemp

When US President Joe Biden took office, he removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. He should have replaced it with one of Neville Chamberlain. After Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938, Churchill told him: ‘You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.’

The first year of Biden’s presidency has been marked by appeasement upon appeasement. Appeasement of Russia, appeasement of Iran, appeasement of jihadists. China also — and we may now be witnessing his most dangerous appeasement so far: helping Beijing cover up the origins of the most consequential harm unleashed on the globe since the Second World War.

Biden inflicted untold damage on the free world by his catastrophic surrender in Afghanistan, demonstrating to America’s enemies and friends alike that, under his administration, the US was no longer willing to stand by its allies nor to protect its own vital national interests.

Biden’s decision to capitulate to the Taliban revealed a failure of one of two key elements of strategic deterrence: credible political will. Failure of the second element, military capability, was exposed by the shambolic and irrational manner of the withdrawal, in which crucial terrain and assets were abandoned first, American citizens and dependents left to their fate and US and allied forces placed at needless risk. Watchers were rightly shocked by such exposure of the most powerful military in the world. Continue reading →

In wartime, serving men want to be with their comrades. It’s those at home who suffer the real pain of absence

Originally published in The Times, 24 December 2010. © Richard Kemp

As the recently released and much acclaimed film The King’s Speech shows, oratory did not come easily to George VI. But fighting to overcome his nervous stammer, he became an inspirational symbol of this country’s resistance to the Nazi menace. The King’s leadership was never more vital than in the dark days of 1940. That year the theme of his Christmas speech was ‘the sadness of separation’.

Today, our troops in Afghanistan, battling valiantly against a lethal and determined enemy in Helmand’s bone-chillingly cold ‘desert of death’, must also overcome the tremendous ordeal of separation from their loved ones: an ordeal that weighs particularly heavily at this time of year.

Under the British Army’s historic regimental system soldiers frequently serve in the same combat unit for many years. They live together, work together, drink together, fight together — and sometimes even get arrested together. Close relationships develop, extending up and down the ranks, making for a tight-knit community: creating the friendships, understanding, trust and loyalty that are essential to effectiveness in war. They become, quite literally, a military family.

The adrenalin-fuelled horrors of violent combat, the like of which our troops experience day in and day out in Helmand, fire this already close comradeship into an iron bond. King George VI, himself decorated for bravery as a gun-turret officer on board HMS Collingwood at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, spelt this out in his 1940 speech: ‘If war brings its separations, it brings new unity also, the unity which comes from common perils and common sufferings willingly shared.’ Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 3 November 2021. © Richard Kemp

‘Free, free Palestine — from the river to the sea.’ I was met, as so often elsewhere, by this ubiquitous chant from the standard issue protesters when I arrived at the University of Essex in the UK to give a talk last week. What river? What sea? I doubt many of them knew. Most of these students are fed such slogans when they are coaxed to come out and demonstrate by the campus rabble-rousers — a little bit of animation to distract from the monotony of student life on an autumn evening.

Their distraction comes at a cost. Not to me: I’ve seen and heard it all many times, often belted out with a bit more gusto and venom. The cost is to the Jewish students on campus who, even if they are not Israeli, are the real targets of Israel Apartheid Weeks and constant agitation against the Jewish state and anyone who supports it. The Jewish students have heard it all before too, but they have to live their lives alongside fellow students and sometimes professors who are demanding an end to the Jewish national homeland.

That is of course the meaning of ‘from the river to the sea’ — tearing down the State of Israel and replacing it with an Islamic state. For those who artfully deny that reality, Hamas, owners of the slogan, again helpfully explained what they intend in chillingly banal detail at a recent conference in Gaza.

The conference of officials, held in September, was entitled ‘Promise of the Hereafter — Post-Liberation Palestine’. In his opening remarks, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said: ‘The full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river’ is ‘the heart of Hamas’s strategic vision.’ He meant from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, in other words, the entire territory of the State of Israel.

The conspirators plotting the downfall of a democratic UN member state came up with recommendations on laws to be applied in the conquered land, currency, borders with neighbouring states, international relations, confiscation of property and the use of existing resources and infrastructure. Continue reading →

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 27 October 2021. © Richard Kemp

Only a few months ago, US President Joe Biden betrayed a US ally by withdrawing forces from Afghanistan, bringing down the government in Kabul and consigning the country to the bitter depredations of Taliban terrorists. Now he is winding up to betray another, much closer ally — Israel.

Biden plans to open a consulate in Jerusalem. This may seem like just another diplomatic facility to issue visas, promote trade and take care of US citizens, with no greater consequence than the US consulate in Edinburgh, UK. But it is far more than a mere office for paper-shuffling diplomats. It amounts to a de facto US embassy to the Palestinians on Israeli territory. Its true purpose is to undermine Israeli sovereignty in its own capital city and will jeopardise future prospects for peace between Israel and Palestinian Arabs.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, understands the implications only too well. In a recent interview, he triumphantly predicted that the new consulate would re-divide Jerusalem.

After the US moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital in 2018, it subsumed the existing consulate in the city to form a single diplomatic mission. This was achieved under the administration of President Donald J. Trump and that, together with a profound misunderstanding of the dynamics of peace, explains Biden’s determination to re-open the consulate. He has devoted much of his presidency so far to undoing everything he could of Trump’s work, with the exception of the Afghanistan debacle, over which he uniquely claims to have been bound by Trump’s previous plans.

The new consulate, exclusively to manage diplomatic relations with Palestinians, is designed to give hope that one day Jerusalem will be the capital of a putative Palestinian state. Israel can and rightly Continue reading →