There's a limit to how many blows democracy can take before it is trampled down and beaten into something else. Democracy and human rights are absolutely essential for protecting who we are, preserving our rights, and enabling us to realize the equality we all deserve.

Prime Minister Netanyahu was quoted in The Washington Post on Saturday, in response to a question on an independent inquiry following the Goldstone report, responding thus: "We're looking into that not because of the Goldstone report but because of our own internal needs."

There exists both hypocrisy and truth...

For starters, here's the sprint version of this post: this Saturday, I am going to participate in the first full triathlon in my life. It's a huge effort, and honestly - I'm quite anxious, but also excited and hopeful. I hope to be able to actually finish, and to even...

The annals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have certainly charted many triumphant peaks of newspeak. Still, recent weeks seem to somehow have succeeded in yet setting new records in this unfortunate endeavor. Cynicism put aside, we should not be amused. The cost of politicians toying so recklessly with our future is...

July 1: Not A Marginal Difference
An IDF officer allegedly orders one of his soldiers to shoot a bound, blind-folded Palestinian detainee at close range. The soldier then fires a rubber bullet at point-blank range at Mr. Ashraf Abu Rahma. The incident is caught on-camera by a B'Tselem...

The prologue was a national election campaign, which, amongst other novel ideas, put into question the citizenship of one in five Israelis. With such a promising opening, chapter one quickly unfolded: Less than 100 days into this new government, a barrage of anti-democratic initiatives emerged: Nakba remembrance on Israel's Independence...

Listening to all the endless, pompous rhetoric about Jerusalem, one might be convinced to believe that this is a city inhabited by divine symbols, not by real human beings, flesh, blood, sweat and all. But Jerusalem is obviously both: a city of unique international symbolism and home to more than...

In a recent NY Times piece ("In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Look at Past Use", April 21), a former advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 and 2006, Mr. Philip D. Zelikow, is thus quoted:

"Competent staff work could have quickly canvassed relevant history, insights from the...

As any trekkie knows, rifts in the space-time continuum are a fact of life; and as any Israeli knows, one of the defining such domestic rifts is the one between Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: for the two cities are only 60 kilometers (40 miles) away, and yet they stand some 2,000...

When I was younger, or so the legends go, the wars here were more robust. They used to come once a decade or so, coherent, conventional, with a clear beginning and ending. And now, I blinked my eyes, and suddenly it is January of 2009. It's a month of Broadway...

A powerful intersection between the personal and the professional can be good reason to pause, contemplate, and perhaps even try and conjecture an op-ed or a blog post. Such is my predicament, as I recall that striking talkback from a most thrilled individual writing from somewhere on this planet, featured...