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14 October, 2023

Palestinians with a blacked-out portrait of Deif in 2014. Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty

The phantom commander of Gaza City

Last weekend’s appalling attacks were masterminded by one man, says Mehul Srivastava in the FT. The supreme military commander of Hamas goes by the nom de guerre Mohammed “Deif”, or “Guest”, because he sleeps in the home of a different sympathiser every night to evade Israeli intelligence. Which makes sense – they’ve been hunting him for decades, and almost killed him 20 years ago in an airstrike that blew off an arm and a leg and left him in a wheelchair. Those who knew him before he vanished into the shadows of Palestinian militancy recall a “quiet, intense man”, utterly single-minded about the Arab-Israeli conflict and “using violence as a means to end it”. Only one grainy photograph of him exists in the public domain. 

Deif was with Hamas from the start, studying under the bombmaker Yahya Ayyash, known as the “Engineer”, who was assassinated by Israel in 1996 using a mobile phone packed with explosives. Around that time, the terrorist group was carrying out a wave of suicide bombings to try to derail the Oslo Accords – Israel holds Deif responsible for the deaths of dozens of people in these attacks, including 50 in 1996 alone. He was the architect of the decades-long programme to dig a network of tunnels under Gaza, and involved in the creation of the first rudimentary rockets. A fighter-turned-politician who knew Deif in the early 2000s remembers his logic: “You should fight the Israelis inside Israel and demolish their fantasy that they can be safe in occupied land.” The mass raid in the early hours of Saturday has taken Deif’s lifelong campaign against the Jewish state to a “brutal and unpredictable new level”.

The Chiltern Hills: racist? Getty

Villain

The British countryside, for being racist. That’s according to Haroon Mota, the founder of a hiking group for UK Muslims, who says non-white visitors face “barriers” when they try to visit rural areas. It’s possibly “just a sign of my white privilege”, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, but I can’t for the life of me work out what these barriers are. Does he mean fences, or drystone walls? “If so, the good news is that they aren’t insurmountable. There’s usually a gate, or a stile.” 

Hero

Louis Robinett, a nine-year-old from Dorset who has set a new 5km park run world record for his age group. The speedy youngster shaved 13 seconds off the previous top time, set in California six years ago, finishing in 17min 40sec.

Hero

James Milward, a Surrey IT expert who got so tired of foxes and badgers fouling his garden that he created an automated system which identifies the unwanted visitors and pings out high frequency sounds to scare them away. Milward tells the BBC he knows it “sounds crazy”, but that his gadget, which he calls the Furbinator 3000, keeps his lawn clean enough for his children to play on.

Villain

The French, for their absurd over-reaction to a bedbug outbreak. Newspapers have obsessed over the supposed crisis, and Mathilde Panot told her fellow MPs it had “turned the lives of millions of our infested citizens into a nightmare”. But it’s a big fuss over nothing, says The New York Times. Numbers of the blood-sucking pests are only “modestly” higher than usual in Paris, and as many as two-thirds of calls to pest control are from people mis-identifying other bugs.

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Julie Andrews: best of British. GAB Archive/Redferns

Fry-ups, crumpets, and the essence of Britain

My nine-year-old daughter, who lives in Italy with her mother, has arrived in England for the first time since she was a baby, says Robin Ashenden in The Spectator. I have a week to enthuse her about all things English. “But where do I start?” Sunday lunch, obviously, and a fry-up. Crumpets with honey, anything with jam. Then there’s the world of English chocolate. Mars bars and Bounties are global, but she’s never tried Revels or peppermint Aeros or Crunchie bars. These are things I want to pass on, “far more than the music of Elgar or the designs of William Morris”.

In London, I suppose we’ll have to do open-top buses, Beefeaters, the Changing of the Guard and the Natural History Museum. We’ll take a walk down Burlington Arcade and up Jermyn Street – “that retail museum of classic English style” – and in between, the “unavoidable reek and grind of London” will teach her a little about capital life. Harder to communicate are the “actual textures of Britishness” that evade description. “Knowing who Victoria Wood or Julie Andrews are”, for instance, or the pleasures of washing up while listening to Desert Island Discs. How to explain that James McAvoy is to be commended, and James Corden deplored? What I really ought to show her is a crowded Tube that grinds to a half-hour halt, a cyclist careening along a pavement, and an XL bully dog. There’s usually an abyss between the life we dream of and the one we get. “I shall just have to warn her to Mind the Gap.”

A big 007 fan: JFK in 1963

The James Bond books have long been derided by intellectuals, says Max Hastings in Bloomberg. Even Ian Fleming’s wife regarded them with contempt. But there’s one place where they have always found favour: the White House. John F Kennedy named From Russia With Love as one of his favourite books. George W Bush and Donald Trump have both “invoked 007 with enthusiasm”. Perhaps the most effusive was Ronald Reagan, who said: “James Bond is a man of honour. Maybe it sounds old-fashioned, but I believe he’s a symbol of real value to the Free World.” 

Feeney: donated $8bn to charitable causes. The Atlantic Philanthropies

The anonymous billionaire who gave it all away

At some point in the 1980s, Charles Feeney began feeling troubled by his “opulent life”, says The New York Times. The American entrepreneur had made billions from his duty-free business, and owned “palatial homes” in New York, London, Paris, Honolulu and elsewhere. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t deserve it. “I just reached the conclusion,” he said, “that money, buying boats and all the trimmings didn’t appeal to me.” So he decided to give it all away. Over the next 35 years, Feeney donated almost the entirety of his $8bn fortune to a vast range of charitable causes around the world, from universities and medical institutions to human rights groups and peace initiatives. Not only that, but he did it all anonymously. Beneficiaries were told the cash came from a generous “client”; those who learned of his identity were sworn to secrecy. 

Feeney, who has died aged 92, did make what he called “decent but unextravagant” provisions for his five children, and kept around $2m for himself. But he adopted a deeply thrifty lifestyle. He flew economy and travelled by bus or subway, bought his clothes off the rack, and stopped eating at fancy restaurants. He and his second wife “lived in a modest rented apartment in San Francisco”. In 2016, with a $7m donation to his alma mater, Cornell University, Feeney officially emptied the account of his philanthropic organisation. “I cannot think of a more personally rewarding and appropriate use of wealth,” he said, than to “devote oneself to meaningful efforts to improve the human condition”.

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Joanna Lumley in 1986. Michael Ward/Getty

“The piranha-infested waters of publishing”

Even many “literary buffs” hadn’t heard of Jon Fosse when he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature last month, says The Economist. He writes mainly in Nynorsk, a language used by around 10% of Norwegians, and his best-known work, Septology, proudly touts itself as a “radically other” reading experience. But the Nobel committee is used to criticism. The list of top writers who were never even nominated for the prize, let alone awarded it, includes Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. In its very first year, in 1901, the prize went not to Leo Tolstoy but to the French poet Sully Prudhomme, “a name as underwhelming then as it is now”.

This is because the judging process is, frankly, a “nonsense”. The winner is selected from all living authors, “writing in every language in the world” – all 7,000 of them. Judges are given just two months to whittle a shortlist of 200 down to a winner. And they must somehow adjudicate between vastly different types of work: “a book on the Sri Lankan civil war here and the inward musings of a middle-class American woman there”. But the biggest problem, as with any book prize, is getting the group to settle on a winner. After judging the Booker, Joanna Lumley said the “so-called bitchy world of acting” was a “tea party compared with the piranha-infested waters of publishing”.

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”

Oscar Wilde

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