A video showing an Israeli Border Police officer demonstrating admirable professionalism and politeness in his interaction with activists has gone viral in recent days. But behind this purportedly exemplary civility is a much grimmer reality.

The two-and-a-half minute clip shows a Border Police officer, who introduces himself as Alon Tiff, interrupting a verbal altercation between a security guard and a minivan full of Ta’ayush activists wielding video cameras at a checkpoint near Jerusalem that leads deeper into the West Bank. We don’t know where the activists are going, but it’s reasonable to assume they are on their way to participate in a grassroots political activity in some Palestinian village. Ta’ayush is active on behalf of Palestinian land and farming rights in the Hebron Hills, where they are frequently attacked by extremist settlers.

Tiff walks over to the passengers in the van, who are involved in an argument over whether or not they have the legal right to film at the checkpoint, with one of the security personnel ordering them to stop filming while the activists chorus that they have every right to film him, since he was a public servant carrying out his job in a public place. Angry at having his authority challenged, the young man asserts that he is no one’s servant. At which point Alon Tiff intervenes.

Tiff introduces himself with exaggerated politeness and gives the passengers his full name and ID number at their request, as he is required to do by law. He does not press the passengers when they assert their right to refuse to tell him where they are coming from. Then Tiff shows them what he says is a military order that gives him the authority to decide who goes through the checkpoint. He allows them to photograph the order. Then he informs the minivan passengers that he has decided to exercise his legal right, as described in the very loose wording on the order he reads aloud to them, and refuse to allow them through the checkpoint. He does not give any reason for his refusal; nor is he required to do so.

While the interaction is going on, one of the minivan passengers points to another private car that goes whizzing through the checkpoint, unimpeded, and sarcastically asks Tiff if “blondes” get to go through, since the driver of the private car happened to...

Freedom House has downgraded its ranking of Israel’s media from ‘free’ to ‘partly free,’ citing closer ties to the government and a spike in paid media content. But it has one flagrant omission: Israel’s poor treatment of Palestinian journalists.

By Lisa Goldman

Freedom House, the U.S.-based watchdog NGO that reports on the state of civil liberties around the world, has downgraded its ranking of Israel’s media from “free” to “partly free” in its 2016 Freedom of the Press Report. The authors of the report cite the influence of the free daily newspaper Israel Hayom, which is owned and subsidized at a huge loss by American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is an unabashed patron of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel Hayom pursues an editorial agenda that is overtly partisan toward Netanyahu, which is why it is often referred to as the “Bibiton,” a portmanteau of the Hebrew word for “newspaper” and the Israeli leader’s nickname, Bibi. The report also cites the “unchecked expansion” of paid media content, which is not always clearly identified. It notes that this paid content is sometimes funded by the government.

In 2014 Israel’s media was back up to “free” status, along with the perennial note that it has the freest media in the region, where not one country’s media is ranked “free.”

The free/partly free ranking is a matter of just a few points in their methodology, pointed out Freedom House’s Sarah Repucci, who heads up the publication of the annual Freedom of the Press Report. She added, “We use detailed methodology. Israel shifted only two points this year.”

There was some outrage in right-wing circles over the downgrade, with Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin quoting a couple of DC-based neo-cons to support her claim that the report was an example of anti-Israel bias.

Leaving aside the all-but inevitable expressions of outrage from the Israel advocacy crowd over any criticism of Israeli policy or society, a more detached observer might note that there is no mention in the Freedom House report of Palestinian journalists. On the one hand this makes sense, since Palestinian residents of the occupied territories are not citizens of Israel. But on the other hand, Palestinian journalists work in territory that is controlled by Israel. And they do not have any of the legal protections afforded to their Israeli colleagues working in the same territory.

In tangible terms, this means...

What happened at AIPAC was shameful and frightening. Liberal Jews are horrified and the ones who are not seem pretty smug in their lack of self awareness. Welcome to the schism.

On Monday night 18,000 Israel supporters, mostly Jews, sat in a Washington D.C. stadium and applauded for Donald Trump, a man whose candidacy for president of the United States is supported by neo-Nazis.

