The Netanyahu-Trump meeting on Friday at Mar-a-Lago will be the low-pressure encounter of the like-minded who share political interests and personal circumstances. The family resemblance is uncanny: Opposition to incumbent Democrats in the White House; strong in words, weak in deeds; repeatedly persecuted for corruption; politics as a family business. It is easy to add…
Following the death of the great Daniel Kahneman. In 2010 I reached out to Daniel Kahneman — my only personal interaction with him — for his opinion on the peculiar macro-scale demonstration of the Conjunction Fallacy (or CF, sometimes also known as the Linda Problem), which I noticed to have taken place in Israel in…
Just a few passing thoughts: Victory is an empty word There is not, and never was, a concept of “victory” to guide Israeli leadership. It is quite clear what a “victory” in war means, and how a war may end (consider WWI or WWII). But what could the picture of victory for this state-against-militia situation…
Will miracles never cease? Finally there’s political unity in Israel. The first bill in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul package — that which would curb the Supreme Court’s ability to examine a law based on its reasonableness — passed unanimously. Of course, nothing in Israeli politics is unanimous, or at least not since February 16,…
On the British Constitution, following the Queen’s death. In Haaretz
Constitution Needed: When Israel’s founding leaders declared independence in 1948, they promised to govern through a constitution. That vow remains unfulfilled to this day. The Forward, 2012
Each of us gets to decide whether to follow the rules or change them. In Hebrew we call this ‘combina,’ a slang word referring to the bypassing of rules or commitments. Haaretz, October 15, 2010 A historic event passed almost unnoticed on Sunday. A group of some 200 intellectuals and other public figures gathered in…
The LGBT Center’s Town Hall: A Jerusalem Take, Gay City News, March 31, 2011 At the end of the two-hour town hall meeting at the LGBT Community Center, nobody looked particularly content. No party was recognized as victorious; little news awaited breaking; no obvious sound bites emerged to shape future discourse. After two time extensions,…
The Jerusalem Post, July 15, 2017 When a strong majority of Americans support LGBT equality, it takes a lot for a pride parade in any American city to cause a controversy, but the Chicago Dyke March, now in its 21st year, did exactly that in June. And it isn’t even the city’s official pride parade,…
How Schulman unwittingly undermines her own argument.
Gay City News, December 7, 2011 The New York Times recently dedicated precious space to the follies of Israel’s public relations. I’m not talking about Sarah Schulman’s “Israel and Pinkwashing,” which alleges that the Israeli government effectively leverages the gains of the LGBT community to have its way with the Palestinians, but rather a Times…
The venomous disregard for the truth makes Spanish criticism of Israel banal and misses important issues. This simplistic anti-Israel narrative represents not a noble struggle for human rights, but rather a contamination of both journalism and the great democracy that the newspaper serves. (Read on the Haaretz website) Haaretz, April 3, 2009 Imagine that Spanish…