Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
A routine rebuttal to the argument that Israel is an apartheid state is to focus on the conditions of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Israel’s defenders allege, for example, that Palestinians within its borders (whatever those are taken to be) live better than other Palestinians, or even other Arabs. Others like to point out that [...]
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Well, the second most meaningless word after ‘terrorism’, of course, as Glenn Greenwald so expressively pointed out last year. Clearly, terrorism means nothing more than the violence your enemies commit. By construction, therefore, it never describes your own behavior, no matter how many innocent civilians you kill or under what circumstances, even if you kill [...]
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We are accustomed to hearing about how Israel as an ethnically exclusivist state was necessary to protect the Jews after the Holocaust. For most Israelis, this assertion has taken on almost axiomatic status. So it’s interesting to note that many of the early Zionist leaders, including the relentlessly mythologized David Ben-Gurion, Zionist leader and first [...]
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File this under the bat-shit crazy category of racism. Latma TV, the same fundamentalist right-wing media group (founded by luminaries such as the neuron-challenged Caroline Glick) that brought us the “We Con the World” parody after the flotilla massacre, now publishes a truly offensive skit mocking the Arab democracy revolutions. It would have been literally [...]
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There are seven reasons why Ari Shavit’s seven reasons to recognize Israel as a Jewish state form the primary basis for conflict rather than offer any solution. Here I address his hyper-nationalistic detritus one point at a time. An (Exclusivist) National Home The first argument he makes is that “the supreme goal of Zionism is [...]
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The big story at the moment is the forthcoming law that would require all non-Jews, who want to become Israeli citizens, to make a loyalty oath to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic” state. Although revealing in the insecurity of identity and purpose that motivates it, it really is just one more law (among at [...]
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Israel’s Moldovan FM Evet Lieberman took the stage at the UN this week to advocate for a “peace” settlement based on “population exchanges”, by which he meant settlers remaining on stolen Palestinian land in “exchange” for Palestinian citizens of Israel having their citizenship stripped of them and giving them instead citizenship in the nascent Palestinian [...]
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Discontent with Christopher Hitchen’s almost but not quite uniform hatred for Muslims, Benny Morris decided to pen a Haaretz op-ed that encourages Hitchens to extend his prejudice toward Palestinians as well. He begins by explaining Hitchens’ “no love for Muslims” views, as printed in his latest book: [The Islamic Arab world] is a world riddled [...]
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It is difficult to recall such a striking example of personal and institutional racism, which allows justice to be meted out so differentially, so disproportionately to individuals from different ethnic groups. Of course, the issue has nothing to do with black men impersonating white men, as the title suggests. Rather, the actual story centers on [...]
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This is not a current event, but then again the Israeli effort to erase Palestinians from history and contemporary life make the article forever relevant. According to a doctoral dissertation prepared at Ben-Gurion University using Israeli government archives, Israel “plundered and destroyed” 27,000 Palestinian books as part of its effort to “Judaize the country,” which [...]
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