Let’s leave aside Trump’s misogyny, his vulgarity, his racism against non whites and his encouragement of violence. Let us leave aside, for a moment, the point that he is unabashedly a spectacularly ignorant man who has the attention span of an adolescent with an  addiction to junk food and first-person shooter video games. Let’s just focus on one salient, astonishing and monumentally shameful fact: a stadium full of Jews sat, (and sometimes stood) and applauded for a man who does not deny that he sleeps with a book of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed, and who refuses to disavow his neo-Nazi supporters.

The organized, actively pro-Israel American Jewish community has been teetering on the edge of a full blown crisis for many years. You can’t vote Democrat, recycle your waste, buy your kids gender-neutral toys, advocate for immigration, and look the other way as the Israeli army kills over 500 children in Gaza — and not be at serious risk for a moral crisis. But, let’s say these Progressives Except for Palestine (PEPs) are just misguided. Because they don’t speak Hebrew and never lived in Israel and are badly informed. For the sake of argument, I will cut them that slack.

But not for those who sat and let Donald Trump speak.

The excuse of ignorance or having been misguided does not work for the educated American Jews who sat and applauded for Donald Trump at the AIPAC conference. And when you suspend not only your liberal social values but also your basic self respect (Jews who sat and listened to a man who won’t disavow his neo-Nazi supporters! Jews who gave a standing ovation to a man whose followers give Nazi salutes and tell opponents “go to fucking Auschwitz!”) — all in the name of nationalism and Zionism, you have at the very least a moral disgrace. But I think what we really have here is a crisis. The “leaders” of the Jewish community have lost their way...

Documents that have already been cited in history books are being re-classified in the State Archives.

Israeli state archive documents that were de-classified in the 1980s have been re-classified in recent years, according to a recently hired assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Jewish Studies.

Shay Hazkani, who was Israel Channel 10’s military correspondent from 2004-8 and will soon complete his doctorate at New York University, discusses the background and politics of the state’s decision to re-classify various documents in an interview for the Ottoman History Podcast.

In the interview, which was recorded in July 2014 (I came across it recently by chance), Hazkani estimates that about one-third of documents that were de-classified in the 1980s have been re-classified starting from the late 1990s, when the archives were digitized.

These reclassified documents were used extensively by prominent “new historians” like Benny Morris (“Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem”), Avi Shlaim (“The Iron Wall”), Hillel Cohen (“Good Arabs” and “1929”) and Ilan Pappe (“Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”) and cited in their books.

But even though these books certainly exist in the public domain, and they do cite original documents in the Israeli state archives that note orders given to the nascent Israeli army to expel Palestinians during the 1948 war, the government of Israel continues to promote its official narrative — that the Palestinians left of their own accord. Hence the government and, more specifically, the security establishment attempts to control the discourse by re-classifying these documents.

The 25-minute interview is embedded below and well worth your time. Among other things, Hazkani explains that Israel adopted a law in 1955 that specified documents could be kept classified for a maximum of 50 years. But the Mossad, the army and the Shin Bet, which control very large archives, refused to comply with the law. Petitions to declassify specific documents have been brought before the higher courts, with some pending now.

Toward the end of the interview, Hazkani recounts a fascinating anecdote involving his own experience with re-classified documents, this time connected with an incident reported by Joe Sacco in his graphic novel “Footnotes in Gaza.” Sacco traveled to Gaza in 2002 and 2003 to research the book, which was published in 2009. The...

Can an American politician who was born to Jewish parents just be an American politician who happens to be Jewish? Is Israel becoming less important in American politics?

NEW YORK — Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, won the Democratic primary in the state of New Hampshire on Tuesday night. Sanders, who identifies as a social democrat, is Jewish.

But when he spoke about his background in his victory speech he mentioned only that he was the son of Polish immigrants who were poor and little-educated, making it sound as though they might have been eating kielbasa and pierogi for Sunday lunch instead of challah and tsimmes for Friday night dinner.

He highlighted his own success as an illustration of the national narrative that Sanders called “the promise of America” — the idea that one should be able to achieve one’s goals based on hard work and merit.

