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Book Review | Kreisky, Israel, and Jewish Identity
By Liam Hoare
On 28 September 1973, two Palestinian terrorists from the Syrian Ba’athist faction As-Sa'iqa hijacked a train near Marchegg...
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February 2023
Book Review | British Trade Unions, the Labour Party, and Israel’s Histadrut
By Luke Akehurst
Ronnie Fraser has been bravely fighting a sometimes lonely battle against antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the British trade...
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February 2023
Opinion | Western Democracies Face Two Threats: The Tyranny of the Majority and The Tyranny of the Minority
By Alan Johnson
Alan Johnson is the editor of Fathom, He writes here in a personal capacity. Against the Tyranny...
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February 2023
‘A gamechanger in Israel’s relationship with Egypt and cooperation with the EU’: The geopolitics of Israel’s natural gas fields
By Calev Ben-Dor
Israel has discovered enough natural gas to become a regional energy exporter. As Europe wrestles with its energy...
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February 2023
‘For peace, a political agreement between politicians is not enough’ | An interview with Noor A’wad, Palestinian activist with Roots
By Joshua A. Brook
Noor A’wad joined Roots, a Palestinian-Jewish peacebuilding organisation, in 2016 after meeting Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger and Ali Abu...
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February 2023
Book Review| Israel: A History in 100 Cartoons
By Keith Kahn-Harris
In 2006, the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri announced an ‘International Holocaust Cartoon Contest’ as an outraged riposte to the...
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February 2023
Book Review | Victorious
By Liam Hoare
‘Unlike others, I am no longer slaughtering sacred cows,’ Amos Oz told Niva Lanir in a 2012 interview...
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February 2023
Open letter to The George Washington University regarding allegations of antisemitism
By Daniel Burston et al.
Hundreds of academics have signed an open letter to George Washington University expressing their deep concern about its...
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February 2023
Small Vote, Great Power: Rabbi Tau, Avi Maoz, the Noam Party and the Threat to Equal Rights in Israel
By Daniel Goldman
About a half a million Israelis voted for the ‘Religious Zionist’ slate which made the three parties that...
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January 2023
Opinion | Judicial Reform is needed to preserve the legitimacy of Israeli democracy
By Adi Schwartz
Adi Schwartz is a former staff writer at Haaretz and is co-author with Einat Wilf of The War...
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January 2023
Archive | Menachem Begin on Law and Democracy
By Fathom Editors
In the increasingly fiery debate over the role of Israel’s judiciary, former Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin seems...
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January 2023
When Discourse about Israel Becomes Antisemitic: A Guide for the Perplexed
By Cary Nelson and Michael Saenger
Cary Nelson and Michael Saenger argue for understanding antisemitic anti-Zionism as ‘a prejudice with definable characteristics’ and of...
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January 2023
‘If these ideas get implemented, it will be a major shift. Israel will become a different country’: An Interview with...
By Calev Ben-Dor
Former Likud Justice Minister Dan Meridor discusses what he sees as the erosion of liberal values within the...
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January 2023
A World War and a Jewish War: Derek Penslar reviews Dan Diner
By Derek Penslar
Derek Penslar reviews Dan Diner’s, Ein anderer Krieg: Das jüdische Palästina und der Zweite Weltkrieg - 1935 –...
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January 2023
Book Review | Ten Years Hard Labour
By Marc Goldberg
Chris Williamson was a Labour Member of Parliament representing the constituency of Derby North. He served as Shadow...
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January 2023
Defending Israel’s Legitimacy: Proposals for a reborn Ministry of Strategic Affairs
By Jacob Dallal
Jacob Dallal reflects on his five-years working at the Ministry of Strategic Affairs from 2016 to 2021 to...
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January 2023
Book Review | Bibi, My Story
By Yisrael Medad
The memoirs of politicians and public figures, it has been claimed, are among the most popular form of...
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December 2022
The Annual Fathom Lecture 2022 | Why we should all be Zionists if we want peace
By Einat Wilf
On 7 December 2022, in celebration of its 10th birthday, Fathom invited Einat Wilf to deliver the inaugural...
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December 2022
The Progressive Friend of Israel in the era of Ben Gvir: Prospects and Tasks
By Jack Omer-Jackaman
Jack Omer-Jackaman argues that this is a perfect opportunity to prove the truth of what progressive friends of...
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December 2022
Lessons from Germany’s Social Democrats for the Israeli Labor Party
By Kira Lewis
Kira Lewis believes the Israeli Labor Party can learn some lessons from a historic social democratic party that...
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December 2022
Fathom at 10: Celebrating our first decade
By Fathom Editors
Fathom was created by BICOM in 2012 for the long haul. We were created not to chase the...
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December 2022
Opinion | Navigating China’s Security Presence in the Middle East and North Africa
By Grant Rumley and Carol Silber
Grant Rumley is the Goldberger Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Glazer Program on Great...
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December 2022
Judicial Reform is Not Dangerous for Israeli Democracy – it is Essential
By Russell A. Shalev
Suzie Navot of the Israel Democracy Institute argued in Fathom that the judicial reforms being considered by the...
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December 2022
Yet again, the Courts find for John Ware and his BBC Panorama documentary 'Is Labour Antisemitic?'
By John Ware
Documentary maker John Ware explains why he has brought three successful court cases against those who he believed...
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December 2022
Book Review | Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews
By Kathleen Hayes
This is a very important book. Over the last decade or so, a sweeping ideology that looks much...
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November 2022
The Three Best Books by Israeli Writers (Not Called Oz, Grossman, or Yehoshua), recommended by Liam Hoare
By Liam Hoare
Fathom is inviting experts to select their three favourite books on a theme or subject. The series began...
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December 2022
The Iranian Uprising and the Nuclear Threat: How Should the West Respond
By Matthias Kuntzel
Matthias Küntzel is the author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. This talk was given at...
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November 2022
Judicial Reform and the Implications for Israeli Democracy
By Suzie Navot
In this edited transcript of her conversation with BICOM Director Richard Pater, Vice-President of Research at the Israel...
