Salman Masalha
To study the nonsensical nature of Netanyahu’s rhetoric about regional peace, it is wise to return to the source, to his original habitat
Showing posts with label Israel-Palestine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel-Palestine. Show all posts
The Pillars of Netanyahu’s ‘Peace’
Israel’s left is like the right
Anyone who aspires to lay a foundation for a genuine left must reject this separation. He must break the partitions that separate the country’s citizens on a religious or ethnic basis.
Another Tragic Farce in the Making
Mahmoud Abbas has threatened in the past to do just that. Now he has the opportunity to make a dramatic move that would fundamentally alter the picture.
Exciting Election? Israel Is Snoring
In democratic regimes the opposition is supposed to provide alternatives to the government. These alternatives are meant to show a different path in terms of ideas, society and politics.
And They Shall Ever Meet
Archive (2001) -
While in Germany people want to forget and seek forgiveness, people in the Holy Land look for remembrance.
Where Is This ‘Israel’ They Talk About?
The nation-state law has not one but several intolerable clauses. All those who spoke out against only two of its clauses are full partners to this fraud that is supposedly Israeli, humane and liberal .
Salman Masalha ||
Where Is This ‘Israel’ They Talk About?
In view of the Zionist debate over the nation-state law, it’s time to put things straight and make some unequivocal statements.
First, the nation-state law, which lawmakers of the Smotrich and Dichter breed have promoted, has not one but several intolerable clauses. All those who spoke out against only two of its clauses are full partners to this fraud that is supposedly Israeli, humane and liberal.
At first glance at its wording, one can see that the opening clause is groundless. This “Israel” that appears in it cannot be the “historic homeland of the Jewish people” as long as the borders of the “state of Israel” have not been drafted by those lawmakers who advanced the law, and as long as these borders have not been granted international recognition and legitimacy.
The third clause, which deals with “whole and united Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital, seems to be mistaken in the same way as is the term “Israel.” This clause is likewise groundless because this “Jerusalem” is extremely liquid. Nobody knows where its borders begin and end.
Clause 7, which raised a great tumult due to its blatantly racist wording, was replaced with the more general phrasing: “The state sees developing Jewish settlement as a national value.” This sentence is a renewed recitation of a Zionist principle, which has existed since this movement came into the world. There’s nothing new under the sun. This is how all the pre-state Zionist institutions acted and have been acting since Israel’s establishment. The state’s symbols – the flag, the menorah and the anthem – are the most blatant expression, reflecting the exclusion of one fifth of the state’s citizens.
As for the clause stipulating that Hebrew is the state’s “official” language, which changes the Arab language’s status from an “official” one to one with a “special” status – the Arab lawmakers in the Knesset have cooperated throughout the years with this process. If the Arab MKs had one iota of respect for their tongue they should have made all their speeches from the Knesset podium in Arabic. If you demand respect for the Arab language you should show it in action. The Arab MKs didn’t do so and with this behavior they pushed Arabic’s status with their own mouths out of the public sphere.
Suffice it to visit Arab communities to see that the Arabs themselves have downgraded the Arab language’s status, and signposts in Hebrew prevail in their streets and on their businesses. Nobody stopped the business owners from putting up signposts in Arabic. The Arabs themselves belittled Arabic’s status.
Every Smotrich, Dichter, Slomiansky, Ohana and their kind should know that the mere sound of their family name attests like a thousand witnesses to their origin and descent, which are alien to this place.
This must also be stressed. I, the oversigned, hereby announce to all and sundry: This country is my country and homeland, and anyone who even thinks of doubting this fact of life should be thrown into the dustbin of history. And the sooner the better.
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Haaretz, 20/7/2018
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Hamas in the service of Israel
Hamas Rule in Gaza Isn’t the Enemy of the Israeli Right, It's the Loyal Servant...
Salman Masalha ||
Hamas in the service of Israel
Pundits say the government has no clear policy in the Gaza Strip. They’re wrong. It’s true that when Benjamin Netanyahu was in the opposition he declared, as the head of Likud, that if he came to power he would bring down the Hamas government; that Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman Avigdor Lieberman, before becoming defense minister, said that within 48 hours on the job he would arrange for Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to meet with 72 virgins in heaven; and that Habayit Hayehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett issued hollow pronouncements. But all that was just lip service, for the sole purpose of appealing to Israel’s military machismo, which in the future will drive the ignorant Israeli masses to the polls in droves, to put the right ballot in the box.
