Barbara Perry and Ryan Scrivens contend that there have been too few attempts by academics to systematically analyze the ideologies and activities of right-wing extremists in Canada, resulting in a paucity of books and monographs on this important topic. “There can be little doubt, then, that a theoretically informed contemporary assessment is needed,” they believe. […]
Britain laid the groundwork for the emergence of Israel when, in 1917, it promised to facilitate the establishment of a “national home” for the Jewish people within the boundaries of Palestine.Two of its leading politicians, Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, played an integral and indispensable role in this historic process. […]
Poland emerged broken and destitute from the ashes of World War II. Six million of its inhabitants, Jews and Catholics alike, had been murdered or had died during the German and Russian invasions of September 1939. Several of its cities, notably Warsaw and Wroclaw, had been virtually destroyed. Polish journalist Magdalena Grzebalkowska offers an impressionistic […]
Of all of the thorny issues exacerbating Israel’s protracted conflict with the Palestinians, the “right of return” is doubtless the most complex one. It turns on the unwavering demand by Palestinian refugees to go back to their original homes in what was Palestine and what has been Israel since its declaration of statehood in 1948. This […]
When World War II ended in May of 1945, several million displaced Europeans, ranging from forced laborers to prisoners of war, found themselves in Germany, which Allied bombing raids had devastated and which was now occupied by American, British and Soviet armies. The vast majority of the refugees were repatriated to their respective homelands in […]
Shabtai Shavit worked for the Mossad, Israel’s vaunted external intelligence agency, for 32 years. From 1973 to 1976, he was head of operations. And in the homestretch of his career, from 1989 to 1996, he was its director. Appointed to his post by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, he was the first director of the Mossad […]
Until his assassination last January, Qassem Soleimani was one of Israel’s deadliest adversaries. As commander of the Quds Force, the external operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, he coordinated attacks against Israel from Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Arash Azizi, an Iranian journalist and historian, describes him as “a larger than life” […]
Tens of thousands of Polish Holocaust survivors returned or reappeared in Poland after World War II, hoping to resume their lives and reclaim their properties. Some had gone into hiding, others had endured Nazi extermination camps, and still others had fled into the Soviet Union after Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. The […]
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, was proof of the theory that one man can make a difference. Against the greatest of odds, he laid the foundation for the birth of Israel, an event he presciently predicted at the turn of the 19th century. A visionary, prophet and leader, Herzl was an […]
An old photograph I treasure, taken by a person whose identity will never be known, shows a solemn young couple and their two children sitting on the grass in Montreal’s Fletcher’s Field, a stone throw’s away from heavily-wooded Mount Royal. The woman, a hint of a smile on her face, balances a toddler on her […]