Gershom Gorenberg Zevulun Orlev, I used to think, was the last nearly respectable man in the National Religious Party, or as it’s now renamed, Habayit Hayehudi. Like the rest of the party, he defended permanent Israeli rule over the Whole Land of Israel, without seeming to notice that it meant an apartheid system in the [...]

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Haim Watzman Hazily, I notice that the kid working on his biceps is staring at me, and I suddenly realize that my mouth is hanging open and that my eyes are gaping. He’s in the gym, but I’m having a revelation on the shore of the Red Sea, thanks to the son of a Jewish [...]

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Haim Watzman My friend Atar Hadari’s translation of Hanoch Levin’s anti-epic poem “Lives of the Dead” provides a fine opportunity for English readers to make an acquaintance with an important but very frustrating member of the modern Israeli literary pantheon. Levin, who died ten years ago in middle age, made his major impact as a [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg When Bibi Netanyahu thinks about Iran with nukes, does he “think Amalek”? And if so what does that mean? You ask, we provide answers. Does Bibi think Iran is Amalek? Jeffrey Goldberg set up this discussion last week in a New York Times op-ed.  The key sentence is: I recently asked one of [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Yesterday the army evacuated the illegal outpost of Maoz Esther, as various newspapers reported.  Orders for demolishing an outpost have to come directly from the defense minister, Ehud Barak.  The bulldozers appeared a few hours after press reports that Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to dismantle illegal settlement outposts, and even less [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Ezra Klein and his blog have gone away, gone away, from The American Prospect site. Alas. However, he has landed at the Washington Post, which is apparently betting that the Net will live on and make profits when print is dead. To make the site attractive, the WP is willing to have Ezra’s [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg You could call the timing mere coincidence. Yesterday Bibi met Barack Obama, who told him to stop settlement building: Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well, and I shared with the Prime Minister the fact that under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there’s a clear understanding [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg As I write,  Barack Obama and  Bibi Netanyahu are still meeting in Washington. The meeting has been extended for half an hour, Ha’aretz reports. Until the protocol is released in 25 years or so, we can guess that Bibi is lecturing to Barack about the Spanish Inquisition, Masada, the Holocaust and Iran, and [...]

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Haim Watzman My interview with Israel’s new minister of science, Daniel Hershkowitz, now up on the Nature website, offers food for thought on two fronts, one a matter of policy implementation and one a matter of policy principle. If you have trouble understanding the arcane details of how the state of Israel funds basic research [...]

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Haim Watzman Gershom and I had an argument back in 1996, when Binyamin Netanyahu was elected to his first term as prime minister. Gershom claimed that Bibi was, at core, a radical right-wing ideologue, whereas I argued that he was an opportunistic hack. In that term, Bibi went on to prove himself a devout Republican-style [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg The questions from the Gaza war don’t go away. They stay in the air, seep into conversation like smoke into a room. In the course of some reporting I recently spoke with a rabbi at a West Bank settlement. The conversation meandered to the ethics of war. He raised the question of whether, [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My friend Yehudah Mirsky has written a column about one day in Jerusalem that I highly recommend reading. Any further comment would be superfluous. “The sword without and terror within” (Deuteronomy 32:25) Nobody who has lived in Jerusalem in recent years needs any educating about the sword from without. A week ago Thursday [...]

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