“My friends,” said Sanders,

Several Jewish observers on social media were unhappy at Sanders’ failure to emphasize that his parents were Jews, and that he is now the first Jewish American to win a Democratic primary. (Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee in the 1964 election, had a Jewish father but was raised Episcopalian, although he acknowledged his Jewish heritage.)

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Twenty three men and three women tell the captivating story of Netanyahu’s rise to power, and how he ended up on a collision course with the leader of the free world. Yes, 23 men and three women.

“Netanyahu at War,” a PBS Frontline documentary about Benjamin Netanyahu’s rise to power and the background to his now-infamous, ongoing feud with Barack Obama, opens with the controversy surrounding the Israeli prime minister’s address to Congress last March, which one of his former advisors frames as a Churchillian attempt to warn the world about the dangers of a nuclear deal with Iran. “Netanyahu,” says former advisor Eyal Arad, “has a messianic notion of himself as someone called to save the Jewish people.”

Over the next five minutes, we hear insights into the hostile Obama-Netanyahu relationship from no less than 10 name-brand experts (besides Eyal Arad): Ari Shavit, David Axelrod, Haaretz correspondent Chemi Shalev, Ronen Bergman, Sandy Berger, David Baker, Aaron David Miller, veteran Likud parliamentarian Tzachi Hanegbi, the New York Times‘ White House correspondent Peter Baker, and Dennis Ross. Axelrod describes Netanyahu’s meddling in U.S. foreign policy as “audacious” and “unprecedented.” Sandy Berger says it was a “direct attack” on Obama’s foreign policy legacy. Shalev observes that Netanyahu was “ready to undermine Israel’s relations with the U.S. in order to fight off the Iranian challenge.”

Having thus set the stage, over the next third of the documentary we learn about Netanyahu’s background. His illustrious combat career as an officer in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, and his involvement in the mission to release the hostages during the 1972 Sabena Airline hijacking. The years he spent in the United States, first in high school, and then as an Israeli diplomat when he built his strong relations with leaders in the Jewish community. Then on to his return to Israel in the late 1980s and his rise to leadership in the Likud party during the Oslo period, leading up to Rabin’s assassination in 1995.

Twenty three men

At this point we’re 45 minutes into this documentary and we finally hear from an actual female expert. Really. Dana Weiss, an Israeli TV news presenter, explains why Israelis were insulted that Obama didn’t “stop by for coffee” after he gave his 2009 Cairo speech. And then Diana Buttu, the prominent Canadian-Palestinian attorney who was a spokesperson for the PLO and a participant in negotiations with the...

The idea of Israel has long been an integral part of Jewish-American identity. But with a generational change among American Jews and increasingly stark political differences with Israel’s leadership, could this be the dawn of a new era? 

Last summer Michael Oren, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009-13, blithely offended virtually the entire policy, journalism and government elite in New York City and Washington, D.C. with a series of accusations directed at President Obama and liberal Jewish Americans.

In a nutshell, Oren accused Obama of deliberately sabotaging relations with Israel in order to achieve the goals of ingratiating himself with the Arab Muslim world and negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. He also suggested the president was soft on terror — because he had Muslim daddy issues (his father, who had not been present when he was growing up, was a Kenyan Muslim). Oren also characterized American Jews who criticized Israel as anti-Israel and/or insufficiently Jewish.

Oren offered up his frank opinions and amateur psychoanalysis in a controversial Wall Street Journal op-ed and in a Foreign Policy essay – both of which acted as pre-publication publicity for his memoir, “Ally.”

The response of the foreign policy people who figure so prominently in the discourse about Israel in the so-called Acela Corridor (the name of the rapid train that links New York and D.C.) was one of outrage and betrayal.  They had regarded Oren as an ally who shared their worldview. Instead he had ripped off his mask of moderation to reveal a strident nationalist who was carrying some heavy baggage packed with Hebrew warrior fantasies, a Holocaust obsession and a fortress mentality.

