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 [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg This week’s key misunderstood news story from the Looking Glass Land of the West Bank is that the Defense Ministry is about to approve settlement at a spot called Maskiot, near the Jordan River. On first glance, that’s bad because it means that the government is abandoning its freeze on new settlements. At [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My friend John showed up in South Jerusalem. Long ago and far away, John and I slouched in the back of high school classes together in Los Angeles, mumbling snidely about what was being left out of American history (women, blacks, slaughter of Indians, lynch mobs, poor folk…). Eventually I went into mumbling [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Sometime before November, traffic in Jerusalem will be tied up by Barack Obama’s visit. My new article in The American Prospect explains what Obama should do while he’s here to prepare for the presidency, and why he won’t do any of that: …In Jerusalem, Obama has another task — shoring up support among [...]

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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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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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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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The following statement was not shouted by a long-time Peace Now activist into a megaphone outside the prime minister’s house: You have to understand that a very large population of Palestinians lives here… Take a 50-year-old man who lives here. A man who has spent most of his life – 40 years, since he was [...]

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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 [...]

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