Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
From the category archives:
According to the most recent report on settlements by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a Washington-based think tank, “the main operational effect of the settlement moratorium announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on November 26 has been to increase the pace of authorized new settlement housing construction above historical averages.”
At present, “close [...]
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A beautiful op-ed by Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian attorney and human rights activist, in the Los Angeles Times. As you read this, ask yourself the question in the title of this post. Put aside tribal affiliations for a moment and let the language of equal rights play in your soul. If you [...]
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As is widely recognized, the recent crisis in Israeli and US/Palestinian relations stems directly from Israeli intransigence over settlements. (Digression: Is it really that hard to stop colonizing the future Palestinian state? )
Understandably fed up with meaningless negotiations with Israel while their land is continuously stolen, the Palestinians have begun talking about unilateral [...]
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In yesterday’s post, I argued against the simplistic and, in my view, weak argument that a one state framework for achieving peace in Israel/Palestine is “political fancifulness”. Given that this argument is one of the most commonly heard criticisms of the one state idea, I want to spend a bit more time addressing it. [...]
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Somewhere in my mind, I envisioned this blog slowly gathering incontrovertible evidence that Israel was founded on the contradiction of ethnically exclusive “democracy” in a land populated by over one million ethnic outsiders. Then, I intended to show with patient effort how so many features of the violent patterns we see in Israel today [...]
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In the recent past, it would have been absolutely inconceivable to see a reference to Israeli apartheid from a mainstream news source. Until recently, it would have also been taboo to question the viability of the “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But change is in the air.
Today, no less than [...]
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I have been reading a lot of commentary about Abbas’ announcement to leave Palestinian politics, about Clinton’s shameful pandering to Netanyahu, about Obama’s fading dreams for Middle East peace, about the dim prospects for any progress whatsoever in Israel/Palestine at the current time.
But you don’t need to read all those things. You [...]
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New reports suggest that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has reached an agreement with the Obama administration regarding a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state along the green line, i.e. along the ‘67 borders, i.e. along borders that would include the half million settlers currently living in the West Bank.
The reports indicated that [...]
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Israel appears to have successfully called the Americans’ bluff. Hillary Clinton circa May 2009 was demanding an immediate freeze to all settlement activity. Clinton circa October 2009 now thinks that a settlement freeze shouldn’t be a precondition for peace talks. She even thinks the non-action Netanyahu is yapping about, e.g. temporarily suspending [...]
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In the annals of American media coverage of Israel/Palestine, yesterday’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart was a watershed. On national TV, Jon Stewart interviewed Anna Baltzer and Mustafa Barghouti, advocates for equal Palestinian rights.
They got on TV, they argued for equal Palestinian rights, they advocated for security and democracy for both peoples, [...]
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