July 26, 2016

As we prepare watch the Democrats roll out their plan for America this week, it’s instructive to consider how the issue of Israel and the Palestinians plays out on the domestic policy stage. In a July 19th New York Daily News opinion piece “The GOP is playing a dangerous game with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Reform Jewish movement, wades into the controversy as a mainstream American Jewish leader concerned about our country’s support for Israel. ... Read more

May 15, 2016

I was in Santa Cruz, CA to speak at a conference organized by Friends of Sabeel North America, an ecumenical organization devoted to bringing the voice of Palestinian Christians to the United States, and to mobilizing the church to work for the liberation of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis both from the evil of apartheid in our times.  See this article for the story surrounding that conference — not an uncommon story these days, but the good news is that times... Read more

September 25, 2015

Rabbi Brant Rosen leads a newly-formed Jewish congregation, Tzedek Chicago, a congregation that pursues a “Judaism beyond nationalism…non-Zionist, openly acknowledging that the creation of an ethnic Jewish nation state in historic Palestine resulted in an injustice against its indigenous people – an injustice that continues to this day.” Read Rosen’s first Yom Kippur sermon, and get to know him thorough his blog.  Here he is, once again stunningly on target.  Check out the quote from James Baldwin near the end.... Read more

June 22, 2015

Four years ago I was in Stuttgart, Germany for my first speaking tour in that country. My book had been published in German with the title Fatal Shame: Israel’s Politics and the Silence of the Christians. Several church groups eager to bring a message supportive of the Palestinian cause to German audiences had organized my visit. But this was Germany, and they were a bit nervous. On the evening of my first lecture, the local organizer took me aside and... Read more

June 8, 2015

When I was a boy in the 1950s attending Hebrew school in Philadelphia, once a year we received cardboard folders equipped with slots for dimes. The folders were distributed by the Jewish National Fund, a nonprofit corporation founded in 1901 by the World Zionist Organization to buy land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. On the cover was a picture of a tree being planted by handsome, tanned people dressed as farmers. When the card was full, you sent it in... Read more

August 11, 2014

My review of Joe Sacco’s astonishing Footnotes in Gaza appeared in Commonweal Magazine in October, 2011.  It was a powerful experience for me to turn to it again today.  The brilliance of the book is how it takes us back to ’48, then to the near unknown (outside of Gaza) events of ’56, and how these resonate so horribly and bloodily in present  time. “Present time” for Sacco, of course, and for me when I wrote the book, was the Cast... Read more

August 4, 2014

Telling the truth Five years ago I attended a conference in Boston entitled “One State for Palestine/Israel.” It was March 2009. Gaza was still smoldering from Operation Cast Lead, in which 1400 Palestinians were killed between December 27th and January 18th. Israeli historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Ilan Pappe was one of the speakers, and he talked about genocide. My God, I thought, he’s saying the G word. It was not hurled as an accusation, it was... Read more

June 15, 2014

Dear Subscribers, I’m off to the Presbyterian General Assembly today. This OpEd written by Rev Jeff Deyoe and me is the first in a number of pieces I’ll be sending about the important vote the Presbyterians will be taking this week and the issues it raises. [intro note:] Things have been heating up in the media discourse as the Presbyterians prepare to vote, once again, on divesting their pension funds from Caterpillar, Motorola and Hewlett Packard because of those company’s... Read more

June 10, 2014

Three weeks ago I boarded an Amtrak train in Portland bound for Seattle. I was on my way to meet up with my Palestinian brother and friend, Daoud Nassar, the farmer and peacemaker and owner of Tent of Nations, a 100-acre farm just south of Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Most of you know about Daoud, have heard him speak or have even been among the close to 50,000 pilgrims who have visited Tent of Nations in the past decade -- 8,000 in 2013 alone. My trip to Seattle had been planned for some time, but now it had a particular urgency. The day before, in the early morning hours of Monday, May 19th, the Israeli army closed off the area around the farm to allow bulldozers to enter the fertile valley at the north end of the farm, with the mission of burying over 1500 productive fruit trees under piles of rubble. Read more

April 13, 2014

Dear Subscribers, My friend Robert Cohen in the UK has just sent out his Passover message.  In it he writes: In our post-Holocaust, Israel-centred Jewish consciousness, the ‘Every generation…’ passage has continued to grow in significance, eating away at our moral sensibility. So much so, that we have difficulty  understanding modern Jewish history and politics without constant reference to this paradigm of oppression and threat… Read the entire message, also pasted below, which I commend to you as we enter... Read more


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