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Preferential treatment for settlers continues…while soup kitchens expand in Tel Aviv

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Americans for Peace Now’s Ori Nir describes a new Peace Now report on the preferential treatment still being doled out to Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Lately, Israeli right-wingers and their supporters here have been insisting that “the settlements are not the problem” and are a kind of minor detail in Israeli-Arab relations. Of [...]

Poll: Many Israelis want American Jews to be “critical friends”

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Do Israelis think American Jews should support Israel by sticking to the Israeli government’s positions? The answer is “a decisive `No,”’ writes pollster Dahlia Scheindlin in the Jerusalem Report (June 8, 2009), describing a May 12th survey. This question is still a controversial one within (parts of) the American Jewish community, which has not yet [...]

Mahmoud Abbas and the African National Congress: lessons learned

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

What follows is Thomas Mitchell’s review of A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream by Mark Gevisser (New York, Palgrave Macmillan 2009). Its publication here should not be construed as a complete endorsement of Tom’s views. I think he is too harsh on Mahmoud Abbas for rejecting Netanyahu’s [...]

Peace Now & APN: Freeze construction in the “settlement blocs,” too

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Belated praise for Top Five Bogus Excuses for Opposing a Settlement Freeze, a detailed refutation of several canards by the estimable Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now and Hagit Ofran, who run’s Peace Now’s Settlements Watch progam. All five responses to these “excuses” are worth perusing, but I found one of them to be [...]

Dan Fleshler, without his glasses, on Press TV…

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Before the Iranian elections, I was interviewed for a show called “The Autograph” on Press TV, the Iranian English language network. It focused on me and is about 20 minutes long. You can find the link to the network archive here. Then click on “Autograph” and you’ll find the interview with Dan Fleshler. It was [...]

What else Netanyahu needs to know about Obama

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

The following op-ed just went on-line and will be in Friday’s Haaretz. I’ve been waiting about 25 years to be able write something like this and actually believe it. Something else Netanyahu should know By Dan Flesher Even before President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech last week, there were reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and [...]

Will Obama’s speech “force clarity” on Israel?

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

I took a break from my day job to do a quick scan of the reactions to Obama’s speech in Cairo. The most instructive one thus far comes from Daniel Gordis of the Shalem Center, whose post can be found on the NY Times blog. There has been much talk of late about Obama’ desire [...]

A ray of hope: maybe Bibi has no principles

Friday, May 15th, 2009

Under normal circumstances, we want the world’s leaders to have moral and ideological consistency and to know who they are. Perhaps, under current circumstances, it is better for Israel to be led by a man who doesn’t have the faintest idea of who he is and relies on others to define him. “Nothing has changed [...]

Poll: Growing majority of Americans oppose new Israeli settlement construction

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Just in time for this weekend’s AIPAC conference and the Netanyahu-Obama meeting on May 18th, a new poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org indicates 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 of Americans show [...]

Is praise from Philip Weiss the kiss of death?

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Uh oh. Philip Weiss had nice things to say about me and my book in a recent post. Did he just ruin my life? Walt and Mearsheimer, let us remember, were castigated because David Duke promoted them on his web site. Should I worry for similar reasons? I am sometimes deeply offended by what Weiss [...]

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