‘I am obligated to uphold the law and preserve the settlements, and I say here that there is no contradiction between the two.” Anyone aware of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement in early June can be forgiven a despairing reaction. Only the prime minister and the dwindling number of supporters of Israel’s settlement enterprise…
If you say that the peace process, like the Wicked Witch, is not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead, no one will argue with you. Israel and the Palestinian Authority have not had a real negotiating session since September 2010, when so-called “talks” collapsed following a so-called settlement “freeze.” The last sign of life…
The U.S. State Department has issued its annual [human rights report that detailing arbitrary arrests and killings in the Occupied Territories and discrimination against Arabs and refugees inside Israel. The official assessment, one of nearly 200 country reports](http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/humanrightsreport/index.htm#wrapper), paints both Palestinian and Israeli authorities as failing to live up to international human rights in the…
Israel’s High Court of Justice rejected a compromise deal between the state and residents of the West Bank outpost of Migron on Sunday, an agreement that would have prevented Israel from having to dismantle the settlement following a Supreme Court ruling. The deal was meant to prevent the state from having to comply with a…
If well-meaning American Jews who love Israel believe that the occupation of Palestinian land and people is detrimental and wrong, what are those Jews to do? How can they express those beliefs and take actions that protect Israel, support their fellow Jews, and also hold Palestinians appropriately accountable for their own actions? One response to…
Here’s a “sign of the times” factoid: In recent commentary on Israel’s settlement policy, the number of Jewish settlers beyond the Green Line has ballooned to 600,000 from 350,000 or so. It is as if there had suddenly been a mass immigration to the West Bank. But there has been no such immigration. What there…
A year ago, Israel’s Education Ministry launched a program to encourage schools to visit Jewish sites in the occupied West Bank town of Hebron, drawing fire from doves who charged the ministry with bringing politics into school trips. The doves’ effort to stop the program failed. Having failed to beat them, a dovish group of…
I was last in Ramallah a year and a half ago, and the change since then is striking. The headquarters of the once-feared Palestine Liberation Organization had been on the second floor of a nondescript office building above a furniture store; now it is in a gleaming office tower adjacent to the sprawling compound of…
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