Palestine
In today's episode, Ilana Snyder – President of the New Israel Fund Australia – places the recent turmoil in Israel and Palestine in the context of the all-too-familiar cycle of tension, violence, and ceasefire that has beset the region for decades. What might it take for there to be an enduring peace? Snyder examines this question, while also identifying what sets the most recent violence apart from previous eruptions: an increase in ‘intercommunal violence’ that ‘has pitted Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel against one another on streets where they have lived side by side for decades’.
... (read more)Neighbour against neighbour: The cycle of conflict in Israel, Gaza, and Palestine
The Middle-East conflict is perhaps the most intractable in the world. Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for nearly a century over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The world has witnessed a never-ending cycle of tension and conflict, including a number of full-scale wars, with immense suffering on both sides.
... (read more)Louise Adler reviews 'Bibi: The turbulent life and times of Benjamin Netanyahu' by Anshel Pfeffer
In 1901 the cultural Zionist Israel Zangwill, borrowing a phrase from Lord Shaftesbury, declared, ‘Palestine is a country without a people, the Jews are a people without a country.’ That cliché has continued to influence the impasse in the Middle East for almost a century ...
... (read more)Peter Rodgers reviews 'Palestine Betrayed' by Efraim Karsh and 'Gaza: Morality, law & politics' edited by Raimond Gaita
It is a great pity that Efraim Karsh could not have read Raimond Gaita’s new collection of essays before completing his own. The essays might have prompted him to reflect that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not nearly as straightforward as he would have us believe.
... (read more)Peter Rodgers reviews 'Palestine: Peace not apartheid' by Jimmy Carter
Not long before his election as Israel’s prime minister in May 1999, the country’s former military head Ehud Barak was asked by a journalist what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian. ‘I would have joined a terrorist organisation’, came the blunt reply. Barak, of course, had spent a good deal of his life working out how to kill Palestinians. So his was a decidedly candid acknowledgment that one’s perspective is highly coloured by circumstance.
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