West Bank and Gaza Strip

A few more points about dual-citizenship and dual-loyalty.

Last week at the Brit Tzedek event at the Village Temple, the Israeli veteran said that if the West Bank settlements were uprooted tomorrow, most of the settlers would quietly take compensation and move to Israel. But the religious crazies might leave the country. Many of the Gaza settlers had moved back to the U.S., he said. "To New Jersey," someone in the audience called out, knowledgeably. "To Brooklyn," another man cried.

These people were talking about a real issue: the extent to which dual citizenship has allowed religious nutbags from this country with messianic visions to inflame the politics of the Middle East, then when things don't work out, just to come back here.

I dream about a day when national borders will vanish and we'll all sing Kumbaya. That hasn't happened yet; in the meantime, the U.S. and Israel need to clear some of these issues up. The problem came up on Democracy Now yesterday in a forum on the (disgusting) fact that "the Israeli government has effectively frozen visitation and re-entry of foreign nationals of Palestinian origin to the West Bank and Gaza."

Israeli human rights lawyer Leah Tsemel went right to the dual citizenship issue:

I wanted also to mention one very important point. We get information that there are... a half-million Israelis who live in the United States and have dual nationalities. Those, and most of the Israelis, have a second passport and third passport and third nationality, just to kind of -- to be on the safe side. I think that there should be a demand for mutuality. The same [rights should be afforded by] Jewish Israelis toward our American citizens, as we, the Americans have to your Israeli citizens. Because Israelis can come and go with the re-entry permit... into the United States, and at the same time, there is no mutuality, and [Arab] Americans are not allowed in here.

Exactly. There's a revolving door between Israel and the U.S., for Jews. Neocon Max Singer moves to Israel and continues to work for a Washington thinktank, pushing us to go to war in Iraq. Nutbag settlers move from here to the West Bank with religious visions. This freedom (and absence of freedom) is distorting our politics. Yes I dream of a day when there will be no borders. But not just for Jews.

P.S. John Fonte of the Hudson Institute (a principled guy) takes exception to my recent item on dual loyalty:

I read your comments related to my phone interview with you, and your conversation with Max Singer. It is, as we discussed, perfectly legal at the present time to vote in two countries. The implicit subtext of your comments is that Max as a "neo-con," (horrors, hide the children) should somehow be chastized. Why? Because after serious thought he changed his mind and arrived at a new understanding on the basis of principle? On the contrary, Max should be commended for his principled decision to vote only in the country in which he is most politically active. Many dual citizens have not been as principled.

Last night 100 progressive people, almost all Jewish (one wore Muslim head covering), crowded the Village Temple in New York to learn about conditions in the Occupied Territories. The speakers were a former Israeli soldier and a former Palestinian resistance fighter. They said the following:

—There are 530 checkpoints in the West Bank. Only 30 are on the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel. Yes; some of those have stopped suicide bombers. The purpose of the other 500 has nothing to do with security. "The strategy there is to destroy Palestinian society, to prevent any joint organized struggle [against the occupation]," said the Israeli.

—The Israeli P.M. recently promised the Palestinian President that the checkpoints would be relaxed. They have not been. "The army receives these instructions and... does not take the instructions," the Israeli said, citing Israel's leading newspaper. Thus the army acts on its own as a repressive force (Israeli generals have long defied civilian supervision).

—The Palestinian, his brother, and his father have spent 25 years in Israeli jails, much of that time without due process, for such offenses as graffiti and other statements opposing the occupation. The man's family has lost many acres of its land to Jewish settlers, in a village outside Bethlehem.

—Arbitrary laws prevent Israelis from carrying Palestinians in their cars in the Occupied Territories. The intention, says the Israeli, is to keep the two sides from talking.

The situation these men describe is worse than apartheid. "Three and a half million people live without any rights," said the Israeli, whose own sister was killed by a suicide bomber. "You want to stop these people [suicide bombers], you should give them a reason to live."

