Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
You read about the demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, about the “Israeli consensus” around Gilo in East Jerusalem, about partial settlement freezes that exclude East Jerusalem, about the 250,000 Jewish settlers living in East Jerusalem. Har Homa, Gilo, Sheikh Jarrah, Zur Baher, Jabal Mukaber, Ma’ale Adumim, planning, zoning, residency permits… For people who [...]
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Torched religious sites, burnt holy books, genocidal graffiti, notions of ethnic purity and the legitimate murder of enemy babies. Am I talking about the rise of Nazism in 1930s Poland? Nope, I am talking about the West Bank, this week, late 2009. In recent posts (here and here), I have described how settler lunatics responsible [...]
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An outrageously large number of Israeli politicians express violently racist sentiments in public. What must they say in private? Today’s case study in Israeli racism toward Arabs/Palestinians/Persians/Muslims (aren’t they all the same anyway?) comes from Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who is the spiritual leader of Shas, a right-wing, religious party in Israeli with 11 Knesset seats [...]
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No matter your opinions about Israeli war crimes in Gaza last winter, the fact that Israeli officials are beginning to worry about their travel plans is one of the most positive developments in a long time because it creates one small but real pressure to consider the human implications of their military decisions. In a [...]
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At some point, the endless series of Israeli provocations against peace must force us to reach the only possible conclusion that remains: Israel simply has no interest in peace, not with the Palestinians, not with the Syrians, not with the Iranians. The country has learned to thrive by bingeing and purging militarism, and it is [...]
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I am a severe critic of many Israeli policies. But a part of me always held on to those aspects of Israel that remained principled and democratic. Important interventions by Israel’s High Court against the use of human shields, against the early planned routes of the segregation wall, the injunction to desegregate the road in [...]
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Another nonviolent Palestinian activist has joined Mohammed Othman in an Israeli jail for the sole crime of organizing demonstrations against the separation wall. A couple months ago, Abdallah Abu Rahmah of Bi’lin was providing a tour of his village for Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former UN human rights chief Mary Robinson, and several other [...]
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You really cannot make up such things. It turns out there is one, very substantial point in the infinite space of all possible ideas on which I agree with settlers: Jews are not popsicles. Unfortunately, I disagree that Jews cannot be frozen. Surely, Canadian and Russian and Swedish Jews can be frozen. With current weather [...]
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Next time an Israeli tries to tell me about how much Israelis love peace, I will hold them accountable for this. The Likud, which has been one of Israel’s mainstream parties for decades, the party of the current sitting prime minister, thinks the Oslo Accords were a disaster. (Editor’s note: They were, of course, for [...]
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Settlers are not some magical force of nature, of unknown origin, impossible to contain. They are a state-sponsored movement to drive out Palestinians from their ancestral homeland and move Jews to the newly created space. It is a movement that consumes occupied and stolen Palestinian land purely because the government of Israel, with the fourth [...]
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