Israel-Palestine

Not So Random Questions, Facts, & Observations about Gaza & Israel

November 17, 2012

. If forces in Mexico – drug cartels, for instance – were firing rockets and missiles into an area roughly covering 25% of the United States this is what it would look like. If the U.S. equivalent of one million Israelis were under threat of this bombardment on a daily basis, running for cover, hiding [...]

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God and Man at the Higgs Boson Level

July 10, 2012

. Cross posted at the Algemeiner. I wrote the other day how most physicists who speak of it are uncomfortable with the label “God” particle for the Higgs boson particle, the existence of which scientists at CERN confirmed on Wednesday. The rather casual, sensationalistic origin of the label clarifies that discomfort, as does, I suspect, unsurprising scientific worry that too conventional [...]

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J Street on Its Own Terms

July 2, 2012

. This commentary originally appeared in the Algemeiner, June 28, 2012. It is easy enough to criticize J Street from a conservative perspective, which, given developments since the failure of Oslo and the second Intifada, is the perspective that now predominates among pro-Israel voices. From that perspective, the very identification of J Street as a [...]

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What Can “Free” Palestine

February 24, 2012

. On Wednesday The New York Times published an OpEd by Mustafa Barghouthi, a member of the Palestinian Parliament and “secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative.” The article is entitled “Peaceful Protest Can Free Palestine.” Peace is always a good start to resolving disputes. Here is what else would help to “free” Palestine. The [...]

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The Problem with J Street

October 11, 2010

The problem with J Street is that it doesn’t make sense. It is conceptually self-implosive. This was never really very hard to see. Last year, during the 2009 J Street Conference, Jonathan Chait wrote. The problem, though, was that J Street had loosened the definition of “pro-Israel” to the point where it had virtually no [...]

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Citizen Wald: Islamism, the Betrayal of the Left, and Prospects for Real Coalition-Building and Peace-Work

July 21, 2010

From Citizen Wald at To Find the Principles: One of the peculiarities of the contemporary Middle East conflict has been the historically unprecedented willingness of the putative “left” or “progressive” community to make common cause with or condone the behavior of extremist—notably: reactionary, clerical-obscurantist, even terrorist—organizations with whom they have nothing in common and would [...]

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