Review

A section of the separation wall in Bethlehem, West Bank, February 16, 2013. (hjl/(CC BY-NC 2.0)

Re-imagining a future by examining the past: Novels of love in Palestine

A trilogy of novels set in Palestine raises critical questions about the tension between identity and the desire to live. By Salsabeel Hamdan The Palace of Angels, Mohammed Massoud Morsi, Wild Dingo Press, 2019. In The Palace of Angels, his trilogy of novels set in Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora, Australian-Egyptian novelist Mohammed Massoud Morsi places his…

By +972 Magazine September 27, 2019

Population and Immigration Authority agents arrest a Filipina and her daughter in south Tel Aviv, taking them to a deportation detention facility at Ben-Gurion Airport prior to their deportation, August 16, 2011. It was the first documented arrest in which a child of foreign immigrant workers, born, raised and educated in Israel was arrested and deported. (Oren Ziv/Activestills)

What does the future hold for non-Jews in the Jewish state?

A new book about Israel’s crusade against asylum seekers and undocumented workers strikes at an essential truth about the precarious status of non-Jews in a self-defined Jewish state. “The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others,” Mya Guarnieri Jaradat, Pluto Press, 2017. In a small apartment in south Tel Aviv, a Filipina woman hides her…

By Natasha Roth-Rowland May 4, 2017

Publicity still for Danae Elon's documentary film, P.S. Jerusalem

Israeli ex-pat asks whether it is possible to come home

In her new film, Danae Elon documents her attempts to carve a place out for children where they can be proud of who they are, but realizes that just by choosing to be in Israel, she couldn’t avoid the most difficult questions of war and occupation. In one of the most affecting scenes of her…

By Lisa Goldman September 13, 2015

Latest

Palestinians climb over the Israeli Wall to attend the Friday prayer in Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the town of Al-Ram, near the Qalandiya checkpoint between the West Bank city of Ramallah and Jerusalem, on the second Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, July 3, 2015. (Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org)

The people behind the numbers: ‘Palestine Speaks’

A collection of oral histories offers a penetrating look at life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Gaza could be uninhabitable by 2020. More than 2,000 Palestinians were killed in 2014 and more than 17,000 were injured. Israel arrests and detains between 500 and 700 Palestinian children every year. In August of 2015…

By Mya Guarnieri Jaradat September 8, 2015

Still shot from Yuval Orr's film 'Khalil Helwa'

WATCH: A heartbreaking portrait of life in Hebron, in 9 minutes

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher What does life under occupation look like for a teenage Palestinian? A new, powerful short film by filmmaker and activist Yuval Orr attempts to show exactly that, by following 15-year-old Awni Abu Shamsiya as he attempts to maintain some shred of normalcy in his hometown of Hebron. Hebron, where the occupation is in…

By +972 Magazine December 16, 2014

Funeral for a victim of the 1929 Hebron Massacre. (Photographer unknown)

Book review: The year Palestine became a zero-sum game – 1929

After 1929, Arabic-speaking Jews who had lived in peace and cultural affinity with fellow residents, and orthodox Jews who had shunned Zionism, could no longer feel safe among their erstwhile neighbors and friends. They had to rely on the new Yishuv to protect them from then on, and they never looked back. Introducing new information…

By +972 Magazine January 10, 2014

No happy ending: Film documents the struggle in Sheikh Jarrah

Just Vision‘s latest film is a moving snapshot of the Palestinian plight with Israeli settlement policies in an East Jerusalem neighborhood – and the Israeli Jews that raised awareness about the issue by protesting there. While there is no happy ending, the movie introduces audiences to some of the Palestinians and Israelis who found themselves…

By Lisa Goldman July 21, 2012

Shlomo Sand in 2008 (Photo: Yossi Gurvitz)

Fantasized homeland: Review of Shlomo Sand’s new book

A review of Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Land of Israel” and other musings on religious Zionism. “After the people was exiled from its land by force of arms, it kept faith with it in all the lands of its diaspora, and never ceased from praying and hoping to return to its land and…

By Yossi Gurvitz May 16, 2012

Omissions, half-truths, lies: Ambassador Oren in Foreign Policy

In a piece recently published, Israel’s Ambassador to Washington Michael Oren rejected claims regarding anti-democratic trends in his country, and compared the legal status of Palestinians in the West Bank to that of American citizens in Washington DC and the U.S. territories. A response. When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed Professor Michael Oren – a historian…

By Noam Sheizaf April 10, 2012

When it comes to Israel, the political is personal: Review of ‘Crisis of Zionism’

The author of a new book describing a crisis in Zionism may not be telling us anything we didn’t already know – but in tracing his own personal journey of his anguished relationship to Israel, Peter Beinart has touched a nerve no one in the American Jewish community can ignore. At a recent lecture in…

By Mairav Zonszein April 8, 2012