The Voice of Israel, or Kol Israel, broadcast special radio programs to the Arab world from the late 1940s onward. Mostly hosted by Arabic-speaking Iraqi Jews superbly acquainted with Arab culture, they were quite popular, judging by the stream of appreciative letters from Arab listeners that landed in an Israeli postal box in Geneva, Switzerland, […]
Marco Carmel’s bitter-sweet movie, Arugam Bay, is set in an idyllic corner of Sri Lanka to which surfers gravitate. It’s where three Israelis go on vacation to chill out and reminisce about an old friend who has passed. It will be screened on June 1 at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from May […]
Thanks to a recent agreement between the United States and Egypt, humanitarian aid has begun flowing into the Gaza Strip via Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing, albeit it on a far lower scale. This assistance had been channelled through the adjacent Rafah crossing prior to Israel’s invasion of Rafah and its takeover of the crossing […]
The first group of Jews to be transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland consisted of 999 women from Slovakia. Their gruesome story unfolds in Heather Dune Macadam’s empathetic documentary, 999: The Forgotten Girls, which is scheduled to be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 31. Slovakia, a province of Czechoslovakia, […]
Foreign intrigue suffuses Background To Danger, a 1943 Warner Bros. Pictures movie directed by Raoul Walsh. Recently screened on the Turner Classic Movies channel, this taut espionage thriller unfolds primarily in Turkey but also in Syria and Nazi Germany at the height of World War II. Turkey, one of several neutral countries that stayed out […]
Israel is doing what it absolutely must in Rafah, Hamas’ last urban bastion. Despite a ruling by the International Court of Justice on May 24 ordering the Israeli government to immediately halt an air and ground offensive in that city in the southern Gaza Strip, Israel is pushing ahead with its plan to capture much […]
Israel has been bogged down in an undeclared war of attrition with Hezbollah for the past seven months, and if the current situation prevails or deteriorates, Israel may well be facing a “hot” summer, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned recently. Since Hamas terrorists attacked southern Israel on October 7, Hezbollah, in a tangible show […]
Israel is going against the grain of international public opinion by refusing to countenance the eventual creation of a Palestinian state within the framework of a two-state solution. Scores of countries, including Israel’s friends and allies, already recognize this as a geopolitical necessity, yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right-wing government is adamantly digging in […]
Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, was confident he had reached a judicious and even-handed decision. Having concluded that Israeli and Hamas leaders had committed “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in connection with the October 7 massacre and the current war in the Gaza Strip, he issued arrest warrants for […]
The helicopter crash on May 19 that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, will likely have no tangible effect either in Iran or in the Middle East. Iran’s internal and external policies are tightly managed and controlled by its hardline supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in tandem with the Islamic […]