Follow
Feb. 22, 2021
There are three smiling men in this picture. The middle one is older, with a graying beard, high forehead and a pipe. He looks like a Cuban revolutionary. He is flanked on either side by younger men who look like hot students from the cafeteria. One has a mustache; the other wears glasses. The one with the glasses is Mohammed Dahlan, a bit of a dandy, who rests his elbow affectionately on the shoulder of the older man, Abu Ali Shahin. The smile of the mustachioed one, Marwan Barghouti, looks more like his infectious laugh, behind which is a self-deprecating sense of humor. (At our first meeting in 1997, he explained to me, at my request, how the Oslo Accords would lead to independence. At the end of his explanation, I said I didn’t understand, and he said, “I don’t, either.”)
Feb. 19, 2021
Recently, slightly under the radar, the Jewish National Fund held a competition to choose a national tree for Israel. Like nearly 150,000 other people, I voted. But in retrospect it turned out that I hadn’t taken my role seriously enough. I didn’t urge friends and relatives to vote, I didn’t share my feelings with them, and in fact I abandoned the contest arena to deal with everyday affairs. The results were disastrous.
The winners in similar national competitions have been patently unharmful. The national bird, chosen in a 2008 competition sponsored by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, is the hoopoe; five years later the anemone was voted the national flower. Those symbols, drawn from the local landscape, are attractive and encourage people to identify with them. They are not bogged down with heavy layers of meaning. And that’s the ideal situation for such a symbol: empty and full at the same time.
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tensely awaits a phone call from Washington, he could take the trouble to pick up the red phone himself. Not to dial the Oval Offi
Follow
Feb. 16, 2021
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank may be a fact of life for Palestinians, but it may no longer be a fact on Hebrew Wikipedia. The community of volunteer editors has voted to rename the article on the occupation, dropping the word in favor of Israel’s “rule” or “control” over the contested territory.
Though “occupation” still appears in the article, the change reflects what can be called a version of Israel’s creeping annexation of the territory online in Hebrew, where the West Bank has long been called by its biblical name and the term “occupation” is increasingly perceived as inaccurate due to its temporary and politicized nature.