It’s not what the Jewish majority likes to believe. 

A common Jewish Israeli criticism of Arab Knesset members is that they do a disservice to their constituents by focusing on high politics, mainly the Palestinian issue, instead of dealing with bread-and-butter economic issues that would really help them. (There may be something self-serving about this line of criticism, but who knows?) Last week I went to Jedeida-Makker, an Israeli Arab village a couple of miles inland from Acre, to hear Balad MK Haneen Zoabi give a campaign speech. The residents, including the local council head, indeed told her that she and her Arab colleagues in Knesset should concentrate more on the day-to-day problems of Arab citizens and less on the occupation. However, their complaints offered no vindication whatsoever to Israeli Jews who believe they know what’s best for the Arabs of this country, better than the Arabs do themselves.

The day-to-day, bread-and-butter economic problems the residents talked about all exemplified Israeli contempt for Arab rights. In other words, for Israeli Arabs, the issues they care most about are as highly political and uncomplimentary to Israel as can be.

Before Zoabi’s speech to about 50 people in a Balad campaign office, a local party activist and former Jedeida-Makker deputy council head, Mohasen Kais, showed me a court order he’d gotten a few weeks before. It said he owed the Israel Lands Authority – the state – about $80,000 for nearly a half-century of unpaid land use fees, and that if he didn’t pay it within 30 days, it was up to him to demolish the house and vacate the land, otherwise the “rightful” owner, the ILA, would do the job at his expense.

Kais, 60, says he’s lived in the house since his father bought it in the mid-1960s; his family lives on the top floor now while his brother’s family lives below. The Kaises come from what used to be a nearby Palestinian village – Mohasen said its name was Qurqurdani – that was destroyed in the 1948 war. The family migrated to different villages, to Lebanon, and finally in the early 1950s to Jedeida-Makker.

“First they destroyed our villages, took our land and made us refugees, now they want to do it again,” he said.

About three-quarters of Jedeida-Makker’s 19,000 people are former refugees and their descendants. Dozens of local households have received court orders like the one that...

The party’s new proposal effectively says the unsayable: that on the occupation, Israel is wrong and the Arabs are right.

There are so many people out there, in Israel and overseas, who know that this country has gone wrong and that Netanyahu and the right are leading it to hell. Yet they end up giving their tacit support to the worsening status quo because they don’t have the courage to follow their thoughts to their logical conclusion: that Israel is at fault for the occupation, and that the occupation is at fault for the conflict with the Palestinians. Not Israel and the Palestinians both – Israel alone. Not Netanyahu and Abbas both, if we’re talking about right now – just Netanyahu.

You see it over and over again from Israeli and foreign liberals – they rag the hell out of Netanyahu and the settlements, but then they make sure to add, “But that’s not to say that the Palestinians are blameless, they’ve made plenty of mistakes, Abbas has been much too stubborn …”

And in the end, for all their genuine dismay over the direction this country’s taken, they’re afraid to oppose it head-on, because that would put them in the “Arab camp” against Israel, and they can’t allow themselves to be there – even if the Arab camp happens to be right and Israel wrong.

The Obama administration tried breaking this habit at first, insisting that Israel freeze settlements and accept the 1967 borders with land swaps as the basis for negotiations – in other words, recognize that the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip rightly belong to the Palestinians. But Obama and Co. had that notion beaten out of them by Netanyahu and the Israel lobby. By now, not only has the administration given up its demands – leaving Abbas out there by himself – it has adopted Netanyahu’s insistence on negotiations “without preconditions.” This, after the offers made to the Palestinians by Barak and Olmert, means going back to square one (actually, square minus-one because Netanyahu, unlike Barak and Olmert, says Israel must retain all of “united Jerusalem”). “Negotiations without preconditions” is an attempt by Netanyahu to negotiate in utterly bad faith, indefinitely, while getting the world off Israel’s back so he can build more settlements. His model here is Shamir at the Madrid talks, where he was in charge of hasbara.

Yet in the...

The IDF video makes it appear extremely unlikely that border policewoman ‘N.’ was justified in shooting the Hebron teenager. 

