Dahlia Scheindlin

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A plaza in Tel Aviv called “Hostage Square,” a site of protest and commemoration since Oct. 7. Amir Levy/Getty Images

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Israelis were exhilarated when two hostages held by Hamas in Gaza since Oct. 7 were rescued this month in a daring raid by the Israeli military. It wasn’t just the thrill of seeing the hostages alive in their families’ arms. The rescue reminded many of Israel’s stunning hostage rescue in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, when more than 100 hostages from an airplane hijacked by militant Palestinians and German s were freed.

The Entebbe operation was quickly mythologized as proof that Israel could both save its citizens and reject terrorists’ demands. But the myth of invincibility Entebbe engendered was always flawed: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own brother was killed in the raid.…  Seguir leyendo »

Mourners at the funeral of Alon Shamriz, who was mistakenly killed by the IDF last Friday, at Shefayim kibbutz, Israel, on 17 December 2023. Photograph: Oren Ziv/AFP/Getty Images

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From 7 October onward, Israelis have clung to the one hope that unified this normally fractious and now broken society: freeing the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. The faces of those stolen people haunt us on every street. Hope soared when nearly half of the hostages were released in a temporary ceasefire deal last month, and Israelis took to the streets demanding more.

Then on Friday, three hostages who had survived 70 days in violent, wartime captivity in Gaza somehow got loose, only for Israeli forces to mistake them as a threat – and shoot them dead. They were shirtless and holding a white flag.…  Seguir leyendo »

Protesters demanding government action to return Israeli hostages, Jerusalem, November 2023. Ammar Awad / Reuters

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Almost from the moment Hamas broke through Israel’s security barrier with Gaza on October 7 and began its rampage, it felt like Israel would never be the same. Within hours, Israelis were forced to confront the reality that many of the assumptions that had long guided Israeli policy toward the Palestinians had crumbled. The state’s 16-year-old policy of blockading Gaza had failed to make them safe. The government’s calculation that it could lure Hamas into pragmatism—whether by allowing Qatari funding for Hamas or by giving work permits for Gaza laborers—had instead lured Israel into complacency. And the belief that most threats from Hamas could be neutralized by high-tech surveillance, deep underground barriers, and the Iron Dome missile defense system had proved dead wrong.…  Seguir leyendo »

Demonstrators calling for a ceasefire at a protest demanding the return of the hostages held in Gaza, Tel Aviv, Israel, October 28, 2023. Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images

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After October 7, when Hamas committed the worst terror attack in Israel’s history, the country’s left wing braced for fury from its right. The left hasn’t been in power here for almost twenty-three years, but mainstream Israeli commentators rarely miss an opportunity to blame it for the country’s ills. After the initial shock set in, influential right-wing figures such as the correspondent and columnist Kalman Liebskind began arguing that the root causes of Hamas’s attack were policies Israelis associate with the left—among them all the country’s land withdrawals, from the Oslo accords of the 1990s to Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 (when it dismantled settlements but retained powerful forms of control over life in the Strip from the perimeters).…  Seguir leyendo »

The Pathways to Peace Are Getting Darker

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Like many Israelis right now, I’m inconsolable. I’ve watched for days as the pain over lost lives and hostages accumulates. This is hell, and the days ahead will be worse.

But this moment is excruciating for me for another reason. In those frantic first hours on Saturday as the events unfolded, I feared they could spell the final failure of what I view as my life’s work — a commitment to peace, justice, equality and a reduction of political violence.

Much of my career has been spent working on grueling political campaigns for parties I believed were committed to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and making peace.…  Seguir leyendo »

Supporters of the judicial reform bill in Tel Aviv on 23 July. Photograph: Amir Levy/Getty Images

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Last Sunday, trains from Tel Aviv were stuffed with people standing all the way to Jerusalem, practically stuck together by sweat. On arrival, mass chants of “De!Mo!Cra!Cy!” rang out through the train station. We were among the hundreds of thousands of giddy Israelis who swarmed the country with protests last weekend against legislation designed to suffocate judicial independence in Israel before a key vote last Monday.

But the return to Tel Aviv that Sunday night was different. It had been a long, hot day; the protesters were weary and a bit testy. Our train arrived at the tail end of a massive rightwing demonstration in Tel Aviv, with people who also flooded in from around the country and the West Bank, to support the government’s plans.…  Seguir leyendo »

An Israeli soldier shoots rubber bullets at Palestinians during clashes in Hebron, West Bank, May 2023. Mussa Issa Qawasma / Reuters

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Israel’s coalition government, the most right-wing in the country’s history, has come under fire for proposing reforms that would weaken the judiciary and dismantle checks and balances. They provoked some of the biggest protests ever seen in Israel and were eventually put on hold after a tremendous international and domestic backlash. But another move by the government—a bureaucratic change that has hardly drawn any attention—is just as significant.

In November 2022, Israel’s far-right factions won a parliamentary majority. Soon after, they amended the Basic Law of the government, which acts in some ways like a constitution, to allow the government to appoint a special new minister within the Ministry of Defense.…  Seguir leyendo »

Palestinians arguing with Israeli soldiers in Susya, West Bank, June 2020. Mussa Qawasma / Reuters

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In response to Israel’s One-State Reality.

By Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami

Dangerous Delusions

Anyone seeking to understand why U.S. policy in the Middle East keeps failing—especially on the Israeli-Palestinian issue—need only read “Israel’s One-State Reality” (May/June 2023) by Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami. The essay suffers from the same refusal to face facts that led the United States to launch abortive wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya and reflects the same devotion to ideological nostrums that convinces Washington, time and again, to brand dictators as reformers and allies as pariahs. The result is a scattershot argument that blames Israel for the death of the two-state solution and urges the United States to shun its closest friend in the Middle East in order to force it to abandon its Jewish identity.…  Seguir leyendo »

Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, November 2022. Ammar Awad / Reuters

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It took five elections to finally break the deadlock that has paralyzed Israeli politics for over three years. On November 1, a decisive winner at last emerged when the parties allied with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured a majority in parliament, claiming 64 out of 120 seats and ending the tenure of a short-lived, ungainly coalition established only in June 2021. That government featured eight parties (right-wing, left-wing, centrist, and even Islamist), two prime ministers, and ultimately, irreconcilable ideological divisions. Naftali Bennett, who led a small right-wing party, served as prime minister for just over a year before turning over the top job, by agreement, to the centrist Yair Lapid this past June.…  Seguir leyendo »

Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife in October. Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

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Israel’s election this week is being touted as a new referendum on an old leader — former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is standing trial on corruption charges and is attempting yet another political comeback. But the country faces a much deeper, more worrisome concern: Israel’s judicial branch is on trial and with it Israel’s best hope for democracy.

In mid-October the extremist and ascendant Religious Zionism party released a plan for judicial reform that it called “the Law and Justice Plan”.

Critics were scandalized that the plan would strike from the books a key crime in Mr. Netanyahu’s indictments, “fraud and breach of trust”, while providing substantial immunity for the prime minister, cabinet ministers and legislators.…  Seguir leyendo »

Russian President Vladimir Putin is pictured at a meeting in Novo-Ogarevo, Russia on Aug. 7, 2007. DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP via Getty Images

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Russia pounced on Ukraine even as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rambling speech denying Ukraine’s sovereignty was still reverberating. History will recall that the symbolic trigger for the devastating war was not a bullet but a single word at the end of his tirade, symbolizing decades of Russia’s post-Cold War grievances: recognition.

Why did Putin bother recognizing the independence of the breakaway territories in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region instead of just sweeping in, as he clearly planned to do? It is becoming futile to try to guess Putin’s motives, but his misuse of diplomatic recognition symbolizes how international norms are being twisted and manipulated—and how badly the international structure itself is sagging.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israeli soldiers eat at the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Be’er Tuvia on Wednesday. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

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After extraordinary revelations that the Israeli company NSO Group’s mercenary cyber-surveillance tool, Pegasus, was allegedly used to target political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists and politicians around the world, Israel should be asking itself a few questions. Does its groundbreaking hi-tech industry have a dark side? Do the actors involved in exporting lucrative surveillance products – including the defence ministry, which must approve such sales, or perhaps the top levels of the previous government – bear responsibility?

While top Israeli officials are taking the revelations seriously, Israelis appear neither shamed nor shaken. The day after the NSO story broke, there was an announcement from another company that would eclipse talk of the rogue use of surveillance spyware.…  Seguir leyendo »

The First Job for Israel’s New Government: Clean Up Bibi’s Mess

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After four election cycles, two years and one man in power since 2009, Israel appears to be on the brink of change. On Wednesday evening, eight wildly ideologically different political parties announced that they would establish a coalition, aligning behind Yair Lapid of the centrist party Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”) and Naftali Bennett — a former leader of a council of West Bank settlers — of the nationalist party Yamina (“Rightward”) to remove longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the new government is not yet a reality. The coalition still faces procedural and political hurdles. Ideological differences nearly killed the coalition in the negotiation stage.…  Seguir leyendo »

Naftali Bennett, leader of the Yamina party, speaking in the Knesset, Jerusalem, May 2021. Photograph: Yonatan Sindel/Flash 90 local pool/AFP/Getty Images

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As Israel inches closer to ending two years of political stalemate and 12 consecutive years of Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, pressure on rightwing parties preparing to join a “change” coalition from pro-Netanyahu rightwingers, has reached a crescendo. Like other rightwingers in the “change” bloc, Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, leaders of the hardline Yamina party, have been called traitors and collaborators and received death threats throughout the last month for their planned defection from Netanyahu’s camp.

As so often in Israeli politics, there is an American parallel: Bennett and Shaked’s predicament recalls the unforgettable moment the US senator Lindsey Graham, days after the 6 January Capitol riots, was harangued by Trump-cult followers, unhinged by Graham’s denunciation of their leader.…  Seguir leyendo »

Smoke rising after Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on Tuesday. Credit Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock

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For a few days in early May, Israel appeared close to establishing a new government. After four elections in two years that failed to produce a decisive result, the country was poised for a surprising partnership of ideologically diverse parties including, for the first time, an independent Arab party — Raam. Such a government would have been fraught, even shaky, but it would have ended the two years of political chaos and replaced Israel’s right-wing prime minister, a man currently standing trial for corruption.

What happened instead followed a grim pattern: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict flared yet again. Within days of the start of the military escalation between Hamas and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu that was sparked in Jerusalem and compounded by Jewish and Palestinian violence in Israeli cities, the crisis had put political change on hold.…  Seguir leyendo »