Over five years of on-the-ground research. Almost three years of writing and rewriting. And my book about migrant workers and African refugees in Israel just isn't selling. I’ve spent more than two years addressing everything in my control (with the help of an excellent literary agent who has sold some very big books). My experiences as a journalist--and some appalling numbers from the publishing industry--leave me to conclude that editors are passing on my book because I’m a woman. I've also gotten the sense that publishers aren't interested because the discourse about Israel-Palestine is locked into an overly simplistic discussion of…

The Atlantic's Jeffery Goldberg is worried that Israel might cease being a democracy. When will that be? The threshold he suggests has already been crossed, and is meaningless anyway. His analysis of anti-democratic forces in Israel is equally superficial and prejudiced Jeffery Goldberg, in The Atlantic, is concerned about the possibility that Israel might cease being a democracy. The idea that absorbing the Palestinians in the West Bank will force Israel to choose between being Jewish and being democratic is a cliché in Israel. It was voiced even by Ehud Barak (Labor), Netanyahu's defense minister. Still, it is surprising to…

Almost exactly 10 years ago, on the second day of the Second Intifada, a 12 year-old Palestinian boy named Muhammad al-Durrah was shot and killed during an exchange of gunfire between Israeli and Palestinian forces in Gaza. Several other Palestinian children were killed by gunfire that day, and hundreds more in the months and years since, but only the name and image of Muhammad al-Durrah have become iconic, because only he died in front of a television camera, in his father's arms. Today, there are streets and monuments named for him around the Arab world. According to the unusually well-written…