The Current Issue

February 2023, Issue 515 Jonathan Sumption on the British Empire * Jeffrey Wasserstrom on China's Cultural Revolution * Michael Burleigh on iPhones and Privacy * Lucy Lethbridge on Katherine Mansfield * Alberto Manguel on Italo Calvino * Caroline Moorehead on women writers during the Spanish Civil War * Mark Cornwall on Józef Piłsudski * Colin Thubron on following Chekhov down the Amur * Adrian Nathan West on gun violence in the USA * Tiffany Jenkins on the demise of museums * Sean O'Brien on Seamus Heaney's translations * Ian Critchley on Salman Rushdie * Keith Miller on Bret Easton Ellis * Suzi Feay on Don Paterson *  and much, much more…

Michael Burleigh

Spies in our Pockets

One of the least noticed gambits of Liz Truss’s spells as international trade secretary and then foreign secretary in 2019–22 was her quest for a free-trade agreement with Israel. It was to be as asymmetrical as most of the trade deals agreed since Brexit. Truss was prepared to move the UK embassy to Jerusalem – putting the UK in the select company of Guatemala, Honduras and Trump’s USA – and to ‘revisit’ the two-state solution. Rishi Sunak has since ditched these reckless proposals. The main prizes for the UK were to be joint ventures in defence and cyber warfare. Although a very small nation, Israel is among the leading powers in cyber technology, along with China, Russia, the USA and the UK. Israel’s main tech hub in Herzliya receives one fifth of global private investment in cybersecurity, from such firms as Cisco, IBM and Qualcomm, among others... read more

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