Salon.com > Palestine

J Street split on Israel’s future

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:50:00 +0000

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was nothing if not passionate in his speech at the J Street Gala Dinner on Monday evening. After asserting that Israel cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran, he argued vociferously that negotiations with the Palestinians over a two-state solution must continue, and that they must be successful. “Time is running out for us, not for them,” he exhorted the crowd. Olmert was speaking of the widely held fear that Jews in Israel will soon be outnumbered by the growing Arab population. At that point, Palestinians may simply abandon their desire for their own state and demand the right to vote in Israel proper. Such a reality would mean the end of a Jewish-majority state — in essence, the end of the Zionist dream.

Jennifer Rubin’s boss sees no problem with anti-Arab bigotry

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post's official correspondent for passing along and endorsing the Romney campaign's anonymous criticisms of Rick Perry, recently "retweeted" a link to this blog post by Rachel Abrams, in which Adams responds to the release of Gilad Shalit by calling on Israel to commit mass murder against Palestinians in revenge. Rubin kind of got in a bit of trouble for this, except not really.

The grandiloquent post in question requests either (it's not entirely clear) that Israelis feed Shalit's captors to sharks or that they feed his captors along with women and "their offspring" to sharks. (I imagine Abrams considers nearly every Palestinian in Gaza to be complicit in Shalit's imprisonment, so this distinction may not amount to much.) Either way, the post makes liberal usage of unambiguous anti-Arab slurs ("devils' spawn," "savages," "animals") and, well, it's a call for mass slaughter.

Inside the Mideast prisoner swap

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:23:00 +0000

In recent days, we've witnessed the rare spectacle of Israelis and Palestinians celebrating at the same time. Ironically, this was the result of negotiations between the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian resistance organization Hamas, which Israel and the United States describe as "terrorists." It was a moment that revealed what it would take for negotiations between seemingly irreconcilable foes to result in a credible agreement and why the current "peace process" has gone nowhere.

But in the wake of the Israel-Hamas agreement under which 1,027 Palestinians held by Israel are being released in exchange for one Israeli soldier held in Gaza, the editors of the New York Times expressed a good deal of frustration.

"If Mr. Netanyahu can negotiate with Hamas -- which shoots rockets at Israel, refuses to recognize Israel's existence," they wondered in an Oct. 18 editorial, "why won't he negotiate seriously with the Palestinian Authority, which Israel relies on to help keep the peace in the West Bank?"