Refuseniks
On Peretz Kidron, Refusenik! Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience (London and New York: Zed Books, 2004) 1. General, your tank is a powerful vehicle It tramples the forest, it crushes a hundred men. But it has one flaw:…
Category: Israel
The Demise of the Double Standard in the Middle East?
Double standard, noun. Any code or set of principles containing different provisions for one group of people than for another. Hopes are being raised for President Obama’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. To many, the…
Gaza: Toward Understanding and Action
Because of the extensive, though sanitized, U.S. news coverage of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza, many Americans are paying closer attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict (those with access to Arabic news programming and Youtube…
On Reciprocity and Responsibility
My friend Laura Weis (who is currently working in Indonesia) sent me the following excerpts from a piece by Glenn Greenwald. A while back, an Israeli friend of mine asked me, “Why should you care…
Candor
Israeli Arnon Soffer: “We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire ten in response….when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to…
Change You Can Audaciously Put Your Hope In
From today’s New York Times, on Israel and Gaza… In the campaign, Mr. Obama made statements that sounded similar to those issued by the Bush administration on Saturday. “If somebody was sending rockets into my…
Reflections on “Beautiful Resistance” by Laura Weis
My friend Laura Weis wrote the following about a play we saw together in July in Xavier Hall on SLU’s campus. The playwright and lead actor was Magan WIles, one of my former students and…
The Work Goes on
Recently I learned that Norman Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel and banned from coming there for ten years. Reading about this, I thought of Antonio Gramsci, a leader of the Italian Communist Party…
Jimmy Carter and Rachel Corrie
I am thinking of Jimmy Carter and Rachel Corrie, and how they are quite similar. Not on the surface, for who could more dissimilar: A young college student and an august former statesman. But I can…
Good Human Material
Review of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II by Yosef Grodzinsky. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2004. First published in the Journal…