Before the opening of the new Parliament in London last week, MPs swore allegiance to the Crown on the King James Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Sundar Gutka prayerbook, the Koran and the Hebrew Bible. All this demonstrated the wide diversity of British society in 2024. This positive imagery was shattered by the election of … Read more
In 1939, Nicholas Winton, with his colleagues in the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, were responsible for bringing 669 children from Nazi-occupied Prague to the safety of the United Kingdom. Winton’s remarkable story was told in the recent film ‘One Life’, in which the brilliant Anthony Hopkins played … Read more
Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East By Robert Fisk, published by HarperCollins (Fourth Estate) 2024 pp.644 Robert Fisk, a long-time foreign correspondent for the Independent, died in Dublin in October 2020. This posthumous book which picks up from where his 2005 book The Great War of Civilisation left off and which covers the … Read more
If numerous opinion polls on the forthcoming general election in the UK are to be believed, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is on course to achieve its lowest number of seats in the House of Commons since 1906. In contrast, the victory of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party is predicted to exceed Tony Blair’s landslide in … Read more
When courses on Israel Studies first began in universities several decades ago, they were depicted by some as teaching a fictitious, invented subject – nothing less than an offshoot of the hasbarah industry. For those in communal leadership, it was often seen as just that – an opportunity to promote Israel within academia. The problem … Read more
At this week’s Yom Hazikaron ceremony on Mount Herzl to remember the fallen in Israel’s wars, Prime Minister Netanyahu commented: ‘We will realise the goals of victory – and at the centre of them is the return of all our hostages’. Many hostage family members simply do not believe him and regard such pronouncements as … Read more
Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent 1948-1977 Yale University Press 2023, pp.320 In the early 1960s, Ben-Gurion implied that ideological Zionism, after the founding of the state, had lost its meaning. The imperative to emigrate and build up the Hebrew republic had been replaced by support for successive Israeli governments, bolstered by an … Read more
Sunday’s attack on Israel by Iran involved 185 drones, 36 cruise missiles and 110 surface-to-surface missiles, according to leaked Israel reports to the New York Times. Most came from the Iranian mainland with a few fired by proxies in Iraq and Yemen. Israel, in conjunction with the armed forces of the US, UK, France and Jordan, defended … Read more
Since the start of the war with Hamas, a mere 540 have enlisted to help the war effort. On the other hand, 66,000 young haredi men have received an exemption from military service during the past year, a member of the IDF’s Personnel Directorate told a Knesset Committee last month. The ruling exempting haredim from … Read more
When Pinchas Rutenberg, one of the giants of the Zionist movement, died in 1942, his friend, the writer Moshe Smilansky described him as “a great engineer with the soul of a poet.” Nevertheless, Rutenberg is missing from the public consciousness, even among those who treasure Jewish history. He stipulated in his will that no funds should … Read more