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,” [...]

[Read more →]

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 surprise no [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman
I went to a rally against Jewish settler violence at shul yesterday.
Kehilat Yedidya is one of only a handful of Orthodox synagogues whose members can make a statement like that. And perhaps the only one in which opposition to the gathering came from the left rather than the right. My friend Daniel Avitzour [...]

[Read more →]

Why does the Israeli army defend illegal outposts rather than dismantle them en masse? Why doesn’t the political leadership give the orders for the army to act?
Yagil Levy, an excellent analyst, has a very good, and very frightening explanation, via Ha’aretz:
The bias of the army is naturally in favor of the settlers, over the Palestinians. [...]

[Read more →]

Haim Watzman
So Ha’aretz has joined the gaggle of left-wingers who want to punish Nir Barkat. Barkat supports the construction of Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which is incompatible with cutting a deal with the Palestinians creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel. So a vote for Barkat is a vote against peace.
Now, we here at South [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]