The Monocle Minute

A sense of unease has washed over Israel as fearsome as the unseasonably cold winter storms now crashing on its Mediterranean shores. Just over halfway into the country’s fragile, six-week truce with Hamas to halt the fighting in Gaza, the Islamist terrorist group has announced that it will “suspend” the release of additional Israeli hostages outlined in the ceasefire framework.

Beyond this latest round of Israeli-Hamas tit-for-tat is the deeper uncertainty caused by Donald Trump, who last week stunned the world with his plan for the US to take control of Gaza and send its two million residents packing. Among Israelis, Trump’s scheme has elicited both derision and applause. There’s unease on the streets about this latest injection of political uncertainty but also a feeling that change is overdue and necessary to end the fighting in Gaza.

This is my third visit to Israel since the Hamas attack two Octobers ago and the country continues to evolve to accommodate the new normal. In the past week, Israeli airline Arkia launched a new direct service between Tel Aviv and New York to combat the surging cost of travel to the US and the draining economic effect of American carriers scrapping scheduled flights to the country. The resumption of United Airlines flights, however, is still a month away and Delta Airlines won’t recommence its service until April, meaning that Israel remains relatively isolated from the global economy on which its technology sector is so dependent. If the ceasefire falls apart, the US carriers will almost certainly cancel those services, further hurting Israel’s economy, which contracted markedly in 2024 after decades of robust growth.

As the country prepares for a weekend when three more hostages are supposed to return home, the talk has now shifted to a return to fighting. If Hamas doesn’t turn over those hostages, Israel could pursue a ruthless punishment programme that would cause even more suffering for millions of Palestinians. Trump might be signalling his support for such manoeuvres but the global community and much of the Israeli public are unlikely to be so sanguine. Such uncertainty could ultimately have the most detrimental effect on Israel, deterring foreign investment as much as foreign airlines and sending the economy into a serious chill, if not a freeze. Israel is already contending with its rising cultural-pariah status. Even during wartime, extending this to its exports could prove one blow too many.

David Christopher Kaufman is an editor and columnist at the ‘New York Post’. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Monocle’s editor in chief, Andrew Tuck, has been busy hosting onstage panels at the World Governments Summit in Dubai. Meanwhile, our radio and café team have been striking up conversations on air and over coffee. Here are a few key insights our editors have gleaned from the summit so far.

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The effect of AI is a key theme, especially how it’s upending industries. But the president of the IMD business school in Lausanne, David Bach, told us that we all need to pace ourselves. “People tend to overestimate the effect that new technology will have in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long term,” he said. In short, it’s coming but you have time to get your water wings on.

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Coffee is a great connector. We not only have a Monocle Radio studio at the World Governments Summit but also a Monocle Café. On the first full day, our Swiss café team served more than 1,000 cups of our delicious brew and a mountain of cardamom buns. Our editor in chief might have had six of those.

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Gillian Tans, former CEO of Booking.com and investor in hospitality tech, came by Monocle Radio to talk about the future of the sector. She pointed out that there were 1.4 billion tourism arrivals in 2024 – and that number will grow. So management of the industry – through technology – is going to be vital.

4
Soumitra Dutta, dean of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, recorded an interview for Monocle Radio that corrected some of the tech hyperbole. “AI, technology, [it] never democratises,” he warned. “It makes inequalities greater.” But rather than turning our backs, Dutta insisted that we need to change that narrative.

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Meanwhile, our head of radio, Tom Edwards, is hoping to book a ticket on Regent’s upcoming Viceroy vehicle: an electric sea-glider that flies just above the water’s surface “like a pelican”, in the words of company founder, Billy Thalheimer. Tom is hoping the bill isn’t pelican-like too.

To hear all about the World Governments Summit, tune in to Monocle Radio all week.

It is a reasonable supposition that most of those attending Munich Security Conference (MSC), which begins this Friday, would have preferred that November’s US presidential election had furnished a different result (writes Andrew Mueller). But however bleak their expectations, few would have anticipated having to spend the first MSC of Donald Trump’s second term discussing how best to defend Canada and Greenland, or how to prevent Gaza from being rebuilt as the Mediterranean’s answer to Fort Lauderdale.

The US representation at MSC will be led by vice-president JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio. Both can probably expect a chilly reception, at least behind closed doors: the transatlantic relationship just about remains in a place where Europe finds it expedient to pretend – not least to itself – that it still regards the US as a wholly reliable partner. Probably about the best anybody can realistically hope for is that they can go home with a slightly clearer idea of what detail might lie behind Trump’s gnomic pronouncements on Ukraine, Gaza and other matters.

The team from Monocle Radio’s The Foreign Desk will be attending for the third year running. We look forward to resuming discussions with what promises to be a bulging schedule of presidents, prime ministers, ambassadors and generals. Attention please.

Portugal’s tourism industry is having a moment in the sun: a record 30 million people visited the country in 2024 (writes Carlota Rebelo). Projections show that the country is on course to exceed those figures in 2025 and local authorities are putting measures in place to ensure that the influx doesn’t negatively affect quality of life.

From 1 April, Lisbon will ban motorised tuk-tuks (the three-wheeled vehicles) in a bit to reduce street congestion in much of its historic centre – hopefully the mayor of London takes note too. Public transit operator Carris will also launch a test programme that introduces separate queues for tourists and residents on the city’s historic trams and funiculars. Locals complain that they have to scramble to find a seat among the crowds. While tourism has been a boon for Portugal’s coffers, it’s still trying to find the sweet spot between seizing the moment and preserving its charm. Boa viagem!

We recap the recent Stockholm Design Week. Plus: Zona Maco Diseño in Mexico City.