Endless War?
A Mid-War Assessment
Benny Morris's Corner
History and Current Affairs in the Middle East
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Ben-Gvir's Latest Antic: Crocodiles
A few days ago, Israeli Prison Service bulldozers and diggers began excavating trenches and basins around a section of the vast Ketzi’ot Detention Center for Palestinian prisoners in the Negev Desert.
GENOCIDES GALORE
Israel Condemns the Armenian Genocide
Lebanon in Everyone's Sights
This must be the first instance in modern history, perhaps in all of human history, when one side, the United States and Israel, has won all the battles but lost the war.
A Forgotten Ethnocide
In a godforsaken patch of northeastern Peru, the Putumayo jungle area between the Igara-Parana and Putomayo rivers, sources of the Amazon, lived some 50,000 indigenous Indians, mostly Huitoto tribesmen, in 1904.
The West Bank - A Past with No Future
The Six-Day War, in all that pertains to Jordan and the Palestinians, was an Israeli Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories – a catastrophe in the guise of a success that trapped the country in perpetual crisis with no conceivable off-ramp, undermining both the state’s democratic foundations and its Jewish demography, ultimately threatening its very existence.
A Necessary Special Relationship
The US and Israel
Matti Friedman's "Out of the Sky"
A Tale of Heroism and Sacrifice
ENDLESS WAR, an overview
Israel has now been battling the Islamists who seek to destroy it for three years and there is no end in sight.
Wars in the Valley of the Elah
Mornings I take the dog for a walk in the Valley of the Elah (just south of Beit Shemesh), where, according to the Bible, the young David slew the Philistine giant Goliath, saving the children of Israel, later called the Jews.
DRAMATIC DAYS
On 8 March, a few days after Lebanese Islamist Hezbollah fighters launched a barrage of rockets toward northern Israel triggering Israeli counterstrikes, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tank fired a shell at a house in the border-hugging Lebanese village of Kafr Kela (Qlei’a).
My Wars
I have been in them all, at least those of the 20th century.
Arabs (and Jews) during the Anglo-American Conquest of North Africa in 1942-1943
Politically, it was a strange war, the Allied invasion and conquest of French-ruled North Africa – Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia – in November 1942-May 1943, the campaign that cleared Africa of Axis – Vichy French, German and Italian - forces during the Second World War.
Israel's "Cultural Revolution"
Last week the mayor of Herzliya, the prosperous Israeli town just north of Tel Aviv (named after Theodor Herzl, political Zionism’s founder), banned the screening in the town’s cinematheque of Beyond the Walls, a popular, well-received Israeli film from 1984 that depicted cooperation between Jewish and Arab inmates against oppressive Israeli prison auth…
"Flights of Angels Sing Thee to Thy Rest!"
Georges Borchardt passes at 97
BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
Israel's Arab minority
Some Good (?) News
While gloom and doom have been the order of the day these past three years inside Israel and along its borders, three recent developments, in radically different ways, now hint at a measure of hope, at least for some – via archaeology, technology and diplomacy.
Flu
(To my followers\subscribers:
Netanyahu (and Trump) Reaching Out for a Pardon
A new, indeed grotesque, twist has been added to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s years’ long campaign to undermine Israel’s judiciary against the backdrop of his trial on corruption charges, which began in January 2020.
Sowing Terror
Under cover of Israel’s war these past two years against the Hamas in Gaza, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Islamist Iran, Jewish settlers in the West Bank, using stones, sticks and, occasionally, firearms, have gradually depopulated several dozen small Arab villages and beduin encampments and struck terror in the hearts of the territory’s close to three million Arab…