Search Results

“... prone to exaggeration, had a legitimate grievance about Washington’s automatic bias in favour of Israel since the departure of Eisenhower. The recent Middle East peace conference in Madrid may therefore come to be seen as a watershed. With the Cold War over and the Gulf War won, President George Bush and James Baker, his Secretary of State, have adopted an ...”

“... The problem​ with Israel,’ Tony Judt wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2003, is not – as is sometimes suggested – that it is a European ‘enclave’ in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law ...”

“... thirty years maintained the scaffolding that the Zionists happily tore down when their House of Israel was ready. Despite the objections of some British military commanders and civil servants in Palestine, His Majesty’s Government protected Jewish immigration, encouraged Jewish settlement, subsidised Jewish defence and protected the Yishuv, as ...”

“... the Theatre Royal in London staged a ‘solidarity rally’ for British Jews. The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, scolded the press for blaming the events of 11 September on Israel. Would they, he asked, like to live in ‘Gaza under the Palestinian Authority, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran ...”

“... Stern, broke away to form a small underground movement calling itself Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, but known as the Stern Gang. Stern saw Zionism as a national liberation movement, advocated armed struggle, and because he saw the British as foreign conquerors, was unwilling to wait until the war against Nazi Germany was over before initiating a ...”

“... on an aeroplane carrying Bert’s sister Lilia and her husband Jason to a film location in Israel. The eponymous heroine of Judith was a young actress who became, at various points, the lover of each of the male protagonists. And now we have the concluding volume, Hopeful Monsters, which surprises both in the density of its intellectual lumber ...”

“... own. Intellectuals have ‘scant regard for veracity’ on page 269. On the next page Sir Israel Gollancz ‘virtually created the English department at London University’. But there is no English department at London University, and Gollancz did not create the oldest of the English departments of the colleges that compose it. The one at University ...”

“... Apart from the editor’s obtrusive commentaries, this consists of lectures given at the Jonathan Institute in Washington by George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Arthur Goldberg, Moshe Arens, Eugene Rostow, Paul Johnson, Senator Cranston and many others with similar views. The blurb describes the book as a polemic, which it is, and ‘a comprehensive ...”

“... who love the German language or who hope to find their roots. Others say they could not settle in Israel or the United States. A highly successful criminal lawyer hates Germans but loves defending the victims of German society. Recently he defended two hooligans who had robbed and strangled an old man. He prepared their defence with particular zeal when he ...”

“... As a direct consequence of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon an international commission of six jurists headed by Sean MacBride undertook a mission to investigate reported Israeli violations of international law during the invasion. The commission’s conclusions were published in Israel in Lebanon by a British publisher: it is reasonably clear that no publisher could or ever will be found for the book in the US ...”

“... it’s not about his ancestors and it’s set at the time he was writing it, in the late 1980s. Jonathan Fabrizius, its central figure, is 43 years old and lives comfortably enough, in small part thanks to his earnings as a freelance journalist but chiefly thanks to the uncle who brought him up after the death of his parents and who still sends him a ...”

“... from Bram Stoker’s Dracula) begins with a canny bit of Orientalism. The English solicitor Jonathan Harker is travelling to the Carpathians to meet his client Count Dracula. ‘The impression I had,’ Harker says of crossing the Danube at Budapest, ‘was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges ...”

“... Anglo-Jewry: its charities. Alderman’s silence on one of the most important of these, the Joint Israel Appeal, is indicative of his failure to examine adequately the nature of Anglo-Jewry’s commitment to Israel. To propose that ‘Jews give disproportionately to communal charities because they are disproportionately ...”

“... the sort which tend to be thin on the ground in Britain. Partly, no doubt, this is a question of Israel’s history, and of the urgency of the material which it offers, but there’s also the possibility that when a writer decides to leap boldly into the area where ideology leaves off and action begins, significant analogies between political and literary ...”

“... kaddish’, a prayer so venerable that it goes back to the popular language of ancient Israel, Aramaic, and has been sanctified by millennia of grief. It seemed to my swimming eye to be written in tears. After the service my guardians took me to the front under the pulpit. Mrs Hahn looked at me for a long time and then burst into tears and we ...”