What the Pope won’t see during his visit next week to the West Bank.
Showing all posts tagged settlements
Being given the colonial slops
Bernard Avishai on former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s “unprecedented offer” to the Palestinians.
The silence over apartheid
The Australian Jewish community may think that Israel is worth celebrating, but they conveniently ignore the realities of the West Bank occupation. Israel writer Bernard Avishai publishes a colleague’s report on Jewish extremism: Pogroms: it’s something the Jews know about. I grew up on those stories—Cossack raids on the shtetl, the torture and killings and…
The last roll of the dice is approaching
Patrick Seale, May 1: Will the Palestinians seize the slim chance of statehood offered by President Barack Obama’s pledge to work for a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Or will they throw it away because of unresolved inter-Palestinian conflicts? These unspoken questions lay behind the talks which Fatah and Hamas held in Cairo this…
Anti-democratic and proud of it
Israel is a democracy? Hardly, writes former Israeli politician Shulamit Aloni: …The statistics on the destruction and harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip are familiar to everyone, and not divorced from the oh-so-moral behavior of our army in the occupied territories. In the context of this behavior, for example, the army operates with great…
The only realistic option
Meron Benvenisti, Haaretz, April 30: Judging by the increasing number of symposia around the world devoted to promoting a binational state instead of two states for two peoples, a sea change is underway among academics and organizations engaged in progressive thinking. A generation ago, the demand for establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel expressed a…
Stop the colonies or face exclusion
The profound disconnect between the Zionist lobby and the general public is revealed yet again in this intriguing study: A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll finds that three-quarters of Americans think that Israel should not build settlements in the Palestinian territories. This is up 23 points from when this question was last asked in 2002. One third…
Imagine if the NYT became honest
The following letter was not written in 2001 by Nelson Mandela to the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (here’s the background story), but its words still resonate today: Dear Thomas, I know that you and I long for peace in the Middle East, but before you continue to talk about necessary conditions from an…
This won’t stop as long as Jews support it
Steve Walt, Foreign Policy, April 28: My question is this: What is Netanyahu thinking? Doesn’t he realize that time has nearly run out for the two-state solution, and that failure to achieve it is by far the most serious threat facing Israel? The prime minister and his allies keep harping about an “existential” threat from…
Keep praising those brave IDF boys
Here’s the deal. Zionist Labor MP Michael Danby – an elected politician who seems to love Israel like a beautiful woman and challenge anybody who dares damn Zionist ideology – has complained about an ABC TV program that raised the recent Gaza war. War crimes were committed, but Danby and his media mates won’t tolerate…