Israel/Palestine
Israel/Palestine
Building a Jewish and Democratic State: A Conversation with Peter Beinart
Rabbi Michael Lerner recently interviewed Peter Beinart, whose book– to its credit– has stirred considerable controversy within the American Jewish community.
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War & Peace
Negotiations Between Iran and the West: An Opportunity for Compromise or Prelude to War?
It feels like war against Iran grows incrementally closer each day. Yet websites like Israel Loves Iran, Facebook pages like Israelis Against the War, and Twitter accounts are filled with a message sorely discomfiting Israel’s leaders. How does American presidential politics feature in the run-up to war?
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Israel/Palestine
The Makings of a Center-Left Alliance For Israeli Settlement Boycotts?
During a plenary session at last week’s third annual J Street conference, Raleb Majadele, a Palestinian Israeli member of the Knesset from the Labor party, may have broken an Israeli law. Responding to a question about whether he supports boycotts …
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Education
Israel’s Education Dilemma: Reflections from a Former IDF Soldier in Hebron
As an American, an Israeli, and a Jew, hearing about a new OECD report that ranks Israel as the second most educated country in the world is reason to celebrate, but the true picture is far more complex.
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Israel/Palestine
Debate on Safe-Haven Zionism
Ethan J. Leib and Rebecca Subar offer opposing takes on safe-haven Zionism.
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Justice & Prisons
A Populist Assault on Judicial Independence: Newt Gingrich, Recep Tayyip Edrogan, and Benjamin Netanyahu
It is not unusual to see politicians in the U.S. chastising courts for rulings that contravene their party’s interests or ideology, but the recent proposals from Republican candidates would undermine the critical and constitutional independence of the courts. Similar assaults on the courts being carried out by conservative governments in Turkey and Israel are important as cases of these Republican policies being executed.
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US Politics
Let’s End Our Wars on the “Other”: U.S. Interests, Israeli Fears, and the Demonization of Iran
Among the nations whose regimes it has demonized, the United States has gone to war with North Korea, North Vietnam, Panama, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and sponsored a guerrilla war in Nicaragua and an invasion of Cuba. The current demonization by Western leaders of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has increased the chance of war in the Middle East by inflating Israeli fears that Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons with which to eradicate the Jewish state from its Muslim neighborhood.
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Activism
Israel’s Good Life Revolution
To live the good life, according to the dominant Israeli ideology, is to be sufficiently secure from physical threats, which is why each and every aspect of life in Israel is carried out under the tutelage of the notion of security. What this security is for, what higher end it serves, is a question seldom asked and never answered.
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US Politics
Why A Perry Presidency Would Be Bad For Israel
In a flurry of recent activity Rick Perry made his national debut into the national debate on the Israel-Palestinian conflict with two op-eds and a press conference within a week of each other…. Perry’s unabashed endorsement of the settlement enterprise would mark a distinct shift in presidential rhetoric, but would it appreciably change the outcome of U.S. policy on the settlement issue?
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Israel/Palestine
No Partner for Peace? Reflections on the Limitations of J Street and the Jewish American Peace Camp During the Campaign for Palestinian Statehood
In its short but meteoric rise to relevance in the American Jewish community, J Street has attempted to expand the Jewish American peace camp by taking nuanced positions and poaching supporters from traditional Jewish organizations like AIPAC. But there is a major discrepancy between J Street’s repeated call for “bold and creative action” in pursuit of a two-state solution and its position paper defending the U.S. veto.
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War & Peace
What Is the New Israeliness?
The teenagers and twentysomethings who were barely old enough to light funeral candles after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995 are now doing what today’s adults were unable to do back then: creating a new Israeli identity capable of living in peace with itself.
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Israel/Palestine
Objective Historian or Staunch Ideologue?
Professor Benny Morris — a key member of the group of Israeli scholars known as the “new historians”– devotes almost the entirety of his latest book to shooting down the case for both one state and two states in all their variations.
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Israel/Palestine
In the Land of Double Narrative
You hear the double narrative of Israel/Palestine in words like the Nakba, or Catastrophe, which is how Palestinians describe the first war in 1947, the one the Israelis call the War of Independence because it began after the Arabs rejected the UN pronouncement of the State of Israel — and attacked. And in what the Israelis call the Security Wall, designed to stop the suicide bombers from blowing up discos in Tel Aviv and bus stations in Jerusalem — and the Palestinians call the Racist Wall or the Apartheid Wall because it cuts into their land and prevents their moving freely into Israel proper for jobs and family, as they did before the Intifada, a word that conjures up the liberation movement for Palestinians and the existential threat of annihilation for Israelis.
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Gender & Sexuality
The Stolen Blessing
The Torah has little to say about transsexuality, but it has a lot to say about people who do hard-to-explain and sometimes terrible things in order to be true to themselves. My personal archetype was Jacob. I had never liked Jacob, but even as a child I recognized his life as an uncomfortably apt metaphor for mine.
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Israel/Palestine
Hannah Arendt: From Iconoclast to Icon
Hannah Arendt, the renowned German-Jewish political philosopher and liberal polemicist, has obtained icon status since her death in 1975. Arendt was a sharp dissenter against the Zionist majority from 1942 on, but to regard her as anti-Zionist is an oversimplification. This famous gadfly sharply criticized Zionism, but from within.
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