Forward.com

The Value of Settlement Is ObsoleteIt was one of the most important and largely forgotten milestones in the history of the state: 41 years ago, on July 16, 1967, a young kibbutznik got out of his jeep at Aalleiqa, an abandoned Syrian army base on the Golan Heights, and became the first settler in the occupied territories.…Read more

Report Calls for Examination of Israel’s Military StrategyEliyahu Winograd has read out many judgments in his life. In Israeli history, however, the judgment for which the wizened former judge will be remembered is the one he read in a dry, steady voice on the last day of April 2007: the brief, harsh summary of his committee’s initial report on what went wrong last summer when Israel went to war in Lebanon.…Read more

Anachronistic Ideas on the Military, Immigration Retain Surprising Power in IsraelJared Diamond, author of the best-selling book “Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed,” could gain some sad satisfaction by reading Israeli news in recent days, especially if he reads between the lines. One of his central warnings keeps getting confirmed — for instance, by the report that the Israeli military plans to clamp down on psychological discharges, or by Prime Minster Ehud Olmert’s latest postponement of dismantling illegal settlement outposts. If Diamond feels any sympathy for Israel, the evidence for his thesis won’t cheer him up.…Read more

The Sound of Silence: Olmert’s StrategyEhud Olmert won’t talk. Reduced to its essence, that was State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss’s angry complaint to a Knesset panel Tuesday. The ex-judge was speaking at a hearing devoted to his investigation of how the government handled, or mishandled, the home front during last summer’s war in Lebanon. One reason that the confrontation between Olmert and the comptroller could seize Israel’s attention so completely early this week is that not talking has become the prime minister’s key tactic in foreign affairs as well. With diplomacy at a standstill, there is little to divert the public from the latest inquiry into corruption or the war.…Read more

Jerusalem Dig Fuels Arab Anxieties Over Al-Aqsa MosqueViewed logically, the scene didn’t look a whole lot like an attempt to undermine Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple: At the bottom of a small trapezoidal pit, a single Palestinian laborer wearing a blue hard hat carefully scraped dark soil into a bucket and handed it up to another man standing on a ledge above him, who said “Take!” in Arabic and handed it on to another worker at ground level. At this pace, they were not going to undermine anything in the coming generation.…Read more