July 9: No Israelis need apply

My mother and father emigrated to the US in 1927, when it was rare to see the zenophobic line in help-wanted ads: "No Irish need apply." But a generation earlier, the warning was common in American newspapers. After all, an Irishman was apt to be a Catholic, and nobody wanted to work beside one of those!

So it is weird to read that the "Israeli Settlements (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill" passed the Irish parliament on Tuesday. (Ireland had earlier recognized a Palestinian state, though there is no such thing, which is a delightfully Irish thing for a parliament to do.) The law forbids the importation from Israel of goods originating outside the country's 1967 borders.

In the days of my youth, I regarded Ireland and Israel as soulmates, both victims of neighbors who wanted them gone because their religion was unacceptable. (Indeed, 200 of the notorious "Black and Tan" mercenaries, recruited in Britain to stamp out Irish rebels after the First World War, did similar duty in the Palestine Mandate after Ireland became more or less independent in 1921.) Today, Ireland is as "anti-Zionist" as our student-activists at MIT or Columbia -- or Yale, for that matter, where my own granddaughter graduated a few years ago with a keffiyeh on her shoulders.

Read my earlier musings

The Second World War

Another masterpiece from the estimable Antony Beevor! Yes, it's possible to encompass the six years of the Second World War (or anyhow its most important bits) in a single volume. Sure, some chapters lag, and his treatment of Bernard Montgomery is a bit too forgiving of the British field marshal. I was especially impreswsed that he begins the story, not in Spain or Poland, but in the battle of Nomonhan between the Japanese army and Russian troops under the future Marshal Zhukov, who later plays a major role in the capture of Berlin. See my review in the Warbird's Book Club.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford. Support Ukraine by contributing to Razom (a tax-deductible US-based charity). Or its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

And welcome to the Warbird's Forum!

Here are a thousand or so files about the the planes, pilots, and warfighters of the past hundred years, grouped under these headings: