Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel » Liam Hoare

Gideon Levy, single-minded

Liam Hoare — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 06:00:01 +0000

Gideon Levy has long cut a melancholic figure within Israeli journalism, as if he is carrying the burden of all Israel’s indiscretions upon his shoulders. His work covering the indignities of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank for Ha’aretz has been admirable, and for it, Levy has become foreign media’s go-to guy for grim, matter-of-fact [...]

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Israel, ad 120

Liam Hoare — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:00:15 +0000

In Hebrew, it seems as if there are numerous instructions to live a long and happy life where one’s eye is not dimmed nor natural force abated. Chai, the word for life, becomes l’chaim, ‘to life’, something to be said at celebratory toasts for any occasion, and also Am Yisrael Chai, ‘the people of Israel [...]

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Tzipi Livni did the right thing

Liam Hoare — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 01:30:07 +0000

What else was she supposed to do? During the election campaign, Tzipi Livni spoke repeatedly about the need for the three main parties of the centre-left – Labor, Yesh Atid, and Hatnua – to get it together and form an opposition bloc that would do all it could to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu’s third term. Alas, not twenty-four [...]

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Yachimovich is concluding Labor’s historic role

Liam Hoare — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 07:00:01 +0000

Ha’aretz columnist Ari Shavit credits Shelly Yachimovich with two things: “She revived the labour movement and succeeded in channelling the social justice protest into the Labor Party.” Indeed, she and Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid Party have run their election campaigns entirely on domestic concerns of an egalitarian and communitarian variety: housing subsidies; soaring [...]

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Leon Wieseltier and the case for hope

Liam Hoare — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:11:44 +0000

Last week, I was invited by a friend to speak at my former sixth-form college on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In so doing, I stressed that we can only understand the present real estate dispute when we comprehend the land as having been twice-promised, two peoples having two strong claims to the same [...]

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The road they didn’t take

Liam Hoare — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:13:39 +0000

Thoughts of mortality, of committing thousands of young men and reservists to war, ought to trouble and concentrate the mind. Worrisome, then, are the loose lips of Israel’s top brass like Eli Yishai, who stated Saturday, “The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages”. Disconcerting too are the attitudes [...]

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Mondoweiss goes to Tel Aviv, declares Zionism dead

Liam Hoare — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 12:08:37 +0000

If I were a writer for Mondoweiss, that infamous peddler of anti-Israel (some might say, anti-Semitic) tripe, I would be awfully surprised too if the people of Tel Aviv were “eerily nice to me.” In her fresh-off-the-plane dispatch written in the style of David Livingstone telegraphing Her Majesty during his escapades in the heart of [...]

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From ‘Sam Bacil’ to Dan Senor, the conspiracy lives

Liam Hoare — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 22:19:52 +0000

On the morning of September 12, Sam Bacile – an Israeli-American filmmaker and real-estate developer based in California – had gone into hiding. His movie, “The Innocence of Muslims,” had sparked assaults on United States embassies and consulates in Cairo and Benghazi. The two-hour film was reported to have cost $5 million to produce, and [...]

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Don’t whitewash the Vatican

Liam Hoare — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 11:04:03 +0000

Historical narratives in the Middle East have often been the most malleable of things, twisted and adapted to suit political interests. As Simon Sebag Montefiore notes in his ambitious and sweeping tome, “Jerusalem: The Biography,” during the 1990s, the PLO banned Palestinian historians from admitting that there had been a Jewish Temple built upon the [...]

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Whither the utopian dream?

Liam Hoare — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 11:19:06 +0000

They’re still around. There are fewer of them now, and many of those left have been forced to privatize. Still, some kibbutzim have been able to maintain their collectivized systems of living. In this way, the most archetypal conceptions of what a kibbutz ought to be have been kept alive, even as the Israeli economy has become ever [...]

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On Israel, exposing Romney’s dirty tricks

Liam Hoare — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 21:59:29 +0000

It is far too easily forgotten that, in 1992, Bill Clinton ran against George H.W. Bush from the right on Israel. Bush had opposed a $10 billion loan guarantee program for Israel on the basis that the money could be used to further continue settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza, which peaked at [...]

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