Seventy Five years ago, on 26 August 1944, General Charles de Gaulle walked triumphantly down the Champs-Elysées, engulfed by a sea of jubilant Parisians. The capital had been liberated from the Nazi oppressor, but France was yet to be free. The road from D-Day in June 1944 had been long and tortuous. The original plan … Read more
The reaction of the Labour party to the Panorama programme reflects the desire of the Corbynista elite to pull up the ideological drawbridge and, in true Leninist fashion, not to cede any concession to their critics. Following the student protests of the 1960s, a small group on the far left within the Labour party including Jeremy Corbyn … Read more
One hundred years ago, on 28 June 1919, the victorious powers in the First World War signed the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. It was followed by treaties with Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey — the defeated powers in a conflict in which millions lost their lives. The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was supposed … Read more
Review of Susie Linfield’s The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky Published by Yale University Press, 2019, pp.389 Many who write about the international Left tend to focus on antisemitism rather than anti-Zionism. US academic and journalist Susan Linfield remedies this imbalance in The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the … Read more
The Charedi refusal to serve in the IDF — the stumbling block in Netanyahu’s inability to form a governing coalition — is rooted in an ideological opposition to Zionism and a reticence to come to terms with modernity. It was the combination of the French Revolution and the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, that fragmented a hitherto … Read more
Pope Francis’s announcement that the Vatican will open the archives on the life and times of his predecessor, Pius XII (1939-1958) – some 16 million pages – has answered the call of historians over many decades. The attitude of Pius towards Jews, anti-Semitism and Nazi atrocities has remained a matter of controversy for Jewish and … Read more
Jeremy Corbyn’s accumulated sayings over the last 40 years has proved to be treasure trove for his many critics. From his inability to act as a mediator between Israelis and Palestinians to currently defending the authoritarian Maduro government in Venezuela in the name of socialism, Mr Corbyn’s past is proving to be an albatross around … Read more
Last week the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, telephoned the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Gaza to express his government’s strong support for the Palestinian cause. Significantly Mahathir chose Palestinian Islamism and not Palestinian nationalism, Hamas rather than Fatah, to demonstrate Malaysian solidarity. His publicised telephone call came shortly after his controversial anti-Jewish – as … Read more
Thousands of eager participants are returning from the UK Limmud Festival, whose message of openness in Jewish life has proved a challenge to conformists within the Jewish world and spawned more than 80 Limmud communities across the world – from Beijing to Jerusalem and from New Zealand to New York, run by the brightest and best of … Read more
Forty years ago, the Iranian revolution was reaching its zenith. 1978 had been marked by demonstrations and a massacre of protesters in Tehran’s Jaleh Square in September. By mid-January 1979, the Shah had gone into exile and the Queen’s visit to Iran in the royal yacht, Britannia, had been abruptly cancelled. On 1 February, the Ayatollah … Read more