The campaign by the U.S. Jewish leadership to smear Jimmy Carter will one day be taught in history books, as an effort by a privileged elite to suppress the truth. Slavery and segregation also had powerful defenders who misrepresented those conditions. Despite all their well-connected efforts, these people will lose for two simple reasons: the facts are against them, and a movement has begun to discover those facts. The progressive Jews jamming the temple last night are the evidence.

The Brit Tzedek tour by these two former combatants in the Occupied Territories continues across our country over the next month. It is aimed at one thing: to open Jews' eyes and ears. Let us pray.

TEL AVIV—It’s probably the most clichéd adjective used to describe the recent Isr  read more »

TEL AVIV—It’s probably the most clichéd adjective used to describe the recent Israeli-Palestini  read more »

Toshikuni Doi is a 50-ish Japanese journalist now visiting the U.S. after spending years in the Occupied Territories with a camcorder. The other day at Columbia he had his first American audience, for a documentary about a family in a Gaza refugee camp in the '90s.

"I want to give Palestinian people a human face," Doi said by way of introduction. "You see that Palestinians are human beings like you. They have a family. They love each other. Each person has a name. That is my message."

The film is nearly an hour long, and is cinema verite, compressed from hundreds of hours of shooting, and without commentary. It was shot chiefly inside the cinderblock rooms of the family of a man called Abu Bassam, and its focus is on father and sons, with only occasional intrusions of the outside world. Some heavily-armed Israeli soldiers, for instance, swing by on anonymous patrols.

The film is utterly desolating. You see a large family having to live almost its entire life within a few square meters. Many times there are a dozen people in a small room, eating or talking, paying cards, watching television. The family's income is meager, their opportunities almost nil. The oldest son was arrested for his participation in a demonstration and spent two years in an Israeli prison, and now cannot get employment. "I feel like I am slowly wasting away, day by day." The second son has lately lost his job as a butcher in Israel because he cannot renew papers that were arbitrarily seized at a crowded checkpoint, and the process of renewing the papers involves days of waiting outside, and arbitrary refusals. The third son dreamed of being a doctor. "I wanted to make a contribution to society." There was no way for him to become a doctor, he became a teacher, and he is unemployed.  read more »

JERUSALEM—By all accounts, Avigdor Lieberman began his first full week as Israeli vice prime m  read more »

JERUSALEM—By all accounts, Avigdor Lieberman began his first full week as Israeli vice prime minis  read more »

As I went downtown to see the play "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" last night, I read the Forward's coverage of Jimmy Carter's much-awaited book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Forthcoming from Simon & God bless them Schuster.. The article said that supporters of Israel are most upset by the characterization in the title, apartheid. That characterization used to upset me too, as being tendentious and emotional, till I went to Hebron last summer, the second largest city in the West Bank, where Arabs cannot set foot in large portions of the city center, and met a South African church worker who had lived through apartheid and who said that the conditions of the Israeli occupation were worse than apartheid. The people in the occupied territories have lived under Israeli administration for 40 years and had two elections in that time, yet we call Israel a democracy.

This is in the end the power of Rachel Corrie's words. I know people in the theater world, and so I have heard the rap against the play in the last few months. That it is a piece of polemics, not theater, and that as theater qua theater it is not that effective, too spare and one-note.  read more »

Jeffrey Goldberg’s wonderful new book, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Di  read more »

Jeffrey Goldberg’s wonderful new book, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide  read more »

GAZA—Ahmed Yousef got his doctorate in political science from Missouri’s Columbia State  read more »

GAZA—Ahmed Yousef got his doctorate in political science from Missouri’s Columbia State Universi  read more »

TEL AVIV—In the upcoming weeks, myriad Israeli committees and panels will begin deconstructing  read more »

TEL AVIV—In the upcoming weeks, myriad Israeli committees and panels will begin deconstructing the  read more »

Consider the following condemnations of the Israeli settlement policy in the occupied West Bank: It would create "some kind of South African Bantustan" by frustrating Palestinian rights to self-determination. It would cause international condemnation because at a time of "decolonization in the whole world," Israel was "marching in the opposite direction." Such "colonization" was flatly illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which was adopted because of Nazi Germany's conquest of its neighbors.

