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
Zionism has always posed a problem for the ultra-orthodox. Unlike the religious Zionists of the Mizrachi, they always preferred the actual arrival of the messiah rather than his indeterminable coming to inaugurate a new era in the Holy Land for the Jewish people. Medinat Yisrael, the State of Israel, was nothing less than a blot … Read more
So who, then, was responsible for the murder of Yitzhak Rabin? Yigal Amir, certainly. The General Security Services for their complacency, undoubtedly. But who else beyond the immediate participants of that black deed? At which point does the delineation between certain blame and political accusation become blurred? Indeed, the Brooklyn-based Jewish Press told its 350,000 … Read more
From the NNLS Memorial Service Monday 6 November 1995 Colin Shindler Today is a black day for the Jewish people, but as King Hussein said this morning, it is also a day of remembrance and commitment. It has been said many times today that Yitzhak Rabin was a man of war who became … Read more
In September 1982, Erev Rosh Hashanah 5753, Israel’s Christian allies murdered over 700 Palestinian men, women and children in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Like Kennedy’s assassination, many Jews will vividly recall what they were doing when the news broke and will not easily forget the pictures of the dead and dying … Read more