Review of Let My People Go by Pauline Peretz (Trans: Ethan Rundell) Transaction, £54.50 Joseph Stalin’s last years were the “Black Years of Soviet Jewry”. The trial and execution of the Yiddish writers, the Slansky trial of mainly Jewish Communists in Prague, and the infamous Doctors’ Plot in January 1953, all characterised this period. Stalin’s … Read more
Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport By Saul David (Hodder and Stoughton pp. 446, 20 pounds) In 1976 Palestinian Arabs from a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and German far leftists from the Revolutionäre Zellen hijacked an Air France Airbus with nearly 250 … Read more
In Jews Against Themselves, Edward Alexander, a retired English professor from Seattle, deals with the concept of “Jewish apostasy” – members of the tribe who “abandon” the State of Israel. Throughout this collection of essays, the author vents anger against Jews of ‘the progressive persuasion” who fall “to mobilize their intellectual resources on behalf of … Read more
Israel’s Security Men: The Arab-Fighting Political Careers of Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak by Thomas Mitchell (McFarland 2015) pp. 256 $35 Since the Six Day War in 1967, the tendency of IDF chiefs of staff to enter the political bearpit has been accentuated. Those who left under a cloud, such as … Read more
Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron by Menachem Klein (Hurst and Co London) 336 pp THE TITLE of this book, Lives in Common, was truer of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs before 1948 – when the state of Israel was established – than today, Indeed the notion has been replaced … Read more
Red Notice: A True Stroy of High Finance, Murder and One man’s Fight for Justice By Bill Browder Bantam Press (London 2015) 374 pages During the 1990s, international capitalism discovered the dysfunctional society of post-Communist Russia. Privatization offered Western investors the opportunity of unheard of profits in hitherto unknown territory. In Russia itself die-hard … Read more
Nazi Germany and the Arab World What if Monty had lost in the Middle East? By Colin Shindler, April 8, 2015 Meeting of malevolent minds: Mufti and Hitler in 1941 By Francis R. Nicosia Cambridge University Press, £60 What would have happened if Montgomery had lost at El Alamein and Hitler had defeated the Soviet … Read more
Jews and the Left::The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance by Philip Mendes PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2014 As an accidental Jew, Will Self first ‘resigned as a Jew’ during the Second Lebanon war in 2006. In Self’s recent Guardian review of Shlomo Sand’s How I stopped being a Jew, he again resigned his … Read more
Leading the way: David Ben-Gurion was both revolutionary Jacobin and ‘the helmsman of the state’ By Anita Shapira Yale University Press, £18.99 ‘The man possesses the genius of looking at life face to face, of thinking not in concepts but in the fundamental facts of reality”. So wrote Ben-Gurion about Lenin, whom he further described … Read more
Shlomo Avineri Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2013. pp.274 In his autobiography, Chaim Weizmann commented that Theodor Herzl was ‘not of the people’ despite being an inspiring leader and brilliant organiser. The author of this interesting book, the eminent Israeli academic and public intellectual, Shlomo Avineri, has not written a conventional biography of Herzl. Instead he has … Read more