INTRODUCTION In October 1947, two weeks before the vote on UN Resolution 181, the Revisionist Zionist headquarters in Paris approached the religious Zionist Mizrahi movement, the General Zionists, the Marxists of Hashomer Hatzair, and Ahdut Ha’avodah to form an anti-partition front.1 This willingness by Arieh Altman’s Revisionists to cultivate their deadly enemies on the Left … Read more
Tel Aviv was founded on the second day of Passover, 1909. A crowd famously gathered on the dunes on April 11 and dreamed of the rise of an ir metropolinit — a modern Hebrew metropolis. The new white city, inhabited by “the new Jew”, was established to be as far removed from the religiosity and … Read more
A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, by Gudrun Kramer, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, xiii þ 357 pp., ISBN 978-0-691-11897-0 This work is an overview of the history of Palestine up to 1948. The author, Gudrun Kra¨mer, a distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies in Berlin, … Read more
The Amnesty report (Suspend military aid to Israel, Amnesty urges, 23 February) goes into great detail about the US and European sources of arms to Israel. Its research into arms supplies to Hamas is, by contrast, brief and sketchy. It says therefore that such weaponry has been acquired from “clandestine sources”. Israel’s suppliers are clearly … Read more
The general election in Israel on 10 February 2009 produced a move to the political right, likely to be capped by the formation of a new governing coalition under Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud. In the perspective of Israel’s history, however, there are losers as well as winners among the established forces on this side of the … Read more
The student union at the School of Oriental and African Studies has passed a motion demanding the cancellation of a lecture series celebrating Tel Aviv’s centenary. The Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS has been hosting the bimonthly lecture series in conjunction with Tel Aviv University since the start of term. The students are calling … Read more
Why the silence over attacks on Israeli campuses? A few days before Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union (UCU), spoke at the demonstration for Palestine earlier this month, my colleagues and I – the Israeli and Jewish studies staff at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) – put out … Read more
Tel Aviv was founded on 11 April 1909 (20 Nissan 5669) as a city of rebellion. It was a reaction to the misery and deprivation of the East European shtetl. It was a desire to improve living conditions for the Jews of nearby Jaffa and to liberate them from Arab slumlords. It was a break … Read more
Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography Anita Shapira. Translated by Evelyn Abel University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, Pp.385, £32.50, ISBN 978-08122-4028-3 Following the sudden demise of Yigal Allon in February 1980, a draft outline for the beginning of an autobiography was discovered in his papers. In the intervening period, Allon’s image has become more complex, … Read more