You'd think that these condemnations came from Arabs, or Noam Chomsky. They don't: they are from high Israeli officials, including a foreign minister and top legal adviser, in 1967 and 1968.  read more »

The evidence that the Israeli Labor government understood the dangers of settlement at the very beginning of the policy's implementation is contained in a stunning and stirring new book, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, by Gershom Gorenberg.

In the Houston Chronicle, Professor Michael Desch makes the argument that Israeli withdrawals from occupied territories save Israeli lives.

Israeli Foreign Ministry figures reveal that while Qassam rocket attacks increased marginally from 2004 to 2005 (309 to 377), the total number of terrorist attacks declined by almost 40 percent during that same period (from 3888 to 2456), mostly due to the over 50 percent decline of terrorist attacks in Gaza. In 2004, 117 Israeli civilians and security forces personnel died in terrorist attacks. In 2005, the year of the Gaza withdrawal, 45 Israelis died, a decline of more than 50 percent. Withdrawal from the occupied territories makes strategic sense because the vast majority of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and security personnel take place there. In 2005, the most recent year for which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports figures, of a total of 2456 total terrorist attacks, less than 8 percent (195) took place inside the Green Line. Judea and Samaria were the site of nearly half of the terrorist attacks in 2005. Despite the recent upsurge in violence, the overall trend is clear: Withdrawal from occupied territory reduces, rather than increases, the terrorist threat to Israel.

In a great piece in the Times last week, Neil MacFarquhar reported from Damascus that the disastrous Iraq war, chased by Israel's Lebanon war, has set back the cause of reform in the Arab world. An Arab moderate is afraid to say good things about the U.S. now without fear of a beating. While the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has shot to political prominence thanks to a U.S. policy that looks to them like destroying the Arab world to save it.

The reformers point to a "taproot" for Muslim extremism:

Reformers invariably add that a credible effort to solve the issue of Arab land occupied by Israel, which they believe is the taproot of extremism, does not even seem to be on Washington's radar.

The taproot of extremism. It was amazing to watch the Sunday talk shows yesterday in the wake of the London arrests and hear the usual blather about Why they hate us?—lack of opportunity in the Arab world, dictatorship, etc.—and not hear one voice expressing the concerns of our friends in the Arab world. Though once, on Meet the Press, Gov. Tom Kean did mention our support of Israel. This question has now been with us for five years.

You get far more honest discussion about this from the Israel Policy Forum, whose leaders wrote into the Times to acknowledge that the Israeli occupation was indeed the "taproot" of extremism, and to insist that withdrawing from the West Bank is the prime business of the Olmert government.

The inability of the mainstream media to examine the apartheid conditions in the West Bank, and the degree to which these conditions are fueling Arab rage across the region, is further proof, if anyone needs it, of the strength of the Israel lobby in this country. Americans are wed, forcibly, to an ideal of Israel as an enlightened democracy. They are almost never shown the militarized, racist, religious zealots who have carved up Arab land in the name of their alliance with us, the United States.

And no, that's not the only reason they hate us. But it's a big one. How long can we live in denial?

I'm freshly returned from Israel and want to get down my impressions. Mine was a political trip but it was also personal. I'll begin with the personal.

The best thing about my trip was the feeling of making a full circle on my life as a young Jew, a life I began to move away from, say 20 years ago. I've never fully resolved that movement personally; and this trip was an encounter with the more-Jewish person I might have been, that maybe my community intended for me to be, but I'm not. There was some grief in that—I learned to read Hebrew as a boy, and now I was seeing Hebrew everywhere, and not knowing what to make of it—but there was also a feeling of reconciliation. Frankly, I liked wearing a yarmulke as I walked around Jerusalem, after visiting friends on Sabbath, but I saw that I don't want to be a Jew in the nationalistic way that Israeli society extols.

