Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 7 May 2024. © Richard Kemp

Hamas’s agreement on Monday to a ceasefire deal that was never on the table was yet another ruse to buy time and build international pressure to halt a major IDF operation in Rafah. It was a sign of the terrorists’ desperation to prevent the destruction of their final stronghold. An IDF move into Rafah has been delayed far too long. It is the result of months of fruitless negotiations over release of hostages that never showed any sign of materialising. Yet Israel had little option than to play along while even the smallest glimmer of hope existed.

The delay was also brought about by unbearable pressure from the US and other Israeli allies, with Biden repeatedly forbidding an attack on Rafah without what he called a ‘credible and executable plan’ to protect or evacuate the civilian population there. Similar demands were recently parroted by Lord Cameron during a visit to Jerusalem. No plan the IDF drew up ever met Biden’s stipulations, but then no plan could have done so if his real intention was to block the final destruction of Hamas amid growing concerns about adverse effects on his own electoral prospects. Of course one credible plan would have been to allow civilians to take temporary refuge through the Egyptian border into Sinai. Biden could have brought that about by pushing Cairo to agree but neither he nor any other international leader ever even raised a finger to do so. That unforgivable failure, which played right into Hamas’s hands, has contributed to many of the civilian deaths during this war and will likely lead to many more.

Now the IDF has been making preliminary moves against Rafah on the ground and from the air. Quite rightly, Jerusalem has not signalled its immediate intentions. Those may be to shape the battlefield for future large-scale operations, including spurring the civilian population to evacuate Rafah to designated humanitarian zones and adding pressure on Hamas to free the hostages. Nor is it impossible that an apparently inevitable push into Rafah might impel elements of the Hamas leadership to make good their escape from Gaza while Continue reading →

Article published by Ynetnews.com,  29 April 2024. © Richard Kemp and Rafael Bardaji

Is the International Criminal Court about to issue arrest warrants for top-level Israeli political and military leaders? That is certainly the view of some legal professionals in the court’s Hague ecosystem — and perhaps as early as this week. Any indictment for international crimes within the ICC’s jurisdiction cannot possibly be made with a solid legal basis in wartime.

The court has not been able to carry out any investigations on the ground in Gaza and will not be able to do so for perhaps many months. That means any such move would be politically motivated, intended to undermine Israel’s ability to defend its citizens from terrorist violence.

Given the high stakes in the region, and the direct involvement of the US in the conflict, it is inconceivable that ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan would issue indictments without the approval and maybe even the active encouragement of the White House.

With the presidential election approaching and a desire to gain votes from both supporters and opponents of Israel, Biden has been trying for months to restrain Jerusalem’s legitimate self-defense while at the same time backing its war effort. That amounts to disgraceful duplicity at a time when America’s closest ally in the Middle East needs full-throated support.

Members of Biden’s administration and his political allies have also shown extraordinary hostility to the democratically-elected prime minister of one of America’s closest allies, going back well before this war began. What better way now of heaping pressure on Israel and trying to drag down its prime minister than having the ICC-level charges at Netanyahu directly as well as his defense minister and military chief of staff?

Just the threat of such a highly dangerous move also opens up other duplicitous opportunities for Biden to coerce Israel. He can perhaps Continue reading →

Article published in The Sunday Telegraph, 27 April 2024. © Richard Kemp

It may sound counter-intuitive, but Donald Trump has probably done more to strengthen Nato than any other political leader in recent years. While he was president, he berated European members of the alliance for failing to pay what he called their ‘dues’, accusing them of freeloading on the US.

Earlier this year, he seemed to go even further by suggesting at an election rally, not only that he would not bring America to the defence of ‘delinquent’ Nato members, but would encourage Russia to attack them. Cue a predictable international outcry, led by Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, who accused him of undermining ‘all of our security’. Joe Biden, of course, waded in, saying Trump’s remarks were ‘appalling and dangerous’ and would give Putin ‘a green light for more war and violence’.

Both of them were wrong. Anyone who has the slightest understanding of Trump’s negotiating techniques knows that he is unlikely to have meant what he said literally; it was a rhetorical device to emphasise his entirely valid point about recalcitrant Nato members. As for a green light, it was Biden who flashed that at Putin with his disastrous retreat from Kabul in 2021, which can only have contributed to Moscow’s calculations on invading Ukraine the following year.

Trump’s presidency was in fact a red light against Putin’s aggression, largely because of his unpredictable nature. And that same unpredictability has now rattled many Nato leaders into recognising that they need to step up their defence efforts for fear that he might abandon Nato in a second term.

Poland, now with the largest defence spending by percentage of GDP in the whole of the alliance, has bolstered its military out of fear of Russian invasion. But do we really think that the likes of Germany would finally have started to get their act together without genuine concern over a second Trump presidency? It doesn’t seem to have been Putin’s invasion that spurred them into action. We’ve had two years of heel-dragging and inadequate military support to Kyiv on the part of France and Germany. Britain, meanwhile, has been inexplicably continuing to reduce the size of its Armed Forces. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Express, 24 April 2024. © Richard Kemp

Grant Shapps has achieved something no Defence Secretary has managed since the end of the Cold War, a historic increase in defence spending to 2.5% of GDP.

