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 In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner, published by Princeton University Press, pp. 372 The renowned sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, a refugee from the anti-Semitic campaign in Communist Poland during the 1960s and subsequently a professor at the University of Leeds, popularised the term ‘allosemitism’. It depicted the ‘otherness’…
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…
The fact that no state in western Europe could ensure the elementary rights of the Jewish people or defend them from the violence of the Fascist executioners, explains the aspiration of the Jews to set up a state of their own. It would be unjust if we were to reject the right of the Jewish…
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 National Archives released 64 MI5 files from the immediate post-war period last week. The activities of Nazi intelligence agents, Soviet spies, right-wing extremists and Stalinist fellow travellers are all described in fascinating detail — two files refer to the unsuccessful attempt by Lehi (the Stern Gang) to blow up the Colonial Office on April…
“‘I’m disappointed in you, Dick. The report you have produced is grossly unfair’. “I was genuinely puzzled and said: ‘Unfair to the Jews or to the Arabs?’ “To this he replied crossly: ‘No, unfair to Britain, of course. You’ve let us down by giving way to the Jews and Americans’.” So wrote Richard Crossman,…
Review of Daniel Heller’s Jabotinsky’s Children The acknowledged founder of the Zionist Right was the assimilated Odessa-born intellectual Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose abilities were admired by both acolytes and opponents. A hundred years ago he founded the Jewish Legion, which fought in the British campaign in 1918 to take Palestine from the Turks and promoted a…
THE LETTERS are full of horrifying news about pogroms and the terrible state of mind everybody is in. I can imagine what is going on in everybody’s head and heart. And it is precisely at this difficult time that I am not on duty as a Zionist. This pains me. So wrote Chaim Weizmann to…