Shortly after midnight last Sunday morning, a local resident in an English country village outside RAF Fairford contacted the police to inform them that three white vans were parked near her driveway – and that she had seen masked men. Armed police arrived accompanied by sniffer robots on the lookout for explosives. Five Londoners in … Read more
‘Berlin has been defiled – shame on a people that considers itself among the world’s civilised’. This was the editorial in the social democratic daily, Vorwärts, commenting on a pogrom enacted in the city against the poor emigrant ostjuden (Galician Jews). This attack took place ten years before Hitler rose to power. Victor Sebestyen’s Weimar Germany: Death … Read more
“The impact of settler violence and terrorism has been catastrophic for Palestinian communities. Settlement expansion and attempts to create irreversible divisions on the ground threaten peace, security and the prospects for a viable Palestinian state. Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of a two-state solution.” So stated the new British Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, … Read more
With the next election in Israel now only two months away, the desire of the far right to remain in power has become more explicit and more bizarre. The Minister for National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, recently proposed that 30 to 40 Palestinians in Gaza be “eliminated” every night. While this is expected from Ben-Gvir, the … Read more
Last Monday, Andy Burnham “kissed hands” with King Charles and became the fourth prime minister in the king’s short reign – and the fourth prime minister in as many years. Burnham sees his task as the rebuilding of the UK after a decade of instability following Brexit – to provide “a circuit breaker” in the … Read more
‘For some people, life was split in two on 22 June 1941, for some on 3 September 1939 and for others on 18 July 1936.’ So wrote Ilya Ehrenburg after the horrors of the Second World War, referring to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and to the declaration of war by Britain … Read more
STALIN’S APOSTLES: THE CAMBRIDGE FIVE AND THE MAKING OF THE SOVIET EMPIREBy Antonia SeniorPublished by PublicAffairs, 480 pages; $29 From the 1930s up until Stalin’s death in 1953, six million people were sent to the Soviet Gulag. A quarter did not survive. Another 16-17 million were transported to strict regime labor camps, where the death rate … Read more
David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have all resigned as prime minister of the United Kingdom since the Brexit Referendum in June 2016. These 10 years have been a period of profound instability and a rise in populism on both the Left and the Right. For British Jews, … Read more
A couple of weeks ago, there was an early morning fire near a major kosher supermarket in London’s Golders Green. Many feared that this was yet another assault on the Jewish community. It coincided with the breaking news that the pro-Iranian Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq had been behind 18 attacks in Europe. The group was … Read more