Colin ShindlerA 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
Anja Klabunde: Magda Goebbels (Little Brown, 378pp) $20 Magda Goebbels was one of the many people swept up by the strong ideological currents prevalent during the years between the two world wars. These days she is known mostly for the manner of her death — poisoned with her young children — in Hitler’s … Read more
Conservative Party Attitudes To Jews 1900 -1950 by Harry Defries. Frank Cass, 268 pages. pounds 18.50 One hundred years ago, British Jews were regarded as “un-English,” an alien entity in British society, “a sinister force bent on the destruction of the Empire.” Harry Defries argues that, while there was always prejudice in the British Conservative … Read more
Since the commencement of the current intifada, we have made a clear distinction between unpalatable news and biased news in the highly selective depiction of Israel in the national media. All of us are long-time supporters of the Israeli peace movement, but we are not prepared to serve as apologists for Palestinian terrorism or blind … Read more
Today’s British left has little understanding of Jews and anti-semitism because it was not forged by the struggle against fascism in the 1930s and the Holocaust (The hatred that won’t die, February 28). Jews are perceived to be white, bourgeois and invisible – certainly not members of the oppressed. The left is rationally anti-antisemitic, but … Read more