More in ‘Britain’

What do you call a person who is perennially described as “dour” on the day that he resigns? Labour Leader Former Labour leader Gordon Brown cried “Uncle!” today, paving the way for the Conservatives to control the British government, and for Tory leader David Cameron to become the first non-Labour prime minister since 1997. The ...

Guardian columnist Geoffrey Alderman recalls researching a textbook on the British electoral system in the 1970s and being stonewalled by “an organisation calling itself the Board of Deputies of British Jews”: “I was ordered—repeat ordered—to cease forthwith my investigation of Jewish voting habits. Jews, I was told, voted just like everyone else. … There was, ...

Britain has a long and ignoble tradition of literary anti-Semitism, featuring such anti-heroes as Shylock, Fagin, and Svengali. When I first studied The Merchant of Venice in class, at the age of 12, I took against the play strongly, largely on account of the treatment of Shylock. I don’t think I was vividly aware either ...

To many prospective visitors to Israel it may seem like a technicality that the Western Wall is located in the disputed territory of East Jerusalem. Not so to the British Advertising Standard Agency, which has banned the holy site from an Israeli tourism ad in the UK, calling it “misleading.” And while the Brits are ...

• It looks like indirect peace talks, with U.S. envoy George Mitchell shuttling rapidly between the Israelis and Palestinians in hopes of getting them in the same room, are on, since the Arab League gave its blessing. [LAT]
• The United States drew up new proposed sanctions that would target Iran’s banking, shipping, and insurance. [NYT]
• ...

If you have not been following this exciting story, I wrote a catch-up today for the magazine: do check out. I’ll also be updating it as news that fits it breaks.
As for what’s happened since then …
The big news today was that we finally learned how exactly Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh died: he was ...

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas weapons procurer who played a crucial role facilitating arms shipments from Iran to Gaza, was murdered in his Dubai hotel room on the night of January 19. Dubai police claim the assassination was a Mossad operation—the list of suspects now numbers 26—and basically all reporting agrees with that assessment. But there ...

• Columnist Bradley Burston has an enraged must-read:
What the far-left from Britain to Berkeley has been been unable to bring off—a sense among Israel’s allies that Israel has become a heartless, morally heedless aggressor state worthy of sanction and shunning—the far-right in Israel’s own government, and in particular, its Foreign Ministry, seems determined to inculcate ...

• Because six of the 11 suspects in the Dubai assassination of Hamas’s top weapons procurer carried forged British passports with real Israelis’ names, Israeli attention turned to the prospect that Mossad was indeed involved. (We’ll have more on this later today.) [WP]
• The assassination has become the top tabloid story in Israel, with many ...

Yesterday, at the Oxford Union (at the eponymous British university), Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon—an especially controversial figure, most recently for his deliberate humiliation of Turkey’s ambassador—was the target of shouts of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Itbah Al-Yahud,” which means, “Slaughter the Jews.”
On the other hand, at ...