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November 2022
'Politically homeless': Yamina voters tell their story
By Calev Ben-Dor
Calev Ben-Dor talks to former Yamina supporters to understand their views on the Bennett-Lapid government and voting considerations...
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November 2022
‘The Jews Are Guilty’: Christian Antisemitism in Contemporary America
By Alvin Rosenfeld
Alvin Rosenfeld holds the Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University and is the Director...
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November 2022
Book Review | Bibi: My Story
By Colin Shindler
When he was asked by a student in 2018, what is the most important subject to study for...
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November 2022
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Opinion | Israel’s electoral crisis ends but the struggle for its soul goes on
By Toby Greene
Toby Greene is a former deputy editor of Fathom and author of Blair, Labour & Palestine: Conflicting Views on Middle...
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November 2022
Opinion | This defeat feels different. It feels fundamental. Now we must fight for the country we love
By Paul Gross
Paul Gross fears this will be the first coalition in Israeli history where a majority of its members...
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November 2022
Opinion | The Scapegoating of Yair Lapid
By Alan Johnson
Alan Johnson is the editor of Fathom. ‘God’ said Mark Twain, ‘is the most popular scapegoat for our...
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November 2022
The Lust Libel: Sexual Antisemitism in History and Contemporary Culture
By Jonah Cohen
Antisemites have long depicted the Jews as a perverse, predatory, and pornographic people; horny vampires of the Orient. That...
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November 2022
Book Review | Bibi: My Story
By Anshel Pfeffer
Back in 2017, I sat with a group of Israeli colleagues in a small hotel conference room in...
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November 2022
Fine margins and the Israeli Election – three that will determine the result
By Calev Ben-Dor
As Israelis head to the polls for the fifth time in less than four years, and with little...
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October 2022
Tel Aviv or Jerusalem? The UK mulls moving its Embassy
By Richard Pater
Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss was reportedly mulling moving the British embassy to Jerusalem. Richard Pater argues...
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October 2022
‘Maybe he was the last of his kind’: A Conversation about Amos Oz with Nurith Gertz
By Liam Hoare
Liam Hoare talks to literary scholar Nurith Gertz about What Was Lost to Time (Hebrew), her biography of...
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October 2022
Appease or Confront? Western Policy Options and the Iranian Nuclear Bomb
By Yossi Kuperwasser
Yossi Kuperwasser served as head of the research division in the Israel Defence Force Military Intelligence division and...
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October 2022
A Party Transformed: How UK Labour is ripping Left Antisemitism out by its roots
By Luke Akehurst
In 2020, following Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the UK Labour Party was found guilty by the Equalities and Human...
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October 2022
On Amnesty’s Antisemitic ‘Apartheid’ Report
By Alan Johnson
[The] system of apartheid originated with the creation of Israel in May 1948. – Amnesty International’s Apartheid Report, 2022. ...
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October 2022
Jerusalem Film Festival 2022: On absences haunting films made years after their passing
By Tal Kra-Oz
Tal Kra-Oz is a writer based in Tel Aviv. His work has appeared in Tablet Magazine, The Forward...
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October 2022
The Rise of Itamar Ben Gvir
By Calev Ben-Dor
In the March 2020 elections Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power party was shunned by other right wingers and...
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September 2022
Opinion | Time for the UN to rethink Palestine
By Alex Ryvchin
Alex Ryvchin is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and a member of...
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September 2022
Diary | The inaugural conference of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism
By Kathleen Hayes
Kathleen Hayes is the author of the Fathom articles ‘Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir’ and ‘“Punch a...
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September 2022
Book Review | Peace and Faith: Christian Churches and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
By Jonathan G. Campbell
This lengthy edited volume contains an introduction, sixteen chapters (organized into Parts I-III), appendix (on the history of...
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September 2022
Liz Truss’s world view and its implications for UK-Israel relations
By Toby Greene
‘Geopolitics is back’ Liz Truss has said. In what is the most thorough analysis of her world view...
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September 2022
Book Review | Breaking History: A White House Memoir
By Colin Shindler
Jared Kushner's account of his four years in the Trump White House produces several interesting revelations. It is...
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September 2022
Fathom eBook | Rescuing Israeli-Palestinian Peace: The Fathom Essays 2016-2020
By Fathom Editors
Fathom's new eBook, Rescuing Israeli-Palestinian Peace: The Fathom Essays 2016-2020, contains over 60 articles, reports and interviews. The editors believe it is the most comprehensive...
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September 2020
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Documentary Review | Remember Baghdad (2017)
By Lyn Julius
Remember Baghad, now showing on Netflix, is reviewed by Lyn Julius, journalist and co-founder of Harif, an association...
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July 2022
The Modern Language Association, Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism
By Cary Nelson and Joe Lockard
The MLA Executive Council have hit a new low by acting in secret, without notice and without membership...
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July 2022
Opinion | We Need to Talk About the BBC
By David Collier
In a week when it was reported that the BBC ignore 99 per cent of attacks on Israelis but...
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July 2022
Book Review | Israel’s Moment: International Support and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949
By John Strawson
Herf’s book forensically demolishes the myth that the West set out to create Israel to promote its interests....
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July 2022
Book Review | Nine Quarters of Jerusalem
By Danny Seidemann
There are no experts on Jerusalem. The city is too complex, its history too long, too shrouded in...
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July 2022
Fathoming the Intellectual Revolution of our Time (1) | ‘Punch a Terf’ and ‘Smash the Zionists’: Misogyny and Antisemitism in...
By Kathleen Hayes
Series Introduction: Huge waves of intellectual change are sweeping the Western world at an astonishing speed. Liberal democratic...
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July 2022
Antisemitism and the University of London: Statement by David Hirsh
By David Hirsh
A debate is raging at Goldsmiths, University of London after the President of the Student Union tweeted that...
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July 2022
Book Review | The Wealthy: Chronicle of a Jewish Family (1763-1948)
By Liam Hoare
At the age of 40, having worked as a teacher and an official in the Israeli education ministry...
