Anger as far-right Israeli minister prays at flashpoint holy site in Jerusalem
The area, which Jews call the Temple Mount, is the holiest site in Judaism and was home to the ancient biblical temples. Muslims call the site the Noble Sanctuary, and today it is home to the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.
Visits are considered a provocation across the Muslim world and openly praying violates a longstanding status quo at the site.
Under the status quo, Jews have been allowed to tour the site but are barred from praying, with Israeli police and troops providing security.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said after Mr Ben-Gvir's visit that Israel would not change the norms governing the holy site.
Mr Ben-Gvir made the stop after Hamas released videos showing two emaciated Israeli hostages. The videos caused in uproar in Israel and raised pressure on the government to reach a deal to bring home from Gaza the remaining hostages who were captured on October 7 2023, in the attack that triggered the war.
During his visit to the hilltop compound, Mr Ben-Gvir called for Israel to annex the Gaza Strip and encourage Palestinians to leave, reviving rhetoric that has complicated negotiations to end the war.
He condemned the video that Hamas released on Saturday of 24-year-old hostage Evyatar David, showing him looking skeletal and hollow-eyed in a dimly lit Gaza tunnel.
The minister called it an attempt to pressure Israel.
Mr Ben-Gvir's previous visits to the site have been explosive and prompted threats from Palestinian militant groups. Clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinian demonstrators in and around the site fuelled an 11-day war with Hamas in 2021.
His Sunday visit was swiftly condemned as an incitement by Palestinian leaders as well as Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Sufian Qudah, spokesman for the foreign ministry in neighboring Jordan, which serves as the custodian of the Al Aqsa Mosque, condemned what he called 'provocative incursions by the extremist minister' and implored Israel to prevent escalation.
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Leader Live
3 minutes ago
- Leader Live
I push Keir Starmer to be more extroverted in Scotland
Mr Sarwar said he speaks to the Prime Minister every two or three weeks, often calling at weekends when they both have more free time. The Scottish Labour leader also said he will not engage in any 'back room stitch-ups' with other parties if he becomes first minister following the Scottish election next year. At an Edinburgh Fringe event in front of a live audience, Mr Sarwar was interviewed by Catherine Salmond, editor of The Herald. He was pressed on his relationship with the UK Labour leader and whether Sir Keir was comfortable coming north of the border. He said: 'We're different personalities… I am much more probably conversational, out there, a bit of an extrovert. 'I think it's safe to say he's a bit more introverted in that sense.' Mr Sarwar said Sir Keir had become more relaxed and confident in the five years since becoming Labour leader. He said Sir Keir was more relaxed in Scotland than in other parts of the UK, adding: 'I think we've built up a rapport, probably because I am pushing to be a bit more of extroverted than perhaps he is in other parts.' He said he spoke to the Prime Minister around 'two or three times a month'. However he said the early part of Labour's response to the war in Gaza had been 'challenging' for his party, referring to an interview the Prime Minister gave where he said Israel had the 'right' to withhold power and water from Gaza in response to the October 7 attacks. 'I think the early part was challenging, he himself accepts that what he said in the LBC interview wasn't right,' Mr Sarwar said. Discussing the Middle East further, he said: 'I think we have to be doing much more to hold the Israeli government to account. 'To provide evidence that there is not any components that are being used in a proactive way in Gaza.' Looking ahead to the 2026 Scottish election, Mr Sarwar said he was putting his 'heart, soul energy, time' into winning. He said it would be a 'very close election' likely to result in a 'parliament of minorities'. Rather than doing deals such as the SNP-Green powersharing agreement, he said he would 'work progressively with the parliament' if he became first minister. He said: 'We are looking to form a minority Scottish Labour government that does no kind of back room stich-up but instead moves to govern based on what we promised.'
