SPME
I. Introduction This essay is written a year after October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked civilians, whether at a music festival or in their homes, in an area referred to as the “envelope” in southern Israel, bordering the Gaza Strip.…
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ABSTRACT The failure to prevent Hamas’s slaughter of some 1,300 Israelis on 7 October 2023 – the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – is a direct result of an emergency phone consultation three hours before the terror group’s…
read moreAn apartheid comparison may not necessarily be antisemitic per se as, for example, Nazi comparisons are… It is reasonable to expect Israel (or any democracy respectful of the rule of law) to provide objective and substantive justifications for the imposition…
read moreIn May, while Hamas was firing more than 3000 deadly rockets from Gaza with the express purpose of murdering Jewish Israelis, members of academic communities around the world were falling over themselves to express their solidarity, not with the beleaguered…
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Donna Robinson Divine is Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Emirita Professor of Government at Smith College. The Idea of the Jewish State by Ben Halpern (her teacher at Brandeis) examined how the idea of the Jewish state had…
read moreThe recent death of top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has prompted me to revisit an important document in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, namely UN General Assembly Resolution 194. American educated, the Erekat was a counterweight to hard-core rejectionists…
read moreGreat news! We are told by the Washington Post: “Terrorist attacks are quietly declining around the world.”[1] Citing the University of Maryland’s report on terrorism[2], the WP author points out that there are fewer terrorist attacks since 2016. So, nothing to see here, folks;…
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Donna Robinson Divine was the President of the Association for Israel Studies. In this careful and empathic account of the relationship between the Yishuv and the Diaspora in the years of the Mandate, she rejects the notion that one was simply…
read moreDonna Robinson Divine argues that the Zionist nation-building story, while inspiring, does not reflect the trials, pains and losses of the nameless immigrants who deferred their own happiness to advance the Zionist cause in the years after the Balfour Declaration.…
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For most Israelis, the military victory of 1967 rescued the country from an existential threat. But for some, it fostered a determination to revive and revise a Zionist goal that promised personal and collective redemption on a land made sacred…
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