Polls show that a majority of the Israelis support negotiations with Hamas, but official Israel refuses to talk to it, at any level. Israel instead launches a worldwide campaign to persuade all countries to boycott Hamas and to join its military and financial blockade...

Hamas won the Palestinian elections. Huge surprise. Years of Israeli policy to crush secular Palestinian nationalism succeeded beyond expectation. Who could predict that in the Middle East, where causes invariably produce unintended effects (oh, those irrational...

Hebron is again in the headlines. More than almost any other place, this divided city represents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a nutshell. Occupied by Israel in 1967, the Palestinian town saw its very heart taken over by Israeli settlers, whose presence there is...

Israeli politics is boiling. People rejoice: finally, it seems, the deadlock is collapsing. Amir Peretz, a young, Eastern, social-democratically oriented leader took over the petrified Labor Party from the opportunistic Shimon Peres – the Nobel Peace Prize...

One of the difficulties in writing regularly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, in my eyes, that so little ever changes. The basic constants – above all, Israel's overwhelming military, economic, and political superiority, all serving its colonialist aims...

Personal Thanks Friday night I had a visit. I came home and saw a man running to the back door. With, as I later realized, my laptop, my watch, and some cash. I called a friend, but she had little time for me: her sister in Ramat Gan had just enjoyed a similar visit;...

Historic days in Israel: a showdown between the government and the settlers. Though the sides do negotiate behind the scenes, this time it does not look like the cat-and-mouse games for the media a few years ago, Prime Minister Barak's favorite dissimulation, when a...

Disgrace Disgrace: this is one of my first emotions when I watch the settlers' uprising against the eviction of the settlements of Gaza and a couple in the West Bank. Take a look at these guys: adults and youth, men and women, with no fear, no hesitations, no need to...

What is the first picture the term "occupation" raises in our mind? Probably some kind of extreme violence among civilians: lethal fire in the middle of town, terrified kids in pajamas watching heavily armed soldiers searching a house, a helicopter firing a missile in...

"Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?" is a quite popular question, especially abroad. You won't often hear it asked (with the inevitable self-righteous shrug) here in Israel: after all, the Israeli culture itself worships violence, with the semantic field of "war" being...