Colin ShindlerA Sense of Purpose: Recollections By Suzy Eban Halban Publishers 384 pages; $29.75 Suzy Eban’s recollections encompass almost the entire breadth of Israeli history – from her first meeting in Ismailiya in 1943 with Aubrey Eban, then a British army officer, until his death in November 2002. With the exception of the chapter on the … Read more
The Koch Papers: My Fight against Anti-Semitism By Edward I. Koch with Rafael Medoff. Palgrave MacMillan 256 pages; $24.95 Ed Koch is known internationally as the outspoken mayor of New York between 1978 and 1989. Before that, he was a US congressman for almost a decade. Since his public career ended, Koch has reinvented himself … Read more
Giora Goldberg, Ben-Gurion against the Knesset (London: Routledge, 2003). Pp 338. $150.00 cloth. Ben-Gurion, of course, helped to construct and shape the state of Israel, but his actions in the arena of the Knesset, according to Giora Goldberg, led to unforeseen consequences in later years. In the early years of the state, Ben-Gurion wielded tremendous … Read more
Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship By Martin Gilbert Henry Holt 359 pages; $30 Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft By Michael Makovsky Yale University Press 342 pages; $35 In 2002, the BBC ran a phone-in competition to discover who was the greatest Briton of all time. Nearly half a million people voted for … Read more
The Zionist leadership was incredibly pessimistic in the spring of 1947 that the handing over of responsibility of the Palestine question to the United Nations would bring any sort of positive results. If it eventually came to a vote, the British were confident that the Zionists would fail dismally to achieve a two thirds … Read more
A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism by Yakov M. Rabkin, published by Zed Press There is a tradition of Jewish opposition to Zionism, but this book only deals with a section of it. There is a difference between Jewish opposition which includes sections of the Left and Judaic opposition – … Read more
Mousa Abu Marzook’s positive comment that Hamas welcomes dialogue seems to apply only to external political figures and journalists, not the Israeli peace camp (Comment, August 16). This is in contrast to the PLO, which assiduously cultivated first non-Zionist, then Zionist adherents of the Israeli left. A year ago Gush Shalom predicted an imminent meeting … Read more
As reader in Israeli studies at Soas, University of London, I teach the Israel-Palestine conflict to large classes that include Palestinians, Israelis, Jews and Muslims. I do this without any difficulties in the multicultural environment at Soas, and I work hard for all my students. I am also a loyal trade unionist. While my union, … Read more
Brian Klug is highly selective in his choice of Jewish communal figures to bolster his argument. Many left wing Jewish academics and writers, such as Norman Geras and Howard Jacobson, opposed the initiative of Independent Jewish Voices. They were never approached to sign the IJV letter probably because they did not distance themselves sufficiently from … Read more
With the fog of publicity lifting, it is still difficult to know what Independent Jewish Voices actually stands for. Its advocacy in support of the universality of human rights, condemnation of racism and a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians is not exactly revolutionary. It is certainly not new. The political innocence of its open … Read more