All Hail the Peace Makers 18

Stronger than words

Gaza: Media, myths and the mainstream

Israel blockade cripples Gaza's economy

A Talk with Jeff Halper - The Struggle

"Making Sense of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict" presented by Miko Peled

Muhammad, Where Are You?

IT SOUNDS like a joke. But it isn't.

About a month ago, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, the government statistical office published a set of interesting items about the population of the state. It is intended as a gift for the citizens. The population is growing, it is getting richer and it is satisfied.

One of the items lists the most popular names given last year to newborn boys and girls

Al-Aqsa Lockdown: Middle East on brink of new Intifada?

Chickenshit

WHEN A high-ranking official of one country calls the leader of another country "chickenshit", it may be assumed that the relations between the two countries are not at their best. In fact, they may be considered somewhat less than cordial.

This week, It happened. An unnamed very high-ranking US official said this in an interview with the respected American journalist who bears the very Jewish name of Jeffrey Goldberg.

No high-ranking official would use such a term for publication without the express permission of the President of the United States of America. So here we are.

Turmoil at Al-Aqsa Mosque

Palestinians remind world of their own wall

Unrest spreads after more killings in Israel

Miko Peled in Washington

Wine, Blood and Gasoline

KAFR KANNA, a village near Nazareth, is probably the place where Jesus – according to the New Testament - turned water into wine. Now it is the Arab village where the Israeli police is turning stones into blood.

On the fateful day, the police was confronting a group of young Arabs protesting against the Israeli efforts to change the status quo on the Temple Mount (known to Muslims as "the Noble Sanctuary"). Such demonstrations were taking place that day in many Arab towns and villages all over Israel, and especially in occupied East Jerusalem.

House Demolitions in the Israeli Occupied West Bank

Palestinians in 'demographic war' with Israel

Labor Beat: Steven Salaita and Ali Abunimah at University of Chicago

The Plebiscite

ISRAELIS ARE fed up with Binyamin Netanyahu. They are fed up with the government. They are fed up with all political parties. They are fed up with themselves. They are fed up.

That is the reason for the disintegration of the government this week. It did not fall because of any particular issue. Certainly not because of irrelevant matters like peace and war, occupation, racism, democracy and nonsense like that.

Curiously enough, this has happened to Netanyahu once before. His first government disintegrated in 1999, and the whole country breathed an audible sigh of relief. Indeed, the general feeling was of liberation, as if a foreign invader had finally been expelled. Like Paris in 1944.

Can the Duke become King?

ON MONDAY, the 19th Knesset voted to dissolve itself, less than two years after its election. For many of its members it was a sad day, a kind of political hara-kiri. They have no chance of re-election. Some of them are so forgettable, that I do not recognize their names or faces.

The day after, a political bomb exploded on the TV news. Channel 10 – slightly more liberal than the two others - published the results of a quick public opinion poll by a respected pollster.

ALMOST A thousand Israeli personalities have already signed an appeal to European parliaments for their governments to recognize the State of Palestine.

I am honored to be among the signatories, which include former ministers and members of the Knesset, diplomats and generals, artists and businessmen, writers and poets, including Israel's three outstanding writers Amos Oz, David Grossman and A. B. Yehoshua.

Splendid Isolation

Conflict overshadows Bethlehem's Christmas

Ilan Pappe, The One state Solution, A new roadmap to Palestine, Litterature House, Oslo

My Glorious Brothers

WHEN I was 15 years old and a member of the Irgun underground (by today's criteria, an honest-to-goodness terrorist organization), we sang "(In the past) we had the heroes / Bar Kochba and the Maccabees / Now we have the new ones / The national youth…" The melody was a German military marching song.

Why did we look for heroes in the remote past?

We were in desperate need of national heroes to emulate. For 18 centuries, Jews had not fought. Dispersed throughout the world, they saw no reason to fight for emperors and kings who mostly persecuted them. (Though some of them did. The first authentic hero of the new Zionist entity in Palestine was Josef Trumpeldor, one of the few Jewish officers in the Czar's army, who lost an arm in the 1905 Russian-Japanese war and was killed in a skirmish with Arabs in Palestine.

Palestinian statehood: a lost cause?

Christian Zionism in Canada part 1 of 2(The speech isn't given by an Israeli or Palestinian, but it's still interesting) 

The Rock of our Existence

Opening speech at the Kinneret College conference on the connection between Archeology and Ideology.[*]

FIRST OF ALL, let me thank you for inviting me to address this important conference. I am neither a professor nor a doctor. Indeed, the highest academic title I ever achieved was SEC (Seventh Elementary Class).

But like many members of my generation, from early youth I took a profound interest in archeology.

I shall try to explain why.

WHEN ASKING themselves about my connection with archeology, some of you will think about Moshe Dayan.