Lest we forget: Hamas rule isn’t the enemy of the Israeli right. Au contraire, it’s the loyal servant of all the right-wing governments. Since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War, all Israeli governments have devoted all their time and energy to fighting the Palestinian national movement, which gained momentum due to the occupation. In that context it’s worth mentioning that since the late 1970s, on the advice of various Arabists, there have been several abortive attempts to create a local alternative to the PLO, in the form of the Village Leagues.
The Hamas movement, which now controls the Gaza Strip, was founded with the encouragement of Israeli governments as an Islamic counterweight to the nationalist movement led by the PLO. The Islamist golem that for years turned against its creator — that’s already another story.
Given that this is where things stand, the Israeli right would do well to find the silver lining in the cloud that is the Gaza Strip. It’s perfectly simple. The Hamas government is securing the separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which according to the Oslo Accords are supposed to be a single political entity. As long as Hamas rules in the Strip, no Palestinian political entity exists that can conduct negotiations, that can pass binding resolutions decisions and impose them on the Palestinians living within the borders of the entity. As a result, the Israeli right can argue that there is no Palestinian partner with which it can negotiate an end to the conflict.
The Palestinians thus played straight into the hands of the Israeli right, giving birth to a two-headed creature that is increasingly entrenching itself without any hope of a normal life.
Recently, in the wake of the hospitalization of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the talk of a possible successor, some signs of the delegation of authority to a few individuals in the Palestinian Authority have emerged. If that does indeed happen, then that part of the Palestinian body — the West Bank — will also grow multiple heads. The Palestinians will find themselves in an impossible situation: Too many chiefs means too many pointless internal conflicts within the divided Palestinian creature.
In such circumstances, the Israeli right will go from victory to victory. It will continue down its ancient road. It will continue to steal Palestinian land for the settlements and to build roads for settlers that bypass Palestinian communities — until the complete blockage of the respiratory passages and the resultant death of the strange Palestinian creature.
If the Palestinians seek life, they must perform a quick operation and leave the Palestinian body, which in any case suffers from chronic illnesses, with a single head. A single head that will make decisions, give orders and confidently lead the Palestinian body.
Had the Palestinians been blessed with a fertile political imagination, they would have chosen Marwan Barghouti as the successor to the Palestinian president and Salam Fayyad as prime minister. If they do so, the entire world will support them. If not, their situation will go from bad to worse.
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Haaretz, June 4, 2018
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How We All Got Here
Reflections on Israeli independence day, the Nakba and how the thugs of tribal and religious nationalism from both peoples are tightly grasping the fabric of the land
Salman Masalha ||
How We All Got Here
Three reflections on independence and the Nakba:
1. Despite the fierce opposition to Israelization by Arab politicians of all stripes in Israel, for some reason the Palestinian citizens of the country actually behave like the ultimate Israelis. Their Israeliness is so deeply rooted that they mark Nakba Day according to the Jewish calendar, on the 5th of the month of Iyar – Israel’s Independence Day.
And lo and behold, when Independence Day is moved up a day at the request of the Chief Rabbinate over fear of a mass desecration of Shabbat, the Israeli Palestinians also move up their Nakba Day commemoration, as if they and the Rabbinate were Siamese twins.
The Palestinians in the occupied territories, in comparison, mark the event on May 15, according to the secular calendar, and no one commemorates the Nakba according to the Muslim calendar, which moves from year to year.
Maybe they do this because they’re afraid that
it will dissociate them from Israel’s Independence Day, or maybe according to the saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed: “Among all the nations of the world, you are the most like the children of Israel. You follow them step after step.”
2. All those accused of criminal acts – murderers, rapists, robbers or any other criminals – will always claim they are innocent, usually with the aid of experienced lawyers, in the hope that this will earn them points on the day their verdict is handed down and they ask for a lighter sentence. In many cases, even after the criminal is thrown in prison, he continues to claim his innocence, to search for more witnesses, to offer more evidence and ask for a retrial. He can be an ordinary citizen or a public figure, a Knesset member or prime minister.
