The PLO in the World Order Avraham Sela and Moshe Ma’oz (eds), The PLO and Israel: From Armed Conflict to Political Solution 1964-1994. London: Macmillan, 1997. Pp.x + 310, index. £30 (cloth). ISBN 0-333-72370-8. Roland Dannreuther, The Soviet Union and the PLO. London: Macmillan, 1998. Pp.ix + 222, index, biblio. £45 (cloth). ISBN 0-312-17223-0. … Read more
Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin by Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman 292pp, (Granta)13.99. On November 4, 1995, at the end of a jubilant rally for peace, Yigal Amir, a religious student, pumped two bullets into Yitzhak Rabin and a third into his bodyguard.The shots ruptured his spleen, severed … Read more
Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag (Simon and Schuster) by Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson The Israeli critic, Dov Sadan, symbolised the 20th-century experience as the nations of the world crowded together in a room. The Jews were squeezed in at a coiner of a table, but in the centre of the room. … Read more
The Gates of November: Chronicles of the Slepak family (Secker and Warburg) by Chaim Potok Ten years ago, the telephone rang in the Moscow apartment of Vladimir and Masha Slepak, veterans of the refusenik movement. They had finally been granted permission to emigrate to Israel. It was the end of 17 years of harassment, imprisonment, … Read more
Mordechai Bar-On, In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996. Pp.470, biblio. ISBN 1-878379-53-4. Mordechai Bar-On has written an overview of the Israeli peace movement from the birth of the State in 1948 up to the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn … Read more
Those Wonderful Women in Black: The Story of the Womens Campaign for Soviet Jewry (Minerva Press) by Daphne Gerlis Sometime in 1971, Yitzhak “Ijo” Rager, the diplomat at the Israeli Embassy unofficially responsible for Soviet Jewry activities in Britain, asked me to stand in for him and speak to a group of Jewish women who … Read more
Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 19141933 / by Michael Berkowitz. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. – ISBN 0-521-47087-0 £35 305pp Borrowing a phrase from Eric Hobsbawm, Berkowitz prefers to view Zionism as an ‘invented tradition’ which was remarkable for its adaption to the situation of assimilated Jewries and its ingenious ability to build … Read more
The Hiding Room by Jonathan Wilson (Secker and Warburg 1995) The Rabin assassination showed that seemingly normal Jews are ready to kill their brethren for a cause. After all, Yigal Amir was no American import attempting to turn the West Bank into the Wild West. Amir’ s group was guided by the life and times … Read more
The Stern Gang : Ideology. Politics and Terror 1940-1949 (Frank Cass) by Joseph Heller Blood in Zion (Brasseys) by Saul Zadka Jerusalem: Backgrounds or Memory (Biblios) by Amos Elon Jerusalem: the Endless crusade (Century) by Andrew sinclair When Joseph Heller’s comprehensive study of the Stern Group (Lehi) was first published in Hebrew, it aroused the … Read more
Broken Covenant: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis between the US and Israel by Moshe Arens (London 1995) Moshe Arens’s recollections of the last Likud government will not impress the faithful, recording as they do some candid insights from a seminal figure at the centre of power. Arens was Foreigia Minister in the National … Read more