Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship By Martin Gilbert Henry Holt 359 pages; $30 Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft By Michael Makovsky Yale University Press 342 pages; $35 In 2002, the BBC ran a phone-in competition to discover who was the greatest Briton of all time. Nearly half a million people voted for … Read more
The Zionist leadership was incredibly pessimistic in the spring of 1947 that the handing over of responsibility of the Palestine question to the United Nations would bring any sort of positive results. If it eventually came to a vote, the British were confident that the Zionists would fail dismally to achieve a two thirds … Read more
A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism by Yakov M. Rabkin, published by Zed Press There is a tradition of Jewish opposition to Zionism, but this book only deals with a section of it. There is a difference between Jewish opposition which includes sections of the Left and Judaic opposition – … Read more
Mousa Abu Marzook’s positive comment that Hamas welcomes dialogue seems to apply only to external political figures and journalists, not the Israeli peace camp (Comment, August 16). This is in contrast to the PLO, which assiduously cultivated first non-Zionist, then Zionist adherents of the Israeli left. A year ago Gush Shalom predicted an imminent meeting … Read more
As reader in Israeli studies at Soas, University of London, I teach the Israel-Palestine conflict to large classes that include Palestinians, Israelis, Jews and Muslims. I do this without any difficulties in the multicultural environment at Soas, and I work hard for all my students. I am also a loyal trade unionist. While my union, … Read more
Brian Klug is highly selective in his choice of Jewish communal figures to bolster his argument. Many left wing Jewish academics and writers, such as Norman Geras and Howard Jacobson, opposed the initiative of Independent Jewish Voices. They were never approached to sign the IJV letter probably because they did not distance themselves sufficiently from … Read more
With the fog of publicity lifting, it is still difficult to know what Independent Jewish Voices actually stands for. Its advocacy in support of the universality of human rights, condemnation of racism and a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians is not exactly revolutionary. It is certainly not new. The political innocence of its open … Read more
Zionism has, in recent years, become an increasingly pejorative term. It was, for example, unremarkable for Alexei Sayle to write in the Independent: “If the Zionists wanted a homeland, why didn’t they take a piece of Germany? The answer is, of course, that Arabs, then and now, were not considered fully human by the … Read more
The Reflection of Israel within British Jewry A Special Role British Jewry has played a unique role in the often ambivalent relationship between Britain and Israel. Sometimes it has been characterised as an emboldened advocate for Zionism during the Atlee government during the late1940s. On other occasions, it has been seen as an … Read more