Who was Boris Ginsburg?

EIGHTY YEARS ago this month, Boris Ginsburg was arrested while walking along a street in Proskurov, a city in western Ukraine.Mr Ginsburg was one of the last leaders of the underground Zionist movement in the USSR. It is believed that he died under interrogation by the GPU, the forerunner of the KGB, in Kaminets-Podolsk. He … Read more

The Alternatives to a Two State Solution

Image copyright REUTERSImage caption Donald Trump’s remarks broke with decades of US policy When President Donald Trump commented “two states and one state – I like the one that both parties like” about an eventual Israeli-Palestinian settlement, it suggested a rethink, and perhaps a downgrading, of the time-honoured “two-state solution” of past US administrations. But what are … Read more

2017: A Year of Anniversaries

One hundred and twenty years in August since Herzl opened the first Zionist congress in Basel. Seventy years in November since UN Resolution 181 was passed which proclaimed the partition of historic Palestine – one state for the Zionist Jews, the other for the Palestinian Arabs. Fifty years in June since Israel’s victory in the … Read more

British Jews and Settlement Expansion

By withdrawing its protection at the UN on the question of Israeli settlement expansion, the fading Obama administration has caused turmoil within many Jewish organisations. Despite a recent American $38 billion military aid package to Israel, many viewed the move as a wholesale betrayal and a deliverance into the hands of Israels enemies. Was the … Read more

Revolutionary Yiddishland

Review of Revolutionary Yiddishland By Alain Brossart and Sylvia Klingberg Verso, £16.99 Not all Jews who emigrated to Israel in the last century were Zionists. Some Trotskyists, Bundists and loyal Communists went to Israel as a refuge from the Nazi inferno and Stalin’s gulag. Scarred by such murderous regimes, these survivors of Red Yiddishland represented the … Read more

On the Kasztner Affair

  Review of Paul Bogdanor’s Kasztner’s Crime (Transaction 2016) pp. 323 Paul Bogdanor has penned a well-researched book on the contentious Kasztner affair – a controversy that commenced in wartime Hungary and has continued until the present day. In the summer of 1944, a minor Jewish figure, Rudolf Kasztner, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in the … Read more

60 Years after Suez

  “The Egyptian has his thumb on our windpipe”. So muttered Prime Minister Anthony Eden in July 1956 on hearing that President Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal. It led to a clandestine agreement with then Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion for a joint military intervention – and Israel’s subsequent move into Sinai … Read more