When the existence of a European Association of Israel Studies (EAIS) was first publicized a decade ago, many believed that it was merely a front for advocacy and that the discipline was an invented one. The last ten years have borne testimony instead to a profound intellectual endeavour that indicates Israel Studies is an area … Read more
THE RECENT CONFLAGRATION between Israel and Islamists in Gaza follows a depressingly, familiar pattern. It begins with a spark, deliberate or unintentional, and expands to rockets and warplanes. The international media presents a balanced view at first, which depicts the tragedies and sufferings of both sides. Israel’s military might then gains an edge and the focus … Read more
The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is holy to both Jews and Muslims. It is also the site where religion and nationalism meet — a tinderbox ready to be ignited. Its sensitivity lends itself to be exploited by Islamists, sympathetic to Hamas and Islamic Jihad and by the far Right in Israel and its Kahanist allies. … Read more
DURING THE PAST WEEK, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been engulfed in wave after wave of allegations and accusations about his conduct in the highest office of public service in the UK. He has seemingly slipped deeper and deeper into the slime of sleaze. On a wide range of issues, a familiar story has … Read more
Last Shabbat, 24 April, was the annual day of remembrance of the Meds Yeghern — the “great evil crime” of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. While it often merits a throwaway comment in speeches during Holocaust Memorial Day, it is doubtful whether it earned a mention during the many services in Jewish houses of worship last … Read more
Review of Gershom Gorenberg’s War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East. published by Public Affairs (New York 2021) pp. 476 Eighty years ago, the North Africa campaign pitted Reichsmarschall Erwin Rommel — the Desert Fox — against British forces. This resulted in a year later … Read more
Sixty years ago, on 11 April 1961, a pale, bespectacled, balding man stepped into a glass booth in a courtroom at Beit Ha’am in Jerusalem. Standing stooped before three judges, he was asked: ‘Are you Adolf Eichmann?’ The diminutive figure answered without emotion: ‘Jawohl!’ — and so began the trial of a central figure who … Read more
TEHIYA, TSOMET, MOLEDET, KACH, HaTikva, Tkuma, Eretz Yisrael Shelanu, HaBayit Hayehudi, Otzma Yehudit — these are just some of the far-right parties that have come and gone, coalesced and fragmented while dwelling in the heart of the maelstrom that defines the Israeli Right. Last week President Rivlin called for “unconventional connections” in forming a new government. … Read more
The National Health Service is rightly revered by all in this time of the coronavirus. It is admired worldwide and based on the principle that medical care should be provided ‘free at the point of delivery’. It was established in July 1946, by Aneurin Bevan, the Minister of Health in Clement Attlee’s post-war government. But … Read more
In the growing chill of the Cold War after 1945, the expertise of Nazi scientists was desperately needed in the US as an essential ingredient in the struggle against the USSR. Operation Paperclip was approved by President Truman in September 1946 and it brought 1,600 German scientists and engineers to the US throughout the 1950s. … Read more