The common Zionist is no different in this aspect. By virtue of his Zionist essence and his being here, he will always claim his innocence in causing the Nakba for the Palestinians. He will not recognize reality because the Nakba is a lie and because there is nothing because there was nothing. Four years ago, Moshe Arens tried to repel any attempt or even any hint of recognizing the disaster that befell on the Arab residents of the land with the establishment of the “Jewish” state. (“The Nakba - Perpetuating a Lie,” Haaretz, May 19, 2014)
3. On the Palestinian side too, we cannot expect an Arab to question the actions of his “leaders,” who have led him to this point. He, too, will not recognize the situation created here. It is no coincidence that there are no new Arab or Palestinian historians. For them to arise, Arab society needs to have a democratic substructure of free thought, with mechanisms for self-criticism.
An intellectual infrastructure for conducting self-examination does not exist in Arab culture. From the point of view of Arab rulers and tribal leaders, the implications of self-criticism are far-reaching. They could very well bring about the end of their tribal hegemony, allowing other tribes or ethnic groups to rise up in their stead. These would replace them, take control of the reins of power and fill their own pockets and those of their friends with coin. This is the way it has been since time immemorial, and this is still the way it is to this very day.
And this is how we all have reached this point. The thugs of tribal and religious nationalism from both peoples are tightly grasping the fabric of the land. One says, “It’s all mine,” the other says the same thing, and they cannot find a way to divide it. And the land drinks its fill of blood, sweat and tears over the years.
It seems that this good land is sick and tired of both of them.
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Haaretz, April 18, 2018
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The Massacre of Arab Nationalism
Salman Masalha ||
The Massacre of Arab Nationalism
The Israel Defense Forces are slaughtering Palestinian civilians on the border of the Gaza Strip. Bashar Assad’s regime continues to slaughter Syrian civilians. And the entire world is sitting and watching with folded hands. Tweets, Facebook posts and press statements – these are the lip service the world knows how to pay to silence its conscience. But let’s focus on the Arab world, which presumes to describe itself as a single nation.
It must be admitted that the siege imposed on Gaza ever since Hamas took power there isn’t just an Israeli siege. It’s also an Arab one – because a single Egyptian decision would be enough to break the siege on Gaza’s border with Egypt. After all, the Egyptians pretend to be “Arab brothers,” and also “Sunni Muslim brothers.” Astoundingly, however, they aren’t Arab brothers at all.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has also joined in the festival of abuse heaped on Gaza residents. Every so often, he imposes sanctions on them and cuts the salaries of employees and bureaucrats.
The Palestinian issue always served repressive Arab regimes as a pretext for rejecting all civic demands from within their own countries for freedom, democracy, economic development and jobs for the young. These repressive regimes always beat their citizens with the stick of the slogan “Palestine is the top Arab issue,” and the slogan that followed from it, “No voice will take precedence over the voice of the war” to liberate Palestine. These slogans were the opium which with the regimes silenced and neutralized any aspiration for domestic political and social change.
Thus it’s no wonder that the intifadas that swept the region and became known as the “Arab Spring” occurred precisely in those presidential regimes that raised the standard of Arab nationalism and other empty slogans, such as freedom and socialism.
The past several years have provided decisive proof that all the pompous Arab slogans from the ideological school of the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath parties, about “a single Arab nation with an eternal mission,” were empty ones.
In this context, it’s worth noting that after the champions of these Ba’ath slogans, Assad’s father Hafez and Saddam Hussein, seized power in Syria and Iraq, respectively, there was no sign of these ideas of the unity of the “Arab nation” and its “eternal mission” being implemented on the ground. On the contrary, both in Syria and Iraq the “pan-Arab national party” served as a platform on which both tyrants, the Syrian and the Iraqi, built a sectarian and tribal regime.
In Syria, in every key governmental post, Assad placed members of his own tribe and sect – brothers, uncles, cousins – along with bootlickers from other communities, who received only governmental crumbs. Saddam Hussein did the same in Iraq. The empty slogans of Arab nationalism received grotesque expression in the 1991 Gulf War, when the elder Assad sent Syrian soldiers to join the American-led coalition that fought against Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait. So the standard-bearer of Arab nationalism from Damascus fought alongside the “imperialist” American superpower (to use the Ba’athists’ own term) against their “Arab brothers,” who ostensibly advocated the same ideology.
Recent years have provided evidence not just of the absolute failure of pan-Arab nationalism, but also additional evidence of the failure of the Arab “nation-states” created by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. Syria is the salient example of this failure.
The Syrian civil war, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and created millions of refugees, along with Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, show that there is no “Syrian people.” A president who slaughters civilians who are supposed to be “members of his own nation” has through these crimes removed the mask he wore for many years and revealed the naked, tribal-sectarian truth for all to see.