From the dark, fairly crude IDF video, there are so many things we don’t know about the killing of 17-year-old Mohammed Salaymah by border policewoman “N.” in Hebron a week ago. For one thing, we don’t even know if N. was the only shooter; from the video it looks to me like two police officers might have fired at the boy.

We don’t know if Salaymah pulled a realistic-looking cigarette-lighter gun during the fight, which was N.’s stated justification for shooting him; you can’t see such an object in the video, although again, the video is dark and not very distinct, as if done in “night vision.”

We don’t know what happened just before Salaymah went up to a border policeman and attacked him with his fists – there’s a cut in the 54-second video at 0:24. We also don’t know why the IDF waited four days before making the video available to the public.

We don’t know whether the eyewitness quoted by B’Tselem was correct in saying that the border policemen saw Salaymeh approaching the checkpoint with a gun that looked real, and either confiscated it or tried to, and that Salaymeh was shouting, “It’s mine, it’s mine” during the fight, and was either trying to grab the gun back from the border policeman or stop him from taking it. If this is true – and we don’t know if it is or not – it would cast extreme doubt on N.’s story that she thought the gun was real. If the Border Police had confiscated the cigarette lighter, they would have known immediately it wasn’t a gun, and if they wanted to confiscate it because they thought it was real, they wouldn’t be standing at ease and allowing Salaymeh to saunter from one of them to another before he started swinging, as the video shows. But B’Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli told me the eyewitness, whom B’Tselem considers generally reliable, doesn’t want to tell his story to the Border Police, so we’ll probably never know whether it was true or not.

So what do we know from the video? We know that N. didn’t simply execute Salaymah; the boy clearly attacked another border policeman at the checkpoint, like N. said.

But on...

How the ‘newspaper of the nation’ reported on a Border Policewoman’s killing of a Palestinian teenager who was found to have been carrying a toy gun. 

Yedioth Ahronoth’s picture of border policewoman who shot a Palestinian in Hebron. The writing: “Heroine of the day”

Yedioth Aharonoth’s coverage of Wednesday’s killing of a Palestinian teenager in Hebron tells you pretty much everything you need to know about how Israeli brainwashing works. And Yedioth, the country’s most widely-read, influential newspaper, is considered relatively liberal, which it is in the sense that it often criticizes Netanyahu and the right, but when the story is Israel vs. the Arabs, particularly the Israeli army vs. the Arabs, then Yedioth, the “newspaper of the nation,” becomes as crude, dishonest and gung-ho a war propagandist as can be. It tells the public what it wants to hear, and whenever it’s Us Against Them, what the public wants to hear is Us Good, Them Bad – which is what the army and the government are only too happy to tell them. When that’s the story, Yedioth, like every other major news medium in the country, except for the left-leaning Haaretz (where I work as a copy-editor), takes the army/government line, kitsches it up real good, and serves it to an eager mass of consumers. Brainwashing – by popular demand. You see it here constantly. Yedioth’s coverage of Mohammed Sleima’s killing by Border Policewoman “N.” in Hebron is a perfect example.

The tabloid’s front-page headline on Thursday read: “Border Policewoman kills terrorist.” Her pixilated photo was tagged: “Heroine of the day.” Opening up the paper, the page two headlines, against an ominous black background, went as follows: “Fourth clash of the week in the territories; Border Policewoman shoots terrorist near Cave of the Patriarchs – and kills him; The fear: A third intifada; Border Policemen in Hebron yesterday notice a suspicious Palestinian youth and demand his identification; In response he attacks one of the troops and pulls a pistol on him; Female commander of the post reacts calmly: She pulls a pistol and kills the terrorist.”

It’s only when you’re almost halfway through the page two story that you read: “At the end of the investigation it turned out that the pistol [Sleima] had on him was fake.”

The photo on the...

With all due respect to Meretz and Hadash … 

Until yesterday, the occupation was not an issue in the Israeli election campaign; the only parties running against it were Meretz and the non-Zionist, Arab or largely Arab slates, all of which are marginal to the country’s politics. But with Amir Peretz’s departure from the Labor Party for Hatnuah (The Movement), where he will be No. 3 after Tzipi Livni and Amram Mitzna, there is now a mainstream party with a critical mass of leadership material at the top whose focus is on ending the conflict with the Palestinians, and whose message is that it’s possible – that Israel has a partner for peace in Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.

