Month: January 2014

• January 6, 2014

  Jewish State, majority Jewish state, state of all its citizens, and the healing of history

   

  I am completely committed to a safe haven for Jewish people after 1600 years of insecurity and periodic persecution, occasionally unspeakable tragedy due to homelessness and inequality in a world where many religions still are not used to coexistence as equals. That is why I am happy that the West finally recognized its sins decades ago, after the Holocaust and embraced a safe haven for Jewish people. It is great that there is a place to go, automatic citizenship when facing persecution. Every persecuted people should have such a place to go to, such as Palestinians.

   

  That is why I fail to understand why there is any need for such a haven to be called a Jewish state. First of all, there is no place in the modern world for a state to be an ethnicity. None of us would accept Russia as a Slavic state, a state …

• January 3, 2014

  ‘Ceasefire’ Is the Syria Word We Need to Hear

  Here’s an excerpt from my most recent article in the Huffington Post.  You can read the full article here.

  A bloodbath of civilians, torture and murder of children, willful starvation of millions, forced displacement of a greater population such as the Middle East has never seen, a global jihadi festival. That is Syria today. In far less horrific environments, the world’s major powers demanded ceasefire for warring parties, but not here.

  Why? Conscience demands it, but not geopolitics. War, as has been said so often, is a failure of imagination, imagination of alternatives. The major powers (I will not call them “great”) are backing opposite sides in this war, as is well known, with Russia and Iran the main allies of the Syrian regime, and Saudi Arabia, the government of Iraq, and especially Qatar backing the jihadi influx into Syria. To a tepid degree, the Western countries are backing …