Upon arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport on the night of December 30, 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the convicted spy Jonathan Jay Pollard was greeted on the tarmac by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was wearing a long black coat and a mask. Before formally acknowledging Netanyahu, Pollard made a slight motion with […]
As the fourth month of the Israel-Hamas war fast approaches, the Israeli government is seriously considering the possibility of invading Rafah, the only city in the Gaza Strip that Israel’s ground forces have yet to reach and occupy. While the Israeli Air Force has bombed Hamas sites in Rafah, the most southerly city in Gaza, […]
Three years into World War II, with German armies still on the march and intent on conquering the European continent, RKO Radio Pictures released Once Upon A Honeymoon, a romantic drama with dark overtones screened on the Turner Classic Movies channel recently. Directed by Leo McCarey and starring that inimitable Hollywood pair, Cary Grant and […]
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency is clearly an organization under sharp scrutiny after Israel presented donor nations with evidence that twelve of its employees participated in Hamas’ deadly attacks against Israel on October 7, and that ten percent of its staff, or 1,200 individuals, are members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. As a […]
Italian novelist Primo Levi theorized that ordinary people are more likely to commit atrocities than supposed monsters. As Levi, a Holocaust survivor, aptly observed, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Martin […]
It was a surreal event cooked up by some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics. At a moment when Israeli forces are battling Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip and negotiations are under way to free the hostages still in Hamas’ captivity, twelve government ministers and fifteen members of the Knesset had nothing […]
In the face of damning evidence that Hamas committed mass murder in southern Israel on October 7, Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, recently released a 16-page report denying that it deliberately targeted and killed civilians on that darkest of days. Our Narrative, Operation Al Aqsa Flood, released a few days ago in Arabic and […]
During a ten-month period from December 1938 until September 1939, Britain admitted more than 10,000 refugees up to the age of 18 from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland under a special immigration program known as the kindertransport. Introduced a month after the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany, it was a hastily assembled visa waiver scheme financed […]
Israel’s right to self-defence in the face of Hamas’ massacre on October 7 was implicitly recognized by the International Court of Justice in its interim ruling on January 26. Significantly enough, the court’s president, Joan Donoghue, did not call for an immediate ceasefire, which South Africa and its ally, Hamas, had demanded. This is no […]
One of the most successful European politicians of the 20th century, Bruno Kreisky, was an Austrian Jew who was successively foreign minister of Austria, leader of Austria’s Socialist Party, and, from 1970 to 1983, Austria’s longest serving and only Jewish chancellor. Kreisky is the subject of Daniel Ascheim’s biography, Kreisky, Israel, and Jewish Identity, published […]