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Few even talk about the Palestinians or the Arab world on their borders, despite the tumult and the renewed peace efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry, who has been visiting the region in recent days. Instead of focusing on what has long been seen as their central challenge — how to share this land with another nation — Israelis are largely ignoring it, insisting that the problem is both insoluble for now and less significant than the world thinks. We cannot fix it, many say, but we can manage it.

Jewish Israelis seem in some ways happier and more united than in the past, as if choosing not to solve their most difficult challenge has opened up a space for shalom bayit — peace at home. Yes, all those internal tensions still exist, but the shared belief that there is no solution to their biggest problem has forged an odd kind of solidarity.

Israel has never been richer, safer, more culturally productive or more dynamic. Terrorism is on the wane. Yet the occupation grinds on next door with little attention to its consequences. Moreover, as the power balance has shifted from the European elite, Israel has never felt more Middle Eastern in its popular culture, music and public displays of religion. Yet it is increasingly cut off from its region, which despises it perhaps more than ever.

When a class of Palestinian ninth graders in Gaza recently discussed the deadly 1929 riots over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, it was guided by a new textbook, introduced this fall by the Islamist Hamas movement.

For the first time since taking control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, the Hamas movement is deviating from the approved Palestinian Authority curriculum, using the new texts as part of a broader push to infuse the next generation with its militant ideology.

Textbooks have long been a point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which dueling historical narratives and cultural clashes underpin a territorial fight. And they are central examples of what Israeli leaders call Palestinian “incitement” against Jews, held up as an obstacle to peace talks newly resumed under American pressure.

Israeli prosecutors filed murder charges on Sunday against a man and a minor for an arson attack in the occupied West Bank that killed three members of a Palestinian family and helped fuel the fiercest eruption of street violence in years.

The attack on July 31 killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and his parents Saad and Riham.

Amiram Ben-Uliel, a 21-year-old from a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, was charged with three counts of racially motivated murder at Lod court near Tel Aviv. A second Jewish defendant, whose name was withheld due to his age, was charged as an accessory.

In one, Israel is simply defending itself against a fresh attack. In the other, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is the latest example of a desire to punish and humiliate Palestinians. These two narratives are not reconcilable, which makes reasoned discussion an exercise in futility.

Despite inching toward the Democratic Party’s left flank on various domestic- and foreign-policy issues, the Biden administration has fallen back on the usual formulas, offering robotic recitations about “Israel’s right to defend itself.” On Thursday, President Joe Biden said that he hadn’t seen a “significant overreaction” from Israel, while failing to mention a word about Palestinian deaths.

Hamas leaders see anger against Israel building among ordinary Palestinians, and they see an opportunity to weaponize it. They send rockets across the border and invite destruction because they wish to project relevance and rally domestic support after years of diminished popularity. Hamas is not a bunch of crazed lunatics. Selfish, self-serving, and cavalier toward Palestinian life, its leaders are acting according to a traditional rational-actor model.

For years, pro-Palestinian activists have demanded that the US make its massive foreign aid to Israel conditional on Tel Aviv’s efforts to make peace with the Palestinians.

ernie Sanders, the American senator from the state of Vermont, put that issue front and center during an appearance at a conference organized by J Street, the moderate pro-Israel political advocacy group that supports a two-state solution and engages in active dialogue with much of Palestine’s leadership.

I also believe is the Palestinian people have a right to live in peace and security as well… And it is not anti-Semitism to say that the (Benjamin) Netanyahu government has been racist. That is a fact.”

Senior diplomats attending a summit in France are aiming to organise a peace conference by the end of the year to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Israeli and Palestinian representatives are absent, making the chances of success slim

French diplomats said they felt compelled to act as the opportunity to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel was slipping away, with the situation in the region deteriorating.

Egypt worked around the clock over the past two weeks to end the deadly fighting between our Palestinian and Israeli neighbors. Since the early hours of the conflict, Egyptian mediators led de-escalation talks with both Hamas and Israeli leadership. We supported humanitarian efforts on the ground, including by opening the Rafah border crossing for the provision of immediate medical care to the injured in Gaza. Ultimately, in close partnership with the United States and others, we were able to broker a ceasefire.

However, we will also never accept the notion that this cycle of bloodshed is inevitable. That is why we refuse to let this issue recede in international priorities -- as it has in the past -- until the next crisis emerges and imposes.

In turn, Cairo and Washington must impress on Palestinians the need to work for peace. While having the militants lay down their arms for good might seem a long way off, stopping further attacks is essential to move forward. Those factions rejecting peace efforts and seeking instability, whatever their name or affiliation is, have to be contained, including by undermining their international network of support and finance. After all, armed attacks and military operations, whatever their cause is, never serve the path towards peace and only sets back the ultimate objective of a two state solution.

Last Wednesday, a message appeared in a new WhatsApp channel called “Death to the Arabs.” The message urged Israelis to join a mass street brawl against Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“Together we organize and together we act,” read a message in one of the WhatsApp groups. “Tell your friends to join the group, because here we know how to defend Jewish honor.”

The episode was one of dozens across Israel that the authorities have linked to a surge of activity by Jewish extremists on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging service owned by Facebook.

The Hamas terror attack has triggered war in Gaza, a geopolitical crisis and now – from Sydney to New York City – outbursts of street-level anti-Semitism in the West. Unless it de-escalates quickly, it looks like a strategic turning point both for Palestinian nationalism and Israel

though I am no expert on the region, I can throw some concreteness into the current battle of abstractions.

But the international community has a right to demand proportionality, restraint, respect for international law, and condemn breaches of it. President Biden last night was right to emphasise the need for lawfulness.

Envoys urge Israel, Palestinians to back peace

More than 70 countries have called on Israel and the Palestinians to restate their commitment to a peace settlement and to refrain from unilateral actions.

