Point/Counterpoint

Rafael Medoff
Rafael Medoff

In debate over nuclear Iran, lessons of Auschwitz remain relevant

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the Holocaust in his March 5 speech at AIPAC for the same reason that President Shimon Peres referred to it in his speech the day before and President Obama alluded to it in his news conference the day after: Because in the debate over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, [...]

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Michael Lerner
Michael Lerner

Seeing the world through Auschwitz lens amounts to Jewish PTSD

When I learned of the murder of dozens of members of my family in the Holocaust and then met my Israeli relatives whose Auschwitz numbers could hardly be missed on their arms, I decided to dedicate my life to challenging war, the denial of human rights, the hatred of minorities, and social and economic injustice. [...]

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The Jewish National Fund should plant trees in Israel, not uproot families

As a child, I proudly brought my spare change to Hebrew school to drop in the little blue boxes. With this money, my teachers told me, the Jewish National Fund would plant trees in Israel. I never imagined that these nickels and dimes would also help to evict Palestinians from their homes. Last week, Rabbis [...]

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Safety of Jewish people lies in Israel; campaign against JNF misplaced

The Jewish National Fund plants trees, builds a nation and unifies a people. As a child growing up in a small town in Texas, I dropped my coins in the Blue Box in Hebrew school. My parents and grandparents raised me on the importance and the power of the Blue Box. My grandfather would say [...]

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Mervyn Danker
Mervyn Danker

Op-Ed: A Palestinian state should be the result of negotiations

To establish its independence, Israel had to win a war against the combined might of the Arab nations in 1948. The Arab failure to destroy the nascent Jewish state became known, in Orwellian Arab vernacular, as “Nakba,” a catastrophe. For the next 20 years, neither Jordan nor any of the other Arab states even spoke [...]

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Michael J. Weil
Michael J. Weil

Op-Ed: Israel should support the Palestinian statehood push

Israelis and Jews around the world are awaiting the Palestinians’ push at the United Nations for statehood with trepidation. The official response of the government of Israel and American Jewish groups has been to do everything possible to prevent any action at the U.N. and to line up votes against it. Only America and a [...]

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Marc Stanely
Marc Stanely

Obama isn’t being treated fairly on Israel

I was amused by Adam Serwer’s recent blog post titled “Is Bibi anti-Israel?” in which he pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conditionally offered this month to negotiate with the Palestinians using the pre-1967 borders as a framework. Amazingly, there was no outcry by American Jews that Netanyahu was abandoning Israel by suggesting [...]

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Morton A. Klein
Morton A. Klein

Obama and Israel are not on the same page

It’s high time to face an unpleasant fact: President Obama and Israel are not on the same page. This has been true ever since Obama took office in January 2009, but it was most recently apparent this May when the president ambushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an adversarial speech the day before Netanyahu’s [...]

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Newt Gingrich, a Republican candidate for president, speaks at the republican Jewish Coalition's California summer bash in Beverly Hills, June 12, 2011. (Zach Abrams)
Newt Gingrich, a Republican candidate for president, speaks at the republican Jewish Coalition's California summer bash in Beverly Hills, June 12, 2011. (Zach Abrams)

Op-Ed: Obama’s morally confused Mideast policies endanger Israel

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (JTA) – Israel and America are at a dangerous crossroads in which the survival of Israel and the safety of the United States both hang in the balance. Year after year, the forces of terrorism become stronger, and the claims of terrorists become more acceptable to our European allies and more powerful [...]

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Stuart Eizenstat (JPPPI)
Stuart Eizenstat (JPPPI)

Op-Ed: Obama’s path paves the way for a secure Israel

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A strong secure Jewish state of Israel, supported by the United States as a close ally, has been a central feature of my public and private careers. As a senior government official in several administrations, an American and a Jew, I see Israel from multiple perspectives. Israel plays a strategic role in [...]

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