INTRODUCTIONSome Israelis privately bemoan the passing of the “Old Israel” whereby a new society—different from the ones from which they had emigrated—would be constructed. Nostalgia aside, today’s start-up nation proudly boasts innovation and entrepreneurship—values to be admired and emulated—yet the gap between the “haves” and “have nots” actually resembles that of western Europe. “Egalitarianism” is … Read more
Next week Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, will visit Israel and be greeted effusively by Benjamin Netanyahu. It will follow the recent visit of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, in which both governments agreed an amendment to the Polish law that said Poles as a whole were not responsible for crimes committed by the … Read more
Next week Barack Obama will give the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Johannesburg to commemorate the centenary of the birth of South Africa’s first post-apartheid leader. South Africans will be exhorted “to find the Mandela in each of us” while scores of business leaders and media celebrities are spending a night inside the prison cells … Read more
Review of In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner, published by Princeton University Press, pp. 372 The renowned sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, a refugee from the anti-Semitic campaign in Communist Poland during the 1960s and subsequently a professor at the University of Leeds, popularised the term ‘allosemitism’. It depicted the ‘otherness’ … Read more
Review of Anshel Pfeffer’s Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu Published by Hurst, pp. 424 Netanyahu” means “given by God” in Hebrew. Anshel Pfeffer, one of Israel’s most insightful journalists and the author of this excellent biography, clearly doesn’t believe this to be the most appropriate of surnames for Israel’s current prime … Read more
When the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem last month, Paraguay was quick to follow suit — much to the delight of the Israeli government. At an effusive ceremony in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the Paraguayan president for taking in Holocaust survivors, while President Rivlin said that Paraguay had been a true friend … Read more
Shortly after midnight on 5 June 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian living in the US, in the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles during his campaign to become president. Kennedy died the next day – it was the first anniversary of the outbreak of the Six Day war. In subsequent years, Sirhan … Read more
Interview with the late Arieh Handler, the only British citizen in the room when Ben-Gurion read out Israel’s declaration of independence on 14 May 1948 You were a pre-war Bnei Akiva founder in London. When did you go to Israel? After my wife discovered that her father had perished in Auschwitz, the family went from London … Read more
Fifty years ago, the student revolt broke out on campuses all over western Europe. The revolutionary fervour of the times spawned a generation who believed that a better world was possible if only we dedicated ourselves. In Communist Eastern Europe there were student demonstrations against state-sponsored anti-Semitism. There were occupations and sit-ins at LSE, Leicester … Read more
Last week, the UK’s House of Commons was the scene of a debate about contemporary anti-Semitism. It was an occasion when many Labour MPs, both Jewish and non-Jewish, related intensely personal stories about how they had been targeted by the purveyors of anti-Semitism. Yet despite his formal public declarations against anti-Semitism, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader … Read more