Analysis
Wednesday, April 9th 2014 / Wednesday, April 9th 2014
The apparent breakdown in the American-brokered Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is a good time to re-evaluate basic assumptions of the diplomatic process. Such an evaluation inevitably leads to the conclusion that a comprehensive agreement to end the conflict is not within easy reach. The Palestinians long ago took a decision to reject the two-state solution as Israelis […]
Monday, April 7th 2014
Stephanie Shosh Rotem: Constructing Memory: Architectural Narratives of Holocaust Museums (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2013) How do we remember the Holocaust? What role do museums play in constructing a collective memory of the Holocaust? Almost seventy years after the end of the Second World War, the need to commemorate the victims has not diminished. […]
Monday, April 7th 2014 / Monday, April 7th 2014
It is increasingly obvious that the two-state solution is close to obsolete, although it is still not politically correct to say so in polite diplomatic company. The two-state solution has little chance of coming into being, because the Palestinians do not want the constricted West Bank state that Israel can give them. And they are […]
Thursday, March 27th 2014 / Thursday, March 27th 2014
For nearly twenty years, under the leadership of Middle East historian Efraim Karsh and his Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Programme, Kings College London was a beacon of light with respect to the study of Israel and the Middle East. King's has a superior reputation as one of Britain's foremost research and teaching institutions and […]
Wednesday, March 26th 2014 / Wednesday, March 26th 2014
The 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” in which the character played by Bill Murray relives the same day over and over again, is an apt description of official Palestinian attitudes toward Israel and the peace process. The repeated Palestinian rejection of Israeli overtures raises the stakes and draws ever more attention to seducing the Palestinians […]
Saturday, March 15th 2014 / Monday, March 17th 2014
In memory of Malka – zl No other book of the Hebrew Testament has received such mixed reviews by good, God-fearing men as the Book of Esther. It has had the unique, but clear distinction of frequently being praised by many Jews and ignored or disliked by even more Christians. So appreciative of the […]
Friday, March 14th 2014 / Friday, March 14th 2014
Many centuries ago, just before Purim eve, two Jews ran into each other (literally) as they were rushing home for the holiday. At the time, each of them was carrying an oversized 3-corner hamentashen* pastry. Fortunately, neither of them was injured, but their 3-cornered pastries collided frontally in a way that produced a large […]
Friday, February 14th 2014 / Friday, February 14th 2014
Twenty-five years ago today, Ayatollah Khomeini brought his edict down on Salman Rushdie. Iran's revolutionary leader objected to the author's magical-realist novel The Satanic Verses because of its insults to the Muslim prophet Muhammad and responded by calling for the execution of Rushdie and "all those involved in the publication who were aware of its […]
Thursday, February 13th 2014 / Thursday, February 13th 2014
(Lawrence Solomon’s presentation to the First Sabina Citron Annual International Conference: Approaching Nuclear Showdown — Israel, Iran and the US after Geneva, Toronto, Feb 9 2014) Many consider the Geneva negotiations over Iran to be a betrayal of Israel by America. Yes, it certainly is a betrayal. But is anyone really surprised? […]
Monday, February 10th 2014 / Monday, February 10th 2014
A brouhaha erupted recently in Israel over a completely theoretical question: Could Israelis now living in the West Bank be allowed to live under Palestinian rule? This debate usefully focused attention on one of the trickiest and deepest issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and so it bears pondering. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started […]
Friday, February 7th 2014 / Friday, February 7th 2014
It is often thought, as the great German sociologist Max Weber put it in two influential essays, that politics as a vocation [Beruf, “calling”] and scholarship as a vocation were inimical, indeed antithetical. Scholarship, he thought, demanded an objectivity distorted by necessarily partisan power-political engagement; while politics, committed to transforming reality, required practical compromises in […]
Monday, February 3rd 2014 / Monday, February 3rd 2014
As Americans seek to find an alternative to the stark and unappetizing choice between acceptance of Iran’s rabid leadership having nuclear weapons or pre-emptively bombing its nuclear facilities, one analyst offers a credible third path. Interestingly, it’s inspired by a long-ago policy toward a different foe — the Reagan administration’s way of handling the Soviet […]
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