Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949. By Jeffrey Herf. (Cambridge University Press 2022). 500 pp. NAZIS AND COMMUNISTS AFTER 1945 The author of this highly informative book, Jeffrey Herf, is a distinguished researcher of prewar Nazi Germany and, through his numerous publications, the ties between nationalists and Islamists … Read more
Tal Elmaliach, Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi, Mapam and the Demise of the Israeli Labor Movement, translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2020), 299 pp. Avi Shilon, The Decline of the Left Wing in Israel: Yossi Beilin and the Politics of the Peace Process, translated from the Hebrew by Ira Moskowitz (London: … Read more
When the existence of a European Association of Israel Studies (EAIS) was first publicized a decade ago, many believed that it was merely a front for advocacy and that the discipline was an invented one. The last ten years have borne testimony instead to a profound intellectual endeavour that indicates Israel Studies is an area … Read more
Review of From Antisemitism to Anti-Zionism: The Past and Present of a Lethal Ideology ed. Eunice G. Pollack Published by Academic Studies Press 2017, pp.426 This book is a collection of essays which looks at the transition of anti-Zionism into antisemitism in our time. There are some excellent essays in this collection such as David Hirsh’s … Read more
Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt 1936–1939, Matthew Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), ISBN 978-1-107-10320-7, pp. 478, £34.99. This work by the military historian Matthew Hughes describes in great detail the multifaceted approach taken by the British army “to grind out the rebellion” (blurb), the suppression … Read more
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
Some British Jews believe that London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies is a den of anti-Semitic iniquity. Some British Trotskyites believe that it is the center of the Zionist conspiracy. Both caricatures exist at one and the same time. Both are false. SOAS, however, is unusual in London colleges in that its firstclass … Read more
The Qatari-owned website Al Araby proudly proclaimed that “SOAS becomes the first UK university to boycott Israel”. This was patently untrue. It was not “SOAS” the institution that voted – not the governing body, not the administration, not even formally the lecturers’ union, but an invented “SOAS community”. Anyone could vote who wanted to – … Read more
Résumé The reaction by the Left in Britain and France to the Arab Spring was one of both joy and opportunity in 2011, but had descended into a muffled and confused embarrassment by 2014. Yet this tentative alliance with Islamism mirrors past ideological mishaps such as a belief in Stalinism or the initial acceptance that … Read more
Menachem Begin: A Life, by Avi Shilon, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2012, xii þ 546 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-16235-6 This book is an English translation of Avi Shilon’s biography of Menachem Begin that first appeared in Hebrew in 2007. Although the author is a journalist with academic interests, this popular work is informed and comprehensive … Read more