Israeli settlements
American Jews at Meretz USA say to Israelis: “The settlements are our business, too!”
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
A potentially explosive new campaign by Meretz USA has just been launched. It calls upon American Jews to urge Israel’s Housing Minister to stop building settlements, and says they have the right and the obligation to do so because they are AMERICAN CITIZENS, as well as Jews with ties to Israel. It’s the […]
Philip Weiss attacks J Street. Why he’s wrong.
Friday, July 25th, 2008Philip Weiss and I have been communicating after he attacked J Street on MondoWeiss. A good many issues were broached, but one of his arguments is that J Street ought to be appealing to a much broader constituency than American Jews who feel some attachment to Israel. Some of his acolytes, true to form, said […]
Ameinu forces us to confront the realities of occupation
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008Ameinu is showing clips from a video documentary that got a lot of attention in Israel in 2005 and deserves to get even more attention now. For two years, Haim Yavin, the venerable Israeli anchor for the government-run Channel 1 TV, roamed the territories with a simple video camera, talked to Jewish settlers, soldiers, Palestinians, […]
AB Yehoshua wants U.S. pressure and denounces the Israel lobby: Anything new here?
Monday, January 21st, 2008Richard Silverstein’s Tikun Olam notes that Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua called for removing the U.S. ambassador to Israel and attacked America’s Israel lobby. But he missed a few nuances. I might be the only one in the universe who cares about these nuances, as they touch upon some of the work I’ve tried to […]
Suddenly, the two-state chorus grows louder, more diverse
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007Something seems to be brewing out there, something new. I’ve been doing Middle East peace work, on and off, since the mid-1980s. I have never heard so many people from so many different corners of America defying right-wingers (and ultra-left-wingers) on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and saying the same things at the same time.
What do a […]
A diplomatic tool: the “freyer” factor
Monday, December 3rd, 2007So just how much pressure can and should the U.S. apply to both Israelis and Palestinians after the Annapolis conference? The “P word” -pressure– still sends chills down the spines of too many mainstream American Jewish leaders, including those who know full well that, at times, Israeli Prime Ministers have desparately needed American pressure […]
The best line ever written about Israeli settlements…
Sunday, November 18th, 2007Lords of the Land, by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, is one of the most heartbreaking books I have ever read (or, more accurately, started to read, as I am half-way through). Written in 2005 and just released in translation by Nation Books, it tells us everything Diaspora and Israeli Jews must be forced […]
Will Olmert actually do something about the settlements? Maybe!
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007There are glimmers of hope out there, suddenly… Am I the only reader of Middle East news reports who feels that way? A few hours ago, both Y-net news and Haaretz.com ran stories about the possibility of a settlement freeze. Both tell us that Olmert informed the heads of the YESHA Council (i.e., the […]