Mitchell Plitnick is the former Director of the US Office of B’Tselem and was previously the Director of Jewish Voice for Peace. He is a widely published and respected policy analyst. Born in New York City, raised an Orthodox Jew and educated in Yeshiva, Mitchell grew up in an extremist environment that passionately supported the radical Israeli settler movement. Plitnick graduated with honors from UC Berkeley in Middle Eastern Studies and wrote his thesis on Israeli and Jewish historiography.
“If you think I’m a racist, then Israel is a racist state.” These were the words of the embattled mayor of the Israeli, predominantly Jewish, town of Upper Nazareth, or Natzrat Ilit, in Hebrew. The mayor, Shimon Gafsou (wrongly translated as Gapso) is running for re-election on an anti-Arab platform, and his words bear a very close examination. (More…)
Making a mockery of John Kerry’s peace efforts is an obsession of the Israeli right. This week, it was the Likud Transportation Minister, Yisrael Katz, who got into the act, announcing a plan for massive railroad construction in both Israel and the West Bank. This, however, could also present opportunities for proponents of both one-state and two-state resolutions of this conflict, if they can find ways to take advantage of it. (More…)
There is no shortage of lessons to be learned from the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Americans of conscience, however they may feel about the verdict, should examine what this says about our attitudes. Those attitudes are reflected not only in how we deal with the violence on our own streets, but also around the world. (More…)
On Tuesday, Jews will observe Tisha B’Av. It’s a sad and solemn holiday, which mainly commemorates the destruction of the two Holy Temples, and which has subsumed many other tragic events that have befallen the Jews over the centuries. Those events continued into the 20th century, as on Tisha B’Av in 1942, the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camp, Treblinka, began. (More…)
It’s hard not to hope that Egypt gets the democracy it deserves. In the wake of the second ouster of a head of state in two years, such hopes might be elevated. However, the current state of affairs in the Middle Eastern country is not an optimistic one. (More…)
Single-state advocates may have a surprising new ally. Likud legislator Tzipi Hotovely believes that the two-state solution is dead, and that Israel should annex the West Bank, granting citizenship to its Palestinian residents. Hotovely, the Deputy Minister of Transportation, is a rising star in her party. While her extremist views are not typical of Likud, her one-state solution is becoming popular amongst Israeli conservatives. (More…)
Barack Obama continues to insist that surveillance of telephone and internet communications is necessary. Speaking in Berlin, where the outcry over PRISM has been the loudest amongst US allies, Obama claimed that the surveillance had thwarted “at least 50 threats of terror attacks in the United States and other countries,” according to the Voice of America. (More…)
PRISM just became the hottest word in America. With the disclosure Thursday by the Washington Post of an explosive PowerPoint presentation from a “career intelligence officer” documenting the breadth of government surveillance on the Internet, user privacy has turned into a full-blown civil rights crisis, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1950s. (More…)
“US OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST.” The simplistic slogan was trumpeted by the radical left for many years before George W. Bush’s foray into Iraq made it a common bumper sticker. The same call could have been used by the isolationist right as well. Unfortunately, both practicality and, more importantly, morality make removing the US from the region more complicated. (More…)
June is shaping to be a very eventful month. The crisis in Syria continues to swell, with no end in sight. The dilemmas facing the United States, Israel and Europe seem to be getting more complicated by the day. Iran will hold its next presidential election, and with the departure of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from that office the United States will be faced with a new set of questions, depending on the outcome. (More…)
Truer words are rarely spoken: “…the State of Israel is already a bi-national state – a state in which two nationalities reside, Jews and Arabs. The advocates of the establishment of a Palestinian state … simply oppose the addition of any more Arabs to the existing Arab population of the State of Israel. (More…)
There’s only one word that can raise the blood pressure of apologists for the Israeli occupation. That word is “boycott.” Their hysterical reaction to Stephen Hawking’s decision to pull out of a Jerusalem conference is a perfect example. (More…)