Review of The Room where it Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton Published by Simon and Schuster, pp. 577 price £25.00 John Bolton is the hawks’ hawk, a maximalist who takes no prisoners — someone who even worried Trump by his views. A neo-con veteran of the Reagan, Bush père and Dubya administrations, … 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
Review of From Antisemitism to Anti-Zionism: The Past and Present of a Lethal Ideology ed. Eunice G. Pollack Published by Academic Studies Press 2017, pp.426 This book is a collection of essays which looks at the transition of anti-Zionism into antisemitism in our time. There are some excellent essays in this collection such as David Hirsh’s … Read more
In 1999, Ehud Barak defeated Benjamin Netanyahu with the slogan, “Too many lies for too long!”. While a similar disdain exists today, do you think that it was inevitable that Benny Gantz would go into government with Netanyahu even after the stalemate of three elections? Netanyahu is a highly intelligent and crafty politician. Over the … Read more
Yigal Amir, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, will celebrate his 50th birthday on May 23, according to the English date. He will have spent almost half his life in prison and has not shown a scintilla of remorse for his act. Coming from a devout Yemenite family, his primary and secondary schools were charedi but he unusually … Read more
LAST WEEK, DAVID FRIEDMAN, the US ambassador to Israel, gave a flurry of interviews to explain and justify the possible annexation after July 1 of part of the West Bank by the new Netanyahu-Gantz government. In an article in the New York Post, he was clearly upset about a recent proposal in Foreign Policy magazine by Philip H. … Read more
THE ISRAELI NGO Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project has documented settlement building and expansion on the West Bank for several years, utilising official statistics and analysis of aerial photographs. Its latest report of settlement activity for 2019 suggests that the construction of units on the West Bank is 25 per cent higher under Donald Trump … Read more
Review of Avi Shilon’s The Decline of the Left Wing in Israel: Yossi Beilin and the Politics of the Peace Process Published by I. B. Tauris 2020, pp. 341 In an epoch of reaction, racism and populism, many ask how did Israel lose its way? Why did the traditional Israeli Left decay? Why did the … Read more
The emergence of Sinn Féin as a major political force in last week’s election in Ireland is a watershed in the onward march of Irish republicanism towards a united Ireland. Like the Conservatives on the mainland, dissatisfied voters who felt left behind deserted the major parties and turned to Sinn Féin. Even so, like the … Read more