Skip to main content

60 years on......to celebrate or not

Authors David Grossman and Daniel Gavron offer competing portraits — one sad, one happy — of where Israel stands as it prepares for its 60th birthday.

Grossman, writing in Salon, paints a gloomy picture, arguing that the Jewish state has yet to truly confront that alarming existential lessons of the war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.

On the other hand, Gavron strikes entirely different, more optimistic chord in the NY Times – which reads almost like a direct response to Grossman’s angst.

Read the different perspectives, on The Telegraph, here.

Meanwhile, over at Al Jazeera:

"Norman Finkelstein is one of Israel's fiercest academic critics and a vocal supporter of the Palestinians.

He is urging the Palestinians to break down the "segregation" wall built across the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein was an assistant professor of Political Science at Chicago's De Paul University for six years until he was denied tenure there in June 2007.

Known for his critical investigations of other scholarly works on Israel - notably his ongoing feud with Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and Israel supporter - he has published six books on the occupation and the issue of Palestine.

Finkelstein's works have earned him both praise and condemnation.

Finkelstein is working on his seventh book - A Farewell to Israel: The Coming Break-up of American Zionism - postulating that American Jewish support for Israel is beginning to wane.

Currently on an international speaking tour of Venezuela, The Netherlands, Turkey, Lebanon, Japan, the UK, Canada and the US, Finkelstein spoke with Al Jazeera about the siege on Gaza and what options Palestinians there faced."

Read the Q & A here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...

Palestinian children in irons. UK to investigate

Not for the first time does MPS wonder what sort of country it is when Israel so flagrently allows what can only be described as barbaric and inhuman behaviour to be undertaken by, amongst others, its IDF. No one has seemingly challenged Israel's actions. However, perhaps it's gone a bridge too far - as The Independent reports. The Foreign Office revealed last night that it would be challenging the Israelis over their treatment of Palestinian children after a report by a delegation of senior British lawyers revealed unconscionable practices, such as hooding and the use of leg irons. In the first investigation of its kind, a team of nine senior legal figures examined how Palestinians as young as 12 were treated when arrested. Their shocking report Children in Military Custody details claims that youngsters are dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, have their wrists bound behind their backs, and are blindfolded and made to kneel or lie face down in military vehi...

Wow!.....some "visitor" to Ferryland in Newfoundland