Yesterday in El Dorado, Kansas, Barack Obama told of his white lineage, and how his maternal grandparents had met and fallen in love (did people fall in love back then, or just hook up?) in Kansas. His mother was born…
On January 11, an Ohio volunteer for the interventionist group Christian Peacemaker Teams visited grazing lands of a Palestinian village in the South Hebron Hills where settlers from an illegal “outpost” settlement called Havot Maon had stopped Palestinians from grazing…
OK, maybe Walt and Mearsheimer were the first guys over the barbed wire, and they left their bodies there. No one’s allowed to touch their ideas now. They were bad and wrong. Worse: controversial. OK. Well, comes now Barack Obama…
The universalist impulse in Jewish and Arab life continues to be shut out of our press in favor of the parochial. You wouldn’t know it, but on Saturday, over 1000 Israelis–Israeli Jews and Palestinians–led a convoy of cars from Tel…
Remember when everyone used to worry about inflation? Now the problem is conflation. The Miami Herald reports that, campaigning for the Jewish vote for John McCain in Florida, Joe Lieberman has linked hawkish U.S. activities in the Middle East with…
Three straws in the wind: –Last night on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace”, Kai Ryssdal did a wonderful interview with Palestinian economist Youssef Dauod about prices in Rafah, in which Dauod was allowed to say that the Israelis had created a…
Dan Sisken of Mideast Brief has corrected my spelling of the Arabic word “nakba,” referring to the disaster of ’48. I spelled it “naqba.” I think it’s important to try to use accurate transliterations of Arabic. It should be “Nakba”…
I keep thinking about things that the historian Ilan Pappe said in a forum on Israel/Palestine at Oxford last summer. He said that peace could not be achieved in the Middle East until the three A’s occur: Acknowledgement, Accountability, and…
One of the most important reporters on neoconservatism, Jim Lobe of IPS, has an item on Freedom’s Watch in which he notes the mainstream press’s lazy and fearful shorthand re neoconservatism–“strong supporters of Israel.” Why don’t those reporters spell out…