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July 2022
Arabs sharing government power with Jews in Israel is the new normal. It works, and there is no turning back
By Ron Gerlitz
Written shortly before the collapse of the Israeli coalition government, Ron Gerlitz, CEO of aChord – Social Psychology...
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June 2022
Fathom Opinion | A Left-Winger’s Lament for the Israeli Coalition
By Jack Omer-Jackaman
Written shortly before yesterday’s long anticipated break-up of the Israeli government, Jack Omer-Jackaman argues that leftists like himself...
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June 2022
The most important creative output in modern Hebrew literature since Agnon: Yael Halevi-Wise appreciates the life and work of A.B.Yehoshua...
By Yael Halevi-Wise
Yael Halevi-Wise marks the passing of her friend, the Israeli novelist, short story writer and playwright, A.B.Yehoshua. Author...
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June 2022
Looking Forward by Farming Upwards: Israeli Diplomacy in South East Asia
By Haim Shweky
Haim Shweky was the cultural attaché to the Israeli embassy in Vietnam between 2018-2019. He recounts his time...
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June 2022
The Boston Mapping Project: BDS and the Paranoid Style of Politics
By Richard L. Cravatts
Richard L. Cravatts is President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. The Boston ‘Mapping Project’...
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June 2022
‘What is your nation, if I may ask?’: Antisemitism and Zionism in James Joyce’s Ulysses
By Noga Emanuel
In 2022 book-lovers celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, which tracks the...
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June 2022
Understanding decision-making in the Palestinian arenas
By Michael Milshtein
BICOM Director Richard Pater speaks to Dr Michael Milshtein, a colonel (res.) in the Israel Defense Forces and...
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June 2022
Christians and the reconciliation route to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict
By Cary Nelson
A few months ago, Presbyterians for Middle East Peace (PFMEP) published Peace And Faith: Christian Churches and the...
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June 2022
Algeria, where are your Saturday people, and where are your Sunday people?
By Lela Gilbert
Lela Gilbert is a Fellow at Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom and the author of Saturday People,...
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June 2022
Beyond Liberal Peacemaking: New Initiatives in Israel
By Calev Ben-Dor
With the peace process frozen, some groups – Mosaica, Shrinking the Conflict Initiative, Women Wage Peace, Shaharit, the Herbert...
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May 2022
How Israeli & Palestinian Peacebuilders Can Leverage Post-Pandemic Trends in Philanthropy
By Adam Basciano
Adam Basciano is the co-founder and former director of IPF Atid, Israel Policy Forum’s network of next generation...
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May 2022
Fathom Opinion | ‘We are suffocating among people who think that they are absolutely right’: When totalitarian speech invades the...
By Hedda Harari-Spencer
Hedda Harari-Spencer is a Senior Lecturer in Hebrew at Tufts University. All translations from French are her own....
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May 2022
The Three Best Books on Understanding Evil
By Stephen de Wijze
Stephen de Wijze is senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Manchester and the co-editor with...
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May 2022
The political odyssey of Ayman Odeh
By Calev Ben-Dor
What took Ayman Odeh, the young Arab politician who rose to prominence before the 2015 elections and was...
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May 2022
‘Israel Is Living On Borrowed Time’: Yossi Melman on Security Threats and Social Divisions
By Yossi Melman
In early April, deputy editor Samuel Nurding sat down with Haaretz’s intelligence and security correspondent Yossi Melman and spoke about...
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May 2022
The Anti-Israel Politicisation of the US Academy: The Next Phase is Happening at California and Illinois
By Cary Nelson
The University of California and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign UIUC are on the verge of green-lighting...
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May 2022
My Israeli Music | Hen Mazzig
By Hen Mazzig
Hen Mazzig is an Israeli writer living in London. He is a Senior Fellow at The Tel Aviv...
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May 2022
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Israeli-Palestinian Peace: The Abraham Accords have created space for a radical transformation in our thinking
By Koby Huberman
Koby Huberman argues the Abraham Accords have made possible a paradigm shift in the way we think of...
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April 2022
An Open Letter to Anti-Zionists from a Veteran of the Left
By Kathleen Hayes
Kathleen Hayes invites the ‘anti-Zionist’ Left to think again. For 25 years, I was a member of a...
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April 2022
Israel on Netflix | Maktub (2017)
By Noga Emanuel
Noga Emanuel kicks off our new irregular series looking at Israel on Netflix with her take on Maktub,...
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April 2022
British Christian Zionism (Part 3): Reverend William Hechler – from Hovevei Zion to Herzl and beyond
By Philip Earl Steele
Philip Earl Steele examines the contribution of Reverend William Hechler to the early Zionist movement and argues that...
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April 2022
Fathom Opinion | ‘Al-Aqsa is in danger’ is a dangerous lie. ‘Temple Denial’ is antisemitic historical revisionism. It’s time for...
By Richard L. Cravatts
Richard L. Cravatts is President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Last week in Jerusalem,...
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April 2022
Understanding the recent terror attacks in Israel
By Ely Karmon
On 4 April deputy editor Samuel Nurding spoke with Dr Ely Karmon about the recent terrorist attacks in...
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April 2022
Diary | Back from the ‘Other Side’: Reflections on a Visit to the West Bank and East Jerusalem
By Mike Prashker
Mike Prashker is an Israeli educator, social entrepreneur, writer and public speaker. He founded MERCHAVIM – The Institute...
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April 2022
My Israeli Music | Tal Kra-Oz
By Tal Kra-Oz
Tal Kra-Oz is a writer based in Tel Aviv. Previous contributors to this series have done an excellent...
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April 2022
Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai | An interview with Matti Friedman
By Matti Friedman
In early March, Fathom's deputy editor Calev Ben-Dor sat down with Matti Friedman to discuss his new book,...
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March 2022
Book Review | Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai
By Calev Ben-Dor
Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai is the latest in Matti Friedman’s wonderful array of books...
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March 2022
Israel Needs to Talk about the Arab Riots of May 2021
By Russell A. Shalev
In little more than a week in May 2021, Arab rioters set ablaze 10 synagogues and 112 Jewish...