New Statesman
32 minutes ago
- New Statesman
The meanings of Mein Kampf
Photo byJust over 100 years ago, on 18 July 1925, the most notorious book of the 20th century was published – Mein Kampf ('My Struggle') by Adolf Hitler, who became dictator of Germany less than eight years later. It has been described as the epitome of 'absolute evil', the 'most disgusting of all books' and 'the nadir of depravity'. More than a few historians have regarded the book as providing a blueprint for what came later, from the destruction of German democracy and the genocide of Europe's Jews to the launching of the Second World War and the ruthless ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe by the Nazis. Its centenary provides an opportunity for re-examining its origins, its nature and its influence. Hitler began writing the book during a period of enforced idleness following his arrest and imprisonment for leading a violent attempt to overthrow the state government of Bavaria on 9 November 1923 – the so-called Beer Hall Putsch – which ended in a hail of bullets fired at him and his Nazi supporters by the Bavarian police. Brought to trial in Munich on 26 February 1924, Hitler claimed that he had acted purely out of patriotic motives. He regarded the democratic political order of the Weimar Republic, founded in the wake of Germany's defeat in the First World War and the overthrow of the Kaiser, as an expression of anti-German sentiments. It was dominated by liberals and socialists who had put their names to what he saw as Germany's betrayal in the Treaty of Versailles. He found a willing listener in the judge, Georg Neithardt, who allowed him to speak at length from the dock, and meted out to him the remarkably lenient sentence of five years in 'fortress confinement', a form of punishment reserved for offenders who had acted from 'honourable' motives, such as duellists. Immediately after the failure of the putsch, Hitler had been plunged into a deep depression and gave serious thought to suicide. He even began a hunger strike in protest against his arrest and incarceration. But he pulled himself together with the help of his close political associates and wrote a lengthy defence of his actions for use in court. This formed the kernel of the far longer piece of writing that eventually became Mein Kampf. He was able to compose it because, under the astonishingly indulgent conditions of his sentence, he was allowed visitors – 325 of them altogether during his months of confinement. Some of them, notably Winifred Wagner, the English-born daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner, brought him reams of paper and writing materials, while his patron and tutor Helene Bechstein provided a typewriter. Meanwhile, his visitors supplied him with so much food that his cell was known in the prison as 'the delicatessen'. Hitler was a relatively uneducated man, and it used to be thought that he had dictated much of the text to his fellow inmate and slavish admirer Rudolf Hess, who had studied history and economics at the University of Munich. But in fact we now know that the writing was all Hitler's own work. His style was crude and unpolished, and the book is rambling, poorly structured and often difficult to follow. Its original title, which his publisher got him to drop in favour of the snappier Mein Kampf , was Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. Had he not followed his publisher's advice, the book might have sold fewer copies. As he worked on the book, continuing to write after his release on 20 December 1924, Hitler began to take it away from the original concept of an 'accounting' with the people he blamed for frustrating his attempt at a coup in 1923. Short of money, and keen to establish his political credentials as leader of the ultra right in Germany, he decided to publish the book in two volumes, of which the first, more autobiographical one, came out on 18 July 1925 and the second, more programmatical one, on 10 December 1926. Hess and his wife, Ilse, along with an editor at the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper, devoted many hours to correcting the many linguistic mistakes and infelicities in the script and the proofs. The Beer Hall Putsch and Hitler's subsequent trial for treason had transformed him from a local politician mainly known in Bavaria into a nationally notorious far-right agitator. But Mein Kampf was still fairly limited in its impact – hardly surprising, since the Nazis won less than 3 per cent of the vote in the national elections of 1928. Nevertheless, his newly acquired notoriety ensured that the first printing of volume one – 10,000 copies – was almost sold out by the end of 1925 and was quickly reprinted. Evidently readers were keen to know who Hitler was and where he came from. Lacking the autobiographical element, volume two did not do nearly so well. But a 'popular' one-volume edition published in 1930, at a time when the Nazis were rapidly gaining support, sold 228,000 copies by the end of 1932. By this time the party had risen to become the largest in the Reichstag, the national legislature. Appointed head of a national coalition government on 30 January 1933, Hitler intimidated and outmanoeuvered his conservative-nationalist coalition partners and established a one-party dictatorship by the summer of 1933. Mein Kampf now became a key symbol of the ruling Nazi Party. Although sales to the general public fell off sharply after the first months of the regime, the book sold some 12.5 million copies between its publication and the end of Hitler's self-styled 'Third Reich' in 1945. There were deluxe editions, a braille edition for blind readers, and an edition printed on especially thin paper for soldiers to carry with them when they went into battle to ensure they knew what, and whom, they were fighting for. Altogether, eight million copies were printed during the war. Symbolically, as Hitler began to redefine the war as a struggle for Western civilisation against the Bolshevik hordes, instead of a drive for Germany's world domination, he decreed that the book should be printed in a roman typeface instead of the previously employed gothic one, known as Fraktur and employed mainly in Germany. