Our Fathom Highlight this week is an essay by John Lyndon, European Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP). Lyndon sets out how both the two-state camp in Israel and secular Palestinians have erred by choosing short term gains over long-term goals. He argues that if the peace camp is to return to its heights of the early 1990s, it must learn from the long-termism, strategic patience, institution-building and political discipline of the settler movement and so re-learn how change has always been achieved in Israel.
This weeks Highlight also includes a review, written by Paul Iddon of Susan Shand’s, Sinjar: 14 Days that Saved the Yazidis from Islamic State – her first book and the only comprehensive examination we have of ‘the first genocide of the twenty-first century’. The book is a moving account, argues Iddon, of the Islamic State’s (ISIS) genocide against the Yazidi community in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in August 2014, which claimed the lives of over 2,000 Yazidis, saw over 10,000 more abducted and tens-of-thousands more displaced.
Our Voice of the Week features two of Israel’s smaller parties, both aiming to shake up the Knesset, one new and one old. Gonen Ben Yitzchak, former Shin Bet agent, is a co-founder of The Protest Movement for State Leadership party and active in the recent ‘Yellow Vest’ protests in Israel. Yariv Oppenheimer, former head of Peace Now, is a candidate for the left-wing Meretz party.
Our Image of the Week is a scene from a snowy winter night in Jerusalem’s Old City, as Ultra Orthodox Jewish men dance at the Western Wall – 16th January.
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