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March 2022
Keir Starmer’s attempt to portray the Labour Party as having ‘closed the door’ on antisemitism is premature
By Euan Phillips
In 2021, after the EHRC-mandated rule changes to tackle antisemitism had been approved by his party, Sir Keir...
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March 2022
Fathom Opinion | The University of Toronto’s Antisemitism Problem
By Stuart Kamenetsky
Stuart Kamenetsky is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The institution, he writes, has an...
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March 2022
Israel, Ukraine and the Right Side of History
By Dahlia Scheindlin
Dahlia Scheindlin, writing from Tel Aviv on 15 March, critically assesses the three reasons the Israeli government has...
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March 2022
Bennett, Putin and Zelensky: Between Mediation and Surrender
By Gerald M. Steinberg
Gerald M Steinberg is emeritus professor and founder of the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar...
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March 2022
The Meaning of Shahd Abusalama
By Marc Goldberg
Marc Goldberg of the Community Security Trust, writing in a personal capacity, casts a concerned eye over some...
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March 2022
Amnesty International, Israel and Race-Baiting
By Cary Nelson
Cary Nelson argues that Amnesty International’s report, by reducing a complex, political, national question involving two victim peoples...
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March 2022
Rejecting IHRA: The Avoidable Debacle at the University of Toronto
By David Matas and Aurel Braun
David Matas is an international human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg. The author of several books, he is...
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February 2022
The UK-Israeli trade relationship | An interview with Ian Austin
By Ian Austin
In this BICOM episode, Richard Pater speaks to Lord Ian Austin, UK Trade envoy to Israel, about his...
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February 2022
On Amnesty’s car-crash interview in Israel
By Shany Mor
When the two most senior Amnesty officials presented their new report in Israel they struggled to answer the...
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February 2022
The Three Best Recent Books on the Yishuv during the British Mandate, recommended by Donna Robinson Divine
By Donna Robinson Divine
Fathom has been inviting exerts to select their three favourite books about their subject. See Sara Hirschhorn on...
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February 2022
After Soleimani, is Iran losing control of its proxies?
By Danny Citrinowicz
The recent Houthi attack on strategic targets in the UAE has once again raised the issue of Iranian...
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February 2022
Mothers Against Violence: Viewing settlers’ violence under a ‘powerful womanly lens’
By Hamutal Gouri
Hamutal Gouri participated in the response of Mothers Against Violence to settler violence in the Palestinian village of...
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February 2022
The Arab citizens of Israel | An interview with Dr Arik Rudnitzky
By Arik Rudnitzky
In this BICOM Podcast, Richard Pater speaks to Dr Arik Rudnitzky, a researcher in the ‘Arab Society in...
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February 2022
Book Review | The European Left and the Jewish Question 1848-1993: Between Zionism and Antisemitism
By Colin Shindler
While many look to the rise of both Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany to understand the Left's evolution...
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February 2022
The Middle East in 2022
By BICOM
BICOM’s seventh annual forecast is a guide for policy makers and opinion formers to issues and events that...
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January 2022
Israel is sliding into a one-state reality
By Emanuel Shahaf
Emanuel Shahaf is Co-Chair of the Federation Movement which proposes a federal citizen state in Eretz-Israel/Palestine, excluding the...
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January 2022
My Israeli Music | Jonathan Spyer
By Jonathan Spyer
Jonathan Spyer is an Israeli analyst, writer, and journalist of Middle Eastern affairs. He emigrated to Israel from London...
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January 2022
The Israel Question and the Left: A Review Essay
By Barry Finger
Barry Finger is a frequent contributor to US socialist journals, a former shop steward and activist with the Public...
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January 2022
Britain should do less in the Middle East, but do it better | An Interview with Michael Stephens and Christopher...
By Michael Stephens and Christopher Phillips
What Next For Britain in the Middle East: Security, Trade and Foreign Policy after Brexit (I.B Tauris, 2021),...
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January 2022
Is Israel a 'Settler-Colonial' State? A debate between Alan Johnson and Leila Farsakh
By Alan Johnson
On 17 December Peter Beinart hosted an online discussion entitled, 'Professors Alan Johnson and Leila Farsakh on whether...
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January 2022
Rereading | The Idea of the Jewish State by Ben Halpern
By Donna Robinson Divine
Donna Robinson Divine is Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Emirita Professor of Government at Smith College....
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January 2022
My Israeli Music | Yossi Kuperwasser
By Yossi Kuperwasser
Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser was chief of the research division in IDF Military Intelligence, and until recently,...
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January 2022
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A filmmaker, a feminist, an Israeli, a Bedouin, a Palestinian. A conversation with Rana Abu Fraiha
By Calev Ben-Dor
Rana Abu Fraiha was born in the Bedouin town of Tel Sheva before leaving with her family at...
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December 2021
The Afghanistan retreat: We may soon be recalling why we went there in the first place.
By Tzvi Fleischer
Tzvi Fleischer argues the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal does not mark the end of the global conflict launched on...
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December 2021
Thomas Mann’s Philo-Semitism and Colm Toibin’s Thomas Mann
By Shalom Goldman
In January 1934, the Bavarian State Ministry of the Interior revoked the novelist Thomas Mann’s German citizenship, in...
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December 2021
A reply to David Davidi-Brown on the Israeli government's designation of six Palestinian NGOs
By Gerald M. Steinberg
Gerald M. Steinberg is the Director of NGO Monitor. Fathom published his supportive response to the Israel government’s...
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December 2021
Book Review | The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness
By Philip Spencer
The subtitle of this interesting memoir is ‘comfort in rootlessness’. This formulation is, as the author suggests, a...
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December 2021
It’s too soon to write the obituary of the anti-Iran alliance in the Middle East
By Jonathan Spyer
The claim that the pro-Western alliance in the region has collapsed in the wake of a US withdrawal...
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November 2021
The jibe ‘Progressive except for Palestine (PEP)’ is a cynical political strategy to exclude moderate progressives from debates on resolving...
By Philip Mendes
In this essay, Philip Mendes argues that the new buzzword for Palestinian nationalists, 'Progressive except for Palestine,' aimed...
