Colin ShindlerDuring the last decade of his life, Qassem Soleimani emerged from the shadows and was promoted as a noble and self-effacing warrior, an Iranian Napoleon who would recreate a new Persian empire — a Shia crescent from Mashad near Turkmenistan to the Mediterranean in Lebanon. Soleimani’s story was that he was recognised as a military … Read more
Review of We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain by Daniel Sonabend Published by Verso 2019, 369pp IN APRIL 1946, a government committee decided it would be an error to ban fascist groups as they now posed no threat. Manny Shinwell, a committee member and Jewish Labour MP disagreed; … Read more
Two weeks ago, Mario Sandoval, a professor at the Sorbonne’s Institute of Latin American Studies, was finally extradited to Argentina after a seven-year legal fight. In a former life, he had been a police officer during the military junta then assigned to unit 3.3.2 at Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada, the naval college known … Read more
Labour’s crushing defeat in last Thursday’s election is the party’s worst performance since 1935. It is undoubtedly an ideological watershed, a political upheaval on a par with the 1945 Labour victory of the reforming post-war party under Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 victory marking the ascendency of hard-nosed Conservatives. Commentators were forced to consult … Read more
The remarkable revelation that Jeremy Corbyn — as part of a Palestine Return Centre (PRC) mission to Beirut in 2011 — met representatives of Palestinian rejectionist factions is further evidence of his fundamentalism when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. It meant that he had no qualms sitting with those opposed to the PLO, those who refused … Read more
Review of Trinity by Frank Close, Published by Allen Lane 2019, pp. 528 Thirty years after his death in Communist East Germany, the saga of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs still astonishes. The author of Trinity, Frank Close, a distinguished professor of theoretical physics, has forensically dissected this story with nuance and insight.Fuchs came of … Read more
The Road from Kristallnacht: Unlearning the Past Seventy-Five years ago tomorrow, on 12 November 1944, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle laid a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It commemorated the multitudes who had fallen during World War I. Churchill, De Gaulle and many others … Read more
Kristallnacht took place on the nights of November 9 and 10 1938 as a planned act of revenge for the killing of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a seventeen Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan. 200 synagogues were burned to the ground, thousands of Jewish shops and homes ransacked, 30,000 sent to Buchenwald, Dachau and … Read more
A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion by Tom Segev Published by Head of Zeus 2019, pp.804 This is a long but inspiring account of the life and times of David Ben- Gurion. It is a “Jewish journey” like no other. Its dramatis personae cross the stage of Jew- ish history during … Read more
There have been many explanations for the rapid spread of antisemitic utterances within the British left. For some, the explanation is that it is ideologically ingrained since the birth of socialism; for others, sheer ignorance about Jewish history exacerbated by social media; for still others, an indifference to the Jews per se, that Jews are … Read more