Next week the Glasgow Film Festival will close with a showing of Nae Pasaran! (They Shall Not Pass!) which tells the story of how engineers at the Rolls-Royce East Kilbride factory in 1974 refused to repair aircraft engines that belonged to the Chilean armed forces. Led by General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean air force, flying … Read more
29 November 1947 On 29 November 1947 the member states of the United Nations – almost a quarter of the current membership – voted for the partition of Palestine into two states. Jerusalem was to be internationalised. The Arab state was 99% Arab while the population of the Jewish state was 55% Jews 45% Arab … Read more
During his first tenure as Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu was dubbed “the magician” by the local media because of his uncanny ability to extricate himself from the most difficult of situations – starting with his unexpected victory over Shimon Peres in the 1996 election. Mr Netanyahu’s luck – or expertise – may have run … Read more
Five years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was an obscure member of the British Parliament — someone on the far fringes of the Labour Party who was seen as less likely to attain power than Donald Trump was in the United States. With Labour’s defeat in the 2015 general election, Corbyn scrambled to obtain the necessary votes … Read more
Obituary: Barry Davis The actor and Yiddish scholar Barry Davis was “a Hackney boy” — from beginning to end. It was his cultural milieu, a location to be embraced in all its intellectual richness. In 1991, he interviewed Harold Pinter. Instead of a detailed excursion into contemporary literature, these two old Grocers’ Company schoolboys (Hackney … Read more
Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel 1917-2017 Ian Black, published by Allen Lane 2017) pp. 640 Ian Black, a longtime Guardian journalist, sees Yasser Arafat’s appearance at the UN in 1974 as the “apogee of his 40-year leadership.” It’s a curious notation in his latest book, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs … Read more
History is important. It is a template for imagining the future and for analysing the present. In an age of slogans and soundbites when abbreviation is preferred to complexity, tales of Jewish history are marginalised and Zionist ideology demonised. The past is a foreign land to the purveyors of fake news. The historian and archivist, … Read more
Last week, the remains of King Victor Emanuel III were brought back from exile in Egypt to Italy by an official air force aircraft — and then quietly reinterred in the burial plot for members of the House of Savoy. The Italian Jewish community strongly condemned this, because the king had not only been a … Read more
In recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, President Trump is reflecting Jewish emotional and spiritual yearning for Jerusalem. In doing so, he is appealing to many outside of the far Right and the strictly orthodox in American Jewry who make up his usual supporters. 82 per cent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump — far more than … Read more
The National Archives released 64 MI5 files from the immediate post-war period last week. The activities of Nazi intelligence agents, Soviet spies, right-wing extremists and Stalinist fellow travellers are all described in fascinating detail — two files refer to the unsuccessful attempt by Lehi (the Stern Gang) to blow up the Colonial Office on April … Read more