But while prominent members of the inner policy circle like Martin Indyk challenged Oren’s accounts of his dealings with the Obama White House in testy exchanges on CNN, almost no-one addressed the former ambassador’s curiously clichéd personal narrative, which is like a plot ripped straight from a Leon Uris novel. A nerdy, physically unprepossessing Jewish boy grows up in suburban America, relentlessly bullied at school by anti-Semites. As a teenager he becomes intensely aware of the Holocaust, vows to make sure it never happens again, becomes an ardent Zionist and works hard to save his money so he can immigrate — or make aliyah — to Israel, where he magically morphs into a handsome combat warrior who wades heroically into battle and...

If a video of religious youth stabbing a photo of a murdered Palestinian infant isn’t enough to convince mainstream Israel that there is a problem, what will?

Celebrants at a Jerusalem wedding for a couple from Israel’s radical right were filmed dancing and singing as they brandished a photo of Ali Dawabsheh, the 18 month-old Palestinian baby who was killed in a July arson attack on his family home in the West Bank village of Duma.

In the video, which was recorded on a cell phone, a dancing wedding guest impales a photo of the baby on a knife. His face is covered. Other dancers wave army-issued combat weapons, while one youth hoists a bottle with a roll of paper stuffed in its neck to mimic a molotov cocktail, indicating the method by which the Dawabsheh home was set alight.

The Duma attack killed baby Ali at the scene, while his parents died of their wounds in the hospital a few weeks later. Only his four-year-old brother survived, albeit with severe burns. The story was widely covered by the Israeli media and was condemned by leaders on both sides of the political spectrum.

Hebrew graffiti on the walls of Duma dwellings indicated that the arson was a “price tag,” a term used by “hilltop youth” to describe their attacks on Palestinian villagers. Some of the notorious recent price tag incidents include an arson attack on a bilingual Arab-Jewish school in Jerusalem and death threats graffitied on the homes of leftist intellectuals. There are dozens of amateur videos on YouTube that show these masked Hilltop Youth assaulting unarmed Palestinian villagers in the West Bank, burning their olive trees and destroying their property. Everyone knows who they are and what they do.

But while Kahanists are well known to security forces and the Shin Bet, months passed before any arrests were made. There are now several suspects in custody. According to a report published by the Jewish Daily Forward, a liberal Jewish newspaper in New York, relatives and attorneys of the detainees say they have been subjected to torture while under interrogation and that they are being held without charge under administrative detention.

The Forward reporter, Josh Nathan-Kazis, notes that the Shin Bet commonly uses torture and administrative detention on Palestinians, while it is very uncommon to hear of these interrogation methods used on...

The Jewish American establishment clearly cannot handle an Arab non-Zionist with the chutzpah to assert his right to be treated respectfully and equally in his own country.

Ayman Odeh’s decision to visit the United States and meet with Jewish community leaders cannot have been an easy one. The burden of scrutiny has been heavy indeed, from all sides. His own constituents, the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, were ambivalent at best about what many perceived as a mission that would either be co-opted to soften the perception of Israel’s policies toward its Arab citizens, or twisted to undermine both Odeh and the credibility of his party’s platform.

With Jewish community leaders so firmly supportive of the Netanyahu government, and the United States so committed to its unbreakable alliance with Israel that it had not undertaken a single step to end the occupation in over two decades, many worried that Odeh’s bridge building mission would be misinterpreted as asking for favors.

To a certain extent, these concerns were borne out by events on December 10, when Odeh backed out of a meeting with the Conference of Presidents, a major Jewish NGO umbrella group, because the chairman insisted on holding the meeting in the same office as the Jewish Agency. This is the same Jewish Agency that has been directly involved in hundreds of initiatives to establish new residential communities for Jewish Israelis on land that was expropriated from Palestinians.

Rather than show some sensitivity to Odeh’s point of view, the president of the Conference of Presidents, Malcolm Hoenlein, refused not only to hold the meeting in another room but also immediately released a statement in which he accused Odeh of canceling the meeting.

