“Is it time for this occupation to end? Morally speaking, how much should this military occupation go on, generation after generation?” Said Arikat asks the State Department after another humiliating incident: Israeli soldiers forced a Palestinian woman at a cagelike checkpoint to strip her three-year-old’s tshirt because it pictured a rifle.
Divisions over Israel will bring “disaster and disunity” for Jews in the U.S., Abraham Riesman writes in New York magazine in an article about his grandfather, an Israel lobbyist who helped cover up war crimes. Young Riesman says the massacres and imprisonment of Palestinians today makes Jews unsafe.
Historian Jerome Slater reinterprets the Cold War in the Middle East: “It’s an easy case to make that it was the United States, specifically Nixon and Kissinger… who sabotaged Soviet inititatives that I think were very fair for a two state settlement guaranteed by the super powers.” The Soviets wouldn’t have been in the Middle East if the U.S. hadn’t supported Israel so vigorously, which left Arab states no choice but to align with the Soviet pole. But the Soviets pushed peace in an effort to thwart a global conflict.
“Unwilling to make territorial, symbolic, or other compromises, Israel has not merely missed but sometimes even deliberately sabotaged repeated opportunities for peace with the Arab states and the Palestinians,” writes Jerome Slater in his forthcoming book.
What if Palestinians suddenly disappeared from Israel and Palestine? That is the premise of Ibtisam Azem’s mystical story in “The Book of Disappearance.” And yes, at first Jewish Israelis see it as a great miracle.
It’s been 53 years since Israel won 1967 war, and David Harris of the AJC expresses the mythic views of that war he held at 18, when it happened: that Israel faced a second Holocaust and annihilation, and acted in self-defense. Historians have thoroughly revised these distortions.