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
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
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
Tel Aviv was founded on the second day of Passover, 1909. A crowd famously gathered on the dunes on April 11 and dreamed of the rise of an ir metropolinit — a modern Hebrew metropolis. The new white city, inhabited by “the new Jew”, was established to be as far removed from the religiosity and … Read more
A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, by Gudrun Kramer, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, xiii þ 357 pp., ISBN 978-0-691-11897-0 This work is an overview of the history of Palestine up to 1948. The author, Gudrun Kra¨mer, a distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies in Berlin, … Read more
Tel Aviv was founded on 11 April 1909 (20 Nissan 5669) as a city of rebellion. It was a reaction to the misery and deprivation of the East European shtetl. It was a desire to improve living conditions for the Jews of nearby Jaffa and to liberate them from Arab slumlords. It was a break … Read more
Yigal Allon, Native Son: A Biography Anita Shapira. Translated by Evelyn Abel University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, Pp.385, £32.50, ISBN 978-08122-4028-3 Following the sudden demise of Yigal Allon in February 1980, a draft outline for the beginning of an autobiography was discovered in his papers. In the intervening period, Allon’s image has become more complex, … Read more
The Distortion of Zionism Zionism is often seen by the left in perjorative terms today. Yet more often than not, such prejudice is based on ignorance rather than knowledge and understanding. Significantly, Peace Now, the grassroots mass movement which has a long history of protest against support for the settlements is never characterised as … Read more