The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) voted unanimously last week to invite Israel to join the group, along with Estonia and Slovenia. At a May 27 ceremony the three countries will formally become members of the international economic agency that more or less defines the developed world. To understand the meaning of this
While in the U.S. last week for AJC’s stirring annual meeting in Washington and a series of speaking engagements at AJC offices along the eastern seaboard, I read an eye-opening book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing. Bishop is a journalist
Some observers close to the Israeli government are expressing concern over reports of a meeting of former U.S. national security advisors with President Obama at which there was said to have been discussion of a new peace process strategy if Israeli-Palestinian negotiations—still blocked by Ramallah—fail to produce results. Although the Administration has subsequently and repeatedly denied
The U.S. Army gave us the acronym “snafu.” As the Oxford Dictionary explains: “situation normal—all … fouled up,” meaning “a confused or chaotic state; a mess.” The U.S.-Israel relationship appears to be settling dangerously into a semi-permanent snafu. There is open, if officially unacknowledged speculation that Obama seeks to unseat Netanyahu, which would theoretically produce a government
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,
JERUSALEM – Three recent events demonstrate heightened challenges to the European Union: President Obama’s declaration that sanctions against Iran will be tightened “within weeks”; Iran’s unveiling of the newly developed Simorgh missile, a “satellite launch vehicle” that experts say can be turned into an ICBM; and President Obama’s decision not to attend the EU-U.S. summit
JERUSALEM — In the current controversy over the New Israel Fund, no side comes out looking good. Perhaps, then, we should begin our discussion with a play of the theater-of-the-absurd genre. In 1959 Eugène Ionesco published Rhinoceros, a study of the anti-democratic power of conformity. The plot follows a town whose residents are transformed, one after
JERUSALEM – The Federation of American Scientists is an organization concerned with the ethical responsibility of scientists to inform and help shape national discussions of science, technology and government policy. It is endorsed by 84 Nobel Prize laureates. Founded by Manhattan Project researchers after World War II, it runs a program opposing the abuse of
In the midst of so much heartbreaking news out of Haiti, there is modest consolation for Israelis in reports about their country’s relief efforts. The army sent a field hospital. Civil society—including the IsrAID coalition, to which AJC has given $110,000 to date—sent rescue and medical teams. Through this assistance, babies were safely born (one
On January 12, George Baghdadi reported on CBS News: “Syria on Tuesday summoned the highest-ranking American diplomat in Damascus and protested Washington’s ‘unfriendly procedures’ on Syrians wishing to travel to the States, warning it would take reciprocal measures if the move was not annulled.” Think of the apocryphal murderer who kills his parents and asks
Road 443 is an east-west highway that connects Israel’s coastal “Center” with its largest city and capital, Jerusalem. For about thirty kilometers, 443 cuts through a section of the West Bank northwest of Jerusalem, connecting the major town of Modi’in, and also major Palestinian population centers Ramallah and El Bira, to the national highway grid.
The 10th of Tevet: Taking the Long ViewGoing over old clippings of news items from the beginning of the decade, I found a pessimistic evaluation by someone who was a government minister at the time. It claimed that Arafat had a “strategic advantage” in that he did not need to “win” the terror war launched
For some Israeli analysts, new strains in U.S.-Israel relations in 2009 shook confidence in the longstanding alliance. They point to the cumulative effect of several factors: missteps by the adamantly pro-Israel Bush Administration that had the effect of strengthening Hamas and, with the Iraqi decapitation, the Islamic Republic of Iran; the economic crisis with its
In January 2007, Israeli historian Benny Morris published a vision of Iranian nuclear potential that is every Israeli’s nightmare: One bright morning, in five or ten years …the orders will go out and the … missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel’s half-dozen air
When we see images of a soldier from something called the “master race” shooting a baby and his buddy killing a helpless young girl, we assume they portray events from the Nazi years, perhaps the Warsaw Ghetto. But the soldiers in the drama shown last week on Turkish state-owned television are Israelis, and the victims
Misunderstandings often reveal more about a society than premeditated public statements. A good example was a Jerusalem Post headline last week that inadvertently cast a spotlight on the profound dilemmas that face Israeli human-rights NGOs.AJC has warm ties with Israel’s watchdog civil-society groups. We are in regular touch with organizations like B’tselem and the Israel Religious Action
In his biting poem “Pink Eyeglasses,” the great Hebrew poet Natan Alterman wrote of the power of illusion to distort even the most honest analysis: “The lens gives the color and the heart follows.” During the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, all of us—and especially our leaders—need to look through
What a week it was! For the first time in Israel’s history a former prime minister was indicted. Two former ministers began serving prison sentences. And the trial of former president Moshe Katzav finally began. Who can blame the Israeli media for paying most of their attention to the visit of pop megastar Madonna?Israeli newspapers
Dr. Moshe Itzhaki, an old friend, is a soft-spoken former kibbutznik, a farmer and paratrooper who began his university studies in his thirties and is today a respected professor of Hebrew literature. Moisheleh, as he is universally known, is also a poet who makes the Hebrew language sing—lyrically, boisterously, with a delicious earthy complexity that
The popular Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet recently published a pseudo-exposé without factual basis alleging that the IDF killed Palestinians and stole their organs for sale. As I write, the libel still festers, threatening Israeli-Swedish relations.The incident is notable in two respects: the distortion of thinking involved, and its impact on the credibility of Europe, since Sweden currently heads
The New York Times recently carried an op-ed by former National Security Council staffer Robert Malley and Oxford don (and Palestinian negotiator) Hussein Agha, entitled “The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything.” This, incidentally, was the same Malley-Agha team did much to confuse the issues around the failure of the 2000 Camp David conference. Their sympathetic portrayal of
The Bethlehem Fatah conference—the first in twenty years—provides one more illustration of the need to reevaluate the Middle East peace process.Somewhat confusingly, Fatah understands that the goal of the process is two states, but refuses to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people and appears to claim all of Jerusalem for the future
It is hard to recall a marathon week such as the one we just had in Israel. Visits by Secretary of Defense Gates and National Security Advisor Jones—with large delegations of senior staff, including White House advisor Dennis Ross—followed close on that by Senator Mitchell. Senior Israeli government officials are keeping uncharacteristically mum, but it
Once again, people not born Jewish who decide to link their fate to the Jewish people are discovering that the representatives of the state of the Jews are not their allies, but rather mistrustful inquisitors, suspicious of their decision. This time it is the Interior Ministry, which recently circulated instructions requiring its clerks to apply administrative
JERUSALEM – New reports must be read with care, especially in our region. Often, events that did not even take place—such as the Jenin “Massacre” of April 2002, which even Fatah now concedes never happened—fire the imagination of the media.Sometimes the opposite is true: significant developments are barely reported. For those of us trying to
Clearly, encouraging conversion is a key factor in ensuring the future of Diaspora Jewry, and a posture of intransigence taken by the government – refusal to accept converts as full members of the Jewish people – threatens the Jewish future. read more http://bit.ly/TleoTN
In 2001 I wrote this article about a fundamental misunderstanding of the conflict that Palestinian negotiators brought to Camp David. Has this changed?
