This week she lost the leadership of Kadima, but Livni lost her voice when she supported Operation Cast Lead - and she wasn't alone. In the euphoria immediately after Obama's election night in 2008, and with Israel's own election four months away, I wrote that "if there's any Israeli candidate who can catch the fire he lit, it's Livni." While granting that she wasn't a true "peacenik," meaning she didn't seem too bothered by the immorality of the occupation, I called her "a woman of integrity, a woman of justice...[and one] who appears sincerely eager to make peace with the Arabs." My opinion was based on Livni's having been the only member of Olmert's cabinet…

Polls say most Israelis oppose Netanyahu on Iran, but there hasn't been a protest, a press conference or even a bumper sticker to give them a voice The world is worried more and more that Israel is going to attack Iran and start a Middle Eastern war, yet the Israeli peace camp, which used to put hundreds of thousands of people in the streets to protest war and occupation, is sitting there, excuse the expression, with its thumb up its ass. Not one demonstration (unless you count a few dozen nuclear disarmament folks standing on the street), not a press conference, not a TV interview, not an ad in the newspapers, not a bumper sticker. "I spoke…

In interview published in The Nation online, novelist says starting a war is an even worse option than living with a nuclear Iran       In his first public statement on the conflict with Iran, David Grossman, the leading Israeli novelist of the last generation and strongest voice of his country’s moral conscience, told The Nation that he opposed an attack on the Islamic republic by Israel or the U.S., saying the likely consequences were more daunting even than those of Iran building nuclear weapons. “I don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, but I think that if the sanctions do not work, Israel and the whole…

Posters in Jerusalem in January 2007, protesting the killing of Abir Aramin (Photo: activestills.org) In January 2007, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 10-year-old Palestinian girl on her way home from school.  Abir Aramin lived in Anata, a Palestinian village north of Jerusalem. The pathologist who performed the autopsy found that Abir was hit in the head by a rubber bullet. However, an Israeli police investigation found the soldiers innocent, claiming there was no proof that gunfire killed Abir. For the last four and half years, Aramin's family knocked every door seeking justice. I was there at the funeral when…

Following a written assault against B'Tselem in Commentary Magazine, accusing it of being a "wolf in sheep's clothing," B'Tselem press officer Sarit Michaeli refutes his arguments point by point, showing that B'Tselem is widely regarded as essential to Israeli society By Sarit Michaeli There is an inherent contradiction in smear attacks such as Noah Pollak’s tirade against B’Tselem in the pages of Commentary. On the one hand Mr. Pollak would like to convince his readers that the world-respected B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories – is an insignificant and alien fringe group in…

I'd like to step away from the relentless discussion of Grossman's activism and to explain why he hold such a tremendous place for me and many more as an author - and what his last novel to appear in English tells of this country's future. David Grossman has a new book coming out today in Israel; it's Hebrew title translates as "Falling out of Time." Grossman is a politically contentious figure; to many Israelis, he is too political, while to many activists, he is not political enough. He's been accused equally of being subversive and of serving the hegemony and…