Currently Browsing: Israel 20 articles
A Response to Chief Rabbi Mirvis: Zionism does not define my Jewish identity
A response to the Chief Rabbi’s statement on Zionism
HaTikvah – The Failed Hope?
So many versions of Israel’s national anthem are being sent on social media during these times of trauma. Its title, Ha Tikvah: Hope. The lyrics, written in 1886 by Galician poet Naphtali Herz Imber, to Samuel Cohen’s melody based on a theme from Bedrich Smetana’s Moldau, focus on two stanzas: To be a free people […]
Humanity and War
I tuned in to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day recently, and I heard Dr Chetna Kang discuss Hindu values in times of battle. Without referring to the war between Israel and Gaza, she said it was important never to forget the humanity of the enemy. If you forget their humanity, she said, the torment […]
The Holocaust as moral instruction? Holocaust survival and memory in Zionism and anti-Zionism
Parts of this article are adapted from the posts by the author on Twitter/X. “My grandpa didn’t survive Auschwitz to bomb Gaza”, reads a placard held by a Jewish woman at a protest in Mexico against a previous Israel assault on Gaza. A photo of the placard went viral on social media in 2021. More […]
Israel 1993
Sue Fox I have been invited on an Embassy-sponsored press trip to Israel which will open doors I have never been through before. It’s eighteen months since I was last here. Money that once went into settlements has been diverted to the roads. There is a freeway to Herzliya which is popular with tourists and […]
Israel and Covid
Sue Fox charts the hassle of flying to and from Israel in the age of Covid. Israel here we come. Never mind PASSENGER LOCATOR FORM, what I need is a brain locator form. Flights to Israel were bought pre-Covid. It was barely two years ago but I seem to have aged another decade. When Israel […]
A Jewish Panther
Aidan Beatty reviews a new biography of Meir Kahane. It is now generally well recognised that America has never recovered from the 1960s; the Civil Rights Movement brought about the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation in the South but that was then replaced by the mass incarceration and unreformed police brutality that Black Lives Matter […]
‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man’
Shai Afsai writes on how The Independent’s Joe Sommerlad’s ‘A brief history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict’ plagiarises Rawan Damen’s four-part Al Nakba documentary. Al Nakba — written and directed by Rawan Damen, produced and first run on Al Jazeera Arabic in 2008, and re-versioned by Al Jazeera World to English in 2013 — is precisely […]
Keeping the show on the road
The May 2021 conflagration in Israel/Palestine has raised painful issues of resilience in the UK Jewish community.
Peace under fire
Dana Mills reports on her experiences working for Peace Now in Israel while under fire from Gazan rockets There is never a more urgent time to be a peace activist during a war. However, working for peace and to end the occupation under fire brings to light all the challenges and contradictions that this path […]