False Dichotomies

A few people have asked me about it recently, so I thought I’d remind readers that if you want a copy of my masters dissertation entitled “The Progressive Zionist vision of Israel’s Future”, just drop me a line at alex.stein@talk21.com.

I wrote Tales From A War Zone ten days ago, a thousand flippant words about how little impact the conflict made on life in Jerusalem. As I sit on my couch writing this, the follow up, I feel somewhat more sombre, somewhat more morose, somewhat less lackadaisical than I did then. This is why… Continue Reading »

Essential post from the Headheeb on Qana. Here’s an excerpt:

“Military force can be used intelligently, in a way that combines with diplomacy to achieve political goals. It can also be used stupidly, causing pointless death and ultimately harming the attacker’s own objectives. It’s possible for force to be legal and proportionate, and still be stupid. The attack on Qana was stupid.”

Read the rest here.

Just a brief note: I’m not writing a piece on Qana as yet, but plan to include a section on the awful events there in a much larger piece I am working on, which is going to deal with the issue of war crimes and proportionality.

Just now, as I started to write this email, a door slammed behind me
and I
jumped out of my seat, and that’s a pretty good introduction to our
life in
haifa-at-war at the moment. Everyone’s very tense, very jumpy. You have
to
be, every few hours, for the past two weeks, we’ve been running to the
bomb-shelters every time we hear the warning sirens wail outside, or
Katyusha rockets explode in the sky above us, or buildings collapsing,
or
shouting and screaming and ambulances in the streets outside. Continue Reading »

The Palestinian cab driver, presumably from East Jerusalem, had a moral clarity that the pro-war protesters around the world would do well to take note of. He was unequivocal in his condemnation of what he viewed as Israeli war crimes (an increasingly tautological concept, of which more in the coming weeks), but at the same time understood that Hizbollah, Syria and Iran were no friends of the Palestinians. A rock and a hard place. This is the only place to be. Holistic worldviews may be seductive, but their limitations too often outweigh their strengths. In attempting to comprehensively describe reality, they fall short of our lived experience. Continue Reading »

Haaretz reports this morning that 23 Palestinians were killed in Gaza yesterday, including six civilians. This was one of the heaviest days of fighting since the capture of Gilad Shalit. Some of those looking to justify Hizbollah’s actions in the north have explained it as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians. The fact that events in Gaza are now almost totally ignored, both in Israel and in the wider world, shows that (predictably) they have served to distract from the Palestinian issue. There is talk of a possible ceasefire agreement being reached, which you can read about here. Let’s hope this speculation comes to fruition.

While some may deride the following as naive, it’s important to have tangible alternatives to unilateralism on the table. And I’m also hoping that IPCRI are going to have me as an intern, so that increases the chances of Middle East peace considerably! Anyway, this position paper should be considered under the rubric of what the Hitch (echoing Gandhi) calls living ‘as if’ the change you want to see in the world already existed: Continue Reading »

The Head Heeb is the King of the Blogosphere. He provides a “running commentary on the topics that interest me. Law, both domestic and international. American and Israeli politics. The Middle East conflict. Post-colonial African and Pacific cultures - yes, that’s the one I always have to explain. Judaism. Islam. Religion in general. Language. Literature. Food. Movies. Marriage. Have I left anything out?” Check out a fresh post entitled ‘The Weakest Link’ here.

This is a famous passage from the end of The Counterlife: Continue Reading »