Eighty years ago in April 1940, British Jews sat down to celebrate the festival of freedom at their Passover Seder with a sense of foreboding and trepidation. A few days before, Nazi Germany had invaded Norway and Denmark. While the Nazis initially viewed Denmark as a model protectorate, there was fear for the fate of … 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 Laurel Leff’s Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life and Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Germany Published by Yale University Press 2019, pp.357 To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar (from Nazism) had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and … 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
Review of A Train to Palestine: The Tehran Children, Anders’ Army and their Escape from Stalin’s Siberia 1939-1943 by Randy Grigsby, published by Vallentine Mitchell, pp.271 History is often written in cold sentences, but not in this book. Randy Grigsby’s popular account in A Train to Palestine relates the harrowing story of one small Jewish … Read more
Hosni Mubarak’s long life encompassed the history of both modern Egypt and modern Israel. A young pilot serving in King Farouk’s forces, he embraced the revolution of 1952 which ousted the monarchy and brought the Free Officers Movement to power. The dominance of the military through its leaders — Mohamed Neguib, Gamal Abdul Nasser and … Read more
Review of Chris Millington’s A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front published by Bloomsbury 2020, pp. 235 In 1995, President Jacques Chirac stated that France was responsible for the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up of Jews in 1942. In 2018, Marine Le Pen, president of the Front National, attributed … 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
During the last decade of his life, Qassem Soleimani emerged from the shadows and was promoted as a noble and self-effacing warrior, an Iranian Napoleon who would recreate a new Persian empire — a Shia crescent from Mashad near Turkmenistan to the Mediterranean in Lebanon. Soleimani’s story was that he was recognised as a military … Read more
Two weeks ago, Mario Sandoval, a professor at the Sorbonne’s Institute of Latin American Studies, was finally extradited to Argentina after a seven-year legal fight. In a former life, he had been a police officer during the military junta then assigned to unit 3.3.2 at Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada, the naval college known … Read more