the other

Illustrative photo of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man walking past an Arab shopkeeper in the Old City of Jerusalem. (Gil Yaari/Flash90)

Seeing the ‘other’ on Yom Kippur, in Jerusalem

On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of Jerusalem. For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop, not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with buttons and zippers and spools of thread in every…

By Orly Noy October 11, 2016

Hagana militants training in the Yizrael Valley, January 3, 1948. (Photo by Zoltan Kluger/GPO)

The dark narrative of Israel’s Rhodesia fantasy

The Rhodesia fantasy sees an Israel that can be controlled by a very small elite, what they refer to as a ‘villa in the jungle.’ At the heart of the delusion is an imagined community of ‘founders’ and an imagined majority status for what was always a minority. By Seth J. Frantzman Earlier this month the…

By +972 Magazine September 24, 2015

A Palestinian man from Gaza walks down an open air corridor at the Erez Crossing terminal, the northern checkpoint leading from the Gaza Strip to Israel, in the area of Beit Hanun, February 14, 2012. (Photo by Anne Paq/Activestills.org)

The mentality of conflict: Six steps to avoiding empathy

From Protective Edge to the Jerusalem implosion, the mentality of conflict has been pushed under a microscope. During that time I’ve noticed a few axioms about how Israelis experience these wars. I imagine other sides in other conflicts may share them too, although they require pretty close scrutiny and insider knowledge – so I won’t…

By Dahlia Scheindlin November 20, 2014

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