One year ago, the world awoke to the news that war had broken out in Europe after almost 80 years of relative peace. British Jews were stunned by this turn of events — especially those whose ancestors had escaped Tsarist persecution in Ukraine. For Putin, the fall of the USSR in 1991 — like the … Read more
A Survation poll last week, commissioned by The Jewish News in the UK, indicated that 52% of British Jews felt their view of Israel was impacted by the presence of the far-Right in Netanyahu’s government. Some 42% felt that it was not. It also showed that older people were more reticent to criticise an Israeli government than younger people … Read more
Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949. By Jeffrey Herf. (Cambridge University Press 2022). 500 pp. NAZIS AND COMMUNISTS AFTER 1945 The author of this highly informative book, Jeffrey Herf, is a distinguished researcher of prewar Nazi Germany and, through his numerous publications, the ties between nationalists and Islamists … Read more
A visit to the Israel Cartoon Museum in Holon several years ago first gave me the idea of telling Israel’s history through cartoons. It was undoubtedly the hardest of all my books to write. Which episode in a year to highlight; which cartoon to select, which events to record? Clearly there could have been an … Read more
Benjamin Netanyahu’s long tenure in power has been a boon to cartoonists and satirists — and never more so than during the current quagmire of his own making in turning to the far Right and hinting at authoritarianism. Recently, Eran Wolkowski in Ha’aretz showed Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir driving past a gathering of demonstrators — the balloon … Read more
Kreisky, Israel and Jewish Identity by Daniel Ashheim Published by University of New Orleans Press, 2022, pp.225 Bruno Kreisky was the longest serving Chancellor of Austria (1970-1983). He was also a Jew who had fled to Sweden when Hitler annexed the country to the Third Reich. More than 20 family members perished in the Shoah, … Read more
“We seek to strengthen every citizen’s freedoms and the country’s democratic institutions and to bring Israel more closely in line with the liberal American model.” These soothing words were not those of Ben-Gurion or of Begin in the past, expressing their admiration for the values of the American Revolution of 1776, but were part of … Read more
One hundred years ago, on 30 December 1922, four republics, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia, agreed to form a union of states — the Soviet Union. This was to be ‘a decisive step on the path of unification into a World Socialist Soviet Republic’. The same year also saw the first trials of Zionists in … Read more
The late Rafi Eitan was – as the title Capturing Eichmann: The Memoir of a Mossad Spymaster suggests – an intelligence operative, a maverick with a finger in many pies. Working on this account until a few days before his death in 2019, this posthumous publication relates many fascinating episodes in his life: how he killed two German Templars … Read more
Last Friday, the Likud signed an agreement with the Kahanist party, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), to give it an expanded range of responsibilities in the new government, covering the Public Security Ministry, the Development Ministry for the Negev and Galilee and a Jewish Heritage Ministry. It is likely that Itamar Ben-Gvir will now run the … Read more