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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

Two State Dissonance

Even apart from the Gaza flotilla attack, Jews can't reconcile the real Israel with some of their deepest assumptions.

Gershom GorenbergJun 10, 2010
(AP Photo)

Meyer Landsman lives in the Hotel Zamenhof. Landsman is the hero of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, in which the Jews lost the 1948 war in Palestine and have taken refuge in a Jewish autonomous region of Alaska. The run-down hotel is named for L.L. Zamenhof, the Russian-born Jew who invented Esperanto in order to bring world understanding and peace. In other words, Landsman's residence is a liberal Jewish dream that has seen much better days.

A Brief History of the Gaza Folly

The flotilla attack is just the latest in a series of bad decisions Israel has made about Gaza over the past five years.

Gershom GorenbergJun 01, 2010
Palestinian flags wave in Gaza port a day before a flotilla of aid ships was to arrive. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

At first, reports of the number of dead fluctuated by the hour. After Israeli naval commandos landed on a Turkish ferry heading for Gaza, rumors said that Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the radical Islamic movement among Israeli Arabs, had been killed on board. The rumors turned into news items in the Arab media; the sheikh was then reported alive and well. Descriptions of what actually happened on the crowded deck of the Mavi Marmara have, predictably, been wildly at odds. Activists who were on board say the Israeli commandos fired before being attacked; the Israeli military says the soldiers were defending themselves from a mob. Both sides present film clips of the nighttime struggle to back up their case.

The Road to Injustice

How Palestinians lost access to a main West Bank highway.

Gershom GorenbergMay 27, 2010
A Palestinian protester at Highway 443 near the West Bank village of Beit Urr, Friday, Jan. 11, 2008. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer)

Arriving home in Israel after a semester teaching in New York, I got in a taxi at Ben-Gurion Airport and asked the cabbie to drive me to Jerusalem. "Take the main road, not Route 443," I said. Route 443 runs through the West Bank. When it was transformed from a country road to a highway in the 1980s, Palestinian land was expropriated under the legal fiction that the project's main purpose was to serve Palestinian residents of the area. Since 2002, however, the Israeli army has barred Palestinians from using it. I take 443 only when I must to cover a story.

After 43 Years, a Divided City

Most Israelis now ignore Jerusalem Day. It is time for some truth-telling.

Gershom GorenbergMay 14, 2010
An Ultra-Orthodox Jewish man looks at the Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem's old city. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Lest it be said that I never agree with anything that Benjamin Netanyahu says, I actually concur with one clause -- not a whole sentence -- in the speech he gave Tuesday evening. "The struggle for Jerusalem is a struggle for the truth," the prime minister of my country said.

Brokering With Bibi

The administration aims to change what Netanyahu does, rather than what he says. Is that enough?

Gershom GorenbergApr 29, 2010
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

A worldly colleague of mine once complained that with the demise of the Soviet-era Pravda, the intellectual joy went out of newspaper reading -- the satisfaction of examining photos for who wasn't on the dais, of studying statements for what wasn't said, in order to reason out the real news. He was too quick to mourn. Reading the text of the State Department's daily press briefing provides nearly the same pleasure and even sheds some light on what Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is up to.

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