Later, Hoenlein told the Forward that he saw no reason to “succumb” to Odeh’s request that the meeting be moved to another room (even though it was Hoenlein who had asked for the meeting and Odeh was his guest). Hoenlein also told the Forward, “It’s outrageous that a member of Knesset would say that I can’t go into a place because it has Zionist associations.” Hoenlein added: “He doesn’t have a problem taking [his Knesset] paycheck.”

Hoenlein’s response is, to be kind, monumentally inappropriate. Not to mention: arrogant and entitled beyond belief. Hoenlein is a Jewish citizen of the United States who is the unelected head of an NGO that espouses political opinions far to the right...

NEW YORK — “I believe in talking to everyone,” said Joint List leader Ayman Odeh. “In the Knesset, I speak with everyone.” He added, with a half smile, “Except [Avigdor] Lieberman. But that’s only because he refuses to speak to me.”

Odeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel whose non-Zionist party is the third largest in the Knesset with 13 seats, is currently visiting Washington and New York for a series of meetings with diplomats, Jewish community leaders, journalists, think tanks and NGOs. But so far the only meeting that has been reported by Jewish media outlets is the one that controversially did not take place — at the New York office of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.

Upon arriving Thursday morning at the organization’s midtown Manhattan building, Odeh discovered that the umbrella group shared its office with the Jewish Agency. The Agency is affiliated with Israel’s Ministry of Absorption and with the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which is involved in initiatives to displace Palestinians from their homes in favor of Jews.

Staffers for the umbrella group suggested moving the meeting to another office on a different floor in the same building — specifically, to the offices of the Reform Jewish Movement. But Executive Vice President Malcolm Hoenlein rejected the suggestion. He then sent out a press release in which he wrote that he was “deeply disturbed and shocked at the refusal” of Odeh to meet him.

“I did not refuse to meet him,” Odeh told +972. He emphasized that he had responded to an invitation from the Conference of Presidents — that he had not requested the meeting. He did not know until he arrived that the umbrella group shared an office with the Jewish Agency.

“I just asked if we could move the meeting to another room, but they refused. Instead of saying, okay, I understand your discomfort, and offering to meet me in another office, they did everything to make me uncomfortable.” Odeh noted that he made no public statement about the aborted meeting, except in response to the statement released immediately afterward by the Conference of Presidents.

The Jewish Agency’s mandate is to promote aliyah, or Jewish immigration to Israel. The JNF has, as reported extensively by +972, been directly involved in displacing Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel, in order to convert their...

There is a tendency on the Israeli right to express Schadenfreude when Europe is targeted by terrorists — especially when the perpetrators are jihadis. The subtext is that Israel is unfairly judged for its policies toward the Palestinians.

As social media reporting from Paris increased in pace and volume on Friday, a well-worn pattern emerged. Bursts of incoherent information were followed by news flashes from the wire services and the 24-hour satellite news channels. Rapid sharing of video clips filmed by eyewitnesses with smart phones and quickly uploaded to video sharing platforms like YouTube. As the reports start to repeat themselves, people start to get a bit bored. That’s when the commentary, recriminations, arguing and flat out tasteless tweets start to flow.

Yesterday on Twitter, the well-established pattern continued. As soon as it became obvious that the confused reports were repeating themselves and it would take awhile for the news organizations to frame the story in a more organized fashion, people started turning on one another. There were the “blame” tweets: attacks on people who had inadvertently shared unverified or incorrect information; sanctimonious comments about moral relativism given the outpouring of emotion and saturation coverage of the Paris attacks versus the relative silence over the Beirut bombings the previous day; and, of course, the left and the right attacked one another over gun control and the refugee issue.

There is a tendency on the Israeli right to express Schadenfreude when Europe is targeted by terrorists — especially when the perpetrators are jihadis trained by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). The subtext is that Israel is unfairly judged for its policies toward the Palestinians. Netanyahu preaches to this crowd when he conflates Hamas with jihadis, name-checking them with ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda and so on.

Yesterday Dan Margalit, a veteran and well known Israeli journalist, wrote a tweet that gained him a shellacking of scorn from people who responded to him in Hebrew. In light of the EU’s decision to label products from Israeli settlements, and while the bodies in Paris were still being counted, Margalit wrote:

Ariel is a large West Bank settlement with a population of about 19,000.

