10 articles
Any humane, responsible reaction to the 7 October Hamas terror attacks on Israel and Israelis must be directed towards de-escalation. That means avoiding inflammatory rhetoric as much as respecting civilian lives.
Last-minute negotiations in Israel have secured the agreement of rival ideological parties on a coalition that could finally oust Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister will now face a vote of confidence with a far-right replacement ready. Behind the recent escalation of violence between Israelis and Palestinians lies a history desperately in need of careful resolution.
The Left in Israel has been decimated. Some believe that the only chance for meaningful opposition is for the Left to drop the doctrine that Zionism requires a Jewish State. The Zionist Left, so this argument goes, should abandon the two-state solution in favour of a federal arrangement with Palestine. A discussion.
Conflict over Israeli territory is a historically sensitive issue. But should past injustices and fear legitimize recent crimes against humanity? Avraham Burg’s home truths on current Israeli societal division assess critical ideological, economic and constitutional issues.
Like a prophet, Mahmoud Darwish is positioned between the tragic past of the Palestinian nakba, the present of occupation and exile, and hopes for a liberated future. Zeina G. Halabi places him in the context of the Arab enlightenment and the post-Arab Spring world to offer Palestinian liberation as a way of redeeming all humanity.
Twenty years after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat shook hands over the Oslo Accords, Frida Skatvik reveals how Norway ended up a broker of peace in the Middle East and assesses the legacy of the ensuing peace process.
Thematizing the Balkan wars and the Israeli-Palestine conflict, Belgrade’s 2011 October Salon exhibition failed to get beyond dogmatic subjectivity and recycled preconceptions, writes Ana Bogdanovic.
Interviewed in “Host”, the Israeli novelist Avraham B. Yehoshua echoes Barack Obama’s Cairo speech on the necessity for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. “I am hopeful that Barack Obama will say to Israel: enough, enough with the settlements,” he says with foresight. “The settlements are the problem.”
The Israeli Right nurtures the image of the nation as a bastion under eternal siege, but fails to see that Israel is laying siege to the Palestinians. Attending a family funeral, Göran Rosenberg observes how Israelis’ fears are exploited so that one version of Israel is furthered at the expense of another. The window of opportunity opened by the Oslo agreement has been closed for good, he fears.
Israel’s incursion into Gaza, the arrest of Hamas ministers and legislators, and the financial embargo on the Palestinians show that Israel, with the United States, mean to provoke the collapse of the Hamas-led government. This activity comes just as Hamas and Fatah seemed set to agree on national unity. From the West Bank and Gaza, Wendy Kristianasen traces the background to the current crisis.



