Gershom Gorenberg
By Gershom Gorenberg
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Opinion Ignore the Theatrics, Bibi Just Wants To Build
The show goes on. As I write, a radio newscaster is repeating an item about the evacuation of an illegal settlement outpost in the West Bank: At Nahalat Yosef, near Nablus, the army demolished two makeshift mobile homes and removed a third, thereby erasing the outpost. Settler leaders promised to rebuild it. Judging from past…
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Opinion The Value of Settlement Is Obsolete
It was one of the most important and largely forgotten milestones in the history of the state: 41 years ago, on July 16, 1967, a young kibbutznik got out of his jeep at Aalleiqa, an abandoned Syrian army base on the Golan Heights, and became the first settler in the occupied territories. Only five weeks…
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News Report Calls for Examination of Israel’s Military Strategy
Eliyahu Winograd has read out many judgments in his life. In Israeli history, however, the judgment for which the wizened former judge will be remembered is the one he read in a dry, steady voice on the last day of April 2007: the brief, harsh summary of his committee’s initial report on what went wrong…
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News Anachronistic Ideas on the Military, Immigration Retain Surprising Power in Israel
Jared Diamond, author of the best-selling book “Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed,” could gain some sad satisfaction by reading Israeli news in recent days, especially if he reads between the lines. One of his central warnings keeps getting confirmed — for instance, by the report that the Israeli military plans to clamp…
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News The Sound of Silence: Olmert’s Strategy
Ehud Olmert won’t talk. Reduced to its essence, that was State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss’s angry complaint to a Knesset panel Tuesday. The ex-judge was speaking at a hearing devoted to his investigation of how the government handled, or mishandled, the home front during last summer’s war in Lebanon. One reason that the confrontation between Olmert…
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News Jerusalem Dig Fuels Arab Anxieties Over Al-Aqsa Mosque
Viewed logically, the scene didn’t look a whole lot like an attempt to undermine Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple: At the bottom of a small trapezoidal pit, a single Palestinian laborer wearing a blue hard hat carefully scraped dark soil into a bucket and handed it up to another man standing on a…
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News In Twist, Peres Must Break Own ‘Law’ To Win Presidency
Poor Shimon Peres. If only Israel’s presidents were chosen by foreign diplomats or Diaspora Jews, he’d stand a strong chance of winning. To Peres’s misfortune, the Knesset elects the president by secret ballot. It is a law of nature in Israel that Shimon Peres loses elections. A corollary to that law says Peres runs the…
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News Series of Scandals Rock an Unsteady Jerusalem
At a corner bakery in Jerusalem, the television perched over the counter switched from covering the latest corruption arrests of top government officials to the funeral of legendary Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek. “The most honest man in the world is dead, and these guys are living it up,” the normally jovial baker commented glumly. Never…
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