Zionism
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Ameinu forces us to confront the realities of occupation
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Ameinu 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, […]
Israel, human rights and the silence of [most] American Jews
Friday, March 28th, 2008Those who empathize with the plight of Palestinians under occupation are often puzzled by American Jews’ silence in the face of Palestinian suffering, especially when the suffering results from Israeli actions that much of the world deems to be human rights abuses. A whole industry exists to monitor and refute human rights NGOs whenever they […]
Announcing the “Fleshies”: awards for the best responses to anti-Semitism on the Web
Friday, March 7th, 2008It is hard to convey the amount of bile and reductionist, blame-the-Jews-for-every-sin rhetoric that has taken over much of the blogosphere. Phil Weiss’s blog generally attracts some of the most articulate Jew-bashers, so I tune into the comments from time to time in order to gauge the level of hatred.
I just noticed some great […]
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 […]
For Zionists, the obsession with Jerusalem is a recent phenomenon
Saturday, December 22nd, 2007The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations recently “reaffirmed its longstanding position that a united Jerusalem should remain the sovereign and eternal capital of Israel,” according to a JTA story. Some left-of-center groups were against it but they could not stem the tide. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in […]
Mearsheimer, Walt and what didn’t really happen at Camp David
Friday, September 14th, 2007There is a sentence towards the end of Walt and Mearsheimer’s new book that undercuts some of what they have tried to accomplish with their critique of the “Israel Lobby.” Having rejected the binational, single-state solution as well as Israel’s permanent occupation, they assert: “The United States will have to put significant pressure on […]
What does Wallace Stevens have to do with Zionism?
Sunday, July 29th, 2007I am quite certain that the following post will be the first discussion of the Jewish National Fund and Zionism to invoke the poet Wallace Stevens. People who appreciate Stevens tend to be amateur philosophers and a bit nerdy (yeah, I appreciate him), but if neither of those apply to you, please have patience […]
Postscript on the JNF law: A matter of official Israeli policy, not private whim
Thursday, July 19th, 2007Ken Bob, President of Ameinu, is a self-taught expert on the morass of official and semi-official Israeli institutions. For that alone, he deserves a medal. In an email, he cleared up an issue raised in the previous comment thread by “Chris,” who insisted that the JNF is a “private organization:”
[The term] “JNF” […]
Time to throw out the little blue JNF box?
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007My new friend Jerry Haber, “The Magnes Zionist” tipped me off to a shameful story about the Jewish National Fund and proposed Knesset legislation. Here is the Ha’aretz report:
Bill allocating JNF land to Jews only passes preliminary reading
By Yoav Stern and Shahar Ilan
The Knesset plenum approved a bill Wednesday, in its preliminary reading, […]
The Magnes Zionist on “moral” vs. “immoral” Zionism
Sunday, July 15th, 2007I have found a rare commodity: a kindred spirit in the blogosphere. “Jerry Haber” is the nom de plume of an Israeli professor whose provocative blog, “The Magnes Zionist,” wrestles bravely with the same issues I am trying to address. Both of us were recently plugged by Mobius in his indispensable “JewSchool.”
Judah Magnes, as […]