Gershom Gorenberg
The Israeli Post Office has issued a stamp commemorating the settlements of Gush Katif in Gaza - the settlements evacuated by the Israeli goverment in 2005. The stamp shows an orange ribbon, originally the symbol of the furious protest movement against the withdrawal. Today the ribbon is the icon of those [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
My article on the first settlement in occupied territories, and the obsolescence of settlement as a value, appears today in Ha’aretz. The original Hebrew is here, and the English translation is here. (No, now that you ask, that’s not my English.)
Also in South Jerusalem on settlement:
Israeli Right Supports Right of Return
At a Settlement, a [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
One of the bizarre ironies of Israeli politics is revealed once more in a response by NGO Monitor* to Nicholas Kristof’s recent column on Hebron and the price of occupation.
Kristof wrote of the particular burden imposed on Palestinians - and on Israel itself - by maintaining Jewish settlers inside Hebron:
The security system that Israel [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
In your last post, Haim, you mention the soldier who is outraged by Machsom Watch volunteers at checkpoints in the West Bank. Much as I understand him, I think he’s got it backwards.

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Gershom Gorenberg
Dov, the guy who owns the hole-in-the-wall computer lab, explained to Elliott and me that the operating system was only in English; he didn’t have Arabic Windows. As for service, he said, that would be no problem, "as long as he brings it here."
Unfortunately, Muhammad Abu Arkub, to whom we were delivering [...]

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Yehiel and I met Elliott at the appliance repairman’s shed on a side street in South Jerusalem.
Elliott Horowitz, a historian at Bar-Ilan University, had already paid for the almost-new washing machine, with cash that friends have pledged to repay. We wrestled the heavy white hunk of metal into the back of Yehiel’s undersized station [...]

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I can remember precisely what the weather was on Israeli Independence Day in 1983: Horrid. On the mountain near Nablus where Peace Now was demonstrating against the establishment of a new settlement, the rain was coming down in big cold drops that soaked through my ‘rain-proof’ shell and down jacket and sweater and shirt and [...]

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The Government Press Office was kind enough to send me a notice from the Municipality of Ariel:
Some 600 American Christian Zionists, led by well-known Evangelical leader, Pastor John Hagee, will arrive in Israel this week to express their support for Israel on the Jewish Homeland’s 60th year of Independence. One of the highlights of their [...]

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