In the face of these sights, every self-respecting Arab must recalculate his path.
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Haaretz, April 9, 2018
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For Arabic, press here
Biblical Presidents
With the Embassy Move to Jerusalem :
Samuel Goldman ||
Biblical Presidents
For American evangelicals, there is a term of praise for President Trump that falls like a question mark on most everyone else: “You are Cyrus.” That’s what the Christian pro-Israel activist Mike Evans promised to tell President Trump after his announcement that the United States would move its embassy to Jerusalem.
Mr. Evans, who plastered Jerusalem with billboards praising the embassy decision, isn’t the only one to draw a connection to the ancient Persian king. In a 2016 book called “God’s Chaos Candidate,” the minister Lance Wallnau asked, “Could Trump be God’s Cyrus?”
Even some Jews have gotten into the act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the connection in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this week, predicting the rise of a new Cyrus. Last week, the Mikdash Educational Center, an Orthodox group, produced a “temple coin” that superimposes an image of Mr. Trump over one of Cyrus.
Obscure though it may seem, pro-Israel activists who suggest that Mr. Trump is a counterpart to Cyrus are drawing on a deep well of religious history that nourishes his current evangelical support. For centuries, American Christians have argued that United States foreign policy should follow biblical models. The desire to see America and its leaders as instruments for the fulfillment of divine intentions remains an important cause of their longstanding sympathy for Zionism and the State of Israel.
King Cyrus, who is credited with allowing Jews to return to Jerusalem from exile in the Babylonian empire, represents the possibility that a nonbelieving leader and state could be used by God to reunite the chosen people and the promised land.
The prominence of the Cyrus trope has revived fears about religious influences on United States foreign policy that have swirled around Republican presidents for decades. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both accused of allowing their policies toward Israel to be influenced by interpretations of the Book of Revelation that foresee a literal Battle of Armageddon.
And encouraging presidents to take up the mantle of Cyrus is also something of an American tradition. The Chicago-based preacher William Eugene Blackstone — who described himself as God’s “errand boy” — visited the White House in 1891 to present President Benjamin Harrison with a petition. It called on him to use his influence to extract Palestine from the Ottoman Empire and promote a Jewish state. The petition was signed by 413 prominent citizens, including the Supreme Court’s chief justice, Melville Fuller; the future president William McKinley; and the tycoons J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Its cover letter explicitly compared the president to Cyrus, offering him a “privileged opportunity” to serve as patron of the Jewish people. For this service, five years before the publication of Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat,” Louis Brandeis reportedly described Blackstone as the real “father of Zionism.”
Harrison was not even the first president to be imagined as a potential successor to Cyrus. In the 1790s, the New Jersey minister David Austin suggested that the United States under John Adams might help assist the world’s Jews in returning to Palestine. Austin went so far as to purchase ships and warehouses that could be used for this purpose.
Austin’s practical efforts for the cause were unusual. But a fellow resident of Elizabeth, N.J., Elias Boudinot, an aide to George Washington who served as president of the Continental Congress, director of the United States Mint and other important posts, wrote several books urging the new republic to act as patron to the Jews and assist in their return to the territory God promised to Abraham. In a book published in 1816, Boudinot wrote, “Who knows but God has raised up these United States, in these latter days, for the very purpose of accomplishing his will in bringing his beloved people to their own land.”
Why have American Christians been so interested in the fate of the Jews, even decades before the foundation of the international Zionist movement? One reason is that they were members of a society steeped in the Bible. Many historians emphasize the importance of republican sources like Cicero and Livy to the American political tradition. The problem with this argument is that relatively few Americans could read Latin or were familiar with Roman history. Unlike the classics of republican thought, the Bible was universally available and familiar even to those unable to read English. As such, it provided a shared idiom for thinking through matters of public concern.
The availability and familiarity of Scripture made biblical analogies expedient. But the deeper reason the Cyrus model has particularly appealed to Americans is that it placed the United States and its colonial predecessors in what might be called “sacred history” — the Bible’s sweeping story of the creation, corruption and redemption. Since the Puritans, many Americans have wanted to believe that their own endeavors were part of that story. They faced a problem, though: The Bible revolves around the nation of Israel, makes no mention of the New World. By describing their experiences in terms of its central nations, places and figures, Americans have been able to see themselves as participants in the Biblical drama. Some Americans believed that they were themselves a replacement for the biblical Israel, but others contended that they were more accurately compared to Cyrus.
