Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
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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There have been a couple excellent op-eds in the Israeli press recently, which examine the social psychological structures that allow Israelis to accept their little apartheid regime. Here I want to summarize one of them, by the journalist Yitzhak Laor in Ha’aretz. First, he describes Israeli reactions to the recent High Court injunction to desegregate [...]
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“Palestinians are blurry figures,” writes Aluf Benn in a recent Ha’aretz column. “Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh speak, women covered from head to toe mourn in a tent, men run with a stretcher after an ambulance, men concealing their faces fire Qassam rockets. Israelis have no interest in knowing anything further.” Israeli psychology is an [...]
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Whereas socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.” — George Orwell, New English Weekly, 21 March 1940 Although the [...]
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I really did not want to write a story about organ theft in Israel. The ugly accusations and the even uglier reality seemed too sensational to be worthy of the time I needed to compose a post. But buried in the guts of the story is an important point about Israeli “diplomacy”, i.e. official and [...]
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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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There might have been a window for a two-state solution, which was open for a brief period decades ago. Israelis as a collective chose instead to allow—indeed, to aid—its most extremist elements in destroying the two-state framework. And because we allowed the settlers to do it, because we gave them our money, the lives of [...]
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