Every elected Israeli prime minister since 1996 has been the subject of a criminal investigation. Sometimes charges were dropped through lack of evidence or defendants were acquitted in court. Yet Ehud Olmert was found guilty as charged and sentenced to prison for the ‘cash in envelopes’ affair while Ariel Sharon’s son, Omri, was indicted for … Read more
ISRAELI FOREIGN POLICY(Indiana University Press 2020 pp.356) $48.54 Uri Bialer There is a profound difference between the objective outcome of a thought-through policy and the superficial sound bites of transient politicians. Uri Bialer’s excellent and well-researched Israeli Foreign Policy: A People Shall Not Dwell Alone (Indiana University Press 2020) provides any reader with an intelligent appraisal of … Read more
IN MARCH 2019, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, told the Christian Broadcasting Network he believed that God was acting through President Trump to protect the Jews of Israel. While Queen Esther had saved the Jewish people from certain Persian annihilation during Purim, today, Pompeo argued, President Trump was saving the Jews from the wrath of … Read more
Last Monday the UAE Ambassador and its Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Lana Nusseibeh, was rapturously greeted by the American Jewish Committee in New York. It was a celebration of the decision of Israel and the United Arab Emirates to proceed towards a normalisation of diplomatic relations. While it was clearly different from the … Read more
SULTANIC SAVIORS AND TOLERANT TURKS by Marc David Baer Writing Ottoman Jewish history, denying the Armenian genocide338pp. Indiana University Press. $95 (paperback, $45). Until quite recently, whenever Turkey was criticized for its approach to minorities – Greeks, Kurds and Armenians – they were known to deflect the argument by pointing to 500 years of tolerance … Read more
EIGHTY YEARS AGO, on August 6, 1940, 25,000 Jews stood in silence on the streets of New York to bear witness to the funeral cortège of Vladimir Jabotinsky as it passed by. The death of the Revisionist Zionist leader at the age of 59 shocked the Jewish world and he was mourned by friend and foe … Read more
For British Jews of a certain age, Alfie Bass, David Kossoff, Warren Mitchell and Lionel Bart were household names in the world of popular music and theater. They were also children of London’s Jewish East End who aspired to make it in the wider world, felt very Jewish, but at the same time were perplexed by … Read more
“Israel can be a partner, a junior partner, but a perfect partner for China in the development of a variety of technologies that change the way we live, how long we live, how healthy we live − in every area.” So spoke Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to China in March 2017. He then went … Read more
“IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of an Israeli ambassador to maintain intimate links with his fellow Jews, in whatever country he serves. If you have a Jewish heart and soul, how can you not want to be an integral part of a Jewish community when you are representing the Jewish state?” So spoke Yehuda Avner, a much-respected … Read more
Suppose you were given two tomatoes of equal size, quality, taste and price. Suppose you were told that one was from an Israeli kibbutz and the other from a West Bank settlement. Would you choose to eat one and not the other? Some would undoubtedly be indifferent and choose either — a tomato is a … Read more