This is not to say Hatnuah could lead a left-center or even left-center-Arab bloc to defeat Netanyahu and the right-religious bloc in the January 22 elections. Bibi and Likud Beiteinu are going to lead the next government; that, as Noam Sheizaf wrote, is as certain as anything can be.

But what Hatnuah does is give Israel what it has needed and lacked like nothing else for these last several years: an opposition.  A pro-peace opposition that can push back against the inexorably rightward direction the country’s been taking. One that can put some other ideas in the air, that can suggest other future possibilities besides dictatorship and war. And finally, one that is big enough and whose leaders are prominent enough in the eyes of the general public to have an impact – and to be seen as a credible contender for power in the years ahead.

Hatnuah gives Israel a mainstream liberal camp, something that every Western democracy has, but which Israel hasn’t had since 2006. In that year the post-disengagement rocketing from Gaza convinced the public that the conflict was insoluble, that the best Israel could do was “manage” it, which has come to mean “cutting the grass” – Operation Whatever – every two or three years.

Since 2006, the National Camp has ruled exclusively; Israel has effectively become a one-party country, the party of dictatorship and war, with the only debate being between right and further right. By nature, this is a dynamic that keeps moving in one direction only. The current election campaign marked a giant leap rightward: Likud joined up with Yisrael Beiteinu, while both of the viable mainstream “opposition” parties...

Netanyahu didn’t invent the E-1 dealbreaker that’s got the world so mad at him; it goes back to Rabin and reflects overwhelming Israeli opinion.

Except for right wingers, people look at the outrage over Bibi’s revival of the E-1 plan, which would connect Jerusalem and the eastward Ma’aleh Adumim settlement with thousands of new homes, and say: Well, that’s Bibi for you, picking fights for no good reason. Who needs more settlement construction?

But if you ask them – “them” meaning all but the left-wing fringe among Israeli Jews and the country’s supporters abroad – whether they’re willing to give up Ma’aleh Adumin and its 40,000 settlers in a peace deal with the Palestinians, they’ll say hell no.

Ma’aleh Adumim, 4.5 kilometers east of Jerusalem, built in 1975, is not only “within the national consensus,” it is deep in the heart of the national consensus. Ma’aleh Adumim is thought of, correctly, as a suburb of Jerusalem; the people aren’t popularly regarded as settlers but as average middle-class Israelis; in past elections, a decent percentage of them voted Labor, and a few even voted Meretz.

It’s not one of those “tiny, isolated settlements,” it’s a “settlement bloc,” it’s one of the “Jerusalem-area” settlements, it “protects Jerusalem” by being on the high ground nearby, it gives Israel “defensible borders” – it’s a Jerusalem security defensible borders settlement bloc with 40,000 people, for fuck’s sake, do you want to give that up, are you crazy?

And here’s the thing – to keep Ma’aleh Adumim, Israel has to build E-1, those thousands of homes connecting it to Jerusalem, because otherwise the only thing connecting it to the capital will be a thin highway with nothing but Palestine on either side. Indefensible. Not viable. Ma’aleh Adumim would be isolated. So if you want to keep it – and who doesn’t, except the left-wing fringe? – you have to build E-1, like Bibi says.

But not just Bibi – every one of his predecessors insisted on keeping Ma’aleh Adumim. As the right-wing Jerusalem Post pointed out in an editorial titled “The Logic of E-1″:

Since winning reelection, Obama has championed Netanyahu’s war in Gaza and rejectionism in the UN. Enough illusions about this U.S. administration.

It’s hard to see how Mitt Romney could have been any more pro-occupation or anti-Palestinian than Obama’s been since getting reelected three and a half weeks ago. (That’s all it was!)

First Rashid Khalidi’s old friend supports Operation Pillar of Defense as an exercise of Israel’s “right to self-defense,” without any mention of the people in Gaza (or the West Bank) living under Israel’s thumb for nearly half a century, or, God forbid, that they may have a right to self-defense, too.

