“Aid provides the U.S. with no influence over Israeli decisions to use force,” former ambassador Dan Kurtzer claims. Not true. Cutting aid would be the beginning of the end for the special relationship.
An Israeli government body that represents 72,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank has published a map of its jurisdiction that shows only Jewish settlements– simply removing scores of Palestinian villages and the cities of Ramallah and al-Bireh. The map was published by the Binyamin Regional Council on a webpage titled “Build Your Future With Us” that is designed to attract American Jews to move to “northern Jerusalem suburbs.”
My friend the late writer Yossi Gurvitz was an apikoros in the best sense of the word, the Jewish term for a freethinker. His heresy led him to support BDS. Educated in yeshivas, he broke out as a teen when he discovered Plutarch, reading real not bible history. That independence led him in time to become “Israel’s first serious anti-occupation blogger” and to point out the vicious ethnocentrism in the basement of Jewish religiosity that Israel was awakening– “and every demon that was pushed into the basement is up and has an M16.”
Phil Weiss speaks to Yossi Gurvitz to unpack the March 23rd Israeli election results. Yumna Patel discusses the upcoming Palestinian elections with Dr. Yara Hawari and Dr. Haidar Eid.
Yossi Gurvitz wrote that when American Jews seek to influence Israel as Jews they are reinforcing the illiberal ethnocratic nature of the state. Jonathan Ofir disagrees and says it is possible to engage with Israel as both Jewish and a liberal.
This video, recorded December 27, 2012 by a B’Tselem volunteer, documents a Jewish settler attempting…