Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel » Allen Katzoff

‘The Gatekeepers’ — see it

Allen Katzoff — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 01:00:36 +0000

Run, don’t walk, to see the academy-award nominated Israeli film “The Gatekeepers,” which was released in the USA today. Go with your friends to see it, especially those on the right or in the center – or those who may not be familiar with what has occurred in Israel these past decades. The film consists [...]

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A Man, a Woman, and a Baby

Allen Katzoff — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 21:28:45 +0000

From Maimonides: Our sages commanded us to visit the non-Jewish sick and to bury the non-Jewish dead along with the Jewish dead, and support the non-Jewish poor along with the Jewish poor for the sake of peace. As it says, “God is good to all and God’s mercies extend over all God’s works” (Psalms 145:9), [...]

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The West Bank in Israel

Allen Katzoff — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 06:26:49 +0000

Historian Gershom Gorenberg, in his book “The Unmaking of Israel,” devotes an entire chapter making the case that the ideology and practices of radical Jewish settlers and the government in the West Bank are spreading into Israel proper within the Green Line (the border before the 1967 Six-Day War). In this post I want to [...]

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Home Demolitions: A Challenge to Israel’s Moral Credibility

Allen Katzoff — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 21:12:25 +0000

“I still remember the day the Israelis destroyed our house. It was the last day of Ramadan…. Suddenly we heard some noise outside, and when my father looked out from the window, he saw the Israeli tanks in front of our building. I started crying and shouting. I knew they came to kill us….” Young [...]

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A review of Peter Beinart’s ‘The Crisis of Zionism’

Allen Katzoff — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:10:01 +0000

If Israel does not survive as a Jewish democratic state, I want to be able to tell my children that I did what little I’m capable of. I’m a writer, so what I can do is to try to sound an alarm. I just want to be able to say that to them. – Peter [...]

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Hope: Former IDF soldiers and Palestinian militants

Allen Katzoff — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:36:39 +0000

Last Friday I found myself sitting in a large room with 30 former IDF soldiers and Palestinian militants. As I looked around the room, I could imagine many of them holding guns and trying to kill each other in the past. Some just looked the part; they had the bearing, the aura, of former fighters. [...]

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To boycott or not to boycott?

Allen Katzoff — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:39:04 +0000

For the past few years, my wife and I, always preferring to buy Israeli made-goods whether we are in Israel or the USA, have been carefully scrutinizing labels on Israeli products to see where they were made. Living half of each year in Tel Aviv, it seemed almost normative to not purchase goods made in [...]

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The Negev: A Bedouin Village versus a JNF Forest

Allen Katzoff — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:12:12 +0000

There was a clear blue sky after many days of rain when we drove to Al-Arakib near Be’er Sheva down in the Negev. The air was cool but the sun was strong. All around us the desert was in bloom as we turned onto the dirt road, passed a small cemetery on the left and [...]

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From Africa to Tel Aviv, Part Three: Demonizing Asylum Seekers

Allen Katzoff — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:41:42 +0000

In my prior two posts (here and here) I described the plight of African asylum seekers in Tel Aviv and how the Israeli government is not fulfilling its legal and ethical responsibility to protect their human rights. I explained how it’s not abiding by the stipulations in the 1951 United Nations Convention dealing with refugees [...]

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From Africa to Tel Aviv, Part Two: draconian policies

Allen Katzoff — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 05:32:29 +0000

In a previous post I described the plight of African refugees in Levinsky Park in downtown Tel Aviv, where many hundreds, ill clothed and hungry, face an unprecedentedly cold and rainy winter. Last week was no exception. When I visited the park one night, it was chilly but thankfully the rain wasn’t falling. That was about to change, [...]

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From Africa to Tel Aviv: Part One

Allen Katzoff — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:47:39 +0000

It was 6:45 a.m. when I arrived at Levinsky Park in south Tel Aviv, across from the central bus station. I was bundled up in a coat, scarf, ski hat, and gloves, opening and closing my black umbrella every few minutes as the rain started and stopped. The refugees were just getting up. In the [...]

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Singing to the soldiers

Allen Katzoff — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:23:05 +0000

There we were, standing on the edge of the ledge, facing a line of armed-to-the-teeth Israeli soldiers 15 feet away from us — as if our scraggily band of middle-aged folks with a sprinkling of 20-somethings posed any threat to their bulging muscles, semi-automatic rifles, and the other weaponry in their hands. They had just [...]

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A Virtual Tour of East Jerusalem

Allen Katzoff — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:06:27 +0000

In January I went on a drive through East Jerusalem with Ir Amim, a human rights NGO that works to protect the rights of all of Jerusalem’s residents and to prevent the establishment of facts on the ground from precluding a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the tour we stopped at high lookout [...]

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