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….
Category: Israel
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,…
Realpolitik, or, The Way of the World
1. We must expel Arabs and take their places… and, if we have to use force—not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those…
Lexicon (The Way It Looked in 2003)
By politicide I mean a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity…. Politicide is a process that covers a wide…
Disobedience
U.S. historian Howard Zinn once said, “The Holocaust might serve a powerful purpose if it led us to think of the world today as wartime Germany — where millions die while the rest of the population…
Lexicon/21
Sumud, Arabic, noun, state of perseverance; samid (masculine form): the steadfast, the persevering, samdeh, feminine form; samidin, plural. Sumud is watching your home turned into a prison. You, Samid, choose to stay in that prison…
Journalist/2
1. That is precisely what I have been trying to elicit all these years: Outrage, outrage, and offense at what Israel is making a million and a half immiserated people Living in the Strip endure….