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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

The Damage He Did

Gershom GorenbergJan 13, 2014
AP Photo/Heidi Levine, Pool, File
AP Photo/Heidi Levine, Pool, File O n a January night eight years ago, I dined with a visiting American friend in a tiny downtown Jerusalem restaurant that happened to be a few hundred meters from the official residence of the prime minister—at that time, Ariel Sharon. A national election was a couple of months off, and Sharon had just led his loyalists out of the Likud to form a new party. Polls showed he'd win re-election in a breeze. Then again, he was under investigation in a complex bribery case. "Think he'll be indicted before the election?" my friend asked. "Who knows?" I answered. "The age of prophets ended a long time ago. It's a bad idea to make predictions." Late in the evening, I got home and glanced at a news site. Sharon had just had a massive stroke, a headline shouted. A few weeks earlier he'd suffered a smaller stroke. After that, a cautious man would have spent his nights at the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem, just minutes away from the hospital. Sharon—78...

Israel's Ultimate Rightist Smiles at Kerry. Be Suspicious

Gershom GorenbergJan 08, 2014
AP Photo/Brendan Smialowski, Pool
AP Photo/Brendan Smialowski, Pool O n Sunday morning it seemed that Israeli scientists, or perhaps John Kerry, had learned how to do personality transplants. The first operation was reserved for Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, heretofore the growling voice of unreconstructed Israeli ultra-nationalism. "I want to express my true appreciation of the efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry, who works day and night … to bring an end to the conflict between us and the Palestinians," Lieberman told a conference of Israeli ambassadors who were home from posts around the world. Kerry's positions on a peace agreement, Lieberman added, were better than "any alternative proposal that Israel will receive from the international community." Two days earlier, Lieberman had met with Kerry and issued an upbeat statement declaring that the American-brokered negotiations "must continue." Was this the same man who began his first term as foreign minister in 2009 by declaring that the previous round...

The "Infiltrators"—Israel's Unwanted Asylum Seekers

As Sudanese and Eritreans marched on Jerusalem earlier this week, it became harder for the government to ignore its refugee issue.

Gershom GorenbergDec 19, 2013
Gershom Gorenberg
Gershom Gorenberg T hey simply left. As soon as they got the chance, the refugees from Darfur and other parts of Sudan and from Eritrea walked out of the guarded camp in the Negev desert and marched north in bitter winter weather toward Jerusalem. There they stood Tuesday afternoon, on an icy sidewalk facing the Knesset, holding up brown cardboard signs with handwritten slogans, chanting in eerily subdued voices halfway between determination and desperation, until they were arrested, manhandled onto buses and sent back to the desert. This is the condensed version of the refugees' dramatic three-day protest this week. It is also a condensed version of their lives: They are people—young men, almost all—who made the dangerous decision to leave their countries because staying was even more dangerous. They headed north into Egypt, then crossed the Sinai desert into Israel, hoping for freedom and safety, and were imprisoned as "infiltrators." But the end of the protest this week is not the...

The Year in Preview: Dates of Judgment in the Middle East

Gershom GorenbergDec 13, 2013
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Pool)
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite I n front of the United States State Department, two large digital screens should be erected by New Year's, showing the countdown to the Obama administration's looming foreign-policy deadlines for 2014. One screen would flash the days left before March 29, when the nine months allocated by Secretary of State John Kerry for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations run out. By then, the two sides have to reach agreement, or at least show enough progress to have reason to keep talking. On the other screen, we'd see the time remaining until May 24, when the six-month interim accord on Iran's nuclear program ends—with a longterm accord, or well-founded hope of one, or a return to an unpredictable confrontation. In principle, the only thing that links success on the two tracks is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's insistence that peace with the Palestinians depends on removing the Iranian nuclear threat. But the two diplomatic challenges do share common...

Bibi's Agreement Anxiety Disorder

Gershom GorenbergNov 25, 2013
T o explain Benjamin Netanyahu's frenzied reaction to the Geneva agreement on Iran's nuclear program, let me begin with the stack of brown cardboard boxes under my wife's desk. Each of the five cartons contains a gas mask and related paraphernalia for a member of my family to use in the event of a chemical-weapons attack. They were delivered last January, as part of the gradual government effort to prepare every household in Israel for a rain of Syrian missiles. I suppose that having "defense kits" in the house could be macabre, but what we usually notice is that they're a nuisance: another thing on which to bang your toe in an overstuffed city flat. What's more, they're apparently an obsolete nuisance. A couple of weeks ago, the usual nameless military sources told the local media that the Defense Ministry would recommend ending production of gas masks for civilians. According to the leaks, intelligence assessments said that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons...

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