And now this at the UN. The “good guys” did it again. The Obama administration actually lobbied the world not to recognize a Palestinian state, arguing that the way to go is for Abbas to negotiate with Netanyahu – on Netanyahu’s terms, without preconditions. The U.S. line remains identical to Bibi’s. (And Obama’s most influential domestic supporter, the New York Times, made the same case – no to Palestine at the UN, yes to peace talks without preconditions – in an editorial.) The president and his people warned and are still warning the Palestinians not to use their new status to take Israel to The Hague. About the only downgrading in the administration’s UN performance from the first time around, in September of last year, is that instead of Obama himself flacking for Bibi at the podium, UN Ambassador Susan Rice did it from her seat.

What’s going on? Obama and the rest of them can’t really believe this crap. They can’t believe Netanyahu wants to negotiate a deal with Abbas, or that the Palestinians were being rash (!) in going to the UN – they know that if Abbas accepts their advice, he and the Palestinians will get nothing but more Israeli contempt for their weakness. The folks in Washington aren’t stupid, they don’t like Bibi one bit, and they don’t have Likud in their blood, either. Everything Obama, Rice, Clinton and the rest of them have been saying since November 6 on Israel and Palestine is, for them, a lie. So why, when they don’t have to worry about Jewish voters in Florida or any other electoral consideration, are they still slinging it for Israel’s No. 1 Republican?

Any number of possible reasons – they don’t want to go back on...

The defense minister symbolizes the 21st-century failure of the Israeli ‘warrior for peace.’

Ehud Barak, who announced his retirement from politics today, said a couple of very brave things in his political career. “If I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage,” he said early on. A couple of years ago he said: “If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic… If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don’t, it is an apartheid state.”

Unfortunately, those words represent what a lot of people (myself included) once thought Barak might become, but they clash almost completely with the real Barak and his actual deeds. The words that reflect his true legacy, the operative words of his career, are “we have no partner,” which he said after returning from Camp David in 2000, and, a few years later, that Israel is a “villa in the jungle.”

As a statesman, Barak had one great, brave achievement – the 2000 pullout from Lebanon, which he carried out in defiance of the military brass. After that, his career was a series of tentative impulses toward peace that the warrior and establishment insider in him always managed to overcome.

He moved toward peace with Syria, but got cold feet midway through, sitting on his plane in Washington, where the talks were supposed to continue, telling Martin Indyk: “I can’t do it,” and adding later, “I can’t look like a freier [sucker] in front of my people.”

He made Arafat a reasonable opening offer at Camp David, but when Arafat didn’t accept it right off the bat, he refused to talk to the Palestinian leader anymore.

Later, as defense minister, he opposed the strike on Syria’s embryonic nuclear reactor, but then went along with the majority. Same thing in Operation Cast Lead, when he wanted a cease-fire after a few days. Same thing just now in Operation Pillar of Defense, when he reportedly wanted to accept the Egyptians’ initial cease-fire terms, which called for opening Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza.

And for the nearly four years of the current government, he has probably been best known for serving as Netanyahu’s partner in the drive...

By agreeing to negotiate freedom of movement for Gazans, Israel has admitted – with the whole world watching – that 1.7 million Gazans are not free. A victory for truth in the ‘information war’.

One of the good things about the Israel-Gaza ceasefire is that it highlights a truth that Israel and its mouthpieces have pretty effectively obscured: that Gaza and its 1.7 million people are still not free because Israel doesn’t allow it.

Ever since the 2005 disengagement, Israel has been repeating over and over that “there is no occupation in Gaza,” and thus Hamas and the other armed groups are firing rockets not out of any grievance, because they have no grievance – they’re doing it out of pure, satanic desire to kill Jews.

But on Wednesday night, Netanyahu, Barak and Lieberman effectively admitted that this was never true. They agreed to negotiate the easing of Israel’s restrictions on Gazans’ freedom of movement: in and out of the Strip, and also within it. This was a crucial element of the ceasefire, it was reported and discussed on Israeli TV and in news media around the world. After this awfully high-profile  agreement, it’s going to be harder for the hasbaratists to say there’s no occupation (though I’m confident they will try).

