The Charedi refusal to serve in the IDF — the stumbling block in Netanyahu’s inability to form a governing coalition — is rooted in an ideological opposition to Zionism and a reticence to come to terms with modernity. It was the combination of the French Revolution and the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, that fragmented a hitherto…
Colin Shindler: In your book, Never a Native, you recalled that your parents went to see The Merchant of Venice in Essen in 1932 and were so appalled by the antisemitic comments in the audience that they left halfway through. What do you remember about the rise of Nazism in Germany at that time? Alice Shalvi: I very…
AS THE DEADLINE FOR submitting party lists neared on February 21, Benny Gantz (Hosen l’Yisrael) and Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) joined forces to form a centrist bloc, ‘Blue and White’ for the 2019 Israeli election in early April. It represents the strongest challenge to Netanyahu for years. In the two months since Netanyahu called an election,…
Last week the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, telephoned the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Gaza to express his government’s strong support for the Palestinian cause. Significantly Mahathir chose Palestinian Islamism and not Palestinian nationalism, Hamas rather than Fatah, to demonstrate Malaysian solidarity. His publicised telephone call came shortly after his controversial anti-Jewish – as…
MENAHEM BEGIN spent almost three decades astutely constructing a broad coalition of the right based on his own Herut movement until his election in 1977, when he began to realise that the responsibilities of office differed vastly from opposition.He was confronted with a rebellion when only 57 per cent of Herut loyalistsvoted for the Camp…
Thousands of eager participants are returning from the UK Limmud Festival, whose message of openness in Jewish life has proved a challenge to conformists within the Jewish world and spawned more than 80 Limmud communities across the world – from Beijing to Jerusalem and from New Zealand to New York, run by the brightest and best of…
Forty years ago, the Iranian revolution was reaching its zenith. 1978 had been marked by demonstrations and a massacre of protesters in Tehran’s Jaleh Square in September. By mid-January 1979, the Shah had gone into exile and the Queen’s visit to Iran in the royal yacht, Britannia, had been abruptly cancelled. On 1 February, the Ayatollah…
IT WILL TAKE A NEW generation, and a change of leadership, on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict for there to be a real possibility of progress towards peace, one of the world’s leading scholars on Israel believes. Professor Colin Shindler, a visiting British academic who will deliver the first of three lectures at the University…
As the British Labour party conference opens Sunday in Liverpool, the charge of anti-Semitism is the elephant in the debating chamber. Many in the leadership simply want the problem to go away, so that they can prepare for government as the ruling Conservative party ritually performs hari-kari over Brexit. Whereas Jeremy Corbyn is seen by…
Forty years ago during the early summer of 1978, 348 reserve and non-commissioned officers signed an open letter to prime minister Menahem Begin. It stated that ‘a government that prefers the establishment of the State of Israel in the borders of a Greater Israel above the establishment of peace through good neighbourly relations instils in…