Colin Rubenstein

Letters - April 2005

April 2005, no. 270

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

Barry Jones on the ODNB

Dear Editor,

I read Angus Trumble’s review of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ABR, March 2005) with close interest and some envy. It was probably inevitable that he should concentrate on entries with Australian relationships. He comments that all deceased Australian prime ministers are there, except Scullin and Page. In fact, Fadden and Forde are also missing.

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Herzl's Nightmare: One land, two people by Peter Rodgers

by Colin Rubenstein •

December 2004–January 2005, no. 267

Colin Rubenstein reviews ‘Herzl’s Nightmare: One land, two people’ by Peter Rodgers

Peter Rodgers, Australia’s Ambassador to Israel from 1994-97, has produced a flimsy and flawed anti-Zionist tract that tells the reader much about his mindset but does not provide anything approaching a reliable historical or contemporary guide to Middle Eastern realities. Rodgers maintains a veneer of even-handedness, but his underlying point appears anything but balanced. Israel, apparently, was born in sin through dispossessing another people. Herzl’s ‘Zionist dream came at terrible cost to both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples’, according to Rodgers, who is now firmly rooted in the ideological terrain of those diplomats and journalists who believe that Israel deserves all the pain it is suffering. Herzl’s Nightmare is nothing more than a skewed anti-Israel diatribe that builds its case by means of a selective presentation of some facts.

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