If well-meaning American Jews who love Israel believe that the occupation of Palestinian land and people is detrimental and wrong, what are those Jews to do? How can they express those beliefs and take actions that protect Israel, support their fellow Jews, and also hold Palestinians appropriately accountable for their own actions? One response to…
Here’s a “sign of the times” factoid: In recent commentary on Israel’s settlement policy, the number of Jewish settlers beyond the Green Line has ballooned to 600,000 from 350,000 or so. It is as if there had suddenly been a mass immigration to the West Bank. But there has been no such immigration. What there…
A year ago, Israel’s Education Ministry launched a program to encourage schools to visit Jewish sites in the occupied West Bank town of Hebron, drawing fire from doves who charged the ministry with bringing politics into school trips. The doves’ effort to stop the program failed. Having failed to beat them, a dovish group of…
I was last in Ramallah a year and a half ago, and the change since then is striking. The headquarters of the once-feared Palestine Liberation Organization had been on the second floor of a nondescript office building above a furniture store; now it is in a gleaming office tower adjacent to the sprawling compound of…
Fred Schlomka is quite an extraordinary man, and his travel company, Green Olive Tours, is built to match. Working from his small home in Kfar Saba, a suburb of Tel Aviv, he operates a network of a dozen Israeli and Palestinian guides who take tourists deep into the Occupied Territories, from Nablus and Jenin in…
Israeli society has been confronted recently by a troubling new trend: vigilante attacks by some settlers and their supporters against Palestinians in the occupied territories, Arab citizens of Israel and, increasingly, Israeli peace groups. These began as the settlers’ own form of retaliation — exacting a “price” for any Palestinian violence — but have devolved…
A social service trip to Israel may seem like an innocuous program for a Jewish social service organization. But at Avodah, a domestic Jewish anti-poverty group, one staff member has quit and others involved with the group have launched a protest petition amid heated argument sparked by the prospect of just such a trip. The…
With his New York Times op-ed today, Judge Richard Goldstone continues his long march towards insuring that his name no longer be synonymous with self-hating, Israel-bashing Jew. He has written to argue — from his vantage point of having been a judge in apartheid-era South Africa — that the attempt to label the situation in…
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