Colin Shindler

On Raoul Wallenberg

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Ingrid Carlberg’s Raoul Wallenberg is a painful book to read. The story is known. The outcome is known. But history cannot be unwritten. This well-researched, detailed account relates the saga of Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews in wartime Hungary in 1944. This long book conveys every morsel of information – from the important to the trivial … Read more

Robert Briscoe: Jewish IRA Gunrunner and Lord Mayor of Dublin

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One hundred years ago a small group of Irish men and women staged a military uprising from Dublin’s General Post Office in a futile attempt to throw off the British yoke and achieve Irish independence. The leadership of the uprising were foolishly executed after courts-martial. They became martyrs in a religious country which believed in … Read more

Jabotinsky : In his own words

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Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Story of My Life Edited by Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis Published by Wayne State University Press (Detroit 2016) pp.162 Eighty years since Vladimir Jabotinsky originally published his Hebrew autobiography, an English-language version has made his life story available to a wider audience. The original manuscript was found in the Jabotinsky Institute archives in Tel Aviv by the Russian … Read more

Israel and Ireland : A Response to Gideon Levy

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The Irish Ambassador to Israel would laugh at Gideon Levy’s assertion in his opinion piece ‘Don’t Celebrate the Israeli Occupation’s Impending Demise Just Yet’ that “It took the Irish 750 years to get rid of the British occupation, which was much less brutal and ferocious than the Israeli one” – even taking into account the fact that … Read more

Britain’s Moment in Palestine

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Britain’s Moment in Palestine: Retrospect and Perspectives 1917–1948, Michael J. Cohen (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), isbn 978-0-415-72985-7, pp. 518, £90.   This is a revelatory book, which comprehensively details Britain’s contentious and anguished moment in Palestine as ruler and colonizer. In one sense this is a solid “old-fashioned” factual overview of British policy during the thirty … Read more

On Arik Sharon

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David Landau: Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 631 pp. Did Ariel Sharon have a clear-cut ideology? How can all the inconsistencies in his political outlook be reconciled? It can be argued that Sharon belonged to the flexible Ben-Gurion school of perception of current reality. In addition, Sharon was … Read more

On Hilary Benn’s Speech

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Hilary Benn’s remarkable speech during the Syria debate in parliament last week did not please everyone. It did however align voting to bomb Daesh installations with past traditions of the Labour party which are rarely mentioned today. Benn spoke about internationalism and evoked the struggle against Franco during the Spanish Civil War – a struggle … Read more

Jeremy Corbyn: Accidental Hero

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W. Stephen Gilbert has written an adulatory account of the emergence of the new British Labor party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the subsequent hope for “a new politics” in the United Kingdom. Corbyn, the eternal party rebel on the far Left, was unexpectedly elected to lead the Labor Party in September because of a new voting system that permitted many non-Labor party members to vote … Read more