Zionism

Ian S. Lustick asks: How close is Israel to pariah status? Quite close. Americans know that ratings for Congress are now in the single digits: below traffic jams, colonoscopies and cockroaches, though still above North Korea and telemarketers. If Israel were included in that survey it would of course do better than Congress — among [...]

Mustafa Akyol writes: Last week, during a visit to Vienna, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan initiated an international controversy by condemning “Zionism,” albeit in passing. “As is the case for Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism,” he said, “it is inevitable that Islamophobia be considered a crime against humanity.” Soon objections came. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon [...]

Tony Karon writes: Mowing the lawn. That’s how some Israeli securocrats described their recent air-strike campaign in Gaza. Periodic bombardment won’t eliminate Hamas or resolve the conflict, but they hope to re-establish a temporary deterrent against militant rocket fire. Callousness aside, the metaphor shows that Israel has no political strategy for dealing with the challenge [...]

Henry Siegman writes: The Middle East peace process is dead. More precisely, the two-state solution is dead; the peace process may well go on indefinitely if this Israeli government has its way. The two-state solution did not die a natural death. It was strangulated as Jewish settlements in the West Bank were expanded and deepened [...]

The Financial Times reports: Yitzhak Shamir, who has died at the age of 96, is most likely to be remembered as a terrorist against British rule in Palestine during the 1940s and as a man whose aggressive Jewish settlement policy on Arab lands may have stymied Middle East peace for a generation. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s [...]

Haaretz reports: A former Israeli soldier, who was residing in the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem, was recently arrested by Palestinian security forces at Israel’s request. Born in the Soviet Union, Andrey Pshenichnikov, 24, moved to Israel eleven years ago. Pshenichnikov served in the Israel Defense Forces, including an extra 18 months as a career [...]

Yousef Munayyer writes: I’m a Palestinian who was born in the Israeli town of Lod, and thus I am an Israeli citizen. My wife is not; she is a Palestinian from Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Despite our towns being just 30 miles apart, we met almost 6,000 miles away in Massachusetts, where we [...]

A recent poll conducted by the University of Maryland in which 24,090 citizens across 22 countries were interviewed, revealed that around the world Israel is viewed as negatively as North Korea. Considering the fact that Israel has vastly greater opportunities and resources to promote its image than does North Korea and that the North Korean [...]

Rick Perlstein writes: In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line. My dad, who had a replica Uzi sub-machine gun [...]

When Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, called Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes to speak about their upcoming report, “Christians of the Holy Land,” it’s clear he had only one objective: to kill the report. When interviewed by Bob Simon, Oren did not express concern about how [...]

Mya Guarnieri: I’m writing this from somewhere in Europe. Sunday morning, I will board a plane* bound for Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. Organizers of the “Welcome to Palestine” campaign tell me that more than half the passengers on my flight will be international activists. When they arrive in Ben-Gurion Airport on Sunday, the activists [...]