Ned Temko (Comment, last week) is right to differentiate between the present Israeli incursion and Sharon’s categorical refusal to heed cabinet decisions in 1982. By marching instead on Beirut, Sharon brought out 400,000 protesters in Tel Aviv in 1982. Today, demonstrations against the conflict from the Israeli far left can only muster hundreds. There is … Read more
An outright victory over Hizbullah, as David Grossman argues (Comment, July 20), is impossible, but it may be considerably weakened militarily. The Israelis have learned the lesson of 1982 by not mounting a ground invasion of Lebanon. At that time, Sharon disobeyed cabinet orders to clear a 40km swathe of territory of Palestinian fighters and … Read more
Einstein’s address to the National Labor Committee for Palestine – which Howard Jacobson quotes (8 January) – followed the attacks by the Irgun Zvai Leumi on Arabs in November 1937. Up until then, the policy of the Zionist leadership during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 was one of “self-restraint” – no retaliation to killings of … Read more
Arafat’s pursuit of the politics of expediency led him to support the killing of students in Tiananmen Square and the suppression of the democracy movement. He expressed “extreme gratification that you were able to restore normal order after the recent incidents in People’s China”. He was also sympathetic to the coup in the USSR to … Read more
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, believes there has been a concerted attempt to label his paper as a receptacle for liberal anti-Semitism due to its criticism of current Israeli government policies.In Daphna Baram’s incisive new book, “Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel,” (Guardian Books, £17.99), he is quoted as saying: “And, of course, once … Read more
Andreas Whittam Smith (Opinion, 19 April) quotes selectively from a harsh English translation of Jabotinsky’s famous article “The Iron Wall” which was originally published in Russian in 1923. Jabotinsky wrote in the aftermath of Arab attacks in 1920 and 1921 and was actually protesting about the British inability to protect the Jews or arm them. … Read more
Although an overwhelming majority of Israelis accept the need for a security fence, only a minority, according to polls, believe that it should go through Palestinian territory. Some would prefer it to follow the Green Line. Yet Silvan Shalom and the Palestinians are silent on this option. Each suicide bombing prolongs the occupation. Any cessation … Read more
The problem in negotiating with Hamas is that it does not base its ideology on the Enlightenment and 19th-century nationalism – as does the IRA – but on the political theology emanating from the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Its 1988 charter seeks to replace Israel with an Islamic entity. It clearly has no … Read more
The newly released MI5 files (Terrorists plotted death of Bevin, May 22) further confirm historians’ belief that Jewish nationalist groups fighting the British in Mandatory Palestine in the 1940s regarded themselves as “the Zionist Sinn Fein”. Both Menachem Begin and Avraham Stern looked to the Irish struggle. The nom de guerre of Yitzhak Shamir, the … Read more
Ewen MacAskill’s suggestion that the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration and the Israeli right read from the same hymn sheet may sound logical, but it is not borne out by the facts (Road map to nowhere, April 14).Just before the outbreak of the Iraqi war, Paul Wolfowitz stated that the US stake in pushing for … Read more