That said, I found I had some pride in Israel's achievement. It is amazing that this country leaped up from a fairly rural society to a modern one in 60 years. That's my people's achievement. They were focused and determined to make something to show the world, and did. I don't think much of Israeli architecture (and I despise the destruction and modernization in the Jewish Quarter in the Old City, but the roads, the journalism, the cultural life are impressive. And there are the institutions of a modern state. An Arab intellectual I spent some time with in Jerusalem expressed rage toward Israel for the way it's treated his people, but he also expressed awe for its institutions, and he's hoping that democracy will rub off on the Arab world—the free speech, the rule of law, democratic institutions.

On to politics. I went to Israel because I've said again and again in the last few months that the United States should not be joined at the hip to Israel. I come back feeling more strongly about that position than I did when I left. Allies, yes. Joined at the hip, no way.  read more »

If you want to understand Muslim anger toward the West, this picture is helpful, for it shows one of the great griefs of Jerusalem. Taken two Fridays ago, by an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, it shows Muslim men, having been barred by Israeli soldiers from entering the Old City of Jerusalem so as to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, simply plunking down in the grass outside the wall of the Old City to pray in the direction of the mosque.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque is one of the three holiest sites in the Muslim religion, sacred to 1 billion people who believe the messenger of God came to that place.

Israeli authorities routinely bar Muslim men under the age of 45 from entering the Damascus Gate of the Old City on Fridays to pray at the mosque because they fear terrorist incidents when large crowds enter the Old City. You can understand the Israeli security concerns, arising from the suicide bombers of the second intifadah; and yet the resulting restrictions underscore the resentments created by Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem and the Old City, as well as by its occupation of the West Bank: Christians and Muslims often feel discriminated against. Just last Friday angry men clashed with police, and the police employed stun grenades.

By the way, Jordanian rule of Jerusalem, which lasted from 1949 to 1967, was even worse. Jews couldn't enter the Old City, couldn't get to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, where the First and Second temple were destroyed (and where some religious nuts now want to build a third temple, and do what with the Al-Aqsa Mosque I don't know). Here is a famous photo of Israeli soldiers arriving at the Western Wall in 1967:

Jerusalem is truly an international city and one filled with seekers of all description (includng many messianic nutjobs). Lauren Likkel's picture demonstrates the unfairness of the Israeli occupation, and also why it is so important that the U.S. take a more evenhanded stance in this holy tinderbox, to turn down the temperature across the Arab world. There's got to be a better way to manage things than depriving religious people of access to a sacred site.  read more »

AMMAN, Jordan, Aug.  read more »

JERUSALEM—On July 26, the Israeli army suffered a historic blow when eight men from the elite Gola  read more »

JERUSALEM—On July 26, the Israeli army suffered a historic blow when eight men from the elite  read more »

A year ago neocons Richard Perle and Michael Rubin and the former Israeli Ambassador Dore Gold and an Israeli general had a panel at the American Enterprise Institute, and released an elaborate booklet with colored charts inside, putting forward the idea that Israel needs defensible borders. Yes, Gaza was being given back, but there were hills in Judea and Samaria, as Perle put it—that's the West Bank to most of us—that were within 15 miles or so of Tel Aviv, and so Tel Aviv is vulnerable to rocket attack. Ergo, Israel will need to command the ridgelines in any contemplated Palestinian state.

Of course since then missiles have been fired on the Israeli town of Sderot from Gaza, and, in the latest outbreak of violence, from Lebanon onto Haifa. A lot more than 15 miles. And of course Israel was attacked by Iraq in 1991 from a distance of 250 miles, and Iran is within 1000 miles, and threatening to get nuclear weapons. You can imagine the anxiety in El Paso and Detroit if the Mexicans and Canadians were committed to our destruction, or if we had become convinced that they were. As Perle pointed out, these same concerns were raised by Sen. Henry Jackson, 30 years ago. The anxieties never end, and neither does the violence.

