A small opening

Barack Obama, Cleveland, February: I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel. Nobody should be under any illusion about Obama’s ability or interest to seriously shift America’s role…

The power of Israel

How much longer must we deny Israel’s unhealthy grip over Western governments? The full extent of government anxiety about the state of British-Israel relations can be exposed for the first time today in a secret document seen by the Guardian. The document reveals how the Foreign Office successfully fought to keep secret any mention of…

Why discourse matters

Leading Jewish blogger Phil Weiss kindly adds to the international debate started by my recent article in Haaretz: …Where is Loewenstein’s argument appearing? In Haaretz, of course. Israel can hear these opinions. They are marginalized in my country, as the voices of Arabists, terrorist-sympathizers, appeasers. We are all morally inscribed and reinscribed in the Shoah…

How to manage a killer

The UK Independent investigates: Heathrow airport, September 2005. An Israeli general accused of war crimes flies in. Waiting for him is a team of Met police officers. Would they dare to arrest him and risk provoking an international incident?

The hardest word

My following essay appeared on February 19 in the Israeli publication, Haaretz: Newly-elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized last week to tens of thousands of Aboriginals known as the ‘stolen generation’, who as children were forcibly removed from their families by the government until as recently as the early 1970s. The apology was…

The Jewish psyche?

Idith Zertal, the Israeli co-author of Lords of the Land, talked at Columbia University last week (as recounted by blogger Philip Weiss): Zertal talked about the Israeli psyche. She said that in 2003 a young Israeli officer was interviewed by British tv and asked about the killings of Palestinian children. The ratio of Palestinians to…

Complicit in silence

My following article appeared in yesterday’s Guardian Comment is Free section: During the current Israeli siege of Gaza – correctly described by Saree Makdisi as “strangulation”, Israel’s ambassador to Australia issued a plea for understanding the Jewish state’s position. The ambassador, Yuval Rotem, argued that, “the people of Gaza are not the enemy”. He also…

How to define a people in one sentence

Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, The New Republic, February 4: [Barack] Obama doesn’t understand that the Palestinians are more interested in Israel‘s destruction than in establishing a Palestinian state. This is the default Zionist lobby position. Defame an entire people, deny their right to independent thought and presume terrorism lurks within…

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