Israel

Beyond chutzpah is a long, tedious and barely readable rant, known less for its content than for the childless controversy it succeeded in provoking. Despite the promise of its subtitle, the book makes no meaningful attempt to describe or to understand the misuses of anti-Semitism. It is, instead, an obsessive assault on another book, The Case For Israel (2003), by the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who has gained prominence for defending O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Klaus von Bülow and, more recently, Israel.

Last year I turned eighty. Vacillating between denial and celebration, I decided, with some trepidation, on the latter. It was thirty years since I had last had a big birthday party: this one needed to be special. I consoled myself that, old as I am, I am still younger than the president of the United States, Mick Jagger, and the pope.

Michael Gawenda has written a deeply personal story about his Jewish identity. It comes during a period when conflict in Israel/Palestine has been painful for all. While he remains committed to a two-state future that supports the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in their own countries, the author critiques influential sections of the political left where acceptance has come to require demonising the Jewish state. A key message of the book is that too often on the left the only good Jew is one who publicly rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains silent when it is declared racist and nothing more than a coloniser of an indigenous population.

Pressure is mounting on the Albanese government to recognise Palestine as a state. Following a resolution moved by Penny Wong, this became ALP party policy in 2021, and it will almost certainly be reaffirmed at this year’s party conference in August. Former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans has written a powerful defence of the policy, which has been assailed, predictably, by the Israel lobby.

The recent pause announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in pushing a controversial legislative package through the Knesset marks a temporary respite from a concerted plan to challenge and overturn the system of government that has been in place since the state of Israel was created in 1948.

In today's episode, Ilana Snyder – President of the New Israel Fund Australia – places the recent turmoil in Israel and Palestine in the context of the all-too-familiar cycle of tension, violence, and ceasefire that has beset the region for decades. What might it take for there to be an enduring peace? Snyder examines this question, while also identifying what sets the most recent violence apart from previous eruptions: an increase in ‘intercommunal violence’ that ‘has pitted Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel against one another on streets where they have lived side by side for decades’.

The Middle-East conflict is perhaps the most intractable in the world. Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for nearly a century over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The world has witnessed a never-ending cycle of tension and conflict, including a number of full-scale wars, with immense suffering on both sides. 

In Israel’s recent election, Benjamin Netanyahu desperately defended his position as Israel’s prime minister, but perhaps also as a free man, because he may soon face trial for corruption charges. As Israelis learn more about his lavish life style, many yearn for the days of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), whom they recall as an ascetic statesman of vision and integrity. Netanyahu is seen as the opposite of Ben-Gurion.

So mused Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev, author of this important biography of Israel’s first prime minister, in Haaretz newspaper. But, he added, Netanyahu has in many ways followed in Ben-Gurion’s footsteps, especially in his view that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians can at best be managed, not solved.

In 1901 the cultural Zionist Israel Zangwill, borrowing a phrase from Lord Shaftesbury, declared, ‘Palestine is a country without a people, the Jews are a people without a country.’ That cliché has continued to influence the impasse in the Middle East for almost a century ...

While there have been many histories of Israel written over the decades, Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea, published in 1959, remains a classic guide to the intellectual underpinnings of Zionism. It is now joined almost sixty years later by Michael Brenner’s excellent book, In Search of Israel: The history of an idea ...