The mourners gathered round the body at Alice Shalvi’s funeral in Jerusalem last Tuesday and sang with great emotion and passion, Eshet Chayil – “a woman of worth”. Chanted each Friday night to welcome in Shabbat, it summed up a woman who was deeply loved and revered. Her family, friends, community, students and colleagues in their hundreds accompanied … Read more
One area of the tortuous Israel-Palestine conflict that has been under-researched has been the ties between Nazi propaganda and Islamism. The German academic, Mattihas Küntzel, has attempted to fill in the gaps in this short, but absorbing book. Nazi propaganda regarded the spoken word as more effective than the written word and began to broadcast … Read more
Fifty years ago, at exactly 14.00 hours on October 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrians forces advanced in a coordinated attack on the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), stationed on the east bank of the Suez Canal and on the Golan Heights. For the Jews, the 19-day conflict has passed into history as the Yom Kippur war. … Read more
A few weeks ago, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in the UK published a report entitled, “What do Jews in the UK think about Israel’s leaders and its future?” Comparable to Australia’s Crossroads23 demographic analysis, its authors, Jon Boyd and Carli Lessof, honed in on Jewish attitudes towards Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the “judicial reform” controversy. … Read more
In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, Jews began to understand themselves in terms of more than a religion – a people with a history, a culture, a literature, and a plethora of languages. With the rise of antisemitism, many considered a territorial solution to the … Read more
Avi Shlaim, a British historian of the Middle East, was forced to leave Baghdad with his family for Israel as a five-year-old by an Iraqi government that cared little for minorities. Some 110,000 Jews left Iraq in 1950 and 1951 – a Jewish community that could trace its origins back to the Babylonians. Some were … Read more
Fifty years ago, in mid-July 1973, the outgoing head of the IDF’s Southern Command, Ariel Sharon, held a retirement party in the garden of his Beersheba home. His farewell speech evolved into a tirade against David Elazar, the IDF Chief of Staff — there was no love lost between the two. Elazar had swept away … Read more
Last week, Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, celebrated his 53rd birthday in Ramon prison. He has spent more of his life behind bars than in freedom. He has served more time in prison than Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa and, unlike most Israelis sentenced to life imprisonment, it is highly unlikely his … Read more
In 1970, Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik, published his famous essay, “Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?” Amalrik was killed in a car crash in Spain in 1980, so didn’t live to see the collapse of the USSR in 1991. His essay, however, has become more prescient in a wider international sense — and with … Read more
The founding of a Hebrew republic in the Land of Israel in May 1948 changed history. For Jews, there is only before and after. The proclamation of the state took 32 minutes. A few hours later Egyptian aircraft were bombing Tel Aviv as worshippers rushed home from shul. The Chief Rabbi’s Office in London issued … Read more