Colin ShindlerThe only reason Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir attended the Ma-rid peace conference on he Middle East was because he was forced to by James Baker and George Bush. Even though, according to one newspaper poll, 91 per cent of Israelis were in favour of the conference, nothing else would have induced Shamir to … Read more
THE PALESTINIAN UPRISING: A War by Other Means By F. Robert Hunter — I.B. Tauris, London PROFESSOR HUNTER IS AN American academic who decided to spend a year on sabbatical leave at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in order to write a book on Egypt and Tunisia. His year away instead coincided with … Read more
President Bush’s threat last week to veto any immediate Congressional approval of the US$10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel for the absorption of Soviet Jewish immigrants caused a near apoplectic reaction in Jerusalem and from the Israeli government’s hardline supporters in the United States. The reaction has hardly been diffused by secretary of state … Read more
JONATHAN Sacks’s elevation to the Chief Rabbinate marks a watershed between the generations: the pre-Holocaust generation and those born after the war. Unlike those scarred by the years of fascism and anti-Semitism, their sons and daughters do not seem to have that psychological need for survivalist policies and symbols; they are generally more open … Read more
Itzik Feffer is not only a talented Yiddish poet; he is also a gifted journalist and a splendid speaker. It is difficult to draw any fast line of demarcation between Itzik Feffer the poet and Itzik Feffer the public worker. His poems are calls to action. They are simply worded, like folk poems, full of … Read more
One year ago, the two Germanies became one. The hated Berlin Wall was literally pulled down by the will of the people. The Stalinist gerontocracy which had ruled East Germany for more than four decades collapsed like a pack of cards. Their eyes and ears, the members of the Stasi secret police, were run to … Read more
“A GOOD opportunity”, “a new mood since the Gulf war”, “a tragedy to let this opportunity slip” — such was the official phraseology of the Board of Deputies of British Jews on the prospect of an international . peace conference on the Middle East. The comments could be construed as merely a public-relations exercise … Read more
IMAGINE A MILLION Catholics moving to Northern Ireland in the space of a few years—or the influx of a million Protestants. The social changes and the inter-communal problems arising would easily fill a book. In the Middle East, such a migration is no fantasy: 75,000 Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel in the first five months … Read more
THE END OF EMPIRE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. Glen Balfour-Paul Cambridge University Press, £30 UNHOLY BABYLON: THE SECRET HISTORY OF SADDAM’S WAR. Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander Gollancz, £9.99 HOLY WAR FOR THE PROMISED LAND. David Dolan Hodder & Stoughton, £4.99 TERROR. Conor Gearty Faber & Faber, £12.99 The establishment of a pax britannica … Read more
It is, of course, wrong to speak ill of the dead—but there are exceptions. For many Jews, the life and times of Rabbi Meir Kahane were not a cause for celebration. Indeed, the bitterness which he aroused in many seemed to feed his need to achieve a self-perpetuating urge to self-destruction. Shortly after Kahane’s murder … Read more