Shlomo Ben-Ami sounded exasperated. “We are a society living at a high decibel level without a moment of rest,” Israel’s Internal Security Minister said in a newspaper interview last week. What Israel needed from its leaders were the kind of “fireside chats” President Roosevelt used to give to Americans. But instead of calming influences, … Read more
Colin Shindler Likud and the Christian Dispensationalists: A Symbiotic Relationship THE AMERICANIZATION OF ISRAELI POLITICS IN THE 1990S ISRAEL HAS, OF COURSE, CHANGED dramatically since 1967. The publication of the 1999 report of the Human Development Index by the United Nations indicated that Israel occupied 32nd position of 174 countries surveyed, ahead of Hong Kong, … Read more
The PLO in the World Order Avraham Sela and Moshe Ma’oz (eds), The PLO and Israel: From Armed Conflict to Political Solution 1964-1994. London: Macmillan, 1997. Pp.x + 310, index. £30 (cloth). ISBN 0-333-72370-8. Roland Dannreuther, The Soviet Union and the PLO. London: Macmillan, 1998. Pp.ix + 222, index, biblio. £45 (cloth). ISBN 0-312-17223-0. … Read more
Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin by Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman 292pp, (Granta)13.99. On November 4, 1995, at the end of a jubilant rally for peace, Yigal Amir, a religious student, pumped two bullets into Yitzhak Rabin and a third into his bodyguard.The shots ruptured his spleen, severed … Read more
The State of Israel and the Land of Israel One of the more interesting manifestations of the 1999 election campaign in Israel is the unraveling of the grand coalition which Menachem Begin assembled and coalesced as the Likud in 1973. It was based on Begin’s shrewd capitalising on the deep antagonism which many groups-—religious, Sephardim, the underclass, the far right–felt towards an indolent … Read more
A summer of football and flags has enabled tens of millions to proclaim their patriotism in a relatively harmless fashion. Big business, royalty and organised religion all jumped on this acceptable bandwagon. Jews, up and down the land, followed the team, for the Crusaders’ Cross no longer inspires fear. Nine hundred years after the slaughter … Read more
At the end of January, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu travelled to Washington for a tough meeting with President Clinton. At the top of the agenda for discussion were the redeployment of Israeli troops in the Territories and the percentage of West Bank territory to be evacuated. Netanyahu came to the talks with Clinton from a … Read more
Last year the Hale-Bopp comet traversed our skies. It was paying its first visit to the inner solar system for two and a half thousand years. The last time that Jews looked up and gazed in wonderment was during that terrible period of exile and return. Carrying with them the harrowing memory of the destruction … Read more
You were amongst the pre-war founders of Bnei Akiva-Bachad in London, but when did you leave for Israel? After my father discovered that her father had perished in Auschwitz, the family went from London to Palestine in May 1947. I was still engaged in Zionist work in London at that time as Director of … Read more
Mordechai Bar-On, In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996. Pp.470, biblio. ISBN 1-878379-53-4. Mordechai Bar-On has written an overview of the Israeli peace movement from the birth of the State in 1948 up to the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn … Read more