Gershom Gorenberg At 10:03 on Monday morning, Osama Rusrus phoned from Beit Umar in the West Bank with wonderful news:  His wife Sunya and daughter Dalal had crossed through the checkpoint into Jerusalem, on their way to Alyn Hospital. It took nearly two months of wrangling with the Israeli authorities, especially the agency that never [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect: Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi stood at a lectern last week wearing the kind of size XXL skullcap that is the social marker of Orthodox settlers, praising an army program that is the pride of Israel’s religious right. He looked slightly bashful. Ashkenazi, Israel’s military chief [...]

[Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg All right, not so shocking. Anyway, with a bit of a delay, here’s my column on what the Wikileak cables say about Israel: In January 1969, the labor attaché at the U.S. embassy in Israel sent a report classified “confidential” to the State Department. In it, she passed on the inside information on [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman In the valley that runs west of the Omer ridge I wrestle with my angel. Noon is approaching and I’m munching a bagel-and-cheese sandwich under a tamarisk tree with my hiking buddies at our meeting point on the most boring section of the Israel National Trail. It’s a 21-kilometer stretch that is nearly [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman My translation of Nurit Kotler’s short story, “Next to the Traffic Signal, Under the Streetlight,” has just been posted on the Zeek website, after appearing in the Summer 2010 issue. Set in Paris, the story tells of an unscheduled and unlooked-for encounter between a nervous Israeli expatriate and an elderly Jewish man. Good [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman Worth reading: Israel Finkelstein’s rebuttal to Aljazeera’s propaganda film Looting the Holy Land, which accuses Israel of a systematic policy of stealing artifacts from the West Bank. Finkelstein is the Tel Aviv University archaeologist whose “late chronology” theory claims that most of the finds once attributed to the era of Kings David and [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman Archaeologists classically discover lost cities and get excited about buried ramparts, palaces, and temples. But today they get excited about the small stuff, too—grains of wheat, mineral grains produced by plants, and tiny crystals of calcite. Take a look at my latest feature in the science journal Nature to read about the fascinating [...]

[Read more →]