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November 2021
Palestinian NGO Terror Links: Assessing the Implications of Israel's Designations (2)
By David Davidi-Brown
Fathom invited responses to the Israeli government’s decision to designate six Palestinian NGOs as prohibited terrorist fronts from...
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November 2021
‘Can’t You See He’s Fooled You All?’: An Open Letter to Peter Gabriel et al explaining why Israel is not...
By Alan Johnson
100 artists including Ken Loach, Mark Rylance and Susan Sarandon have signed an open letter indicting Israel as...
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November 2021
Book Review | War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East
By Efraim Halevy
Gershom Gorenberg, a historian and journalist, has spent years researching and writing this account of dramatic events in...
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November 2021
UK-Israel 2021 | Ambivalent Allies? Zionism, Israel and the Conservative Party from Balfour to Boris
By James Vaughan
James Vaughan is Lecturer in International History at the University of Aberystwyth. His current research focuses upon the...
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November 2021
Palestinian NGO Terror Links: Assessing the Implications of Israel’s Designations (1)
By Gerald M. Steinberg
Fathom invited responses to the Israeli government’s decision to designate six Palestinian NGOs as prohibited terrorist fronts from...
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November 2021
The Fourth Window, or the Wounds of Amos Oz
By Liam Hoare
Liam Hoare says The Fourth Window, a new documentary about Amos Oz by the Israeli filmmaker Yair Qedar,...
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November 2021
My Israeli Music | Lusil Blek
By Lusil Blek
Lusil Blek is an Israeli graphic designer. Her mother constantly reminds her that she started singing when she...
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November 2021
Book Review | Growing up Jewish in India: Synagogues, Customs and Communities from the Bene Israel to the Art of...
By Khinvraj Jangid
Growing up Jewish in India is a book about the Jews of India told from a variety of...
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October 2021
Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel After the May 2021 Unrest: A Survey by Sammy Smooha
By Sammy Smooha
In May 2021, for the first time in Israel, Arabs and Jews in the mixed cities of Haifa,...
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October 2021
Combatting gang crime and violence in Arab communities
By Michael Milshtein
Dr Michael Milshtein is head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern...
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October 2021
Rasmea Odeh: How an unrepentant Palestinian terrorist became a political hero of the anti-Zionist left
By Cary Nelson
Cary Nelson reviews Steven Lubet’s The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship....
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October 2021
Book Review | Hidden Heroes: One Woman's Story of Resistance and Rescue in The Soviet Union
By Yisrael Medad
From 1962, when Matzot for Russia’s Jews for the upcoming Passover holiday were dumped on the pavement in...
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October 2021
The Abraham Accords One Year On | An interview with Dr Moran Zaga
By Moran Zaga
Dr Moran Zaga is a research fellow at the University of Haifa focused on the geopolitics of the Gulf....
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October 2021
How Best to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism on the Left: An Exchange between Kathleen Hayes and Michael Walzer
By Kathleen Hayes Michael Walzer
Mosaic magazine ran four pieces in July 2021 focusing on the respective merits of the IHRA Definition of...
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October 2021
Opinion | Labour Party Conference 2021: 'Significant progress has been made on tackling antisemitism, but there is still a mountain...
By Luke Akehurst
I’ve spent most of the last week at the Labour Party’s Annual Conference, in my capacity as an...
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October 2021
Opinion | ‘Labour’s stance on Israel-Palestine is shifting back to the balanced, mature and constructive approach of the Blair-Brown years’:...
By Michael Rubin
Michael Rubin is the Director of Labour Friends of Israel. Six years ago, at his first conference as...
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Article
My Israeli Music: Keith Kahn-Harris on Israeli Metal, Punk and Noise
By Keith Kahn-Harris
Keith Kahn-Harris is the author of Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge, and Strange Hate: Antisemitism,...
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October 2021
What does the withdrawal from Afghanistan mean for the US role in the Middle East?
By Jonathan Rynhold
Professor Jonathan Rynhold, the Deputy Head of the department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, spoke to Fathom-BICOM...
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September 2021
Amazon Prime's Human Factor: American negotiators and the failure of the Oslo Peace Process
By Calev Ben-Dor
Calev Ben-Dor praises The Human Factor as a great piece of documentary making but argues it is ultimately...
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September 2021
We Shall Be as A City on A Hill: Trump, ‘Progressive’ Antisemitism, and the Loss of American Jewish Exceptionalism
By Shalom Lappin
Shalom Lappin argues that American Jews are caught between a white supremacist threat from the far right and...
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September 2021
My Israeli Music: Aaron Kalman
By Aaron Kalman
Prior to joining Lightricks, a Jerusalem-based hightech unicorn developing apps to unleash creativity, Aaron Kalman was a senior...
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September 2021
Jean Améry as a Critic of the Anti-Israel Left
By Alvin Rosenfeld
Jean Améry is best known as the author of At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on...
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September 2021
Book Review | More Than I Love My Life
By Liam Hoare
In October 1951, Rade Panić—who had fought for Josip Broz Tito’s partisans during the Second World War—committed suicide...
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September 2021
My Israeli Music: DJ Antithesis
By DJ Antithesis
Samuel Green, aka DJ Antithesis, produces the longest-running Israeli music podcast: Kol Cambridge. Also known as The Zionist...
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September 2021
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Bar Kochba and Us: The Israeli Debate during Tisha Be’Av
By Calev Ben-Dor
Calev Ben-Dor argues that the fight raging today between Israeli politicians about how to interpret the meaning of...
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July 2021
Fathom Long Read | The Progressive Saviour Complex: Quakers, American Jews and Israel
By Alex Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky
Alex Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky are senior non-resident scholars at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and co-authors...
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July 2021
Iran under President Raisi: What should the region and the West expect? | An interview with Henry Rome
By Henry Rome
On 13 July, Fathom’s deputy editor Samuel Nurding sat down with the Eurasia Group’s Henry Rome to discuss...
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July 2021
Rereadings | The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership by Yehuda Avner
By Liam Hoare
‘The ultimate insider’s account’ wrote George Gruen on the release of Yehuda Avner’s book The Prime Ministers in...
