Opinion | Religious Absolutism: Isaac and Ishmael
Devout militants have gained power among both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims, making the conflict even more intractable.
Opinion | For Israel: A Blank Check or Tangled Strings?
The West Bank is such a crazy-quilt of settlements that Palestinian sovereignty there would require evicting tens of thousands of Jews.
Opinion | The Arsenal of Memory
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only a clash of two nationalisms with overlapping claims to territory—it is also a clash of histories, whose wounds resist healing.
Book Review | In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner
Brenner’s In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea chronicles the competing ambitions to preserve and nourish Jews and Judaism in safety, embraced by an array of Jewish thinkers and leaders from the late 19th century into the present. Would it be by assimilating into the dominant culture, as the Jewish German foreign minister Walther Rathenau argued?
Book Review // Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman
A double myth about Yitzhak Rabin has prevailed since his assassination in 1995. For the Israeli right, his peacemaking attempts were and still are evidence of traitorous subversion. For the Israeli left, and especially to much of the outside world, his memory is crowned with rare nobility.
Book Review // Khirbet Khizeh
On 1979, an Israeli censorship committee chaired by the justice minister deleted five evocative paragraphs from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s memoir: his first-person account of the expulsion of Arab residents from the towns of Lydda and Ramle during Israel’s War of Independence in 1947-49. The description contradicted the heroic official line, which pictured Arabs as fleeing the fighting, not being deliberately forced out by Israeli forces.
David K. Shipler: America Before Religious Freedom
Until the separation of church and state, the colonies were a hotbed of persecution.