By William Booth,  August 28, 2016

For a quick reality check on the current stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there’s no better place to visit than this little village of miserable huts and sheep pens in the middle of nowhere.

The hamlet in the hills south of Hebron has become an improbable proxy in a cold war waged among Jewish settlers, the Israeli government, Western diplomats, peace activists and the 340 or so Arab herders who once inhabited caves on the site and now live in squalid tents.

Israel’s military authority in the West Bank wants to demolish the Palestinian community, contending that the ramshackle structures, made of old tires and weathered tarpaulins, were built without permits and must come down.

The Palestinian residents insist they are not squatters but heirs to the land they have farmed and grazed since the Ottoman era.

They say Israel wants to depopulate the area of Arabs and replace them with Jews.

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PRINCETON – Those who lead Israel’s defense establishment often come to consider peace with the Palestinians a necessary condition for the country’s security. Being tasked with maintaining the territories Israel has occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967 evidently causes the military and security brass to support political measures that would end the occupation. And yet the government shows no interest in pursuing a permanent settlement.

To appreciate this divide, consider the late Meir Dagan, who served as Major General of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and then as Director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. Several years ago, I sat on a panel at a conference in Jerusalem convened by then-Israeli President Shimon Peres. To my right sat Dagan, who had just completed eight years as head of Mossad; to my left sat Dore Gold, a former academic and former Israeli ambassador.

The two men held very different views about how best to guarantee Israel’s security, and it is worth recapitulating their respective arguments.

Gold argued that returning to pre-1967 armistice lines would leave Israel without “defensible borders.” He insisted that Israel could guard against threats from the east only if it maintained a military presence in the West Bank and controlled the Jordan River – which runs along the border separating Jordan from Israel and the West Bank.

Dagan countered that the military’s role is to safeguard Israel’s borders, regardless of where those borders are drawn. While the IDF would certainly prefer to operate with the strategic advantages that holding more territory can confer, it would fulfill its mission under whatever conditions the Israeli government set for it.

But Dagan went further...
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Yedioth Ahronoth
by Nahum Barnea

The failed coup in Turkey holds many lessons for Israel. One of them, and not the least of them, is that we do not sufficiently appreciate the regime bequeathed to us by the state’s founders, and mainly—we are not doing enough to preserve it.

The Turkish Air Force officers who were involved in the attempted coup spoke in the name of democracy; their enemy, Erdogan, also speaks in the name of democracy, and both sides bear the name of democracy in vain.  Ataturk, the founding father of modern Turkey, imposed a secular dictatorship on the Turks, in which the army is the supreme source of authority and the guardian of the constitution; Erdogan posed his alternative to this legacy, an Islamic and Ottoman dictatorship. He is photographed with the picture of Ataturk in the background because officially he is still the father of the nation, but his life’s mission is to destroy Ataturk’s legacy. This week’s events bring him another step, an important step, closer to fulfilling his goal.

David Bernstein has written an articulate defense of those who, like him, refuse to denounce the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, or in some extreme cases even admit that an occupation exists. (“Why I Don’t Call Israel Out on the Occupation,” Opinion, July 8) He argues that simply calling for an immediate end to the Occupation does not recognize the complexity of the situation and will not bring peace and security to Israel.

Sadly, however, my friend David has missed the mark. The occupation can be denounced without calling for immediate withdrawal.

The occupation is evil. It is immoral. It is un-Jewish. When I carried my JNF blue “pushka” on the streets of Brooklyn as a child, when I literally leapt for joy as I listened to the announcement of results of the UN vote in 1947, when I worked, together with David Bernstein at the American Jewish Committee and now at the JCPA, and as chair of Americans for Peace Now, for the safety and the security of the State of Israel I did not dream of a Jewish nation that would be the oppressor of another people.

Israel’s prime minister is fighting hard to weaken the most important moderate force in his country. Which is why he’s going to be a big problem for the next U.S. president.

Despite Monday’s bus bombing, terror incidents have waned. Is the $100 million a year the U.S. spends on the Palestinian Authority Security Forces paying off?

Pinto, a battalion commander whose infantry unit was responsible for this north-west sector of Gush Etzion, a restive part of the southern West Bank, seemed preternaturally calm despite being at the doorstep of a major Palestinian city—which was likely the point.

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1| What more could be done to achieve
peace between Israelis and Palestinians?

2| What might women bring to the
peace process if more were included?

with Ruth Calderon, Tamara Cofman Wittes, Nadia Hijab, Naomi Chazan, Caroline Glick, Fania Oz-Salzberger, Laila El-Haddad, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Anat Saragusti, Cora Weiss, Sarai Aharoni, Noura Erakat, Laura Blumenfeld, Lara Friedman, Simone Susskind, Felice Friedson, Leila Hilal & Galia Golan

When did you last hear someone say something new about the peace process? And when did you last hear someone new say it? Every day, it seems, a panel of experts—diplomats, pundits, scholars, chin-pullers of all varieties—convenes to chew over the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations. These groups all have something in common: They are overwhelmingly male. The PBS program Frontline recently attracted criticism for asking 23 male experts and three women to reflect on the career of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We at Moment have been offenders ourselves, printing past symposia on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that featured far more male than female contributors.

APN Board member Sid Topol mentioned in Farah Stockman's farewell column in the Boston Globe.

Dear Boston,

The first time I laid eyes on you, I worried that I might be out of my league. The gold dome of the State House was impressive bling for a Midwestern girl like me. To be honest, I took you for a snob at first. After all, you’re a city with not one but two Harvard clubs, in addition to hosting parts of Harvard itself.

But over time, I got to see your down-to-earth side. Your longshoremen. Your stevedores. Your fierce, proud unions.

It took me years to learn your secrets: that it’s OK to save a parking space shoveled out of the snow in Southie, but not in the South End. That Mike’s Pastry is for tourists, but Modern Pastry is for Nonna.

Op-ed: As Im Tirtzu's supporters saw last week, the fervent quest to implicate others as traitors can quickly go too far. Israel's witch hunters need to stop now, before it's too late.

"Let there be no hope for informers", says the Shemoneh Esrei prayer. That harsh saying has many different and interesting religious interpretations, but when I was young, me and the other kids at a secular school in Tel Aviv took it literally: Bad things are in order for people who inform on their buddies. We wrote the words on a large piece of cardboard paper, and hung it on the wall next to the principal's office.

Since his office was near the restrooms, one child made a slight change to the sign, switching the Hebrew words to mean "Let there be no hope for those who pee." It created a small controversy, one of many. The school itself closed down years ago. Its restrooms now service the coffee shop that has since opened nearby. Whenever I schedule a meeting there, I make sure to give that wall a respectful visit. Not because of the restroom: Because of the informers.

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Let’s take a moment for a thought experiment. I do this days after more Palestinian attacks on Israelis, including the horrific murder of a mother of six children; soon after Israel announced the expropriation of another 370 acres of land near Jericho; and after Majed Faraj, the Palestinian security chief, announced that Palestinian security forces had intercepted 200 potential terrorist attacks against Israel. The thought experiment focuses on whether the “Plan B” for the Israel-Palestine dispute should be Israel’s annexation of the territories it occupied in 1967 and the extension of full citizenship rights to the Palestinians in those areas.

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