On the Phone with Hedy
Even her detractors might agree: Two of Hedy Epstein’s characteristics— Pertinacity and indomitability I’ll add a third and fourth Tenderness and compassion As when I called her from Ramallah To explain why I was unable…
Category: Israel
Israel’s Checklist for Palestinians to Reach a Settlement
Dear Bella Levenshteyn If you read the US press The following will strike you As conventional wisdom Perry Destroy your rockets. Quit whining. No more stone-throwing. Enough already of this “we’re the victim” routine. Forget…
The Way It Looked in 1996
The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be…
Sumud
Another sunny Ramadan morning in Rafah We head out to meet some people in Block J It, too, had been battered during Israel’s Operation Root Canal A few weeks before we internationals arrived We attract…
“I refuse to give academics more importance than being a human being responding to other human beings in need”
Cook School of Business, Saint Louis University, where I read (with several SLU undergrads) from Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine for the Social Justice and Advocacy Series; Friday afternoon 30 October 2015 When Grades…
Face to Face with Elie Wiesel
This short review was originally published in the bulletin of the Center for Ethics and Social Policy in Berkeley, April 1993. My book, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, was published in spring 2001….
With My Own Eyes: Israel and the Occupied Territories 1967-1973
An attorney who defended Palestinians in Israeli courts, Felicia Langer was an exemplar of accompaniment and focused, righteous indignation. In With My Own Eyes, she recounts some of her experiences in the first years of the…
Finkelstein’s Pessimism and Optimism
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as three masters of suspicion in the modern West. Over the last three decades, Norman Finkelstein has shown himself to be a contemporary maven of suspicion when…
An Option for “Unworthy Victims”
On Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Year First published in the National Catholic Reporter, fall 1997 Some years back, the political critics Noam Chomsky and…
Burning Children and the Duty to Resist
In May 1968 Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wrote a statement on behalf of the Catonsville Nine as to why they were performing an act of civil disobedience in protest of the Vietnam War. It reads,…