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July 2021
Criticism of Israel is not Antisemitic. But ‘Anti-Zionism’ is. This is why
By Russell A. Shalev
Russell Shalev argues that human rights movements cannot adequately address anti-Jewish discrimination, harassment or violence without recognising the...
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July 2021
Anshel Pfeffer and Antisemitism: A Reply by Ben Cohen
By Ben Cohen
Ben Cohen is the author of Some Of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism. He...
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July 2021
‘Choosing comrades’: Solidarity in the Middle East and Labour’s foreign policy
By Gary Kent
In this essay, Gary Kent argues that the British Labour Party should seek to amplify the voices of...
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July 2021
Opinion | Liberal Zionists fight for liberalism in Israel, and Zionism abroad
By Paul Gross
Before immigrating to Israel from the UK in 2007 Paul Gross worked for the British government on religious...
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July 2021
The erasure from historical memory of Israeli statehood offers and Palestinian rejections is badly distorting today’s debate about Middle East...
By Salo Aizenberg
The erasure from our historical memory of Israeli attempts to achieve peace by agreeing to Palestinian statehood, and...
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July 2021
Fathom Long Read | Valentina Azarova: A Controversy Assessed
By Cary Nelson
Debate rages about the possible appointment of Valentina Azarova to the position of Director of the Toronto Law...
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July 2021
UK-Israel 2021 | Mandate: The Palestine Crucible 1919-1939
By Colin Shindler
Three years ago, a retired British army officer, Ian Westerman, wrote an article in Ha'aretz, entitled 'What did...
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July 2021
Incoming! Watch out, Peter Beinart is Fighting the Good Fight (again)
By Joshua A. Brook
Peter Beinart backed the US invasion of Iraq. He called it ‘the Good Fight’ and wrote a 2006...
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July 2021
UK-Israel 2021 | The Flourishing of UK-Israel Academic Networks
By John Levy
John Levy, Director of the Academic Study Group on Israel and the Middle East (ASG) explains how his...
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July 2021
Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir
By Kathleen Hayes
'I swam in a sea of antisemitism for years and didn’t notice the water was filthy,’ writes Kathleen...
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July 2021
Book Review | Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future
By Justin Bronk
Drone Wars is an ambitious attempt to provide a narrative framework for the development, combat usage and future...
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July 2021
Against Solutionism, Against Nowism: For ‘the Longer, Shorter Path’ | An interview with Moshe Ya'alon
By Moshe Ya'alon
Former Israeli Minister of Defence Lieutenant General (Ret.) Moshe ‘Bogie’ Ya'alon was born in Kiryat Haim in 1950...
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June 2021
Opinion | Iran now controls three borders with Israel. Hamas’s missile war was a foretaste of what Tehran intends next
By Kyle Orton
Israel has been thwarting Iran’s global terrorist operations but has been less successful closer to home. The IRGC...
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June 2021
‘The Monash Soviet’ and Israel: A case study of how the Australian campus far left lost its way after the...
By Philip Mendes
For a half century, for good and for ill, Western universities have been incubating world views which go...
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June 2021
My Israeli Music: Hamutal Gouri
By Hamutal Gouri
Hamutal Gouri is the former executive director of the Dafna Fund, a feminist fund working to promote women's organisations in Israel. She...
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June 2021
The Three Best Books on Antisemitism, recommended by Dave Rich
By Dave Rich
Fathom is inviting experts to select their three favourite books about a subject. The series began with Sara...
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June 2021
Book Review | Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities
By Eve Garrard
Academic freedom is the liberty which academics have, within the confines of the law, to question and test...
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June 2021
Gazan Futures | After Operation Guardians of the Wall
By Amos Yadlin
Amos Yadlin discusses the recent asymmetric conflict between Israel and Hamas, providing five insights about the operation and...
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June 2021
Gazan Futures | Five ways to strengthen the Palestinian Authority and facilitate its return to Gaza
By Celine Touboul
Celine Touboul is the co-Executive Director of the Economic Cooperation Foundation (ECF), an Israeli policy-planning think-tank. Celine leads...
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June 2021
Gazan Futures | Prospects of a long-term armistice or hudna with Hamas
By Ehud Yaari
Ehud Yaari is an expert on Middle Eastern affairs. He is the author of eight books on the...
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June 2021
Naftali Bennett and Israel’s (divided) National Religious Community: A Guide for the Perplexed
By Calev Ben-Dor
The new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is a ‘religious-Zionist’. But what does that mean and why has...
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June 2021
My Israeli Music: Michael Wegier
By Michael Wegier
In a new Fathom series, we invite guests to select their favourite Israeli music and tell us a little about...
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June 2021
Opinion | The UK and EU should recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — and Palestine
By Liam Hoare
In April 1949, what was then the New Statesman and Nation — at the time aligned with the...
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June 2021
Britain and Israel in 1948: A note in response to Ronnie Fraser
By Natan Aridan
In March 2021 Fathom published ‘The Rockiest of Starts: Anglo-Israeli Relations 1948-1950’ by Natan Aridan, editor of Israel...
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June 2021
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2017 Fathom Interview with Naftali Bennett
By Naftali Bennett
‘Forming a Palestinian state along the lines that many readers of Fathom believe is the way forward would...
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Winter 2017
Peter Beinart and Palestinian Refugee ‘Return’: A Critique
By Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf
Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf are the authors of The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the...
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June 2021
The Danger of Greater Israel
By Michael Walzer
In this urgent essay, written before the new Israeli coalition government was agreed, but with great relevance to...
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June 2021
Opinion | A desire to remove Netanyahu has created a coalition stretching from Naftali Bennett to Mansor Abbas. Can it...
By Calev Ben-Dor
The (four-time) failure of the right wing and ultra-Orthodox parties to garner 61 seats, the steady erosion of...
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June 2021
How to Defeat Hamas
By Toby Greene
Toby Greene argues that military tools are not enough. What’s needed is a long-term vision for sustainable political...
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June 2021
Book Review| The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War
By Paul Iddon
Sam Faddis's recent account of his time as a CIA operations officer in Iraq in the run-up to...