Many will argue that, given the increasingly dangerous world, even this is not enough. But realists understand that, with so many demands on the public purse, it was the best that could reasonably have been hoped for.

It is particularly striking at this range from a general election, with defence never traditionally seen as a vote winner in peace time.

Some will complain that part of the increased budget will be spent on support for Ukraine. But helping defend Ukraine is also helping defend the UK, by enabling Kyiv to fight against a despot that, as part of the Russia-China-Iran axis, threatens the whole of the Western world.

After decades of hollowing-out by successive governments, our armed forces are in dire need of this uplift. We have a wide range of military capabilities, many highly sophisticated, but in almost every category, we simply don’t have enough – not enough tanks, artillery, planes, ships, missiles.

A key focus should be on expanding existing forces as well as developing new weapons. Recent defence thinking has leaned towards technology over hard fighting power. That was always mistaken, and has been demonstrated recently by the World War 2 style battles in Afghanistan and bitter street by street warfare in Gaza.

The truth is you need both, and that is very expensive.

We also don’t have enough manpower to fly our planes or crew our ships, while the Army has been leaching its soldiers and is unable to recruit enough replacements.

Some of the money needs to be spent on better pay and improved conditions for our troops. Continue reading →

Article published in The Express, 14 April 2024. © Richard Kemp

On Saturday night I witnessed the most intensive aerial assault I have seen against Israel. To the soundtrack of thunderous explosions, the sky over Jerusalem was lit up with Star Wars-like air defence projectiles colliding with Iranian missiles. But Iran’s historically unprecedented attack was a total failure, with the overwhelming majority of killer drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles knocked out of the sky before even entering Israeli territory. As well as 300 air weapons fired from Iran, projectiles were launched by Tehran’s proxies in Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon, again without success. The total effect of this massive bombardment was the severe wounding of a child and only minor damage to an IDF air base. Nevertheless it is important to recognise this was not a symbolic attack designed to fail. That would have been done with far fewer missiles and drones. The response to this strike should be commensurate with Iran’s clear intent: to hit hundreds of targets and kill hundreds of people.

Yet President Biden has told Prime Minister Netanyahu that he should consider this ‘a win’. In other words: take it on the chin. Did Biden pressure Ukraine not to respond to Russian missile strikes on it territory? No he did not and such a call to Israel now is preposterous. It is exactly this approach from the start of Biden’s presidency that has led us to where we are today — consistently appeasing Iran and responding with abject feebleness to repeated attacks against US forces.

Of course the ayatollahs ignored Biden’s hollow warnings in recent days not to attack Israel and of course they have now directly threatened the US not to get involved in any Israeli retaliation. Lining up with Biden’s timorous message Iran’s military mission to the UN has said that, with its strike on Israel, ‘the matter can be deemed concluded’. But it is far from concluded. Iran has repeatedly confirmed its intent to annihilate the Jewish state and has constructed a ‘ring of fire’ of proxies surrounding Israel to achieve that. Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on 7th October was part of this monstrous design. As are the daily rocket attacks against Israel since Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 11 April 2024. © Richard Kemp

An attack on Israel by Iran seems imminent. President Biden says his support is ‘ironclad’ and that the US would do all it can to protect Israel. Britain too has a clear responsibility to stand alongside Washington and Jerusalem if Iran launches a significant attack. That means Lord Cameron’s words, ‘We stand up for Israel’s right to self-defence’, need to become more than mere platitudes and the UK should be ready to take direct military action against Iran.

Why should we get involved? The conflict in the Middle East is Iran’s war. Its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and the West Bank have all been targeting Israel since October 7. Tehran has only been able to bring that about as a result of US and British weakness. Trump’s maximum pressure policy to contain Iranian aggression was displaced by Biden’s knee-bending appeasement from the moment he took office.

Desperate to coax the ayatollahs back to Obama’s fundamentally flawed nuclear deal that Trump had abrogated, the White House did little to curb Iranian violence and instead unfroze billions of dollars in assets that could be used to fund terrorist proxies and the nuclear programme. On top of that, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, failure to adequately support Ukraine in the face of Russian invasion and his ideological show of distancing himself from the Netanyahu government made it clear to Khamanei that America would be unlikely to stand up for its allies.

It amounted to a red rag to a bull. Where was Britain in all this? Waving our own red rag right beside Washington’s. And as Tehran repeatedly disrespected the nuclear deal, we, as one of the remaining parties to the agreement, failed to punish it. We happily maintained diplomatic relations with Tehran and have still refused to proscribe the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps despite the previous Home Secretary labelling it last year as the biggest threat to the UK.

This strategic ineptitude by the US and Britain, as well as other Western countries, has contributed a great deal to the violence engulfing Israel today. It’s important to understand that the latest Continue reading →