At 65, having worked at this site for 15 years, I’ve thought about how to move on. But the murder of Ali Abu Alia in Palestine reminds me of my commitment. My Jewish privilege gives me a lot of responsibility.
“U.S. Jews, you broke it, you bought it — Move to Israel!”
Sam Bahour says American Jews need to see Israel with their own eyes and “only then will your love affair with The Idea of Israel meet the reality of Israel.”
Today the idea of a hopeful, humane Zionism is obsolete. For more than 100 years Jews wrestled with Zionism’s darkness. Daphna Levit profiles those thinkers, who range from enshrined heavyweights like Buber, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt, through more specialized contemporary scholars, journalists, activists, and lawyers. All of them once believed in a hopeful Zionism; all resisted its darkness; not all of them went all the way to renounce it completely.
On the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Haidar Eid writes that the only way to honor those who have been lost since the 1948 Nakba is to make sure that their descendants live in a just society where all citizens are equal.
In what sounded like an audition for secretary of state, Sen. Chris Murphy tells an Israel lobby group Joe Biden will restore a “decision” the two parties made long before Trump came along not to argue about Israel. He said Donald Trump’s “anti-Muslim” actions had the unfortunate effect of making Netanyahu’s policies toward Palestinians look racist to some Democrats, but those days will end under Biden.
Yitzhak Rabin never evolved from warrior to peacemaker. Until the very end, he retained his “warrior” attitude by openly resorting to the mass killing of civilians to serve his political aims. This includes Operation Accountability, a week-long bombing campaign against the residents of south Lebanon in 1993, that took place as the Oslo Accords were being negotiated.
Liz Rose reflects on Rosh Hashanah: “We made the desert bloom,” my mother said when I was ten years old. “How did we do this,” I asked, “from the other side of the world?” My mother pointed to the blue JNF box full of loose change. “That’s how.” And then I felt a selflessness in me, learning to give to others who required help, like Israel, who I believed–because my mother believed–needed money to help make the empty forest grow.
Haaretz covers Israeli army plans to convert “an ancient olive grove in the Galilee” into a shooting range with sympathy for the Israeli residents but no awareness that the once-thriving Palestinian village of A’mka there was uprooted by Zionists to make way for the Jewish-only settlement of A’moka. The Palestinians became refugees.
Jonathan Cook outlines Israel’s long-running war on Palestinian history, and those who try to tell it.
Dareen Tatour talks to Palestinians living in the West Bank who had a once in a lifetime opportunity — to visit the sea in Jaffa.