Haim Watzman “Man, this is the life!” I say as I lean back in my empyreanite chair and stretch my legs and arms out as far as they can go. My Talmud is open in front of me, Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” is wafting through the beit midrash, and a cool, [...]

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Haim Watzman “Suicide,” said Shaya. He meant the one-state “solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. More and more Palestinian intellectuals are now advocating a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, this after years in which short-sighted Israeli governments pursued policies aimed at making it impossible to establish a Palestinian [...]

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Haim Watzman Yisrael and Shalom, In response to your comments on my post “Mahmoud Darwish, Zionist Poet,” if you read more carefully, you’ll see that: a) I don’t put down the Jew, but rather express my admiration for Greenberg’s poetry; b) I except myself from Darwish’s politics, while expressing admiration for his poetry; c) I [...]

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Haim Watzman What’s a Zionist to make of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet whose funeral today in Ramallah will be a celebration of both Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian culture? Darwish was a refugee. His family came from the village of Birwa, near Acre, and fled to Lebanon in the wake of Israel’s War of [...]

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Haim Watzman “Demolish the home of a mentally deranged Palestinian? What a joke,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared today in an exclusive interview with the influential South Jerusalem blog. Barak revealed that, in advocating the destruction of the home of the bulldozer terrorist who killed three Israelis and wounded dozens of others on Wednesday, he’d [...]

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Waltz With Bashir directly addresses the philosophical question we’ve been discussing here. Ari Folman, the film’s director, served as an Israeli soldier on the perimeter of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut at the time of the massacre committed there by Lebanese Phalangist militiamen in mid-September 1982. Folman clearly feels guilt, and feels that he abetted an act that was comparable to the Nazis’ massacres of Jews in Europe—his parents are Holocaust survivors. To what extent is he, an individual soldier, morally culpable. Should he have acted otherwise than he did?

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Haim Watzman In response to your last post, Gershom, we don’t disagree about most of the big issues. Of course soldiers, like national leaders and citizens, must make moral judgments, and must make them frequently. My point my previous post was that people in all these categories inevitably make these decisions with imperfect—often woefully imperfect—information. [...]

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Haim Watzman “On both sides of a war, unity is reflexive, not intentional or premeditated. To disobey is to breach that elemental accord, to claim a moral separateness (or moral superiority), to challenge one’s fellows, perhaps even to intensify the dangers they face,” Michael Walzer writes in his seminal Just and Unjust Wars. Walzer refers [...]

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Haim Watzman I recall a gathering of journalists once many years ago at which a well-meaning but clueless intern told me that she worked in “Jerusalem, Israel” and then quickly corrected herself: “I meant just Jerusalem. I believe it should be an international city.” In response to my Jerusalem Day post earlier this week, DanH [...]

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What if you make a peace agreement and nobody comes? That’s the fundamental story behind “A Possible Peace Between Israel & Palestine: An Insider’s Account of the Geneva Initiative.” It’s a fascinating look into the conflict and the “peace industry.” Contrary to the intention of its author, political scientist Menachem Klein, it raises more doubts [...]

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The siren last night caught me backing up my hard disk. I’d planned to be at the neighborhood ceremony or upstairs with my family at the beginning of Memorial Day, but I kept procrastinating. When I got upstairs, the television broadcast of the official ceremony was just coming to an end. I had something to [...]

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CAMERA, which claims to monitor the accuracy of reporting on Israel in the American media, doesn’t feel obligated to be all that truthful itself, as I explain in my new column at the American Prospect. A CAMERA staffer organized activists to work as a group to edit Wikipedia articles on Israel – while hiding their [...]

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