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June 2021
Still Standing, but Shaky: Jordan at 100
By Asher Susser
Asher Susser is Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University (TAU). On the occasion of Jordan’s...
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May 2021
‘Calling a truce with left-wing antisemitism’: The Case Against the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism
By John Hyman and Anthony Julius
University College London’s governing Council voted in November 2019 to adopt the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) Working...
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May 2021
UK-Israel 2021 | When Britain almost declared war on Israel
By Ronnie Fraser
At the beginning of January 1949, eight months after Britain had withdrawn from Palestine, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin...
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May 2021
I hope that UCL faculty and staff will defend IHRA, as I would do were I with them
By Michael Walzer
Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and editor emeritus...
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May 2021
Fathom Long Read | Antisemitism and the IHRA at University College London
By Cary Nelson
For twenty years Cary Nelson was part of the elected leadership of the American Association of University Professors,...
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May 2021
Read it again. Read better. Dave Rich on Derek Penslar’s serial misrepresentations of the IHRA
By Dave Rich
Dave Rich is Head of Policy at the Community Security Trust. He argues that Derek Penslar’s criticisms of...
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May 2021
Cultivating Israel Hatred in the University: The role of the T-Group Classroom
By Channa Newman and Thomas Mullane
The Basic Skills Training Group, or simply ‘T-group', was popularised in the 1950s as a humanistic therapeutic approach...
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May 2021
UK-Israel2021 | The Roots of the ‘Al Aqsa is in Danger’ Myth: Alfred Mond and a Speech Distorted
By Yisrael Medad
In 1921 British politician Alfred Mond, visiting Palestine, said ‘our sanctuary, our Temple, we will construct as an...
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May 2021
The UK and US can help build an International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. The time is now.
By John Lyndon
This journal has long argued that people-to-people peacemaking programmes on a grand scale are essential to advance the...
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April 2021
Once Again on the Jerusalem Declaration: A Rejoinder to Derek Penslar and Michael Walzer
By Cary Nelson
Cary Nelson’s responds to replies by Derek Penslar and Michael Walzer to his Fathom article ‘Accommodating the New...
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April 2021
IHRA and JDA: Examining Definitions of Antisemitism in 2021
By Jeffrey Herf
Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland College Park. His latest book, Israel’s...
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April 2021
‘A Remarkably Aggressive Naïveté’: A Response to Derek Penslar and Michael Walzer
By Richard Landes
Richard Landes argues that the claim made by the signatories of the Jerusalem Declaration that – in the...
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April 2021
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism may inadvertently give cover to antisemites
By Gerald Izenberg
Gerald N. Izenberg is Prof. Emeritus of History at Washington University in St. Louis. He argues that the...
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April 2021
Diary from London | Adam Ognall, Chief Executive, New Israel Fund UK
By Adam Ognall
After ten years in post, Adam Ognall is stepping down as CEO of the New Israel Fund UK...
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April 2021
Palestinian Elections: As In 2006, A Dangerous Idea
By Elliott Abrams
Elliott Abrams is Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Deputy...
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April 2021
Why I Signed the Jerusalem Declaration: A Response to Cary Nelson
By Derek Penslar
Derek Penslar is William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University and Resident Faculty at the...
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April 2021
The Jerusalem Declaration: A Response to Cary Nelson
By Michael Walzer
Michael Walzer is Professor Emeritus of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University. For many...
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April 2021
Book Review | The Star and the Scepter: A Diplomatic History of Israel
By David Rodman
The State of Israel has existed for a little over 70 years. A medium power by global standards,...
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April 2021
President Biden's Middle East Policy
By Yossi Kuperwasser
Yossi Kuperwasser argues that President Biden's Middle East policy reflects the tension between his understanding that the region...
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April 2021
Fathom Long Read | Accommodating the New Antisemitism: a Critique of ‘The Jerusalem Declaration’
By Cary Nelson
Download and print a PDF version here. In this comprehensive critique Cary Nelson argues that the recent ‘Jerusalem...
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April 2021
Book Review | Stories from Palestine: Narratives of Resilience
By Zeina M. Barakat
To be entrusted with someone’s narrative is a privilege. To grant such access … is an act of...
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April 2021
Three best books on Zionism, recommended by Gil Troy
By Gil Troy
Fathom is inviting experts to select their three favourite books about a subject. The series began with Sara...
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April 2021
Mansour Abbas: Islamist Kingmaker of Israeli politics
By Calev Ben-Dor
Arab political parties have become central players in Israeli politics. But how has a young dentist turned politician...
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March 2021
Opinion | Israel voted for change, but that’s only the beginning of the story
By Toby Greene
During Benjamin Netanyahu’s first premiership in the late 1990s, his crisis-driven leadership style led British Ambassador David Manning...
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March 2021
UK-Israel2021 | The Rockiest of Starts: Anglo-Israeli Relations 1948-1950
By Natan Aridan
Natan Aridan is Lecturer in Israel Studies and researcher at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of...
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March 2021
Book Review | The Wondering Jew
By Robin Moss
In the spring and summer of 2017, Micah Goodman caused something of a publishing sensation with Milkud 67,...
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March 2021
Israel's political system is broken. Here is how to fix it.
By Yohanan Plesner
As Israelis head to the polls for the fourth time in two years, Yohanan Plesner, President of the...
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March 2021
Israel Election Special | Eight Israelis explain their vote
By Fathom Editors
Next Tuesday, 23 March, Israelis will go to the polls for the fourth time in two years. Slowly emerging...
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March 2021
Israel Election 2021 | 'Why I am voting for the Likud'
By Fleur Hassan-Nahoum
The main reason I am voting Likud in this election is because two years ago after years of...
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March 2021
Israel Election 2021 | 'Why I am voting for Yesh Atid'
By Terry Newman
The big ideological battle of the day is Centrism vs the rest. Centrism not as the middle point...
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March 2021
Israel Election 2021 | 'Why I am voting for the Labour Party'
By Peter Lerner
Avoda, Israel's Labour Party, is the party that established the State of Israel. In November 2020, the ideology...
