Haim Watzman I wasn’t planning to post today but I couldn’t let South Jerusalem’s readers head into the holiday season without alerting them to Anastasia Michaeli, the superwoman who is headed for the Knesset on the Yisrael Beiteinu list led by Avidgor (“the only thing to my right is the wall”) Lieberman. When it comes [...]

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Haim Watzman For years I have preached against small parties. Whenever my friends get excited by the latest new and fashionable political movement or the latest political star whose ego-trip involves founding and leading his own party, I’ve warned that a vote cast for a small party is both wasted and wanting. Wasted because, in [...]

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Haim Watzman Is Birthright a wonderful program that encourages Jewish identity and commitment to Israel, or is it a propaganda machine aimed at promoting a particular right-wing nationalist vision of the Jewish state? The latter, says Josh Nathan-Kazis in his op-ed How Your Free Trip Will Help Israeli Hard Liner Benjamin Netanyahu Become Prime Minister [...]

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Haim Watzman Oooh, how I hate to be associated with Norman Finkelstein, the anti-Zionist Jewish political science with the foul mouth who gives criticizing Israel a bad name. I cross-posted yesterday’s post (Black and Blue: Obama and Golda) on The Huffington Post, where a reader with the moniker CastleBravo1 commented: Thank you for your comments. [...]

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Haim Watzman Beware of Israelis who call for unity. More often than not, what they really mean is “everyone should unite around my political program.” In yesterday’s Ha’aretz, Moshe Arens calls for unity with an invocation of American revolutionary rhetoric (”Divided We Fall”). Yet his bottom line is that unity means acceding to the agenda [...]

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Haim Watzman Tomorrow Israel’s National Planning and Construction Board will take up a proposal to establish a new settlement in the eastern Lachish salient, southwest of Jerusalem. An ad in today’s Ha’aretz, placed by twelve of Israel’s most senior environmentalists, calls on the Board to reject the plan. “The establishment of the settlement will lead, [...]

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Haim Watzman A recommendation: Leonard Fein’s article in the current issue of Dissent. Fein offers a good summary of the current travails of left Zionism. It’s hardly new that Zionist liberals and social democrats often feel as if they are not only out of synch, but positively rejected, by both the left at large and [...]

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Dear Young American Zionist, You want to help Israel in any way possible, and you’re fired up by stories you’ve heard and movies you’ve seen about Israel’s heroic soldiers, commandos, and Mossad agents. You meet some guy with an accent who persuades you that Israel’s future depends on some classified documents you’ve got access to [...]

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Much as I’ve come to disagree with Marty Peretz, I admit that I hesitate viscerally before criticizing him. Marty opened the pages of the New Republic to me in the 1990s. So attacking him feels like an act of ingratitude, if not a minor violation of oedipal inhibitions toward a one-time mentor. In his own [...]

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I don’t usually quibble with what’s written about me, but hey! I only have one biography to give for my nation. Philip Weiss writes at Mondoweiss: The ’67 War galvanized… young Gershom Gorenberg to move to Israel. At the time of the 1967 war, I was 11 years old, in 6th grade, living with my [...]

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It’s such a pain when reality proves to be too complex to fit our favorite theories. A new book, Hillel Cohen’s Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 (University of California Press 2008), shows how varied the Palestinian Arab response to Zionism was, by investigating those Arabs who chose to collaborate with the Jews. [...]

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