Review of The Thirty Year Genocide, by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi This remarkable book by two eminent Israeli historians recalls the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire by the Turks during the First World War and places it in the wider context of how the Turks treated their ethnic minorities. The authors remark … Read more
Eighty years ago, on 1 September 1939, German troops crossed the Polish frontier and ignited a conflagration that claimed the lives of tens of millions of innocents. This descent into the jaws of destruction has been impregnated on our collective memory by the imagery of gleeful Nazis raising the border post in order to enter … Read more
Seventy Five years ago, on 26 August 1944, General Charles de Gaulle walked triumphantly down the Champs-Elysées, engulfed by a sea of jubilant Parisians. The capital had been liberated from the Nazi oppressor, but France was yet to be free. The road from D-Day in June 1944 had been long and tortuous. The original plan … Read more
https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/what-is-zionism-a-very-brief-history/p07hk4yc?playlist=the-a-z-of-isms
Review of Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, published by Harvard University Press, pp.354 In August 2017, white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting ‘Jews will not replace us!’ They espoused a depressing, if familiar world view: that it is Jews who control the banks and the media, imposing their morality … Read more
The final results of the Israeli election showed that the Likud failed to emerge as the largest party, but that its leader Benjamin Netanyahu took one more recommendation from MKs as their preferred prime minister than Benny Gantz’s centrists. Though appointed on Wednesday by President Reuven Rivlin to form the next coalition, Mr Netanyahu is in a … Read more
The reaction of the Labour party to the Panorama programme reflects the desire of the Corbynista elite to pull up the ideological drawbridge and, in true Leninist fashion, not to cede any concession to their critics. Following the student protests of the 1960s, a small group on the far left within the Labour party including Jeremy Corbyn … Read more
One hundred years ago, on 28 June 1919, the victorious powers in the First World War signed the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. It was followed by treaties with Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey — the defeated powers in a conflict in which millions lost their lives. The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was supposed … Read more
Review of Susie Linfield’s The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky Published by Yale University Press, 2019, pp.389 Many who write about the international Left tend to focus on antisemitism rather than anti-Zionism. US academic and journalist Susan Linfield remedies this imbalance in The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the … Read more
The Charedi refusal to serve in the IDF — the stumbling block in Netanyahu’s inability to form a governing coalition — is rooted in an ideological opposition to Zionism and a reticence to come to terms with modernity. It was the combination of the French Revolution and the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, that fragmented a hitherto … Read more