Does any other state have a right to feel anxiety about its borders?

A few days ago I raised the question of whether targeted assassinations in Iraq are helpful, when they kill so many civilians, and whether we weren't emulating Israel too much (again).

Turns out that in late June on Democracy Now, Juan Gonzales brought up the same issue in a dialog with Josh Block of AIPAC (also Norm Finkelstein, on whose site the transcript is posted):

GONZALES: on the targeted assassinations that Israel has often participated, has often executed in Palestinian territories, we hear repeatedly of innocent civilians. Putting aside the fact whether the people who were targeted were actually terrorists or not, because we have Israel's reporting that they are, but the innocent civilians that are inevitably killed in these missile attacks, how is that justified as not terrorism against a civilian population?

BLOCK: You're absolutely right. Those incidents are deeply regrettable. I think any one of us would say that. And I think any American, any Israeli, would say that innocent people who are killed as a result of a military action unintentionally, that's a tragedy. But there's, again, a moral difference between an army -- Israel's military goes to great lengths to prevent those kinds of incidents,

I don't think that's a good answer because the historical pattern here is now so established; i.e., claims of innocent intention cease to have a real significance when the innocent bodies just continue to pile up on both sides (and more on the Palestinian side). (Read Henry Siegman's keen insight here).

My questioning of the tactic stems from a conversation with Peter Voskamp, editor of the Block Island Times. Here's his rap:

My first inkling about the "Israeli-if-ication" of the military visavis targeted assassinations struck me in the opening days of the Iraq war when the TV was reporting breathlessly that Saddam had been targeted and hit by a giant bomb. It turned out to be a miss. But my reaction has less to do with tactics themselves necessarily than how it's presented to the public. It's probably been an old and obvious military tactic to knock out the leadership, but the chest thumping and direct reporting of it as a good and applaudable approach, I'd argue, is new, and to my thinking, something the American public has become inured/ desensitized to with endless nightly news reports about the Israelis knocking out various Palestinian leaders as they drive through Gaza or are caught in their safe-house, as the most run-of-the-mill event.

The videotape of a Palestinian girl running helplessly around a Gaza beach after the rest of her family was annihilated in an unclaimed explosion got the world's attention three weeks ago. Horror like this is rarely captured so freshly (even in Iraq!), and the blast has resulted in an international forensic/PR battle, a politicized whodunnit with advocates for Israelis and Palestinians pointing fingers at the other side.

The Israeli army had been shelling targets near the beach that afternoon, and at the start even Israel's advocates accepted the possibility that Israelis had killed the family. Neocon David Frum wrote in Canadian papers, "It may well prove in the end that it was a stray Israeli shell that killed the Ghalia family. If so, the killing was an unhappy accident, for which Israel has expressed regret."

But the Israeli army maintained that it had stopped shelling some minutes before the family was killed, and the Israeli Prime Minister suggested that a Palestinian shell may have killed the family. The Guardian investigated the incident with some care and disputed the Israeli government, citing hospital records in Gaza to show that it was likely the family was killed during the shelling interval.

A few days passed, then the Israeli army released a fuller report that it said proved on the basis of shrapnel evidence that a missile had not caused the deaths; indeed, The Jerusalem Post put the odds at 1 in a billion that an Israeli shell was responsible. This report fueled the counter-theory that a Hamas mine on the beach, intended to kill Israelis, had killed the family. Now Frum did an about face and said the "most likely" cause of the deaths was a Hamas mine, and added on his blog that the initial coverage of the case was a "miserable story of Palestinian duplicity and Western media credulity." Ah, those duplicitous Arabs.

