Ephraim Katzir was born in Kiev on 16 May 1916. His father, Yehuda Katchalski, was an accountant and an adherent of Zionism. Katchalski and his wife, Tsila, originally lived in Łódź, then in the Tsarist empire, now in Poland. Łódź was a centre of socialist politics and radical endeavour. During the 1905 revolution an uprising … Read more
The Irish Ambassador to Israel would laugh at Gideon Levy’s assertion in his opinion piece ‘Don’t Celebrate the Israeli Occupation’s Impending Demise Just Yet’ that “It took the Irish 750 years to get rid of the British occupation, which was much less brutal and ferocious than the Israeli one” – even taking into account the fact that … 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
UK Jewish Film Festival 8 November 2015
Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport By Saul David (Hodder and Stoughton pp. 446, 20 pounds) In 1976 Palestinian Arabs from a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and German far leftists from the Revolutionäre Zellen hijacked an Air France Airbus with nearly 250 … Read more
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s attempts to be re-elected by confronting the White House, two weeks before Israel’s election, antagonised many American Jews, over two thirds of whom had voted for President Barack Obama; it highlighted fundamental differences in approach between the Jewish state and the most powerful Diaspora community. The same was true in … Read more
Moshe Levinger, who died last week, was the symbolic initiator of the settlement drive in the West Bank, following Israel’s lightning victory in six days in 1967. With some of his students, reputedly posing as Swiss tourists wishing to hold a Pesach Seder, he booked in at a Hebron hotel in April 1968 – and … Read more
Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron by Menachem Klein (Hurst and Co London) 336 pp THE TITLE of this book, Lives in Common, was truer of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs before 1948 – when the state of Israel was established – than today, Indeed the notion has been replaced … Read more
Disturbing rise of the far right Jewish settlers collect stones to build a structure as they attempt to establish an unauthorised outpost at the hill of Eitam Israeli election campaigns are nowadays characterised by the breast-beating of an array of right-wing parties, each vying with their rivals in proclaiming their undiluted patriotism. They have become … Read more
The low attendance at last Sunday’s rally for Israel in part reflects the unease and dilemmas of many British Jews. While the security of Israel’s citizens is paramount, it co-exists with a concern for the sanctity of human life in general. Such nagging doubts underline the unspoken question whether this conflict was avoidable. Its genesis … Read more