Departments

;

Israel

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    3/27/2023

    Have Protests Stopped Netanyahu's Attack on Israeli Democracy?

    by Bernard Avishai

    It's unlikely either Netanyahu will abandon his plans for overhauling Israel's Basic Laws to expand his power or that protests will cease in the near future. Israelis will increasingly have to choose whether the state will be a religious one with trappings of democracy or a democratic one with a nominal religious identity. 

  • Israel and Palestine Have a Way Forward. Will They Choose It?

    by Alon Ben-Meir

    It is time for Israel and the Palestinians to face the bittersweet truth and accept certain realities on the ground that neither side can change short of a calamity. These inescapable realities will frame the contours of a peace agreement in the context of an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian confederation.  

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    2/16/2023

    Israel's Judicial Struggle is Tectonic

    by Michael Oren

    The former Israeli ambassador to the United States writes that massive protests against Netanyahu's judicial reforms will determine whether there is a future for democracy in Israel. 

  • 2/22/2023

    How Israel Lost its Way

    by Alon Ben-Meir

    After Israel has raised several generations as warriors and occupiers, has the nation lost sight of the toll on its own youth and the consequences for peace? 

  • SOURCE: Substack
    2/20/2023

    Beinart: Some of Carter's Critics Should Apologize While they Can

    by Peter Beinart

    Peter Beinart says that Jimmy Carter's 2007 book "Peace Not Apartheid" had flaws, but many of its harshest critics ignored whether its claims about the Israeli occupation were factual and leaped to insinuation and outright accusation that Carter was motivated by antisemitism. 

  • SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
    2/7/2023

    Is a Third Intifada Imminent?

    by Daniel Byman

    The second intifada, between 2000 and 2005, ended not with negotiated peace but with an overwhelming application of force by Israel on Gaza and the West Bank. As Israeli politics tilts rightward and abandons the idea of a negotiated settlement, it is unclear what will prevent a new escalation of violence. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    1/15/2023

    Will the US Build an Embassy on Palestinian Land in Jerusalem?

    by Rashid Khalidi

    As the new ultra-right wing Israeli government prepares to escalate the dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the United States should not allow the siting of its embassy to give cover to this project. 

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    1/9/2023

    The Demographic Shift Behind Israel's Ascendant Religious Zionists

    by Michael Brenner

    Demographics are pushing Orthodox religious nationalists, who are led by West Bank settlers, to political power that is forcing confrontations over both secularism and the occupation. This bloc is growing rapidly less friendly to compromise with secularists, Arabs, or LGBTQ Israelis.

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    1/7/2023

    Israel's Ruling Coalition Turns Toward Theocracy

    by Bernard Avishai

    Netanyahu has engineered an alliance among three disparate strains of religious parties and secular Israelis favoring an aggressive nationalism and occupation policy. But the religious parties have broader goals of undermining secular society in Israel. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    1/5/2022

    Is Israel Criticism the Reason Harvard Refused "Godfather" of Human Rights

    by Michael Massing

    Kenneth Roth retired from Human Rights Watch after nearly three decades, and expected to move to a fellowship at the Kennedy School. Dean Douglas Elmendorf told him his fellowship was rejected because HRW exhibited "anti-Israel bias." Is the school insufficiently independent of the American foreign policy establishment and its donors? 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    12/20/2022

    Israel's Religious Right Pushes for Restrictive Changes to Law of Return

    As Jews around the world are considering Israel as a refuge from antisemitism, that country's religious fundamentalist parties have the political leverage to decide that many fewer people are Jewish enough to qualify for immigration and citizenship. American Reform Jews are particularly affected.

  • SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
    10/13/2022

    The Women Who Secured the Balfour Declaration

    by Natalie Livingstone

    Women in the Rothschild family were instrumental in creating support among wealthy British Jews for Zionism, which they had previously rejected out of perceived self-interest and disdain for the Jewish masses.