Last week, the remains of King Victor Emanuel III were brought back from exile in Egypt to Italy by an official air force aircraft — and then quietly reinterred in the burial plot for members of the House of Savoy. The Italian Jewish community strongly condemned this, because the king had not only been a…
In recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, President Trump is reflecting Jewish emotional and spiritual yearning for Jerusalem. In doing so, he is appealing to many outside of the far Right and the strictly orthodox in American Jewry who make up his usual supporters. 82 per cent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump — far more than…
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…
At noon on December 11 1917, General Allenby dismounted and walked through the Jaffa Gate to take possession of Jerusalem from the defeated Turks on behalf of the British Crown. Five days later Naaman Belkind and Yosef Lishansky were hanged by the Turks in Damascus. They were members of the intelligence network of young Palestinian…
Why commemorate the Balfour Declaration? After all, some in Britain consider it to be ‘a historic mistake’. Others see it as the ultimate rebellion – the attempt of a small, persecuted people to return from the margins to the mainstream and thereby succeeding against all the odds. Many Jews believe that it was solely Judaism…