There are many people, gifted with rare intelligence and tolerance for humankind, who, when addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, run off the rails.

This week, it was the turn of former American Jewish Congress national director Henry Siegman. Noting opinion polls showing that a bare six to eight percent of...

A man named Milton Supman died last week. He died quietly, at 83. He'd grown up in the only Jewish family in a small North Carolina town, his father a dry goods merchant who had moved there from Hungary. His family gave him the handle which was to be the...

We don't need them. They'll never see things our way, no matter what. Let them go.

It's a new Israeli approach which borrows from the very worst of our aging instincts. It says: We're moral, our enemies are out to exterminate us along with our state, that's all you...

I put off reading the Goldstone report the same way I put off scheduling a colonoscopy. I now realize it was for many of the same reasons. You know it's going to be tremendously uncomfortable, you don't want to know what they're going to find, and the consequences could be...

JERUSALEM -- It's been a decade and a half that fanatics on both sides have ruined our lives. But there's a change coming. Whether the extremists like it or not. The sign came on the eve of the Sukkot festival, when Israel freed a group of Palestinian women prisoners in...

Live in this tainted Holy Land long enough, and you come to learn that there are two kinds of political activists, much as there are two kinds of artists.

The first kind, the kind who changes the world, points to something that has yet to have been seen, something...

It is a sickening thought. It is one that many in Israel have had to live with for months. One they have kept inside, silenced, some for reasons of guilt, others out of sympathy, superstition, or denial:

Despite everything, despite international denunciation unprecedented even by the standards of past...

Outside of outright wartime, seldom have the vital signs of Arab-Israeli diplomacy read more bleak. Israel's ruling coalition hinges on a foreign minister so incendiary that his recent prediction that Mideast peace is at least 16 years distant, is as close to moderation as he has yet managed. The Palestinians...

The full post appears on Haaretz.com.

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In Israel, where vitriolic self-criticism is the norm, we have become accustomed to living without heroes. As statesmen, our once-admired military leaders have often proven to be inept, corrupt, narrow of vision, devious of execution.

There are...

STOCKBRIDGE, Massachusetts - I approached the Norman Rockwell Museum, a stately monument to pride and shame, unaware that it would be the perfect, if also the most unlikely, place to think about the Jewish year about to unfold, and to look anew at Israel and Palestine.

Unlikely, because it...

For Liz Troubishi, 17, and Nir Katz, 26, of blessed memory, and for the recovery of the 15 young people wounded late Saturday when a gunman invaded a Tel Aviv club for gay teens.

Lord, teach me to stand naked before you
And, in so doing, learn...

Mr. President,

You have made a determined and vigorous effort to address the Israel-Palestinian impasse with fresh eyes and an admirably low tolerance for cliche.

You have reversed years of inertia and convenient laissez-faire where Mideast peacemaking is concerned. You have based your guiding approach on the only...

As friction between the Obama administration and Israel mounts over Washington's repeated calls for a freeze on settlement construction, anxious supporters of Israel's West Bank settlement enterprise ask one question with ever greater urgency and frequency:

Why should settlers have to pay the price for peace between Israel and...

One of the great strengths of fascism is its ability to persuade a society to simply invite it in.

So what sound does fascism make when it tries to get you to open the door?

Sometimes it sounds like a headline. A drumbeat of shrewd fear-mongering, a little...

For several days now, I've been trying to fathom what made this this Fourth of July different from all other independence days. From this distance, it looks like this:

What the world has seen over the past 12 months is a re-definition of patriotism. It derives from a central lesson...

Everyone who lives here is a hostage. We know it, even if we are often surprised anew by the specific people who are currently holding us hostage, which is to say, staving off progress toward a future peace, and, in the process, taking a direct slap at Barack Obama.

The following is the first phase of a project aimed at helping monitor outposts and clarify the potential difficulty in countering them for the sake of peace. The data is based in large part on extensive research conducted over years by the Peace Now organization, augmented with and cross-referenced by...

I never thought I'd be rooting for Iran .

I am in awe of the courage of the people of Iran.

They are giving the world hope. They are teaching a shocking lesson about truth. They embody freedom. And, perhaps hardest to grasp, for those of...

This post originally appeared on haaretz.com http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1093362.html

In the empire of contradiction that is the Islamic Republic of Iran, where a graying revolution is struggling to cope with a country of the overwhelmingly young, at least one sector appears to be unaffected by the upheaval following the June 12 elections:...

I've got a home in that rock, just beyond the mountaintop --
God gave Noah the rainbow sign...
No more water -- but the fire next time.
(Traditional spiritual of African-American slaves)

It's become a fashion, here and abroad: Jews who are convinced that they...