Human Rights Watch demurred. Having looked into the incident, it questioned some of the Israeli government's conclusions and called for just what Rachel Corrie's family has sought since the skimpy Israeli report on her killing in Gaza in 2003: an independent international investigation. Here is a portion of HRW's latest report:

[T]he IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] agreed with Human Rights Watch that it is possible that unexploded ordnance from a 155mm artillery shell fired earlier in the day could have caused the fatal injuries. The IDF fired more than 80 155mm shells in the area of the beach on the morning of the incident. Sand would increase the possibility of a fuse malfunction leading to a dud shell that may have sat in the sand waiting to be set off. The shelling between 4:31 p.m. and 4:50 p.m. could have triggered a dud shell, as could the human traffic on the beach that afternoon.

The IDF has fired more than 7,700 shells at northern Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal in September 2005, creating a problem of unexploded ordnance in heavily populated areas.

As Richard Silverstein commented on The Jerusalem Post website:

[T]o say that the IDF shell had lain unexploded on the beach & then exploded killing them...is a whole lot less grotesque than an IDF shell being fired upon them and killing them. But it nevertheless leaves the IDF culpable for their deaths. I'd like to hear the IDF say explicitly that one of their shells killed the Gazans. That would be an improvement over previous statements.

Myself, I'm too far away to take a position on whose ordnance killed the family. What is obvious to me is that that the Palestinians are shelling the Israelis, the Israelis are shelling the Palestinians. As Henry Siegman has pointed out, a lot of innocent people get hurt as a consequence of both sides' policies. Anyone who thinks the two sides are making progress is ignoring the bloody evidence of 60 years. Two brutalized sides, in a cycle of violence. The idea that Americans should be supporting one over the other, privileging one side's security claims over the other, is nuts.

Last night on Charlie Rose, the great Henry Siegman said that he had met recently with Hamas leaders in Beirut. He related Hamas's aims.

Hamas is prepared to explicitly recognize the state of Israel. But it cannot do so without Israel recognizing the legitimacy of the Palestinians' aspirations. That means a recognition of the Palestinians' right to a "viable state" in Gaza and the West Bank, within the '67 borders, and a recognition of the legitimacy as a negotiating point of the desire by Palestinian refugees to return to lands lost in Israel, even if they never get to return there.

Siegman said the "heart" of the disagreement between Israel and Hamas remains the definition of the borders of the Palestinian state. "[Hamas is] convinced that the overriding strategic goal of [the ruling Kadema party] continues to be setting unilaterally a permanent border, resolving the issues without Palestinian involvement, and consequently they have despaired of returning to the peace process."

Siegman's points underscore the importance of a forceful and independent American role here to end this conflict. His points also underscore what Stephen Walt said about opposing the pro-Israel lobby on C-Span the other day, "[The Israel/Palestine conflict] is a national security priority for the United States, given the role that it plays in contributing to Islamic radicalism and anti-Americanism generally... The U.S. has never been willing to do anything to halt Israel's settlement policy. Many Israelis now regard [that policy] as a tragic mistake."

Jewish Voice for Peace disputes the reports from The Times on the Presbyterian Church's meeting

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted yesterday to back off from a decision it made two years ago to pursue divestment from companies that profit from Israel's involvement in the Palestinian territories.

Relating to divestment, the most significant change was in language used to describe the longstanding Presbyterian process used to pressure companies linked to human rights abuses in various countries.The 2004 language was this:

"7. Refers to Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee (MRTI) with instructions to initiate a process of phased selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel, in accordance to General Assembly policy on social investing, and to make appropriate recommendations to the General Assembly Council for action."

As of yesterday, The new language is this:

"7. To urge that financial investments of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), as they pertain to Israel, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, be invested in only peaceful pursuits, and affirm that the customary corporate engagement process of the Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investments of our denomination is the proper vehicle for achieving this goal."

As you can see, the vote was an affirmation that the `customary corporate engagement process`, which opens the door to divestment, `is the proper vehicle for achieving this goal.` It should also be noted that the GA voted this year to use this very same corporate engagement process in the context of Sudan.

