Next week Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, will visit Israel and be greeted effusively by Benjamin Netanyahu. It will follow the recent visit of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, in which both governments agreed an amendment to the Polish law that said Poles as a whole were not responsible for crimes committed by the…
Next week Barack Obama will give the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Johannesburg to commemorate the centenary of the birth of South Africa’s first post-apartheid leader. South Africans will be exhorted “to find the Mandela in each of us” while scores of business leaders and media celebrities are spending a night inside the prison cells…
Review of Anshel Pfeffer’s Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu Published by Hurst, pp. 424 Netanyahu” means “given by God” in Hebrew. Anshel Pfeffer, one of Israel’s most insightful journalists and the author of this excellent biography, clearly doesn’t believe this to be the most appropriate of surnames for Israel’s current prime…
When the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem last month, Paraguay was quick to follow suit — much to the delight of the Israeli government. At an effusive ceremony in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the Paraguayan president for taking in Holocaust survivors, while President Rivlin said that Paraguay had been a true friend…
Shortly after midnight on 5 June 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian living in the US, in the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles during his campaign to become president. Kennedy died the next day – it was the first anniversary of the outbreak of the Six Day war. In subsequent years, Sirhan…
Fifty years ago, the student revolt broke out on campuses all over western Europe. The revolutionary fervour of the times spawned a generation who believed that a better world was possible if only we dedicated ourselves. In Communist Eastern Europe there were student demonstrations against state-sponsored anti-Semitism. There were occupations and sit-ins at LSE, Leicester…
For me, Israel is at the forefront of Jewish history. The state is the inheritor of the French revolutionary tradition and nineteenth century European liberal nationalism. As someone who was embedded in the political causes of the 1960s, the Six Day war in 1967 was a watershed. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 propelled…
Next week the Glasgow Film Festival will close with a showing of Nae Pasaran! (They Shall Not Pass!) which tells the story of how engineers at the Rolls-Royce East Kilbride factory in 1974 refused to repair aircraft engines that belonged to the Chilean armed forces. Led by General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean air force, flying…
29 November 1947 On 29 November 1947 the member states of the United Nations – almost a quarter of the current membership – voted for the partition of Palestine into two states. Jerusalem was to be internationalised. The Arab state was 99% Arab while the population of the Jewish state was 55% Jews 45% Arab…
The Kurds are a fighting people that have proven political commitment and political moderation – they are worthy of their own political independence. So spoke prime minister Netanyahu in June 2014. The overwhelming Kurdish vote in support of independence last Monday was endorsed by Israelis of all political views. It built on half a century…