Colin ShindlerReview of Asaf Sinaver’s Abba Eban: A Biography (London 2016) 464pp. Duckworth Overlook. £25 Abba Eban (1915–2002), who served as Israel’s Foreign Minister between 1966 and 1974, was regarded by many in the international community as Talleyrand’s heir. In Israel, by contrast, he was derided for his Jewish liberalism and quintessentially English intellectual approach to diplomacy. The Labour Prime Minister Levi Eshkol … Read more
Ephraim Katzir was born in Kiev on 16 May 1916. His father, Yehuda Katchalski, was an accountant and an adherent of Zionism. Katchalski and his wife, Tsila, originally lived in Łódź, then in the Tsarist empire, now in Poland. Łódź was a centre of socialist politics and radical endeavour. During the 1905 revolution an uprising … Read more
It is often stated that there is an ongoing delegitimisation of Israel. What is rarely mentioned is that there has been a parallel delegitimisation of Zionism – an ideological demonisation by those who are often ignorant of its history and evolution. Such ignorance is the underpinning which allows legitimate criticism to occasionally tip over into … Read more
Briefing Paper: Labour Party Inquiry on Anti-Semitism Who am I? I am an emeritus professor at SOAS, University of London. My book, Israel and the European Left was published in 2011 and I have long been interested in this area. I have therefore written this briefing paper which traces the road which has led to … Read more
The Black Door:Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers By Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac Collins, £30 British prime ministers have never been neutral towards the intelligence services. Intelligence historians Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac have written an accessible book, indicating how different premiers reacted to intelligence reports – and often bypassed their own … Read more
In May 1926, a Jewish watchmaker approached a middle-aged man sporting a cane and attending his favourite restaurant in the Rue Racine in Paris. The watchmaker asked the man his name and, after hearing the response, pumped five bullets into him, adding two more as he lay dying on the pavement. The dead man was … Read more
Last year, the spiritual mentor of Daesh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, gave a sermon in the Great Mosque in Mosul. The advance of Daesh will not stop, he proclaimed, “until we hit the last nail into the coffin of Sykes-Picot”. He was referring to the secret agreement, concluded 100 years ago this week by the Conservative … Read more
The signatories to the letter do not mention that not one single Bundist was ever elected to the Sejm, the Polish parliament during the inter-war years. The Zionists and the ultra-orthodox were far more successful. In 1939 the Bund depended on an electoral arrangement with the Polish Socialist party for its municipal election gains. Those … Read more
Many Labour Jews voted for Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London with a heavy heart. Khan’s past association with unsavoury Islamists who were not shy about peppering their views with anti-Semitic tropes undoubtedly jarred. Yet during the election campaign Khan went out of his way to court the Jewish community and instantly denounced the view … Read more
Last week’s revelations in the national and Israeli press that Associated Press (AP) had ”co-operated” with Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry during the 1930s and 1940s was astounding. The German historian, Harriet Scharnberg, discovered that photographer SS-Oberscharführer Franz Roth of the Propaganda Ministry, whose work regularly appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party daily, was … Read more