Jeffrey Goldberg

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de noviembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

MundoOriente Próximo,

As a condition for participating in talks to decide the contours of peace negotiations, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, demanded that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, release dozens of Palestinian prisoners.

The prime minister, under pressure from John Kerry -- the indefatigable U.S. secretary of state who is paying insufficient attention to the conflagration in Syria and the unraveling of Egypt in order to focus on restarting negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians -- agreed to release, in stages, 104 prisoners, including the terrorist murderers of children and Holocaust survivors.

Two of the men set to be released, according to the Washington Post, are Jumaa Adem and Mahmoud Kharbish, who killed a mother and three of her children in 1988, along with an Israeli soldier who tried to save them.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

This past weekend, Jews celebrated Purim, the boisterous holiday that commemorates the escape by their forebears in Persia from certain annihilation.

The Scroll of Esther, which is read each Purim, recounts the unraveling of a genocidal plot initiated by the dyspeptic vizier Haman, who convinces his king, Ahasuerus, that a certain stiff-necked group should be expunged from his realm: “There is one nation scattered and dispersed among the nations throughout the provinces of your kingdom, whose laws are unlike those of any other nation and who do not obey the laws of the King. It is not in the King’s interest to tolerate them,” Haman tells Ahasuerus, according to the story.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

Many stupid things have been said by people who should have known better in the month since the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The raid — in which heavily armed men with suspected links to al-Qaida killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three American personnel — is being portrayed by some Republicans as an event approaching the attacks of Sept. 11 in importance, and by some Democrats as an unfortunate little mishap that says absolutely nothing about President Obama’s competence and credibility, or about the state of the American war on al-Qaida and its affiliates.

The attack could have been used to teach various useful lessons about al-Qaida’s resilience, about human fallibility, about the limits of security and the imprecision of intelligence.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

It has been a tumultuous couple of weeks in the Iran-Israel War, and it hasn’t even started yet.

Over the past few days, Iranian leaders have promised Israel’s coming destruction about half a dozen times, and have gotten so overheated they’ve begun to mix metaphors: There has been much talk about wiping the cancerous tumor of Zionism from the map, and so on. The Iranians’ language has become sufficiently genocidal that even the secretary general of the United Nations, not generally known as a hotbed of Zionist feeling, said he was “dismayed by the remarks threatening Israel’s existence.”

Israel’s leaders are also “dismayed.”…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

It has lately become the accepted wisdom that the Middle East peace process is dead, finished, kaput. This belief has been reinforced by Al Jazeera’s release this week of some 1,600 documents that are said to describe the inside workings of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2008.

The arguments claiming that the peace process is dead come from all corners: Some contend that the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, is ineffectual or illegitimate. Some say the asymmetry of power between Israel and the Palestinians is simply too great for a genuine compromise. Some insist the conflict is driven by unabated anti-Semitic incitement on the part of the Palestinians, or by irredeemable Israeli racism.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

When the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits the White House on Monday for his first stage-setting visit, he will carry with him an agenda that clashes insistently with that of President Obama. Mr. Obama wants Mr. Netanyahu to endorse the creation of a Palestinian state. Mr. Netanyahu wants something else entirely: the president’s agreement that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Mr. Netanyahu, in his first term as prime minister in the late 1990s, earned a reputation for conspicuous insincerity. It is therefore possible to interpret his fixation on Iran — he told me in a recent conversation that it is ruled by a “messianic apocalyptic cult” — as a way of avoiding the mare’s nest of problems associated with the Middle East peace process, especially the escalating pressure from the Obama administration to curb Jewish settlement on the West Bank.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

In the summer of 2006, at a moment when Hezbollah rockets were falling virtually without pause on northern Israel, Nizar Rayyan, husband of four, father of 12, scholar of Islam and unblushing executioner, confessed to me one of his frustrations.

We were meeting in a concrete mosque in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Mr. Rayyan, who was a member of the Hamas ruling elite, and an important recruiter of suicide bombers until Israel killed him two weeks ago (along with several of his wives and children), arrived late to our meeting from parts unknown.

He was watchful for assassins even then, and when I asked him to describe his typical day, he suggested that I might be a spy for Fatah.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

Tonight, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska will meet in the one and only vice presidential debate of the 2008 campaign. The Op-Ed editors asked people with knowledge of the vice presidency, the candidates and their records to suggest questions they’d like to hear answered from the stage at Washington University in St. Louis this evening.

It is 9 a.m., and the president is traveling abroad. A terrorist attack on the United States occurs. You have 10 minutes to prepare to move to the now famous bunker at the White House to deal with the incident.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

El próximo presidente de Estados Unidos debe hacer una cosa, sólo una, si aspira a que su mandato sea considerado un éxito: ha de impedir que Al Qaeda o una imitación de Al Qaeda logre hacerse con el control de un arma nuclear y la haga estallar en Estados Unidos. Todo lo demás (Fannie Mae, la reforma de la atención sanitaria, la independencia energética, el déficit presupuestario de Wasilla, Alaska) es accesorio. La destrucción del Bajo Manhattan o del centro de Washington causaría muertos por millares o por centenares de miles, una crisis económica catastrófica, una marcha atrás en la globalización, un ambiente permanente de miedo en Occidente y la negación total de la cultura norteamericana de derechos y libertades.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska — is commentary. The nuclear destruction of Lower Manhattan, or downtown Washington, would cause the deaths of thousands, or hundreds of thousands; a catastrophic depression; the reversal of globalization; a permanent climate of fear in the West; and the comprehensive repudiation of America’s culture of civil liberties.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

When the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, arrived at a Jerusalem ballroom in February to address the grandees of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (a redundancy, since there are no minor American Jewish organizations), he was pugnacious, as is customary, but he was also surprisingly defensive, and not because of his relentlessly compounding legal worries. He knew that scattered about the audience were Jewish leaders who considered him hopelessly spongy — and very nearly traitorous — on an issue they believed to be of cosmological importance: the sanctity of a “united” Jerusalem, under the sole sovereignty of Israel.…  Seguir leyendo »