Colin ShindlerThe New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalisation Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled (Westview Press 2000) Between 1975 and 1995, Israel’s GDP grew sevenfold. Its growth rate surpassed several European countries, and the IMF graciously elevated it — together with a number of the Asian tigers — to the status of ‘developed country’. This book of essays … Read more
One trenchant critic privately — and pejoratively – refers to him as ‘Jonathan Henry’. Read the ultra-orthodox press in the United States and he is transformed into `Yonoson’. These different labels symbolise the different worlds which the British Chief Rabbi — Professor Jonathan Sacks of the United Hebrew Congregations of the United Kingdom and … Read more
Recent Israeli opinion polls consistently allocate 62 – 64 seats in the 120-seat Knesset to a coalition of the governing Likud, the far right and the religious parties in the forthcoming elections at the end of January Any potential governing group must attain a minimum blocking majority of sixty-one seats in order to secure … Read more
The Times and “Englishness” In May 1784, John Walter, a bankrupted Lloyds underwriter wrote to is patron, Benjamin Franklin, the American Minister in pre-revolutionary Paris, to inform him that he intended to publish a newspaper. On 1 January 1785, Walter’s project appeared as The Daily Universal Register. Three years later, the title was changed … Read more
A Dissenting Democracy: The Israeli Movement ‘Peace Now’ By Magnus Norell, published by Frank Cass , London 2002, 160 pp On the eve of Netanyahu’s election defeat in 1999, the British Friends of Peace Now hosted a public meeting in London at which a former Israeli Ambassador to the Court of St. James … Read more
The case of Israeli academic Oren Yiftachel (It’s water on stone – in the end the stone wears out, G2, December 12) is a good example of how the British left not only attacks the Sharon government, but actually aids it in victimising Israeli peace campaigners – many of whom are academics. The leadership of … Read more
Holocast and Rescue: Impotent or Indifferent? Anglo- Jewry 1938-1945 by Pamela Shatzkes. Palgrave. 336pp. £45The question of whether more Jews could have been saved by the British and by Anglo-Jewry before and during the Second World War has been a source of debate for more than 50 years. Were the British duplicitous and devious, unwilling … Read more
Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War by Howard M. Sachar. Knopf. 386 pages. $30If there were a sympathy in choice War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound Swift as a shadow, short as any dream. A quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream … Read more
Does the Palestinian right of return negate the right to national self-determination of the Jews? Does it mean a return to Israel or to the future state of Palestine? Would it mean the state of Israel would dissolve into a Greater Palestine with Jews as a tolerated minority? These are questions asked by the Israeli … Read more
On Yom Kippur in Mishnaic times, our ancestors would push a goat — a symbolic sin – off a nearby cliff. In England, we tend to do this to our chief rabbis. During recent times, the reason has been an injudicious remark to the press about Israel government policy. This in turn provokes a demand … Read more