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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

Welfare State Now!

As the U.S. and European governments turn toward austerity, Israel's economic uprising against "piggish capitalism" keeps growing.

Gershom GorenbergAug 05, 2011
Gershom Gorenberg

The crowd surged uphill, a torrent filling a main street in the center of Jerusalem on Saturday night, coursing toward the square next to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's official residence -- one of his three homes. The marchers were overwhelmingly in their twenties and early thirties -- the generation of Israelis who have been written off for years as being terminally apathetic. They were jumping, swaying, pounding on pots and water-cooler bottles as drums, blowing whistles, shouting themselves hoarse in the giddy joy of being angry together.

Tent City Revival

Israelis protest a dearth of affordable housing.

Gershom GorenbergJul 29, 2011
(AP Photo/Bernat Armangue) A 13 year old Israeli boy rests inside a tent in a protest tent encampment in central Jerusalem.

"Even Adam Smith is turning over in his grave," reads a handwritten sign pinned to one of the small, square tents. Next to the sign, sewn to the tent, is a piece of cloth with the address printed on it: "51 Tent Boulevard."

On maps of Tel Aviv, the street is listed as Rothschild Boulevard, but over the past two weeks, the new name has become more appropriate. On the wide, tree-shaded center island, hundreds of nearly identical tents have been pitched in neat rows: a city of protest against the robber-baron economic policies of Israel's current and recent governments, particularly a drastic housing shortage that is hurting not only the poor but the daughters and sons of the country's middle class.

Warning: This Article Is Illegal

In defense of settlements, Israel's ruling coalition has launched an offensive against free speech.

Gershom GorenbergJul 13, 2011
(AP Photo/Oded Balilty) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a parliament session at the Knesset in Jerusalem July 13, 2011, where he defended a controversial new law banning boycotts of West Bank settlements.

This article is against the law. To be more precise: It includes a call for boycotting the products of West Bank settlements, a call that will be illegal in Israel as soon as legislation just approved by the Knesset is published in the official gazette and takes effect. That's normally a matter of a couple of days, perhaps a week.

Israel's Lost Cause

The history of an Israeli rebellion is rewritten by today's government.

Gershom GorenbergJun 30, 2011
(Flickr/Whistling in the Dark)

The plan is to comb the floor of the Mediterranean for the remains of the ship. The Israeli government will reportedly allocate $60,000 for the search. The next stage, much more costly, will be to salvage the Altalena and turn it into a memorial for the men of the right-wing Irgun underground, which sparked the momentary Israeli civil war in June 1948.

Anti-Dissent Disorder

The U.S. Jewish community needs to be open to criticism of Israel.

Gershom GorenbergJun 17, 2011
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street

The film shows emails scrolling across a computer screen. Addressed to Peter Stein, director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, they carry more venom than it seems mere pixels of text could contain. They accuse him of being an anti-Semite and of running an "anti-Israel hate-fest." They include words like "Hitler" and ask if next year he will present a retrospective of Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl's work.

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