Israeli academic Yehouda Shenhav reflects on his latest book, a translation of Arabic literature into Hebrew, in hopes of exposes Israelis to the culture of Palestinians and Arabs, after politics, academic research, and non-fiction has failed to do so.
Israel’s vehement response to Resolution 2334 speaks volumes. It will not “exchange land for peace,” it will not help create a Palestinian state, it will not stop settlements, it will not end the occupation. And in 23 days it will get a new American administration that will sign off on the end of the idea of a Palestinian state.
Most American Jews believe their faith is cultural, including dedication to social justice. But the fundamentalist Liel Leibovitz in a sneering, nasty article says these Jews ignore “the historical and doctrinal truth” that they became Jews by accepting the “burden of becoming God’s chosen children.”
Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, about his mother’s suicide and Israel’s birth, is now a film by Natalie Portman that asks the question, Can you “be sensitive” and also be a Zionist?
When Elliott Abrams says that Dov Waxman has given “Bad Jews” a platform in his new book, Trouble in the Tribe, he is shooting the messenger: American Jews are increasingly troubled by Israeli behavior and seek other ways of being Jewish than harping on anti-Semitism and Jewish nationalism.
The flap over anti-Zionism in British Labour ranks reveals the degree to which Zionism, or Jewish nationalism in Palestine, which depends on anti-Semitism, has replaced Torah, God, and peoplehood as the definition of Jewishness in European and American Jewish communities.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of England says that anti-Zionism is an effort to scapegoat Zionists for Jews. But anti-Zionists are focused on a group that has obviously committed human rights violations. So the claim is a fallacy.
Bernard Avishai is right to extol the rebirth of Hebrew culture in Israel, but that does not justify political Zionism’s unending practices of ethnic cleansing and discrimination
Dan Ephron’s book Killing a King is an almost morbid exploration of the preparation for and political consequences of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin twenty years ago, but in celebrating the two-state solution it ignores the real problems in the Israel/Palestine one-state reality
Mort Sahl understood the conflict. In 1991 he joked, “the actual roadblock to peace is the intransigence of the Israeli government, and.. peace would be aided and abetted if the Israelis would set a humanistic example by voluntarily giving back all the occupied lands to the Palestinians”