The occupation of Gaza works like this: Gazans cannot go in or out of the Strip by boat or plane because Israel blockades their seacoast and airspace. On the ground, Israel allows trucks to bring in goods through the Israel-Gaza border, but doesn’t let people go through except in extreme humanitarian cases, thereby cutting off the Palestinians in Gaza from those in the West Bank.

Finally, Israel has established a “security zone” on Gaza’s side of the border that Gazans enter at their peril. Israel says the zone extends 300-500 meters into the Strip. The Red Cross says it extends a full kilometer, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says it extends up to 1.5 kilometers – making one-sixth of Gaza’s land, including a third of its farmland, a closed Israeli military zone. (Defenders of this policy say it’s there to stop terror – which is what every foreign ruler in history has said to justify its post-invasion control over a weaker nation.)

The enduring Israeli occupation of Gaza results in Palestinian farmers and metal scavengers of all ages getting killed...

The three Israelis killed on Thursday were innocent – but the State of Israel is not.  

Where is the house that got hit with the rocket, I asked the guy behind the counter of a snack bar in Kiryat Malachi on Thursday. Go to the third traffic circle and make a left, he said.  I got to the street, parked my car and started walking toward the satellite dishes, TV truck and the crowd. It’s a poor neighborhood on the edge of a poor town, across the street from open fields. The buildings are old, shabby tenements with dirt for front lawns. After a minute or so of walking and scanning the buildings for signs of a long-range rocket’s impact, which had killed three people, there it was. It took up the left side of the top floor of a five-story building: a giant hole where the front half of the apartment – the balcony and living room – had been a few hours before. A giant, squarish hole surrounded by raw concrete blasted into a mess of jagged angles.

The crowd was of reporters standing around Yuli Edelstein, the minister of public diplomacy and Diaspora affairs. He spoke in earnest, as if from a script. I didn’t pay any attention, I knew what he was saying without having to hear it. Off to the side, an Israeli army spokesman was answering questions, so I asked him the only question I wanted to ask: Why had Israel assassinated Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’ military leader, on Wednesday afternoon when the rocketing had gone down dramatically for at least a day, and when there were reports that the Gazan organizations that had been firing the rockets had agreed to a cease-fire?

The spokesman, Maj. Arye Shalicar, replied:  ”There was no reduction in the rocketing.” And the cease-fire? “Rumors.”

But here is Yedioth Ahronoth on Wednesday: “After three days of firing of Qassams and Grads on communities in the south, yesterday was relatively quiet. Two rockets were fired yesterday…” Here is Haaretz on the same day: “Since Monday’s reports of the agreement by Palestinian militant groups in Gaza to hold their fire, there has been relative quiet in the Gaza envelope area, with two rockets hitting the Ashdod area and Hof Ashkelon Regional Council area yesterday… There were no reports of damage or casualties in either attack.” And during the day...

There is a proven road to security for the people of the Negev: a total end to Israeli rule over the people who are shooting at them.  

Here is my suggestion for how Israel can bring peace and quiet to the people living within rocket range of Gaza: lift the blockade of the Strip entirely (they get all the weaponry and fighters they want through the tunnels anyway); announce that in one year Israel will have no military or governmental presence whatsoever beyond the security barrier (“the wall”) in the West Bank (the settlers will then leave of their own accord, except for a few crazies whom no one will care about); accept the 2002 Arab peace initiative and enter negotiations with the Palestinian Authority to end the conflict; release thousands of Palestinian prisoners with the promise to free them all upon the signing of a peace treaty; and finally, after doing all that, make it clear publicly and privately that any acts of violence against Israelis will be met with harsh reprisals but will not reverse Israel’s course.

The only way to bring security to the Negev is by ending the occupation completely – like Israel ended the occupation of Sinai completely in 1982, like it ended the occupation of Lebanon completely in 2000, and like it did NOT end the occupation of Gaza completely in 2005. That’s why Egypt doesn’t shoot at us and neither does Lebanon (since Israel taught Hezbollah a lesson in 2006), and why Gaza does, and also why the West Bank will probably join in again before too long.

The debate going on in Israel today – whether to invade Gaza, whether to escalate the aerial bombing, whether to assassinate their leaders, whether to do all or only some of the above – is the same debate that went on here from 1985-2000, only instead of Gaza the problem was south Lebanon, and instead of Hamas the enemy was Hezbollah. I imagine the same debate went on here during the 1967-1970 War of Attrition with Egypt (which had a respite after Nasser’s death only to be followed in 1973 by the Yom Kippur War.)