To be sure, this is a softening of the divestment language, and it means the push to get the PCUSA to apply firm economic pressure to end the occupation needs to intensify. But it is also a far cry from revoking the 2004 decision, as the media and some pro-occupation groups are portraying it.

A couple weeks back a guy named David Zellnik emailed me, asking me to come see a reading of his play: "Ariel Sharon Stands at the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl." What a title! So crazily, breathtakingly ambitious—I knew I had to go.

I was blown away. Last Thursday, the Epic Theatre Center staged a reading and "talkback" at the Beckett Theater on 42d Street, and I confess I was crying at its savage conclusion. Zellnik's play seems to me important as an artistic signal of change—the criticism of Israel that is mounting among young progressive Jews.

But first: what the hell is it?  read more »

A couple weeks back I said that no American newspaper would print a piece by the great Henry Siegman, the former American Jewish Congress president who has become outspoken on the need for Israel to deal fairly with the Palestinians.

I was wrong. Yesterday's LA Times has a stunning article by Siegman saying that there is a moral equivalence between Palestinian suicide bombers and the Israeli rocket attacks that mistakenly kill innocent Palestinians. He argues that the Israeli attacks are a cynical effort to sustain the violence, thereby "shattering an entire people" and avoiding a just peace with the Palestinians, at the pre-1967 borders.

The vast disproportion between Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli "mistakes" and Israeli casualties from Palestinian terrorist assaults also brings into question the distinction between the two. It suggests that the killing of Palestinian civilians is, at the very least, more a matter of Israeli indifference than a mistake. Not a single Israeli has been killed by a Kassam rocket since Israel's disengagement from Gaza last year, although during this period Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli artillery and airstrikes virtually on a daily basis. (According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, Israeli forces have killed about 3,400 Palestinians since the intifada started, and Palestinians have killed about 1,000 Israelis).

The apparently accidental killing by Israeli artillery of a Palestinian family on a Gaza beach yesterday has proved calamitous, resulting in the end of Hamas's truce with Israel.

The incident in some ways parallels another border event of ten years ago that is now in the American courts, in which a humans-right group has sued a fellow at a leading rightwing Washington thinktank, over the deaths of 100 civilian neighbors of Israel ten years ago.  read more »

In today's Financial Times, Henry Siegman states that Israel is trying to annex large portions of the West Bank and thereby frustrate plans for a true Palestinian state. "The issue is not whether Hamas recognises Israel," Siegman says. It is whether Israel recognizes the right of Palestinians to statehood. Hamas, he points out, has in spite of its rhetoric not launched suicide bombers against Israel in over a year. Meanwhile, Israel continues to baffle and crush Palestinian hopes for a state.

Three points:

1. Once again, this bold statement, by an American, did not—could not— appear in an American newspaper. It had to appear in Europe. What does this mean? That Americans continue to maintain one-dimensional understanding of Israel. Americans' ideas of Israeli history and policy are "a fantasy built on a fantasy," Tony Kushner told me earlier this year. Reality requires frank discussion, including even Jews like Siegman and Kushner (whose honorary degree from Brandeis, recognizing his work as a playwright, became a rallying point for rightwing opposition!). Americans don't get frank discussion.

2. Siegman is a brave man. He headed the American Jewish Congress for 16 years. He is now the Council on Foreign Relations' leading expert on the Middle East. He speaks out again and again on these matters and has suffered god only knows how much threat and vituperation.

3. As the vision of a Palestinian state dissolves, the left will migrate slowly but inevitably toward another ideal: a one-state pluralistic solution.

Michel Houellebecq—the balding bad boy of French letters—has always written himself into  read more »

Michel Houellebecq—the balding bad boy of French letters—has always written himself into his nov  read more »

Is USA Today emerging as an idealistic voice? It broke the big story on wiretapping citizens. Now Jimmy Carter, once again distinguishing himself as a moral voice, says that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's plans for fences deep inside the occupied territories of the West Bank, preserving settlements, are a landgrab.

