Fathom

‘We should still be prepared to intervene’

Richard Perle on George W. Bush, Barack Obama and the Arab Spring

Part 1: Early Influences Alan Mendoza: Richard, you’ve been a pivotal figure in the US defence and foreign policy establishment for four decades now, but why don’t we start right at the very beginning before you arrived in Washington DC. I’m curious to know who were the early influencers on your thought? Richard Perle: Well, when…

In praise of compromise

Simon Round interviews Amos Oz

Amos Oz has lived through every one of Israel’s wars and fought in two of them. He has seen hope in the peace process replaced by disappointment, compromises almost but never quite reached. Now at the age of 73, despite rockets whizzing over the border from Gaza, the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and…

The Jewish Political Tradition

An interview with Michael Walzer

Excavating the Jewish political tradition Alan Johnson: Let’s start with two big questions. What is the Jewish political tradition? And what is the four volume work The Jewish Political Tradition that you are helping to edit? Michael Walzer: Well, what we mean by the Jewish political tradition is simply the long history of Jewish reflection…

The Making of The Gatekeepers

Dror Moreh

an interview with Dror Moreh

Dror Moreh is the director of the Academy Award nominated Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers, a rare insight into the Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic secret service agency). For the first time ever, six former heads of the Shin Bet agreed to share their insights and reflect publicly on their actions and decisions. Intimately interviewed, they shed…

The pleasures of antisemitism

Eve Garrard

The Pleasures of Anti-Semitism Antisemitism is much more than a cognitive error. It attracts by providing the deep emotional satisfactions of hatred, tradition, and moral purity. (A shorter version of this article appeared in Fathom Summer 2013, Issue 3.) There is something strangely ineffective about many of our attempts to combat anti-Semitism. We treat it…

Israeli cinema: gay but not queer

Yair Raveh

We begin this piece with some trivia. In the past nine years, five Israeli movies grossed more than two million dollars in the US. Now, two million dollars for a small foreign language art film is a lot of money. Rare are the foreign films that reach it, and before 2004 no Israeli film had…

What does Israel’s Arab minority really think?

Alexander Yakobson

The Israel Democracy Institute’s ‘Israeli Democracy Index 2012’ – an annual comprehensive survey of the mood of Israeli society, widely considered one of the most authoritative in the field – provides some fascinating data about attitudes among Arab-Israelis regarding Israeli democracy and the state itself. The findings (not significantly different to previous years) certainly reflect…

April 26, 2013, 09:40 AM What does Israel’s Arab minority really think?

April 26, 2013, 04:29 PM A moment to seize in the Israeli-Palestinian arena

President Obama’s visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories in late March had, among others, the objectives of resetting relations with Israel’s leadership and its public and trying to reinvigorate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and generate public support for it. He without doubt succeeded in the former, but whether his visit will have any lasting…