Ben Lynfield covered Israeli and Palestinian politics for The Independent and served as Middle Eastern affairs correspondent at the Jerusalem Post. He writes for publications in the region and has contributed to the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy and the New Statesman.
In Nabi Samwil, a West Bank village of 250 residents just north of Jerusalem, elementary school principal Khalil Abu Arqoub must choose daily between heeding the orders of Israeli military administrators and upholding the well-being of his pupils. As part of Israel’s stringent building restrictions in this area, the toilet of the Nabi Samwil Mixed…
At the Knesset in West Jerusalem, she has been threatened, denounced as a terrorist and stripped of her parliamentary privileges. Israel’s new kingmaker, Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid, has cited her as the reason he would never join a coalition that depended on support from Israeli-Arab political parties. But at the Ambassador Hotel in…
In August 2011, a report by the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee hailed the Palestinian Authority’s “comprehensive security coordination” with Israel in thwarting terrorist attacks — a judgment echoed in May 2012 by the chief of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency. “The security coordination with the P.A. is good,” Yoram Cohen told…
In this city of 20,000 just 20 kilometers east of Tel Aviv, red flags of the Hadash party, a left-wing Arab-Jewish list, fluttered on the main road. Posters elsewhere featured Isawi Freij, a local who is No. 5 on the Meretz party list. Other posters showed Ibrahim Sarsur of the United Arab List, another local,…
“To whom are you leaving the country?” entreats one poster for Balad, an Arab party, showing a photo of Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. The party has proposed stripping Arabs of their voting rights if they refuse to pledge loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state. But the pitch seems to be…
Israel’s Interior Ministry is preparing prisons in the Negev desert for the mass detention of some 15,000 Sudanese nationals who are seeking asylum as refugees in the Jewish state. The planned sweep, which the ministry now hopes to launch sometime after October 30, follows hard on the heels of Israel’s deportation in June of hundreds…
Shedding their caution about being seen as interfering in the Syrian crisis, Israelis both inside and outside the government are now openly advocating armed Western intervention to topple the beleaguered regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Critics of the new posture say it plays into the hands of the Assad regime, which has been eager to…
With the looming prospect of an Israeli unilateral strike against Iran, the national debate has seen an urgent onrush of warnings from past and present members of Israel’s usually taciturn national security establishment. That reflects a profound change in the country’s political culture, analysts say. And it presages further public questioning of future security decisions….
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