Gershom Gorenberg In the last few weeks, the Netanyahu government has introduces some new arguments for why it can’t freeze settlement, along with recycling the old confidence games. Among the new cons is the legal claim. As Ha’aretz reported: A government source in Jerusalem said the Americans understood that even if Netanyahu agreed to a [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg There’s a lot of discussion on this blog about the issue of Israeli settlements. For someone just dropping in, some of the terms may be unclear. As it happens, the Los Angeles Times’ opinion section today includes a package on the settlement issue, and the editor asked me to explain some of the [...]

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Haim Watzman Had she better breeding and fresher food, I could perhaps have called her a tortoiseshell. But she was an undernourished, neglected garbage-bin cat, a member of the local feral tribe that lives off the huge green dumpster that stands in front of our 38-unit apartment building in Jerusalem. She first caught my eye [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg People often read read news, my son once pointed out, because they want to know what will happen, not what has happened. They want the Daily Prophet. Sorry, we don’t have any more clue of what will happen in Iran than anyone else does. Will there be a crackdown? Will Mousavi win, and [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Is this all coincidence? Or is part of what’s been happening in the Middle East for the past two weeks a result of the U.S. president declaring that the conflict of civilizations is over? My new article in The American Prospect examines the evidence. Barack Obama spoke in Cairo two weeks ago. The [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new article is up at Slate – on the dispute over settlements and why Obama’s approach is better for Israel. An excerpt: …Diplomatic entreaties over the two-state solution will continue in closed rooms. The dispute over the settlements, however, is likely to remain public. In that dispute, Obama is working for the [...]

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Haim Watzman Sometimes a mediocre film puts everything in perspective. When the lights went down in the Cinematheque last night I was in the middle of discussion with my companion (full disclosure: I’m married to her) how to parse Bibi’s two-state speech. One position (not mine) was that the prime minister had offered an honest [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My article in the print edition of The American Prospect is now up at TAP online. Here’s a taste: The small compound on the green hillside has several identities. It is the Elisha pre-military academy, a government-funded training ground for the next generation of highly motivated Israeli soldiers and officers. It is an [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My article analyzing Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech is up at the new Jewish web magazine, Tablet: Before Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the lectern to give his foreign policy speech Sunday night, the most optimistic prognostications went like this: It took Charles de Gaulle, a man of the political right, to recognize that France must [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Haim was right – about the content, and that it would have been healthier to go swimming than to listen.

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Haim Watzman It’s a hot afternoon and I’m still feeling heavy from overeating on Shabbat. So should I go to my Sunday night masters swim group or stay home and watch Binyamin Netanyahu’s much-heralded policy address? Which will get my pulse up higher? I think I’ll go for the swim. By all accounts, Netanyahu will [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg The recording of Max Blumenthal’s combat journalism in the pubs of Jerusalem has been making the virtual rounds, stirring vast debate: Has Max proven that Israelis are racists, or that American Jews are? That Israel should raise its drinking age from 18? Or what, exactly? Well, yes, he did prove that some drunken [...]

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