To visit the offices of the Hotline for Migrant Workers is to encounter the enormous vitality of Israeli civil society. HMW, a grassroots organization, was created in 1998 to prevent abuse of migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers in Israel. Entering a nondescript building on Nahalat Binyamin Street in downtown Tel Aviv, you climb the stairs
Media frenzies often divert attention away from substance. So it was last week when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority. His well-publicized mission was to raise confidence between the parties and launch proximity talks, but the PA and Israel have urgent preoccupations elsewhere. The PA, facing fierce competition from Hamas,
Wars often begin because leaders misread the situation. For example, the First Gulf War, prompted by Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and the Second Lebanon War, sparked by Hezbollah attacks against northern Israel, were launched by authoritarian leaders who miscalculated the response to their aggression, with results that were even more disastrous for their own
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, at heart, a battle of identities. We are not just two nations competing for land, but, more significantly, two competing narratives of national liberation. That is what makes compromise so excruciating and explains the zero-sum view that so many advocates worldwide take. It also helps explain why this relatively diminutive standoff,
