Leon Trotsky once remarked that those who wanted a quiet life were unfortunate to have been born in the twentieth century. Those with a sense of history—a defining characteristic of the JeW’ish people—would certainly nod in agreement and remember the events of the past hundred years. The purveyors of popular entertainment in Britain will help … Read more
The PLO in the World Order Avraham Sela and Moshe Ma’oz (eds), The PLO and Israel: From Armed Conflict to Political Solution 1964-1994. London: Macmillan, 1997. Pp.x + 310, index. £30 (cloth). ISBN 0-333-72370-8. Roland Dannreuther, The Soviet Union and the PLO. London: Macmillan, 1998. Pp.ix + 222, index, biblio. £45 (cloth). ISBN 0-312-17223-0. … Read more
The last Rosh Hashanah before the millennium will no doubt be the occasion for passionate exhortations in synagogues around the world. Rabbis will in all likelihood circumvent the difficult linkage between a Jewish festival and a Christian happening and appeal to their congregants to reflect on the passage of Jews and Judaism through 1,800 years … Read more
Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin by Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman 292pp, (Granta)13.99. On November 4, 1995, at the end of a jubilant rally for peace, Yigal Amir, a religious student, pumped two bullets into Yitzhak Rabin and a third into his bodyguard.The shots ruptured his spleen, severed … Read more
Two demonstrations recently took place in Israel. One of these, ostensibly a prayer meeting, brought together a quarter of a million Jews—a mixture of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist haredim—onto the streets of Jerusalem to protest against the rulings, and raison d’etre, of Israel’s Supreme Court. Yeshiva students were told that it was ‘an obligation’ to be … Read more
The State of Israel and the Land of Israel One of the more interesting manifestations of the 1999 election campaign in Israel is the unraveling of the grand coalition which Menachem Begin assembled and coalesced as the Likud in 1973. It was based on Begin’s shrewd capitalising on the deep antagonism which many groups-—religious, Sephardim, the underclass, the far right–felt towards an indolent … Read more
Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag (Simon and Schuster) by Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson The Israeli critic, Dov Sadan, symbolised the 20th-century experience as the nations of the world crowded together in a room. The Jews were squeezed in at a coiner of a table, but in the centre of the room. … Read more