Joshua Leifer

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

Displaced Palestinians on al-Rashid Street, a thoroughfare that runs down Gaza’s coastline, April 5, 2025. Saeed Mohammed/Anadolu/Getty Images

MundoOriente Próximo

In the early morning hours of March 18, Israel unilaterally broke the cease-fire it had agreed to with Hamas in Gaza two months earlier, launching a crushing aerial campaign across the territory. In less than twenty-four hours, Israeli warplanes killed more than four hundred people and wounded hundreds more.

The assault has continued unabated ever since. On March 31, during the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, Israel issued an evacuation order that covered much of southern Gaza, displacing more than a hundred thousand people, most of whom have been displaced multiple times before; nearly half a million in total have been forced to leave their homes since the end of the cease-fire.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israeli children gathering at the Damascus Gate for the right-wing ”Jerusalem Day” march, Jerusalem, June 5, 2024. Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Middle East Images/Getty Images

MundoOriente Próximo

On the last day of May, in a surprise address beneath the portrait of Abraham Lincoln in the White House State Dining Room, a diminished-looking Joe Biden announced that “Israel has offered”—a fact he stressed twice—“a comprehensive new proposal” to end the fighting in Gaza. This “roadmap to an enduring cease-fire”, as Biden called it, would consist of three phases. First Israel and Hamas would commit to “a full and complete cease-fire” lasting six weeks, which would entail the “withdrawal of Israeli forces from all populated areas of Gaza” and the exchange of the female, elderly, and wounded Israeli hostages held in Gaza for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.…  Seguir leyendo »

Oct. 7 Shattered Netanyahu’s Legacy. The War Saved Him — for Now.

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The moment Israel’s devastating war in the Gaza Strip ends, the unfinished conflict within Israel over its future will begin again. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition partners know this. That may be, in part, why they have set the improbable aim of “total victory” as the war’s ultimate objective, and why they have so far refused any deal that would end the fighting in exchange for returning the roughly 100 hostages still in Hamas captivity. After almost six months, this war is already Israel’s longest since Israel’s war of independence.

The assault on Gaza has nearly frozen Israel’s fractious political system.…  Seguir leyendo »

A member of the press standing in front of a house destroyed during Hamas’s attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, Israel, October 11, 2023. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

MundoOriente Próximo

The devastation in Israel’s south is almost beyond description. Even the gruesome reports—children killed in their beds, babies taken from their mothers’ arms, the elderly slaughtered in their kitchens—that have circulated across the Internet barely suggest the scale. Kfar Aza, a kibbutz close to the separation barrier with Gaza, has been burned to the ground, a charnel house of mangled corpses. At least ten percent of Kibbutz Be’eri’s population has been killed. The number of casualties in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, located less than a kilometer from Gaza, has yet to be released, but there, too, the toll is likely to be high.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israel’s New Kingmaker Is a Dangerous Extremist and He’s Here to Stay

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Late Tuesday night in Jerusalem, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the far-right Jewish Power Party, stood onstage triumphant before a raucous, ecstatic crowd. His supporters chanted, “Look who it is, the next prime minister!” as trance beats blared in the background. Mr. Ben-Gvir, in fact, had not been elected prime minister, but he will have played an instrumental role in returning Benjamin Netanyahu to power.

Mr. Ben-Gvir beamed down at his supporters and began his speech. When he pledged to deal harshly with those disloyal to Israel, they broke out in chants of “Death to terrorists”, a sanitized version of the slogan that is often a fixture at right-wing rallies: “Death to Arabs”.…  Seguir leyendo »

An Uneasy Alliance in Jerusalem. Amir Levy/Getty Images

MundoOriente Próximo,

On June 30, 2022, the Israeli Knesset voted to dissolve itself, setting the country on the path to a fifth parliamentary election in just three years. Since the first of those elections in April 2019, Israeli politics have bifurcated into pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs, with public debate centering almost exclusively on Benjamin Netanyahu’s fitness for office in light of his ongoing corruption trial. Last year, however, the struggle between these blocs produced a surprising development. The anti-Netanyahu forces, headed by the former TV host Yair Lapid and the former settler leader Naftali Bennett, managed to depose Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by forming a coalition that, for the first time in Israeli history, formally included an independent Arab-led party: Ra’am, the socially conservative, moderate-Islamist party headed by Mansour Abbas, a mild-mannered dentist from the Galilee.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘While the calls for a decisive, dramatic response to these attacks are understandable, some of the measures being proposed are a kind of collective punishment of communities of color.’ Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

MundoAmérica,

As the year draws to a close, the air in Brooklyn feels heavy. A spate of antisemitic attacks on Orthodox Jews – at least nine in about a week – has left many in the borough’s Jewish communities feeling vulnerable and frightened. Another antisemitic attack on Saturday in the largely ultra-Orthodox suburb of Monsey, New York – in which a machete-wielding man wounded five people, one of them critically – further traumatized communities already reeling. And this comes only weeks after two assailants opened fire on a kosher grocery in Jersey City, killing Mindel Ferencz and Moshe Deutsch, both Hasidic Jews, and Miguel Douglas Rodriguez.…  Seguir leyendo »