Gershom Gorenberg My new article is up at The American Prospect: Lest there be any misunderstanding: As an Israeli and a Jew, I don’t believe that the current government of Sweden is quasi-Nazi, that all Swedes are anti-Semites, or that I should boycott Ikea, the Swedish furniture firm. At the same time, to remove all [...]

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Haim Watzman Many of the comments on my post First Sheikh Jarrah, Then Baka?, here and at The Forward, constitute textbook examples of how the mere mention of Israel acts like a gravitational lens that bends the rays emanating from extreme Zionism and anti-Zionism until they merge into a single image. Let’s take, as an [...]

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Haim Watzman Mike Huckabee recently made a virulently anti-Zionist remark — and the Jews who accompanied him on his tour of East Jerusalem cheered. “It concerns me when there are some in the United States who would want to tell Israel that it cannot allow people to live in their own country, wherever they want,” [...]

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Haim Watzman The most frightening piece in today’s Ha’aretz doesn’t appear on the newspaper’s website, in either Hebrew or English. It’s Gidi Weitz’s essay on how the police responded when a pal from his weekly soccer game got beaten up by some roughnecks who didn’t like where he’d parked his car. There was no police [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg I’d been at Rosh Hanikra recently for a wedding, held in the evening on the small plaza set on the side of the bluff, overlooking the sea. The grottoes were lit at night, but the water rushing into the chasms from the open sea was dark. Until last week, though, it had been [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column on being an Orthodox dove is up at the American Prospect: The American Jewish filmmaker told me he was doing a documentary on possible answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one state or two — and human-rights issues. When he showed up at my Jerusalem apartment on a recent afternoon [...]

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Haim Watzman Ilana’s got that look on her face. “It’s August,” she says, “and all our friends are going to Corfu, Barcelona, and Antalya. But us?” “If you wanted fancy European vacations, you shouldn’t have married a freelance writer,” I reply. “J.K. Rowling is a freelance writer,” Ilana observes, “and I bet she’s not vacationing [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Before I head off for the Galilee for the week, I’d wanted to give an award for statement in the past week’s Israeli news showing the least understanding of someone else’s motivation. Try as I might, though, I can’t break the tie between two contenders: Col. Ilan Malka, commander of the Givati Brigade, [...]

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