When Israel’s Declaration of Independence was signed, only two of the 37 signatories were women – Rachel Kagan and Golda Meir. This is symbolic of the profound difficulty that women faced in the ideologically male-centered world that existed in the days of early Zionism, in which women were generally expected to remain at home and forget … Read more
British Jews view the killings of 7 October as another tragic episode in Jewish history and recalled past massacres in eastern Europe or the Farhud in Iraq in 1941. In contrast, few of the marchers on last Saturday’s pro-Palestine march would have understood it as a pogrom of ethnic cleansing. Many Ashkenazi Jews in the … Read more
Regardless of who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds at al-Ahli hospital on Tuesday, it is clear that Israel is being blamed unequivocally for this terrible event by the Arab street. Apart from setting back the prospect of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation by years, this incident may provide the fuel to set the Middle East on … Read more
The Arab street is blaming Israel for the destruction of the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza regardless of whether or not Palestinian Islamic Jihad was responsible. Even before the cloud of suspicion was lifting from the IDF, fearful Arab leaders cancelled the planned summit with President Biden. This terrible episode will undoubtedly provide the fuel to … Read more
The mourners gathered round the body at Alice Shalvi’s funeral in Jerusalem last Tuesday and sang with great emotion and passion, Eshet Chayil – “a woman of worth”. Chanted each Friday night to welcome in Shabbat, it summed up a woman who was deeply loved and revered. Her family, friends, community, students and colleagues in their hundreds accompanied … Read more
Fifty years ago, at exactly 14.00 hours on October 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrians forces advanced in a coordinated attack on the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), stationed on the east bank of the Suez Canal and on the Golan Heights. For the Jews, the 19-day conflict has passed into history as the Yom Kippur war. … Read more
Fifty years ago, in mid-July 1973, the outgoing head of the IDF’s Southern Command, Ariel Sharon, held a retirement party in the garden of his Beersheba home. His farewell speech evolved into a tirade against David Elazar, the IDF Chief of Staff — there was no love lost between the two. Elazar had swept away … Read more
Amos Oz: The Legacy of a Writer in Israel and Beyond edited by Ranen-Omer-Sherman, published by the State University of New York press 2023, pp.414 Amos Oz once said that he had two pens on his desk — one to write stories, the other ‘to tell the government to go to hell’. Today his voice … 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
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