Gershom Gorenberg
By Gershom Gorenberg
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Israel News Push for Inquiry Presents Olmert With Major Hurdle
Virtually everyone on the Knesset’s prestigious Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee wants a state commission of inquiry into this summer’s war in Lebanon — everyone, that is, but members of Ehud Olmert’s ruling Kadima party. City council members in missile-shattered Kiryat Shmonah demanded of Prime Minister Olmert that he establish a state inquiry when he…
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Israel News Goals, Tactics Shift As Missiles Continue To Hit Israel
After the disaster came a revamped, harder-fisted approach to fighting. Those words describe what happened at the start of this week, when a Hezbollah missile fell among army reservists at Kibbutz Kfar Giladi near Israel’s northern tip, killing 12 men. But the same words could equally describe the way the war began almost four weeks…
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Israel News Does Jerusalem Have a Plan For What Comes Afterward?
Two weeks into the war, the looming question for Israel is how to end it successfully. Because there are no simple answers, another question lurks in the background: Did the government’s decision to go into battle against Hezbollah in Lebanon include a plan for what would come after? In the welter of bulletins about ground…
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News Fuzzy Rules, Rising Stakes In Middle East Poker Game
Forget about chess, with its ordered rules, as a simulation for war. Israel’s current crisis in Lebanon and Gaza shows that the closest model is poker — a high-stakes version with no limits on bets and no certainty even about who is sitting at the table. In fact, the very meaning of winning is likely…
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News Olmert’s Tough Talk Reveals Dilemmas Facing Jerusalem
Faced with a deadly attack on an Israeli post on the Gaza border last Sunday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s rhetoric was predictable and imprecise — but if read carefully, it pointed to the dilemmas that Israel faces right now. Both in remarks to the Cabinet and in a public speech, Olmert defined the clash as…
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News Unintended Outcomes, or How Unilateral Becomes Bilateral
Middle East politics follows just one law — the Law of Unintended Consequences. A corollary states that the law’s power is particularly great when someone seeks to evade it — for instance, when a leader acts unilaterally, imposing his own will, to keep his opponent from disturbing his plans. If these axioms needed more proof,…
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News As Rabbinate Stiffens Rules, Orthodox Rites Face Scrutiny
The young American Orthodox Jew, about to marry in Israel, was asked to appear before a state rabbinic court that checks whether applicants are indeed Jewish. The immigrant, it turned out, was the child of a woman converted to Judaism by three prominent Orthodox rabbis in a major American community. The court checked with the…
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News Immigration Tiff in Israel Splits Justices
Israeli law contains no provision “by which constitutional human rights give way in a time of war,” even in a time of fighting terror, Israeli Chief Justice Aharon Barak wrote this week — taking his stand on one of the critical legal issues in Israel today. Barak’s statement was part of a Supreme Court decision…
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