In a political culture formed by the Bible, it has often seemed natural to support a reunion of the people and land that many Americans saw as the model for their own history. Far from representing a weird deviation from norms, evangelicals who see Mr. Trump as a successor to an ancient Persian king are participants in an old American tradition. When, in 1953, former president Harry Truman was introduced as the man who help establish the State of Israel, he grumbled: “What do you mean, ‘helped create’? I am Cyrus!”
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Samuel Goldman is an assistant professor of political science and director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom at the George Washington University and the author of “God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America.”
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Source: NYT
Netanyahu's Disastrous Rule Is a Dream for an Arab Nationalist
During his time in the office, he has brought rot to every corner of the country. His continued rule will bring disaster to Jews and Arabs alike.
Salman Masalha ||
Netanyahu's Disastrous Rule Is a Dream for an Arab Nationalist
If I were an Arab nationalist, I would pray for Benjamin Netanyahu to be extricated from all the troubles that have befallen him. I would also hope he continues to head Israel’s government for many years to come. Netanyahu is the great boon that every Arab nationalist seeks. After all, no one else has managed to bring rot into every corner of this country the way he has.
Uri Avnery, with his sharp political senses, wants Netanyahu ousted from power because he believes he’s “a disaster for the country” (Haaretz in Hebrew, February 26). Avnery is obviously correct in this assessment. Therefore, if I were an Arab nationalist, I’d pray for Netanyahu to escape all his legal troubles and for this “disaster for the country” to remain in power and go from strength to strength, until all the immune systems of the Zionist state go into total collapse.
And so if I were an Arab nationalist, I’d urge all the Palestinians to sit quietly. They don’t need an intifada or resistance. Let Israel and its leader continue to build settlements and completely erase the Green Line. After all, even if an apartheid regime is imposed in the occupied territories, all these steps will ultimately bring about Israel’s demise. It’s the irony of history that the Palestinian nationalists’ one-state vision will actually be realized by someone who denies the existence of the Palestinian people.
They should sit quietly and wait. Israel under the right-wing’s rule will swallow up the entire territory with all its inhabitants. The demographic trend won’t change, and the day will come when the majority in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will have its say.
No apartheid system can be sustained over time. Perhaps it will work for 10 years, 20 years, even 30. But when the day comes, all the Palestinians will have to do is speak to the world in a language it understands – the language of equal rights for all residents of this land. There’s light at the end of the tunnel, and any such apartheid regime is destined to be abolished. That’s the law of history.
But I am not an Arab nationalist. On the contrary, I see nationalism of any type, and especially that which rests on religious foundations, as a cursed disease that destroys everything good in man’s body and soul. The battle over this land, which is gradually becoming infected with the nationalist-religious virus, doesn’t leave any possibility of normal life in a single state in which all citizens would be equal.
The inhabitants of this land aren’t Scandinavians. The Arabs aren’t Swedes and the Jews aren’t Danes, so the disciples of Zionism on one hand and the disciples of Palestinian nationalism on the other aren’t headed for the solution of a Scandinavian-style life. In fact, they’re on the path to a Balkan-style clash.
Explosive charges of hate are scattered throughout the length and breadth of this well-guarded land. Therefore, there’s no road to a confederation as a solution. To arrive at a solution of either confederation or a single, normal state – and I doubt this is possible at all, due to the great bitterness and hostility between the two national movements – it would be necessary for each nation to first pass through the stage of national pride in its own nation-state. Only those who have passed through this national stage and understood the pointlessness of nationalism can someday give up this national pride for the sake of a different kind of civic vision.
If I were an Arab nationalist, I’d vote for Netanyahu, the Zionist “disaster for the country,” as Avnery termed him. But I’m not, and as a native of this land and someone who loves it, I fear for all its inhabitants.
The continued rule of Netanyahu and the messianic right will indeed bring disaster down upon Jews and Arabs alike. This disaster must be prevented while there’s still time.
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Haaretz, March 6, 2018
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Make way for Barghouti
The Palestinian president, who comes from Safed in present-day Israel, will forever be seen as a foreigner in Ramallah and the West Bank cities
Salman Masalha ||
Make way for Barghouti
Mahmoud Abbas has often threatened to resign, dismantle the Palestinian Authority and hand the keys over to Israel. The threats, as always, blow over and he stays there at the Muqata in Ramallah, playing the president of Palestine.
