Theodor Herzl was born, 150 years ago this week, in Hungary, moved to Austria as a teenager, embraced German nationalism at university and found salvation in Zionism during the last decade of his short life. In part he was trying to solve his own Jewish problem of who he really was. A few years before … Read more
Right-hand man: Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party appeals to ordinary Israelis’ deep-seated fears By Dani Filc Routledge £75 Why do so many impoverished Israelis vote for the Right? Netanyahu’s policies of privatisation and empowerment of the private sector clearly seem to be against their interests. Yet they shout: “Long live Bibi and Israel”. Dani Filc … Read more
Why improving Israel’s image is a tough job Following Gorbachev’s accession to power in 1985, I was able to visit Jewish refuseniks in Moscow, after many years of being refused a visa due to my work for Jews in the USSR. I met many remarkable people on that visit, including Yuli Edelstein, shortly after his … Read more
Lenin was only interested in Jewish nationalism in so far as it related to the Russian workers’ movement Since the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, an important feature in the debate on the Israel-Palestine imbroglio has been a questioning of the legitimacy of Israel as a nation-state by sections of the political … Read more
One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel-Palestine Conflict Benny Morris Yale University Press 240pp £18.99 ISBN 978 0300122817 The Making of Modern Israel 1948-1967 Leslie Stein Polity 412pp £20 ISBN 978 0745644660 Benny Morris is well known as one of the Israeli ‘new historians’. His evaluations of Israel’s birth in 1948 punctured both the official … Read more
Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism 1945–1948 Author: David Cesarani Publisher: Heinemann Price (RRP): £20 Few books have been written on the British counter-war against Jewish dissident groups in Palestine after the revelations of the Holocaust. Menachem Begin’s Irgun Zvati Leumi and Yitzhak Shamir’s Lehi, known pejoratively as ‘the Stern … Read more
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/judaism/history/zion.shtml BBC Radio 4 7 July 2009
Jonathan Schanzer. Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine. Palgrave Macmillan. London & New York. 2008. pp. 256. During the early part of the Gaza war of 2009. Amira Hass. the Israeli journalist known for her incisive commentary on the Palestinian territories and often accused of pro-Palestinian sympathies. wrote that Hamas operatives had begun to … Read more
INTRODUCTION In October 1947, two weeks before the vote on UN Resolution 181, the Revisionist Zionist headquarters in Paris approached the religious Zionist Mizrahi movement, the General Zionists, the Marxists of Hashomer Hatzair, and Ahdut Ha’avodah to form an anti-partition front.1 This willingness by Arieh Altman’s Revisionists to cultivate their deadly enemies on the Left … Read more