Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
J Street is a fairly new “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying group in the US, which positions itself a notch or two to the left of AIPAC’s “all criticism of Israel is anti-semitic” line. This week, J Street held its first national conference in Washington, DC, which was very well-attended despite being boycotted by Michael Oren, Israel’s [...]
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“Iwant to know how and why it was decided to embark on Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip and to expand it into a ground offensive,” Aluf Benn, diplomatic editor of Haaretz, thunders today: I want to know if the decisions were affected by the Israeli election campaign then underway and the change in [...]
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Some countries become socially more advanced over time. Other countries become increasingly regressive till the point they pilot social experiments that were thoroughly discredited about four decades ago. A special committee appointed by the Transportation Ministry recommended on Tuesday conducting a yearlong trial during which passengers on “mehadrin” public bus lines would be allowed to [...]
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Muzzlewatch’s Sydney Levy hits the nail on the head with respect to the stereotypical demographic fear-mongering Jews that routinely do when assessing the two main options facing Israel: end ethnicity based exclusivism or end Israel’s pretense to democracy. “But let’s focus on the present. The question on the table [at the J Street conference], Is [...]
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More background related to my earlier posting on Major Agassi. He is not an isolated incident but rather one element of a broad infrastructure of messianic Judaism blended with real military and legal power. Here is a recent article by Akiva Eldar, an expert on the settlements who writes for Haaretz: Assistance from people with [...]
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Amnesty International just released a report on water rights in Israel/Palestine. Matt Yglesias gets to the crux of the matter: “Israel is, of course, a democracy. And politicians in democracies are responsive to the interests of the electorate. Jewish settlers in the West Bank get to vote. Palestinians in the West Bank don’t get to [...]
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In 2009, the 5.6 million Jews in Israel (and the settlements) account for 49% of the total number of people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, according to the US State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report 2009 (Thanks to Mondoweiss for bringing my attention to this report). Meanwhile, 4.9 million Palestinians do [...]
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If there is one thing that I could get all Jews—really all humans—to sit and contemplate, to consider with the most profound sincerity we capable of, its the following quote by Arundhati Roy: “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes [...]
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Meet the affable Major Adrian Agassi, a senior Israeli judge in the military courts of the occupied West Bank. He is one of the most important officials in Israel’s judicial administration of occupied Palestinian territory, with responsibilities that include overseeing land conflicts arising out of settlement construction and serving as special judge for administrative arrests [...]
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This blog will also serve as a place to gather remarkable quotations about Israel/Palestine. Today, Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazi, IDF Chief of Staff, said this at a Holocaust memorial ceremony in Germany: “I, Gabi Ashkenazi, a son of a Holocaust survivor, stand here today as the commander of the Israel Defense Forces, and carry with [...]
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