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Those unwilling or unable to afford the book could still borrow it from a public, high-school or university library. In the first two or three years of the Nazi dictatorship, libraries of all kinds bought multiple copies, though not so much in south Germany, where the Catholic Church and its institutions were in control of acquisitions. The few available statistics show in similar fashion that borrowing figures were highest at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship but then, like sales, fell off sharply. Many histories of Nazism lay considerable stress on the fact that under the Third Reich, a copy of Mein Kampf was supposed to be given to every pair of newlyweds upon their marriage, a custom originally established by the publisher to offload surplus copies because of disappointing sales. But many municipalities were too cash-strapped to afford to buy copies for this purpose, and by 1939 only about half of Germany's local authorities had actually purchased the book. Big cities such as Frankfurt, where there were no fewer than 7,000 marriages a year, told the publisher they could not afford it. How many of all these millions of copies were actually read? After the war, claims were widespread in Germany that most people who had bought or been given the book had not actually bothered to read it. Echoing these claims, historians outside Germany opined that if they had actually taken the trouble to peruse it, Germans would have been better equipped to prevent Hitler's rise to power. Whether this would actually have been the case may be doubted: after all, nearly two thirds of the German electorate still voted against the Nazis in free national elections in 1932. But even if they did not read the book from cover to cover, millions of Germans would have been made familiar with its contents through the extracts and quotations constantly presented to them by national and local newspapers and magazines. In December 1936, a secret report smuggled out of Germany to the exiled Social Democratic leadership in Prague concluded that among the educated classes people had read the passages dealing with 'the history of Hitler's youth, perhaps also in addition a few sections on the Jews, but nobody reads the whole book'. Nobody who knew anything about Mein Kampf during the Nazi years could doubt the virulence of Hitler's anti-Semitism. Here in full view was the grotesque and paranoid conspiracy theory that led Hitler to believe 'the Jew' – he always put the term in the singular, to emphasise his conviction that all Jews were driven by their racial character to act as a collective, spreading subversion and degeneracy wherever they lived – was to blame for all the ills and evils that beset the world, and especially Germany. Hitler refused to accept that Germany had lost the First World War militarily – it had fallen victim to a Jewish-led conspiracy of socialists on the home front, which had stabbed the army in the back (there was no truth in this allegation: German Jews had fought bravely on the front, and the army had been defeated on the battlefield, mainly by the rapidly growing superiority of the Western Allies in tanks). For Hitler, the Jews were 'vermin', 'plague bacilli', not human at all. 'If one had on some occasion at the start of the war,' he wrote in an oft-quoted passage in volume two, 'held twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew polluters of the people down under poison gas, like hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from all classes and professions in the army at the front had to suffer, then the millionfold sacrifices of the front would not have been in vain.' The Jews – in fact, even if defined by race rather than religion, less than 1 per cent of the German population – must at the very least be deprived of their rights as German citizens. More generally, Mein Kampf made it clear that democracy had to be destroyed and a dictatorship created under his leadership. Besides dealing with the Jews, he would introduce measures to 'purify' the German race by eugenic sterilisation of the 'unfit', and make extensive use of the death penalty to destroy any resistance to his rule. Germany, forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles from possessing an army of more than 100,000 men, along with combat aircraft and ships, would rearm and launch a second world war to reverse the defeat of the first one, conquering vast swathes of eastern Europe to provide 'living space', or, in other words, food and other resources for the German people. Yet Mein Kampf, however much it might seem to foreshadow Hitler's future actions in retrospect, was very far from being a blueprint for action. Many of its more programmatic statements were to be ignored by Hitler once he came to power, from raising the real wages of the workers to defending the federated states against the central authority in Berlin. In fact, Hitler was to abolish the federal system under which Germany was governed and create a centralised political authority far more powerful than anything that had come before. His promise to protect the workers fell victim to his all-consuming drive to rearm. Mein Kampf 's promise to create an alliance with 'England' remained unfulfilled. What emerged most clearly from the book's pages was Hitler's absolutism: decisions were 'unalterable', opponents would be 'annihilated', policies were 'unconditional'. The murderous hatred at the heart of Hitler's character was expressed in his unambiguous celebration of the unrestrained violence meted out by his stormtroopers to communist counter-demonstrators in the small Franconian town of Coburg the previous year. Nobody could be in any doubt about what would happen to German socialists and communists if he came to power, or to German Jews, to the mentally ill, to people with disabilities . Instead, the majority of Germans who belonged to other political parties thought the Nazis would calm down if they achieved power, as did politicians and statesmen in other countries. How wrong they were. After the war, Mein Kampf was regarded by the victorious Allies as a dangerous book capable of inspiring a revival of Nazism. It was removed from libraries and banned from going on sale. In Germany itself, the Bavarian government, which held the copyright, refused to allow any copying or reprinting of the book. When the copyright expired at the end of 2015, seven decades after the year of Hitler's death, an extreme right-wing publisher issued a new edition, though the book was officially classified as harmful to the young and liable to incite the masses. Munich's Institute for Contemporary History published a huge, two-volume annotated 'study edition' in which a team of scholars pointed out the book's many lies and distortions and identified the sources for many of Hitler's beliefs. In truth, however, the world in which the future Nazi leader lived and wrote has long disappeared. Anti-Semitism remains a conspiracy theory that fuels prejudice against Jews and carries with it a dismaying potential for violence, but its roots, and the causes of its current flourishing, lie above all in hostility to the State of Israel and the policies its current, right-wing extremist government, is deploying in Gaza and Iran, rather than a book published a century ago by a politician whose name has long been a byword for evil. Richard J Evans is regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge. His books include 'Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich' (Allen Lane) [See also: One year on, tensions still circle Britain's asylum-seeker hotels] Related
Economist
33 minutes ago
- Economist
The long-term effects of hunger in Gaza
FOR two weeks, the world has claimed it is working to end the widespread hunger in Gaza. The UN is pleading with Israel to allow more lorries of aid into the territory. Arab and Western states are airdropping food. On August 5th Donald Trump said America would take a larger role in distributing aid, though he was vague about the details. 'I know Israel is going to help us with that in terms of distribution, and also money,' he said. Yet on the ground, Gazans say little has changed. There is not enough food entering Gaza, nor is there law and order to allow its distribution. Airdrops are hard to reach. Convoys are looted soon after they cross the border. Finding food often requires making a risky trip to an aid centre, where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in recent months, or paying exorbitant sums on the black market. This is a calamity in its own right, one that will have long-term consequences for many Gazans, particularly children. But it is also a glimpse of Gaza's future. Even after the war ends, it will remain at the mercy of others for years to come. Wedged between Israel and Egypt, the tiny territory was never self-sufficient. Its neighbours imposed an embargo after Hamas, a militant group, took power in 2007. The economy withered. Half of the workforce in the strip was unemployed and more than 60% of the population relied on some form of foreign aid to survive. The UN doled out cash assistance, ran a network of clinics that offered 3.5m consultations a year and operated schools that educated some 300,000 children. Still, Gaza could meet at least some basic needs by itself. Two-fifths of its territory was farmland that supplied enough dairy, poultry, eggs and fruits and vegetables to meet most local demand. Small factories produced everything from packaged food to furniture. The Hamas-run government was inept, but it provided law and order. After nearly two years of war, almost none of that remains. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says that Gaza's 2m people need 62,000 tonnes of food a month. That is a bare-bones calculation: it would provide enough staple foods but no meat, fruits and vegetables or other perishables. By its own tally, Israel has allowed far less in. It imposed a total siege on the territory from March 2nd until May 19th, with no food permitted to enter. Then Israel allowed the UN to resume limited aid deliveries to northern Gaza. It also helped establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy outfit that distributes food at four points in southern and central Gaza. In more than two months of operation, it has handed out less than 0.7 meals per Gazan per day—and that assumes each box of aid, stocked with a hotch-potch of dried and canned goods, really provides as many meals as the GHF claims it does. All told, Israel permitted 98,674 tonnes of food aid to cross the border in the five months through July, an average of 19,734 tonnes a month—just 32% of what the WFP says is necessary. Although the volume of aid has increased in recent days, it is still insufficient. 'We're trying to get 80 to 100 trucks in, every single day,' says Valerie Guarnieri of the WFP. 'It's not a high bar, but a realistic bar of what we can achieve.' On August 4th, though, Israel allowed only 41 of the agency's lorries to enter a staging area on the Gaza border, and it let drivers collect just 29 of them. Getting into Gaza is only the first challenge. Distribution is a nightmare. Since May 19th the UN has collected 2,604 lorryloads of aid from Gaza's borders. Just 300 reached their intended destination. The rest were intercepted en route, either by desperate civilians or by armed men. Aid workers are nonchalant about civilians raiding aid lorries, which they euphemistically call 'self-distribution': they reckon the food still reaches people who need it. 'There's a real crescendo of desperation,' says Ms Guarnieri. 'People have no confidence food is going to come the next day.' But the roaring black market suggests that much of it is stolen. Gaza's chamber of commerce publishes a regular survey of food prices (see chart). A 25kg sack of flour, which cost 35 shekels ($10) before the war, went for 625 shekels on August 5th. A kilo of tomatoes fetched 100 shekels, 50 times its pre-war value. Such prices are far beyond the reach of most Gazans. Those with a bit of money often haggle for tiny quantities: a shopper might bring home a single potato for his family, for example. Israel's ostensible goal in throttling the supply of aid was to prevent Hamas from pilfering any of it. Earlier this month the group released a propaganda video of Evyatar David, an Israeli hostage still held in Gaza. He was emaciated, and spent much of the video recounting how little he had to eat: a few lentils or beans one day, nothing the next. At one point a militant handed Mr David a can of beans from behind the camera. Many viewers noted that the captor's hand looked rather chubby. As much of Gaza starves, Hamas, it seems, is still managing to feed its fighters. The consequences of Israel's policy instead fall hardest on children—sometimes even before birth. 'One in three pregnancies are now high-risk. One in five babies that we've seen are born premature or underweight,' says Leila Baker of the UN's family-planning agency. Compare that with before the war, when 8% of Gazan babies were born underweight (at less than 2.5kg). There were 222 stillbirths between January and June, a ten-fold increase from levels seen before the war. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed outfit that tracks hunger, said last month that 20,000 children were hospitalised for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July. Even before they reach that point, their immune systems crumble. Moderately malnourished children catch infections far more easily than well-fed ones, and become more seriously ill when they do, rapidly losing body weight. The body takes a 'big hit' when food intake falls to just 70-80% of normal, says Marko Kerac, a paediatrician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who has treated children in famine-stricken places. Most children in Gaza are eating a lot less than that. In July the World Health Organisation reported an outbreak of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that may have links to hunger. Gaza's health ministry says cases are multiplying, including among children. Give us our daily bread Nor is calorie intake the only concern. Although flour and salt in Gaza are fortified with some vitamins and minerals, such as iodine, they are consumed in limited amounts—especially now, since many bakeries have been closed for months, owing to a lack of flour and fuel. In February, during the ceasefire, Israel allowed 15,000 tonnes of fruits and vegetables and 11,000 tonnes of meat and fish into Gaza. Since March it has allowed just 136 tonnes of meat. All of this means there is widespread deficiency of essential nutrients that help children's brains develop. Every child in Gaza, in other words, will remain at lifelong risk of poor health because of today's malnutrition. There is consistent evidence for this from studies of populations that have lived through famine: during the second world war, the 1960s famine in China and, more recently, places like Ethiopia. Children who have suffered acute malnourishment have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic diseases as adults. They are also at risk of worse cognitive development. A flood of aid cannot undo the damage, but it can prevent it from getting worse. It will have to be sustained. The devastation wrought by Israel's war has left Gazans with no alternative but to rely on aid. In February the UN estimated that the war had caused $30bn in physical damage and $19bn in economic disruption, including lost labour, forgone income and increased costs. Reconstruction would require $53bn. At this point, that is little more than a guess. The real cost is impossible to calculate. But it will be enormous. The first task will be simply clearing the rubble. A UN assessment in April, based on satellite imagery, estimated that there were 53m tonnes of rubble strewn across Gaza—30 times as much debris as was removed from Manhattan after the September 11th attacks. Clearing it could be the work of decades. The seven-week war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, the longest and deadliest before the current one, produced 2.5m tonnes of debris. It took two years to remove. Rebuilding a productive economy will be no less difficult. Take agriculture. The UN's agriculture agency says that 80% of Gaza's farmland and 84% of its greenhouses have been damaged in the war. Livestock have been all but wiped out. A satellite assessment last summer found that 68% of Gaza's roads had been damaged (that figure is no doubt higher today). The two main north-south roads—one along the coast, the other farther inland—are both impassable in places. Even if farmers can start planting crops for small harvests after the war, it will be hard to bring their produce to market. The picture is equally bleak in other sectors: schools, hospitals and factories have all been largely reduced to rubble. The Geneva Conventions are clear that civilians have the right to flee a war zone. Exercising that right in Gaza is fraught: Palestinians have a well-grounded fear that Israel will never allow them to return. Powerful members of Binyamin Netanyahu's government do not hide their desire to ethnically cleanse the territory and rebuild the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. Still, the dire conditions have led some people to think the unthinkable: a survey conducted in May by a leading Palestinian pollster found that 43% of Gazans are willing to emigrate at the end of the war. Mr Netanyahu may not follow through on his talk of reoccupying Gaza, which he hinted at in media leaks earlier this month. His far-right allies may not fulfil their dream of rebuilding the Jewish settlements dismantled in 2005. In a sense, though, the ideologues in his cabinet have already achieved their goal. Israel's conduct of the war has left Gazans with a grim choice: leave the territory, or remain in a place rendered all but uninhabitable. ■
