Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
From the monthly archives:
It is a truism that the US and Israel have had an extraordinarily close relationship since the 1960s. This fact makes Israel’s right-wing government’s gloating over Obama’s political troubles all the more. . . . well, troubling. The Republican upset in the race for the U.S. Senate seat held for nearly half a century by [...]
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No Israeli leader has ever called for—much less offered—any peace deal to the Palestinians that would be reasonable for the Palestinians to accept. All such proposals have always undermined a number of the most fundamental characteristics of any sovereign state, such as control over borders, airspace, resources, etc, and therefore failed to provide Palestinians with [...]
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As I mentioned in my earlier post on Haiti and Gaza, Israel sent an IDF search-and-rescue team to Haiti to share “Jewish ethics” with the disaster-stricken locals. This is, of course, entirely unrelated to Israel’s desire to re-earn some of the brownie points lost in the course of, inter alia, its multiple year siege on [...]
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You can argue for the merits of Israeli democracy, of which there are a few, but you cannot do so without taking account of the fact of the institutionalized system of segregation, the differentiated structure of civil and political rights, including state-sponsored discrimination against non-Orthodox Jews, and the fact that Israel has ruled over millions [...]
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Dr. King, if only the world listened to your message instead of using you as a cheapened stage prop. That is the dream I have. “A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings [...]
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Dear Haitians, forgive me for using your current and historical suffering to make a political point about a distant land. Nothing I say is intended to diminish your real suffering and remarkable steadfastness in the face of often externally created adversity. Given your history, there is a strong comparison to be made with the currently [...]
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Where to begin? Regular readers of this blog will undoubtedly know about the severe problem of Israeli racism against Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. But this story leaves even me incredulous. After Ali Abunimah posted a wonderfully sarcastic comment to his Twitter feed (@avinunu) about how much settlers love to hear about the [...]
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Sisters Reem (15) and Ameera (10) are two of seven children living in a small house close to the Israeli border in northern Gaza. Their mother Naema was five months pregnant with their baby sister Habiba when she had to flee during the Israeli offensive. Her children talk about how the military operation affected them [...]
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File this under profiles in Israeli racism, part 279. The Israeli women’s organization, Women to Women, published a report in December 2008 about the widespread use of Depo Provera in the Ethiopian community. Ethiopians comprise just two percent of Israel’s population, yet account for 57% of users of the birth control drug. According to the [...]
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Unlike some of the more thoughtful essays I have highlighted recently, the following article by Gigi Grinstein, the president of a strategy think tank called the Reut Institute, is a classic case of Israelis’ chauvinistic myopia. I am going to try something new and intersperse my comments, in red, throughout the text in the hope [...]
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