Unlike previous films made about gay Palestinians in Israel, ‘Oriented’ is not about Jewish saviors trying to protect Palestinians from political or social repercussions. 

Three men in their mid-twenties are gathered at a Tel Aviv apartment, preparing to go out to a dance party at a popular Jaffa bar called Anna Loulou. Speaking in Arabic laced with Hebrew expressions and the occasional English phrase, they warm up with vodka and grapefruit juice as they sprawl on the couches, talking and listening to music . Will there be Jews at the party? asks one of the young men. Yes, answers another. There will be some. But they’re leftists. They support us. They’re not coming to sing “Viva la Occupation.” The third says, with heavy irony, “Right, they’re coming to save us.” All three men laugh. “Our saviors,” they say.

“Oriented,” a documentary film directed by Jake Witzenfeld, follows the lives of Khader Abu Seif and his friends Fadi and Naim. All three are gay Palestinian citizens of Israel who live and work in Tel Aviv. They are politically active and assertive about their right to define their own complex identity —  and they’re not at all interested in conforming to the expectations of others.

This is probably the first film about gay Palestinians that is blissfully free of cliches. Over a period of about 18 months, the film travels from Tel Aviv to Galilee villages, to Berlin and to Amman. It is a time period that coincides with the 2014 war in Gaza and the immolation of Mohamed Abu Khdeir in East Jerusalem. As the three men cook meals, dance at parties, lie on the beach and make political statements via choreographed videos they upload to Youtube, they and their friends  successfully challenge the received wisdom about homosexual life in the Arab Middle East — particularly the politically loaded templates that are imposed on gay Palestinians by Jewish Israeli society. As Khader, the charismatic protagonist of the film, puts it to a Jewish audience at Tel Aviv’s Open Center for LGBTQ, he is a member of a new generation of Palestinians — one that most people are not familiar with.

Khader, who was born and raised in Jaffa, lives in Tel Aviv with his Jewish partner, who immigrated to Israel as a child from Armenia. His parents, he emphasizes, know he’s gay and accept him. But...

Yair Lapid isn’t sure which Palestinians he wants to separate from or even how many of them there are, but he knows he needs a bigger wall to do it.

Now is the time to get the Palestinians completely out of the lives of Israelis, according to Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid (“There is a Future”) party. The self-declared “centrist” politician called for a bigger, stronger wall to separate Palestinians from Israelis — urgently.

Lapid made his remarks during an October 3 video interview he gave to Ynet, Israel’s most popular online news site. A generous +972 reader volunteered to subtitle the clip, which is embedded below.

In remarks that strongly echoed those made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his notorious race-baiting election day video (“hordes of Palestinians are coming out to the ballot box”), Lapid says in the interview, “The next stage of the current conflict is not the knife but the ballot box.” He adds, “If 300,000 East Jerusalem Palestinians go cast their ballots in the next municipal elections…we’ll have a Palestinian mayor who will decide on the prayer times at both the Western Wall and on the Temple Mount.”

East Jerusalem Palestinians have the legal right to vote in Jerusalem municipal elections, but most choose not to because it amounts to a de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the part of the city that was captured in 1967. Israel’s position is that it has annexed East Jerusalem, a move that is not recognized internationally. For Palestinians, East Jerusalem is meant to be the capital of their future state.

It’s not clear who Lapid is referring to with the term “the Palestinians.” Does he mean all the Palestinians, including those who comprise 20 percent of citizens of the state of Israel? Or perhaps he just doesn’t know how to count. He mentions 3.5 million, but there are actually about 5 million Palestinians currently living in territory that is completely controlled by Israel — roughly 2.5 million in the West Bank, 250,000 in East Jerusalem and about 2 million who are citizens of Israel. There are another nearly 2 million in Gaza, which is remotely controlled by Israel. So, altogether, we are talking about almost 7 million Palestinians living under Israeli jurisdiction. If Lapid is referring only to those who live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,...