Defend the Realm By Christopher Andrew | Knopf | 1,056 pages | $40 In October 1909, Commander Mansfield Cumming of the Royal Navy and Captain Vernon Kell of the British Army started work in a small office in London’s Victoria Street which had been rented by a private detective. Thus began Britain’s security service, known … 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
Avi Shlaim offers a selective, partial view By Avi Shlaim Verso, £16.99 In this interesting collection of past writings, Avi Shlaim emotionally takes the side of the Palestinians, yet intellectually and rationally views the conflict as a clash between two national movements. While this balance is maintained in his earlier work, more recent writings are … 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
Benjamin Disraeli By Adam Kirsch Schocken 259 pages; $21 It is said that when Menachem Begin was arrested by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in Lithuania in 1940, he took with him a copy of Andre Maurois’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli to stave off the intellectual isolation of an uncertain future. Disraeli, a converted … Read more
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
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
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
1948: The First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris Published by Yale University Press, 524pp. Benny Morris has the unique distinction of being criticised and often vilified by both Israelis and Palestinians because of his interpretation of the war of 1948 – and especially his appraisal of the exodus of around 6-700,000 Palestinian refugees. Thus, … Read more