Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
From the category archives:
Ha’aretz runs today a stunning and thoughtful article about how Israel must learn the language of human rights. Written by a media consultant and former adviser to the Interior Ministry, Gilad Heimann, the article manages to cut through Israeli social psychology and government hasbara efforts with admirable efficiency.
The core argument is this: [...]
{ 0 comments }
Still haven’t booked that Spring Break 2010 ticket? Allow to me to suggest something, a trip with mystique, exotic lands, spicy foods, incomprehensible languages, dark-haired beauties, and the smallest tinge of danger just to add that extra element to the trip.
Am I talking about India, Cuba, Thailand, Turkey, or Nicaragua?
Nope, I am talking about [...]
{ 0 comments }
“They sat [the child] down and put his hand on the chair and simply broke it right there on the chair,” recounted a female IDF soldier.
The blogosphere is burning today with the recently published accounts of female soldiers in the IDF, who are expected to compensate for their relative physical weakness with extraordinary [...]
{ 1 comment }
This is a rather scintillating example of the paradox of modern Israeli nationalism. Published in a right-wing newspaper, Arutz Sheva, the article describes how commandos and mercenaries from around the world come to Israel in order to undergo training by the Israeli Defense Forces, which “exposes foreign soldiers to Israel [and] creates a better [...]
{ 0 comments }
From a few thousand miles away, or even from the relative safety of a television image in Tel Aviv living room, it can seem as though the spiral of violence in the Middle East spins ruthlessly with no end and no beginning. In this confusing situation, people then insert their own ideological perspectives: each [...]
{ 1 comment }
In today’s Ha’aretz, Bradley Burnston writes an op-ed in which he fulminates against the critics of Israel’s current mission in Haiti. He starts by saying “thank you” to the IDF medical team, continues by saying “That’s it”, suggesting that’s all he wants to say, and then launches into a tirade against “Israel bashers.” [...]
{ 4 comments }
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 [...]
{ 3 comments }
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 its [...]
{ 0 comments }
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 [...]
{ 2 comments }
“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 [...]
{ 1 comment }