Trump's campaign platform made no mention of Palestinian independence — the solution favored by the international community.

, Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, called Mr. Romney’s remarks “racist.”“It is a racist statement and this man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation,” Mr. Erekat said. “It seems to me this man lacks information, knowledge, vision and understanding of this region and its people.”The Palestinians live under deep trade restrictions put in place by the Israeli government

Mr. Romney also understated the difference between per capita G.D.P. by a wide margin, suggesting that Israelis produce about twice what Palestinians do.In fact, according to an estimate by the Central Intelligence Agency, in 2009 Israel had a per capita G.D.P. of roughly $29,800, while in 2008 — the last year the C.I.A. has numbers on their Web site for the Palestinians — the per capita G.D.P. of the West Bank and Gaza was $2,900.

He knows, as he suggested to me in an interview this spring, that the status quo is not sustainable: The first point of [Israeli national] consensus is that we don’t want a binational state. Another point of consensus is that we don’t want an Iranian proxy in territories we vacate. We want a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the nation-state of the Jews. 

If Netanyahu has convinced himself that a Palestinian state is an impossibility, then he has no choice but to accept the idea that the status quo eventually brings him to binationalism, either in its Jim Crow form—Palestinians absorbed into Israel, except without full voting rights—or its end-of-Israel-as-a-Jewish-state form

When West Bank Palestinians see new roads being built to connect settlements to Israel proper; when they see existing settlements growing, and hear of tenders for yet more dramatic growth, they ask themselves—as any observant person would—if the Israeli government is serious about allowing a viable Palestinian state to be born on land the Palestinians consider to be theirs.

E-mail addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share Print Comments (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? Eyal Press Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute updates culled from an array of online sources on the ground: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Egyptian bloggers. The tone of Reider’s blog was reportorial, but hardly detached. “Good luck,” he wrote on the eve of the huge “Day of Departure” rally in Tahrir Square—a sentiment rarely voiced in Israel’s mainstream media, which stressed the danger of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood if the protesters prevailed. By the time Egyptians had succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, Kav Hutz was getting up to 12,000 visitors a day and had been singled out in Haaretz for leaving the rest of the Israeli press “in the dust.” As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.” For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972. There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,” one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.

In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.

One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,”

It is still unclear whether the international community will support the French initiative to restart talks on a two-state solution.

The ambitious French idea first suggested by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius at the end of January of holding an international conference to kick-start the two-state solution process in Paris in July is alive and kicking. A senior Western diplomat in Jerusalem told Al-Monitor that the initiative to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks has been adopted by the new French Foreign Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault.

The three-step approach — which France proposed at the end of January 2016 and includes consultations with Palestinians and Israelis, a spring preparatory meeting of the international working groups and a July conference in Paris — is definitely on track, the diplomat said.

Five Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested in recent weeks on suspicion of supporting the Islamic State

suggested that the suspects may have intended to carry out an assault, though there did not seem to be evidence that their activities had coalesced into a concrete plot

Five of those arrested have since been charged with weapons violations and support for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, led by Abu Mazen, was dealt a significant blow when President Donald Trump last year managed to get the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan to each normalize relations with Israel — without waiting for a Palestinian-Israeli peace deal.

Israel managed to keep a lid on all of it. But it is not hard to imagine, had it continued or if it flares up again, that this would severely stress Israel’s army and police and economy. Israel has not faced that kind of multi-front threat since the Jewish state was founded in 1948.

s the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland put it last week, a new connected generation of progressive left-wing activists in America and in Europe is reframing the Israeli-Palestinian struggle not as a conflict between two national movements, “but as a straightforward matter of racial justice. Note the placards at last weekend’s demonstration in London: Palestine Can’t Breathe and Palestinian Lives Matter.”

Israeli authorities demolished a rural Palestinian hamlet in the occupied West Bank Tuesday, residents and rights advocates said.

More than 70 structures were destroyed, making it the largest single demolition in the past decade and the biggest forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank in over four years, the United Nations said. The statement said 73 people - including 41 children - lived in what it called a, "herding community."

"A demolition on this scale is extremely rare," said Amit Gilutz of Btselem, an Israeli human rights group that documents and opposes Israel's policies toward Palestinians. "Everyone's attention is directed elsewhere."

This meme conflates the modern state of Israel with the Jewish people, which is of course the central rhetorical move of contemporary Zionism

All of this is bound up with a flagrantly false concept of Zionism that people who know better allow to spread because it’s politically convenient. When I argue about these topics, I constantly encounter people who think that the history of the Jews simply is the history of Zionism - that since 70 AD, when the Romans destroyed the second temple, all of worldwide Jewry has been involved in an effort to rebuild a Jewish state in Palestine. This is totally, historically, factually false.

It simply is not the case that Zionism has been an assumed part of Jewish identity historically, anti-Zionist Jews have been common, and the modern Zionist project is less than 150 years old.

never again is a feeble phrase. The world forgets, just like it has forgotten Bosnia. The nevers have been worn out and abandoned; the again keeps coming back in bigger numbers and darker stories.

The Gaza Strip, already impoverished by occupation and an unlawful 16-year blockade, whose population is made up of 47% children is being carpet-bombed by the most powerful army in the Middle East with the help of the most powerful allies in the world. More than 4,600 Palestinians lie dead and many more face death in the absence of a ceasefire, because they can’t escape bombardment or lack access to water, food or electricity. The Israeli army claims that its offensive, now being stepped up is a “war on terror”; UN experts say it amounts to collective punishment.

These are all facts. Yet even the mention of the word “Palestine” in Germany risks getting you accused of antisemitism. Any attempt at providing context and sharing facts on the historical background to the conflict is seen as crude justification of Hamas’s terror.