I’m shutting down this blog. In a moment I’ll explain a bit about why, and what might come next, but first a word about what’s still here.Blogs are a very ephemeral type of writing. No-one reads old blog-posts, or entire blogs from cover to cover. Read More »

In the summer of 2005 America and Europe wanted Israel’s disengagement from Gaza to be complete. It was really important to them. So by way of convincing Israel there’d be no danger in opening the border between Gaza and Egypt, everyone signed a treaty. The Americans signed, the EU signed, Egypt signed, Israel signed, and the PA signed. Read More »

And comes back with an unsettling report .I once did the same, in 2009, and also came back with a report . Read More »

Yossie Klein Halevy writes about Israel’s most famous picture (The article was published four years ago. Today is the 44th anniversary of that day, by the Jewish calender). Read More »

Michael Totten recommends an essay by Walther Russel Mead, who claims that America very much won the war in Iraq . Read More »

Here are a few links to articles about how Israelis are working to make their country stronger, or to withstand this onslaught or that, and in general things that demonstrate why Israel is not weakening.The techies are convening . Read More »

Here are a number of responses or follow-up comments to the discussion of my post yesterday, about how Israel should leave most of the West Bank, and disengage from the Palestinians. I have no way of knowing what most readers thought of all this, but the ones who commented tended to be critical of the idea.1. Read More »

Back in the 1880s, Yehuda Leib Pinsker thought the Jews could cure the non-Jews of antisemitism by rectifying the abnormality of Jewish existence as a nation without a homeland. He was an important theorist of the first wave of what would later become Zionist settlement. Read More »

The other day I was talking to a young scientist from China who’s completing her PhD at one of the very best American universities, and has just spent a month in Israel. She hails from what she describes as a “middle-or-smallish-sized Chinese town” of about 8 million people, which I admit I’d never heard of. Read More »

That seems to be what the folks in West Dunbartonshire are saying. See for yourselves , and tell me where I’m wrong. Read More »

Aluf Benn at Haaretz comments on the Obama-Netanyahu spectacle : Obama believes Israel will have trouble surviving if it keeps holding on to the territories, expanding settlements and suppressing the Palestinians. Read More »

Chances are, if you read this blog you’re something of a news junkie, with a focus on Israel. In which case you’ll most likely have heard all about how Jim Crow is coming to Israel, as demonstrated by the Black Buses on which Haredi men sit up front, and Haredi women are segregated to the back. Read More »

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the lines of 1967, most of it not helpful, and some of it vague. Politicians, journalists, pundits, bloggers and most everyone else much prefer generalities to particulars. Here’s an attempt to be specific and grounded. Read More »

An anonymous reader suggests this story and recording, about right-wing Amir Benayoun who has recorded a song in Arabic for the Syrian democracy demonstrators, at their request. What can I say? Hee hee sort of sums it up. Read More »

Eve Garrard, writing on Normblog , says it’s time for union members to recognize their passivity equals complicity with the antisemitism of their union’s leadership. The trigger of her piece is the attempt by the UCU to redefine antisemitism so that their actions aren’t it; by the current definitions, they certainly are. Read More »

Netanyahu mostly said the right things yesterday in his speech to the American Congress ; he mostly said them with the wrong timing; and many of the reports on the speech are unreasonable or uninformed or both.First, an historical fact which is not open to interpretation. Netanyahu broke substantial new ground in his speech. Read More »

Not long ago I read an article about some Israeli legislation in the 1950s. It was sobering to see that I’d never heard of almost any of the legislators involved in the matter; even the high-ranking cabinet member who had been presiding over the circus was a fellow I’d never come across before, and in the interval have once again forgotten. Read More »

Eli Lake at the Washington Times tells how the relations between the Pentagon and Israel’s arm’s industry soured between 2000-2005, and then very much got back on track. The crucial turning point was that Israel needed to make up its mind to prefer American needs over Chinese ones. Read More »

Here’s a longish report on the lefty Israeli NGO Ir Amim, which shows how the organization is successfully inserting its message into the international discussion about Jerusalem . It’s in Hebrew, and I’m linking for future reference. Read More »

Here’s a fine speech by Colonel Richard Kemp against the slanderers of Israel, which starts from an unusual point of departure, but then turns to the depressing intensity of the hate regularly spewed at Israel. Then, as if on cue, here’s an example he doesn’t give: public libraries in Scotland are banning books by Israelis . Read More »