There is a lesson of the last 40 years that Israel has not learned with regard to the Palestinians: when it rules other people on their land, those people will fight – and when this state ends its...

Jewish nationalism, in its belligerence and paranoia, is watching the world pass it by – and the overwhelming majority of Jews in America, Israel and elsewhere do not want that to happen to them.

The split between humanistic Judaism and nationalistic Judaism goes back a very long time, but in recent years, the complete takeover of both Israel and the Republican Party by nationalist radicals has obviously sharpened that split, nearly creating schism within Judaism. (By “Judaism,” I don’t mean just the religion but all of Jewish civilization.) Every Israeli election is a battle between these two opposing Jewish camps, but Tuesday was the first time a U.S. election divided American Jewry along the same lines.

This was the first U.S. presidential election in which one of the two parties took the Israeli right-wing line, attacking the other party for endangering Israel’s existence, and calling on American Jews (as well as Christians) to vote for it and donate money to it at least partly on that basis. This wasn’t a marginal, low-key theme, either; in heavily Jewish states, especially the swing state of Florida, the message was as bombastic as can be. Roughly 6.5 million American Jews had this message drummed into their skulls by the Republicans (who took their inspiration and much of their phrasing from the leader of world Jewish nationalism, Bibi Netanyahu): that voting for Obama meant “throwing Israel under the bus.” This was the first time Israel became a left/right issue in a presidential campaign, and the right flogged it with absolutely all their might.

The result: 70 percent of American Jewish voters rejected that message and voted Obama.

While not all the 70 percent are Jewish humanists – most of them voted for reasons having nothing to do with Judaism or Israel – it’s fair to say that all American Jewish humanists were among that 70 percent. None of those voters were Jewish nationalists – a nationalist being one who sees the world in terms of “us vs. them” – because the Republicans were talking the Jewish nationalists’ language on Israel, while Obama was the Jewish nationalists’ nemesis and had been ever since they found out his middle name.

So this election was a tremendous blow to the American Jewish right, which has just been getting stronger and more extreme in step with Israel and the Republicans. It’s a blow to...

Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni can win the January 22 election. 

If there is one loser in the U.S. election outside the U.S., it is Benjamin Netanyahu – and all of Israel knows it. No one is fooled by his denials that he backed Romney and opposed Obama as demonstratively as he possibly could. The widespread conviction, now that Obama has won four more years in the White House, is that Bibi has endangered Israel’s relationship with America in a way that is unprecedented in its recklessness. No Israeli prime minister ever took sides in a U.S. presidential election like Netanyahu just did, and his side lost.

If Romney had won, people here would be hailing Bibi right now as a genius, a prophet. But Obama won, which makes Bibi, in Israeli eyes, a screw-up of historic magnitude. He went and tracked mud on the Oval Office carpet right in front of the president’s eyes. The president couldn’t say anything during the campaign because of American domestic politics, but the campaign’s over and now Israelis are wondering when and how this newly-liberated president is going to take revenge on them for their prime minister’s spectacular arrogance. Conclusion: The only way to get America back on our side is to get rid of Bibi.

That, I believe, is the mood in Israel on this fine morning.

It presents an opportunity, one that most people despaired seeing in the coming years, if ever – the opportunity to elect a left-of-center “peace government” on January 22. Because of Netanyahu’s awesome blunder, the Israeli right is vulnerable as it hasn’t been in 12 years, since the left’s implosion at the start of the Second Intifada. Until today, the public was ready to go along with Bibi and the status quo for lack of an attractive alternative – but now the status quo is no longer tolerable. In the view of the broad Israeli center, Bibi has to go.

Which leaves the question – who is the alternative? Not Lieberman – Obama won’t be able to stand him, either. It cannot be anybody from the right, it has to be somebody from the center, or center-left.

I don’t think Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid or the Labor Party’s Shelly Yacimovich can win because they just don’t have the requisite leadership stature, and thank God for that, too. Lapid and Yacimovich are cowards who have built their...