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Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for The Prospect. He is the author of The Unmaking of Israel, of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He blogs at South Jerusalem. Follow @GershomG.

Recent Articles

Wrong Turns

Blocked by failed negotiations with Israel and an ambivalent Obama administration, Palestinians look to the international stage.

Gershom GorenbergJun 06, 2011
(Gershom Gorenberg)Nadim Khoury

Nadim Khoury watches as brown bottles march single file along the conveyor belt from the machines that sterilize them to those that fill them, cap them, and glue on labels reading, "Taybeh Beer. The Finest In The Middle East." Under his large graying moustache, Khoury has a small smile of entrepreneurial pride.

Hiding in Plain Sight

The Israeli public is shielded from the realities of West Bank life.

Gershom GorenbergJun 02, 2011
(Flickr/Chris Yunker)

The settlement's security man did not like us. He did not like the cameraman with his bulky gear, or the two documentary film producers who'd brought Dror Etkes and me to the outpost of Derekh Ha'avot south of Bethlehem, and he certainly didn't like Etkes, an Israeli activist known for expertise on land ownership and for his legal challenges to West Bank settlement. The security coordinator wore civvies but bounced a bit on the balls of his feet in the spring-coiled posture of junior combat officers, or recently discharged officers.

Political Memory in the Mideast

Obama's Middle East speech comes at a time when both sides are sure the other is misreading history.

Gershom GorenbergMay 19, 2011

Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza, may be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's favorite Palestinian leader -- a true ally, a blood brother. What they share is an all-or-nothing approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: either complete Palestinian rule over the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan or complete Jewish hegemony. Neither man is a totally immovable object -- roped and dragged by an irresistible political force, either might agree to less than the whole land, but only in violation of his life's central conviction.

The Strange Alchemy of the Settlements

Gershom GorenbergMay 13, 2011

Daniella Weiss has a soft smile and a round face that is remarkably unwrinkled for a woman of 66 known for most of her adult life as an incendiary activist. A cloth cap covers her hair, in keeping with a strict reading of Orthodox Jewish rules for married women. In her living room in the West Bank settlement of Kedumim, west of Nablus, religious texts fill the bookshelves. Glass cases display a silver crown for a Torah scroll, filigreed spice boxes, and other Jewish ritual objets d'art.

Boehner and Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel halfway across the world to address Congress, but he won't come very far.

Gershom GorenbergApr 22, 2011
House Speaker John Boehner (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

When I heard that John Boehner was inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress next month, a faded, sharply contrasting memory of another solemn speech, another leader before a foreign assembly, flashed through my mind. I recalled watching the live broadcast of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat's speech to the Knesset in 1977, an event that set the standard of courage by which all Middle East peace efforts have been measured ever since.

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