Just over one year ago, Ariel Sharon was returned as Prime Minister of Israel in an election in which the Likud and its allies easily attained a blocking majority of 61 seats in the Knesset. The candidate of the Labour Party, the dovish Amram Mitzna, was effectively trounced and resigned his position shortly afterwards. During … Read more
The Embarrassment of Zionism As the conference season swings into top gear, there is a plethora of motions condemning the Sharon government. The TUC recently called for probable sanctions against Israel and the Labour Party will follow suit. Yet many Israelis also believe that Sharon has no peace plan and no vision of … Read more
A Dissenting Democracy: The Israeli Movement ‘Peace Now’ By Magnus Norell, published by Frank Cass , London 2002, 160 pp On the eve of Netanyahu’s election defeat in 1999, the British Friends of Peace Now hosted a public meeting in London at which a former Israeli Ambassador to the Court of St. James … Read more
Hizbu’llah Politics and Religion by Amal Saad- Ghorayeb. Pluto Press 254 pages. £14.99Hizbullah calls itself “the party of God,” which exudes a whiff of undiluted certainty that it – and it alone – knows the pathway to heaven. It’s not surprising, therefore, that anti-Judaism is a tenet of Hizbullah truth. Indeed, as Sheikh Na’im Qasim, … Read more
The Body and the Blood – The Holy Land’s Christians at the Turn of a New Millenium A Reporter’s Journey by Charles M. Sennott. Public Affairs. 479 pages. $30 There are two billion Christians worldwide – and some of them are Palestinian Arabs. About 32,000 Christian Arabs live in the West Bank and Gaza, which … Read more
Teaching Conflict and Controversy: A New Course in Israeli and Jewish Diaspora Studies The Israel-Palestine conflict is undoubtedly a controversial subject where there are no absolutes. But it is also extremely interesting – and it is this fact that has attracted students from very diverse backgrounds to my course on Zionism at the School of … Read more
Faisal Bodi’s determination to think the unthinkable this week (Jan 3) in advocating the disappearance of Israel does not break a taboo, but it does represent a psychological leap from wishful thinking to respectable argument. It is, in reality, a sanitised reading of the Hamas platform (the major Palestinian Islamic grouping) which rejects the two-state … Read more
The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After by Edward W Said 345pp, Granta, pounds 15Edward Said is an eloquent advocate of the Palestinian cause in the west, but he is also a hate figure for both the Israeli right and American neo-conservatives. Like Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement, Said … Read more
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