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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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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A violent and wicked wind is gathering against Great Britain. Apparently, some Israelis have taken mostly irrelevant grievances about British conduct and turned them into a call for boycott of British products. Already more than 1/3 of Israel’s Knesset members have signed a petition calling for a boycott of British products, including airline companies occasionally [...]
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Yesterday, Israel announced the construction of another 692 housing units in occupied East Jerusalem. You hear that, Obama? Netanyahu is essentially pissing on your stated desire to see a halt to settlement construction. You must be furious. Now what are you going to do, what are you going to say? Enter Robert Gibbs, White House [...]
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Presume (incredulously, I know) that Netanyahu or some other Israeli leader truly wanted peace. Further, in order to arrive at peace, they would be willing to accept the basic framework for two-states that has formed the international consensus for 42 years. This would require giving up more than 95% of the West Bank inside the [...]
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One reason that Israel has such an easy time maintaining the occupation is because they don’t face the costs of doing so. Of course, the Fourth Geneva Convention stipulates that Israel must provide for the people living under its military occupation. But for over a decade now, since the Oslo Accords were signed in the [...]
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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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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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