In A Tale of Love and Darkness (originally published in 2002), Amos Oz, who was born in 1939 and who over the years was regarded as the representative author of the hegemonic Israeli left, sketches his own genealogy and that of his family over the span of a century and across three continents, while at […]

My aim in this essay is to think about the ideas of a reconciliation based on a civil partnership “form below,” one that grows out of the actual urban space of East Jerusalem. Observing the current planning processes in the city, which simultaneously describe the existing space and act as imaginings of its possible future/s, […]

One of the influential bodies in the international arena is the European Union. This body has the power to play an important role in the process of transitioning from the present paradigm for solving the conflict in Israel/Palestine, which is based on a partition into two nation states, towards an alternative peace paradigm based on […]

Searching for the Roots of the Conflict As the above-quoted decision by the cabinet of Netanyahu’s sixth government attests, the process of “laundering” the illegal colonies in the West Bank is entering a new chapter in 2023. This is a fitting starting point for this brief essay, in which I will argue that adopting a […]

Academic law literature defines transitional justice as a justice that enables the transition from major human rights abuses and injustice to democracy and reconciliation (Teitel, 2003; Bickford, 2004, Ní Aoláin, 2004). It is therefore associated with periods of major political change, and is mostly researched as a legal procedure concerning state actors that happens in […]

For over a decade now, the voices pronouncing the death of the two-state solution have been growing. This pronouncement relies to a large extent on two deeply entrenched assumptions about the settlements issue. The first is that establishing a Palestinian state necessitates the evacuation of all the settlers who at that time will reside inside […]

The process of Israel’s transformation into a religious-national state based on Jewish supremacy, which was expressed in the 2018 passing of the Nation-State Bill, received a governmental boost in the 2022 elections, with the rise to power of the extreme right headed by the Smotrich-Ben-Gvir-Rotman troika. This threesome is promoting a regime of Jewish supremacy […]

Palestinians and Jews typically live not only in separate geographical and political spaces, but also in different realms of consciousness and memory. Each community is absorbed in commemorating its own heroes and victims, in a sealed world that has almost no connection to the world of the other side of the conflict. As Hillel Cohen […]

In the summer of 2012, a group of some ten Israelis and a similar number of Palestinians gathered in Beit Jala. The meeting revolved around a text that I had written in consultation with Jewish and Palestinian friends over the course of the previous summer, at the height of the 2011 Israeli social justice protests. […]

A. The twenty-first century is bucking the short legacy of the twentieth century, the one that began after World War II. The liberal euphoria spawned by the fall of the Berlin wall and the election of a black US president gave way to the despondency that followed the election of authoritative leaders in Western countries. […]

In this essay I will argue that the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must address the conflict’s prominent colonial characteristics, more so than the failed attempts at resolution by partition. The reconciliation will stem from a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle with international backing, and will bring about a resolution in the form of a single democratic […]

In the last essay he published, in 1970, Nathan Alterman wrote: “The moment we admit the existence of a fictitious Palestinian nationality, from that moment on the whole of Zionism becomes a matter of stealing the homeland of an existing people.” Similar arguments are prevalent in both the Israeli and the Palestinian discourses. On the […]

In this brief essay I wish to focus on the cultural and identity-related aspect of the formula “partnership-based peace.” This aspect may also be called “the ours question,” in other words, the question of what is the common element available to all the people of this land, Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis alike. I will attempt to […]

In recent years, a “partnership-based peace” approach has evolved in both research literature and civil society as a leading paradigm for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or more accurately, for Zionist-Palestinian reconciliation. This paradigm contrasts with the predominant perception of peace, which is based on the separation to two nation-states with aspirations for ethnic-demographic […]