Consider the following condemnations of the Israeli settlement policy in the occupied West Bank: It would create “some kind of South African Bantustan” by frustrating Palestinian rights to self-determination. It would cause international condemnation because at a time of “decolonization…
I’m just back from visiting my mother on the Cape and it’s with sadness that I report that all the families seem to be leaving now and heading home. That regretful process used to happen in September. Kids would prolong…
It’s been so long, and gone thru so many bizarre turns, that the JonBenet Ramsey case seems to have lost all reality and become pure entertainment, like a history-channel crime, where no one gets hurt anymore. But I think about…
The death the other day in Lebanon of Uri Grossman, 20, an Israeli soldier and the son of the novelist David Grossman, who has been a peace activist in Israel, underscores a big difference between Israeli society and ours: In…
Lauren Likkel If you want to understand Muslim anger toward the West, this picture is helpful, for it shows one of the great griefs of Jerusalem. Taken two Fridays ago, by an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Eau…
Joey Cavod has pointed out Biblical errors in an article I wrote for the Observer this past week. In explaining the ancient attachment of Jews to the West Bank, I wrote, “David bought Shem, and that is Jerusalem. Joseph bought…
I got some great comment on a post I did on the taboo liberal journalists experience when tempted to talk about Israel. Anonymous grapples smartly (if casuistically) on to the point that the lobby has actually worked against Israel’s best…
Today I was sent this powerful speech denouncing the Muslim world as primitive, by an avowedly-secular woman speaking Arabic. It aired purportedly on al-Jazeera. My friend John Coyne says, “The woman is Wafa Sultan, an Arab-American psychologist from Los Angeles.”…
If you ever needed a reminder of how important the realist intellectuals’ spring assault on the Israel lobby is, today’s Times bore it out. Its polls show that most Americans feel that Israel’s indiscriminate destruction in Lebanon will lead to…