Moshe Levinger, who died last week, was the symbolic initiator of the settlement drive in the West Bank, following Israel’s lightning victory in six days in 1967. With some of his students, reputedly posing as Swiss tourists wishing to hold a Pesach Seder, he booked in at a Hebron hotel in April 1968 – and … Read more
Saved: Jews who had survived the Nazis in Europe were brought in huge ships to Britain to begin new lives Seventy years ago this week, on May 8 1945, many British Jews said the shehechayanu blessing to give thanks that they had survived to see that day. It was Victory in Europe Day, which marked … Read more
Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron by Menachem Klein (Hurst and Co London) 336 pp THE TITLE of this book, Lives in Common, was truer of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs before 1948 – when the state of Israel was established – than today, Indeed the notion has been replaced … Read more
Last week saw the passing of two former Soviet Jewish refuseniks, Vladimir Slepak and Vladimir Prestin, who were not permitted to leave the USSR for almost 20 years. It was only when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that the gates were finally opened for a small group of long-term Moscow activists. Slepak and … Read more
Red Notice: A True Stroy of High Finance, Murder and One man’s Fight for Justice By Bill Browder Bantam Press (London 2015) 374 pages During the 1990s, international capitalism discovered the dysfunctional society of post-Communist Russia. Privatization offered Western investors the opportunity of unheard of profits in hitherto unknown territory. In Russia itself die-hard … Read more
Nazi Germany and the Arab World What if Monty had lost in the Middle East? By Colin Shindler, April 8, 2015 Meeting of malevolent minds: Mufti and Hitler in 1941 By Francis R. Nicosia Cambridge University Press, £60 What would have happened if Montgomery had lost at El Alamein and Hitler had defeated the Soviet … Read more
Jews and the Left::The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance by Philip Mendes PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2014 As an accidental Jew, Will Self first ‘resigned as a Jew’ during the Second Lebanon war in 2006. In Self’s recent Guardian review of Shlomo Sand’s How I stopped being a Jew, he again resigned his … Read more
Disturbing rise of the far right Jewish settlers collect stones to build a structure as they attempt to establish an unauthorised outpost at the hill of Eitam Israeli election campaigns are nowadays characterised by the breast-beating of an array of right-wing parties, each vying with their rivals in proclaiming their undiluted patriotism. They have become … Read more
Some British Jews believe that London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies is a den of anti-Semitic iniquity. Some British Trotskyites believe that it is the center of the Zionist conspiracy. Both caricatures exist at one and the same time. Both are false. SOAS, however, is unusual in London colleges in that its firstclass … Read more
The Qatari-owned website Al Araby proudly proclaimed that “SOAS becomes the first UK university to boycott Israel”. This was patently untrue. It was not “SOAS” the institution that voted – not the governing body, not the administration, not even formally the lecturers’ union, but an invented “SOAS community”. Anyone could vote who wanted to – … Read more