Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
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After nearly six months of pleading with Abbas and the PA to talk to the Israelis while they continue the settler colonization of their future state…
After months of pressuring the Arab League to provide a way for Abbas to sit down to said talks without losing the final shred of credibility he (arguably) has left…
After [...]
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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: [...]
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After months of dawdling, Israel finally completed its UN assignment right at the deadline. Well, not really. As the UN mandated timeframe for investigating IDF crimes in Gaza was coming to a close, the Israeli government handed over a partially finished document that summarized the homework already done and the homework it intends [...]
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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 [...]
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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.” [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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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