Arab leaders don’t quit and clear a path for new leaders. They will never utter a phrase like “I cannot go on any longer.” Moreover, a man like Abbas is someone who never leaves the Muqata for anything but meetings with leaders abroad.
He hasn’t toured Qalqilyah and Tul Karm. He hasn’t visited Jenin or walked around Hebron. He hasn’t gone to Bil’in to be with the protesters against the separation barrier, as did Salam Fayyad, who briefly served as prime minister until he was removed. Fayyad did so because he’s a son of the place. Not so Mahmoud Abbas, who comes from Safed.
This is about the perception of the homeland in the Arab and Palestinian experience. Unlike the broader Zionist view, the Palestinians see the term “homeland” in a narrow sense. The Palestinian approach limits the homeland to the community’s boundaries, to the tribe’s borders, no further.
To understand this issue we should consider the words of Mahmoud Darwish, often considered the Palestinian national poet: “I come from there and I have memories / Born as mortals are, I have a mother / And a house with many windows, / I have brothers, friends, / And a prison cell with a cold window. / ... I learned all the words and broke them up / To make a single word: Homeland ....”
And what is Darwish’s homeland? It’s not the entire Palestinian space. Darwish’s homeland is very restricted. Darwish was born under the British Mandate in what is now Israel. In an interview with The New York Times in 2001, he admitted: ‘’I had never been in the West Bank before. It’s not my private homeland. Without memories you have no real relationship to a place.’’
In other words, the Palestinian national poet’s homeland is different from the homeland in the Zionist sense. The Palestinian homeland is personal and limited to the village, the clan and the tribe. This perception may be the biggest obstacle to settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As long as Abbas bears the title “president of Palestine,” he will keep sitting there praising Palestine. But he will be bearing this name in vain. Abbas, who comes from Safed, will forever be seen as a foreigner in Ramallah and the West Bank cities.
So Abbas won’t quit. To him, to quit means leaving Palestine. He won’t go to Jericho or the Jordan Valley to make the Palestine wilderness bloom. Abbas knows that if he quits, he has nothing to look for in Ramallah and he will leave Palestine to one of the Gulf states, or perhaps to Jordan, to be with his family, with his personal homeland that isn’t there.
If the Palestinians had a developed Arab imagination they’d act differently. In the present situation they have two options – one is to throw the keys onto the Israeli government’s table, let it handle the occupation, and fight for one state with equal rights for all citizens. The second option is to organize broad protests against the “corrupt” Palestinians who signed the Oslo Accords – who were brought in from afar as leaders subordinate to Israel’s whims. They should make way for authentic leaders deeply rooted in the place.
Such leaders exist and they’re doing time in an Israeli prison. The Palestinians must elect Marwan Barghouti as Palestine’s president while he’s sitting in an Israeli prison cell. They must appoint Salam Fayyad, an honest, reputable man, the prime minister of occupied Palestine.
Only Palestinian leaders deeply rooted in their personal homeland can make decisions on an agreement between Palestine and Israel, about peace between two nation-states.
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Haaretz, December 17, 2017
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The never-ending tragedy
No True Leftists on Either Side:
By clinging to nationalism, both Israelis and Palestinians are dooming themselves for more terrible times ahead
Inside Every Islamist Is a Latent Smotrich
It is no coincidence that ISIS operates in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya, which in the past were the standard bearers of Arab nationalism.
Questions for Seder Night
On Lockdown:
Rabbi Ismail used to say: Anyone who doesn’t say these words on the night of closure has not fulfilled his obligations. These words are: robbery, siege and bitter herbs.
The 1948 War Through Arab Eyes
A study of Arab newspapers in the run-up to the Israeli War of Independence shows the kind of rhetoric that led to the Nakba, and is still present today.
The Nakedness of the Israeli Left
Excluding a fifth of Israel’s citizens from their political calculations is not worthy of being called the left.
The Israeli Media Is Hostile
The media sought out cheap Arabist manipulators who tried to bring depth to their analyses and assert that the fires were linked to terror.
Solomon’s Mosque is in our hands
Islam Has Never Denied the Jewish Connection to Jerusalem. On the contrary, anywhere you look in early Islamic literature, if it discusses the city at all you’ll find its Jewish connection.