It is inconceivable that any Palestinian, Arab leader, or any objective member of the international community could accept this illegal action as a permanent solution to the continuing altercation in the Middle East. This confiscation of land is to be carried out without resorting to peace talks with the Palestinians, and in direct contravention of the "road map for peace," which President Bush helped to initiate and has strongly supported.

I went to a friend's son's bar mitzvah on Saturday and in some part because of my blog, and its discussion of Jewish politics, felt a little alienated. I forgot to get a yarmulke, then I ran to get one. I wondered who if anyone there had seen my ideas. Later, at the reception, I got into a discussion about these issues with an old friend, who was joined by a friend of his.

My friend said he was a secular Jew and asked me how I define myself. An assimilating Jew, I said. Shortly after that, his friend said, I don't know what an assimilating Jew is, and walked away.  read more »

I went home for Passover yesterday and felt guilty. I feel close to my family but little closeness to my tribe. I am less Jewish than I have ever been, and certain statements I have made in the last year, both out loud and in my head, about my problem with religion, about official Judaism countenancing the treatment of the Palestinians, seem to have dissolved some of the knots that held me close. Saying the words of the Passover seder, I did not feel the thrill I sometimes feel. I wondered, Who is this story for? Whose lives does it apply to? When we say, Next year in Jerusalem, what does it mean that Israel controls all of Jerusalem, with the holy sites so meaningful to so many different tribes? I was silenter than I've ever been at a seder. I pulled faces for my nephew, next to me, and made him laugh, but more often I felt suffocated by selfish Jewish concerns and troubled by the knowledge that I have broken not a faith, I don't know that I ever had much, but like a blood oath to a people.

There is a portion of the seder text that talks about how the different sons respond to the story. There is the wise son, the contrary son, the simple son and so forth, each of them talking to his dad. The point of this episode is that you are supposed to be the wise son, who asks of his father, Why did the Lord do this for me? The contrary son asks, Why did the Lord do this for you? Excluding himself. It struck me last night that I am the contary son. I might wish that it was otherwise, and indeed the seder text seems to suggest that a kid might choose. But I have made my choices and am now having to live with them. It's not that I regret them, but I do feel guilty and awful about some of the consequences. Yet I feel that in the Seder text there is even some room for the contrary son. He has his place. The father may be upset about it, but he has his place.  read more »

For me, the most disturbing aspect of the craven postponement of the production of My Name Is Rachel  read more »

The latest idiocies from Pat Robertson cast a new light on a long-lost document about the God Biz.  read more »

Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night ( Buongiorno Notte) happens to be the 24th film that the 66  read more »

Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno Notte) happens to be the 24th film that the  read more »

Or maybe he just likes the beaches. In any case, Eliot Spitzer, wife and three kids took their annual vacation to Israel this month. Making them the only New Yorkers in Israel not dragged by their feet from a Gaza settlement.  read more »

Send a pol to the occupied territories with Dov Hikind, and you never know what he'll say.

Here's Brooklyn State Senator John Sampson, making an election-year play for Hikind's support with on field trip to Gaza:

"It's wrong to tell these farmers they have to be uprooted from their lives' work," Sampson said, according to WorldNetDaily, the conservative Web journal that seems to have sent a reporter along with Hikind's troupe.

The story continues:  read more »

"Sampson compared the Gaza evacuation to previous human-rights violations against America's black community: 'This in certain ways is like slavery. Like Darfur. It's the same general concept. Completely violating these Gaza residents civil rights and kicking them out of their homes.... I will spread the word in America when I return.'"

Same general concept.

The President we wish we had settled the Middle East crisis last week.That's how it looked, anyway,  read more »

How Israel Lost: The Four Questions , by Richard Ben Cramer. Simon and Schuster, 308 pages, $24.  read more »

At this moment, the revived Middle East peace process is already colliding with what are politely ca  read more »

I hadn't been to Israel since my grandmother's death eight years ago.  read more »

I've been trying to figure out exactly why I'm so intensely interested in seeing Phil Mickelson win  read more »