Gershom Gorenberg
By Gershom Gorenberg
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News With Pow-wow, Olmert Tries To Bolster Abbas and Himself
When Ehud Olmert stepped outside the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem and kissed Mahmoud Abbas on both cheeks Saturday evening, he was offering the Palestinian leader a political embrace. Regard it as the embrace of two men flailing in stormy waters — but which man was drowning, which was rescuing him and did the rescue…
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News Torn Between the Land and the State
Here’s a measure of the political mood in America’s Modern Orthodox community: At a convention last week in Jerusalem of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America — the main voice of Modern Orthodoxy — guest of honor Ehud Olmert won less applause than the war in Iraq did. Olmert received a few seconds…
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News Gaza Bomb Leaves Political Aftershocks
“Technical failure” in an electronic aiming system caused Israeli shells to smash into a Gaza neighborhood and kill a score of Palestinian civilians last week, an internal army inquiry concluded. As usual when equipment is assigned the blame, that answer has done little to quell recriminations. Instead, the tragedy in Beit Hanun has added fuel…
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News In a Stormy Year, Peretz Raises and Then Forfeits Left’s Hopes
Two soldiers wearing olive-drab ski masks against the autumn chill stood last weekend at a checkpoint on the road into Bir Nabalah, a West Bank village north of Jerusalem. Palestinian cars waited in line 100 yards away. One by one, they moved up to the checkpoint, where one of the Israeli soldiers glanced inside each…
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News Olmert Pal Seeks Tough-guy Regime
Avigdor Lieberman, head of the rightwing Yisrael Beitenu party, wants Israel to have a chief executive with broad new powers. And there’s little doubt about whom the Russian-born lawmaker would like to see in that job. Achieving that goal may elude him. But in recent days, Lieberman has been wielding inordinate power over the country’s…
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News Immigrant Pol Seen as Backing ‘Putin’ Model
How, the joke goes, do you say “Putin” in Hebrew? Answer: “Lieberman.” That’s one implication emerging from the recent discussion in the Hebrew press of Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal for a change in Israel’s system of government. “Lieberman isn’t dreaming of the American model, but rather, the Putin model,” leading pundit Nahum Barnea wrote recently in…
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News Jerusalem’s Damascus Conundrum Raises Wartime Memories of Yom Kippur Past
Bashar Assad says he wants peace — but failing that, he’ll take war. The Syrian president has made a point of intoning that message repeatedly of late. In Israel, the question of how to respond — indeed, whether to respond at all — has created a ragged political division that cuts across the usual lines…
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News Plan To Pay War Bills Exposes Israeli Cabinet’s Fiscal Fissures
Now that the war has ended, the next battle is over how to pay the bills. “The budget I am presenting today is not the one I intended to present… before the war,” said Finance Minister Abraham Hirchson, sounding remarkably tired as he described his proposal for next year’s annual budget to the media on…
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