It is tempting to impute retroactive intentionality to yesterday’s events. As Gershom Gorenberg felicitously puts it, we mistakenly assume “that if things turned out a certain way, someone planned it that way.” Looking back now, it may seem a foregone conclusion that Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank (and in Golan, too) was from…
In yet another Occupy iteration, this week Joan Rivers staged a protest at a Burbank Costco, complete with a megaphone and an entourage of assistants. “Costco, who sells condoms by the pallet,” she shouted, “who sells Paula Deen books and — which is not good for their customers’ health — they decided to ban my…
As a Jew of Iraqi descent living in Israel, I was taught to take prideful note of the role that my ethnic group played in building the country. ”You see that bridge?” my uncle would ask me as we watched footage of a Tel Aviv sports event. “An Iraqi Jew built it.” And when the…
Rabbi Brian Lurie, who recently replaced Naomi Chazan as president of the New Israel Fund, has spent most of his professional life at the heart of the American Jewish establishment. Nonetheless, he is a rebel, a nonconformist, a Jewish communal leader “on the cutting edge,” as former Forward editor J.J. Goldberg puts it, especially in…
Considerable attention has been focused these last several weeks on the report of Israel’s Levy Commission. No great surprise: The three-person commission, appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to render an advisory opinion regarding Jewish settlement in the West Bank, determined that there is no barrier to such settlement and, indeed, that the legality of…
The American Jewish Committee, a centrist pillar of America’s organized Jewish community, is breaking with the long-standing establishment consensus that settlements on the Israeli-occupied West Bank pose no impediment to peace. The committee, in a press release issued on July 12, affirmed the legality of settlements throughout the West Bank and rejected the notion that…
A friend wrote in last week to dispute my critique of Israeli judge Edmond Levy’s settlements report. Levy claimed the West Bank isn’t “occupied” under international law, and therefore settlements aren’t illegal. I wrote that while his interpretation squares with the language of the relevant treaties, not one nation in the world accepts it, so…
Abigail Disney, a descendant of one of the Disney Company founders, has announced that she is disclaiming her share of the family’s investment in the Israeli cosmetics company Ahava, due to the fact that it is located in the West Bank and is engaged in the “exploitation of occupied natural resources.” Disney announced Monday that…
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