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March 2021
Israel Election 2021 | 'Why I am voting for Yamina'
By Shraga Alweiss
The Israeli public approaches these elections battered and bruised. Quite simply, there have been too many failed attempts...
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March 2021
Israel Election 2021 | 'Why I am voting for New Hope'
By Emmanuel Navon
The fact that Israel has experienced four snap elections within two years is not the outcome of a...
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March 2021
Israel Election 2021 | 'Why I am (reluctantly) voting for Meretz'
By Ittay Flescher
As an Israeli with progressive values who believes in seeing equality for all people who live in this...
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March 2021
Israel Election 2021 | 'Why I am voting for Yisrael Beytenu'
By Oded Forer
These elections are about the future of the State of Israel. Not just some theoretical conceptualisation of where...
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March 2021
Israel Election 2021 | 'Why I am voting for the Joint List'
By Guli Dolev-Hashiloni
At first glance, it may seem like these elections – like the previous three – concern one topic:...
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March 2021
Book Review | Jews Don’t Count
By Sarah Brown
The premise of Jews Don’t Count is that antisemitism is too often glossed over – blanked out –...
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March 2021
Trump and Netanyahu: The Disagreements Beneath The Surface
By Ofer Zalzberg
In this insightful essay Ofer Zalzberg, Director of the Middle East Program at the Herbert C. Kelman Institute...
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March 2021
Fathom Long Read | The Meaning of David Miller
By David Hirsh
According to Bristol University Professor David Miller, ‘Britain is in the grip of an assault on its public...
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March 2021
Book Review | Judaism Straight Up, Why Real Religion Endures
By Daniel Goldman
Professor Moshe Koppel is the founder and executive chairman of Forum Kohelet, an influential think tank instrumental in...
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March 2021
Book Review | The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions
By Kyle Orton
A little over a year ago, U.S. President Donald Trump gave the order to kill Qassem Soleimani, the...
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March 2021
Book Review | Matzpen: A History of Israeli Dissidence
By Colin Shindler
Lutz Fiedler's highly informative book about the far Left group, Matzpen, is a welcome addition to the recording...
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March 2021
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The IHRA Definition, Institutional Antisemitism, and Wittgenstein
By Eve Garrard
In the wake of the EHRC report on antisemitism in the UK Labour Party, a variety of complaints...
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December 2020
Book Review | Head of the Mossad: In Pursuit of a Safe and Secure Israel
By Paul Gross
The Director of the Mossad has to think geopolitically. He (and so far it has always been a...
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December 2020
Israel Without Sharon’s Coma: A Counterfactual History
By Calev Ben-Dor
How might the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have looked had Ariel Sharon not suffered two strokes that left him incapacitated?...
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December 2020
‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.’ The tenacity of an anti-Zionist fable
By Shai Afsai
Some authors are unwilling to dispense with unsubstantiated stories, opting instead to put scholarly standards aside in their...
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December 2020
Fathom Long Read | Adorno and Iran: Critical Theory and Islamic Antisemitism
By Stephan Grigat
‘After Auschwitz’, said the German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno, we should embrace a new categorical imperative:...
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December 2020
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020): A Tribute
By Michael Wegier
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks was a good friend to this journal, meeting with its editor when it was...
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December 2020
Opinion | Jews are asking for protection from their universities from antisemitism. David Feldman’s ‘All Lives Matter’ response is not...
By David Hirsh
This is a response to an article by David Feldman, ‘The government should not impose a faulty definition...
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December 2020
Fathom Podcast | Will Saudi Arabia make peace with Israel?
By Sir John Jenkins
In this podcast, Fathom's Deputy Editor Samuel Nurding speaks with Sir John Jenkins, a senior fellow at Policy...
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December 2020
Book Review | Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making
By Liam Hoare
In 2013, the New York-based Israeli novelist Rudy Namdar published The Ruined House. Both upon its initial Hebrew...
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December 2020
Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People | An interview with Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy
By Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy
Fathom Deputy Editor Samuel Nurding spoke with Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy about Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and...
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November 2020
The Unique Voice of Ruth Gavison (1945-2020)
By Alexander Yakobson
Alexander Yakobson is co-author with Amnon Rubinstein of Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and...
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November 2020
What Corbyn’s favourite sociologists Greg Philo and Mike Berry get wrong about contemporary antisemitism
By Matthew Bolton
Matthew Bolton is the co-author with Frederick Harry Pitts of Corbynism: A Critical Approach, praised by Professor Paul...
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November 2020
Symposium: Biden and Israel | ‘Biden will not reprise the acrimony of Barack Obama’s dealings with Israel. He may prove...
By Joshua Muravchik
A Biden administration carries the promise of restoring bipartisanship to support for the Jewish state, says Joshua Muravchik....
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November 2020
Symposium: Biden and Israel | Don't expect to see the Obama/Kerry paradigm
By Robert Satloff
Robert Satloff, the Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argues that whilst the Middle...
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November 2020
Symposium: Biden and Israel | ‘There is simply too much damage to repair around the world. The Israelis and the...
By Jo-Ann Mort
A Biden/Harris administration will seek to return foreign policy to the Obama track, but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will...
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November 2020
Symposium: Biden and Israel | ‘The biggest challenge for US-Israeli relations will be Iran. The Biden team has been vague,...
By Jonathan Rynhold
While the theatrics of Biden and Netanyahu’s personal relationship may engage the attention of media pundits, policymakers will...
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November 2020
Symposium: Biden and Israel | The Abraham Accords shattered a policy paralysis and a cycle of failed mediation and negotiations...
By Alex Ryvchin
Trump’s decision to upend the failed foreign policy establishment orthodoxy about the Middle East Peace Process is being...
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November 2020
Diary from Ramat Gan | ‘The humanities classroom is one of the great achievements of Western civilisation’
By William Kolbrener
William Kolbrener is professor of English Literature at Bar Ilan University. He has written widely on the literature, politics...
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November 2020
Corbyn is one man. Left-Wing Antisemitism is a Tradition
By Alan Johnson
Alan Johnson, editor of Fathom and author of our 2019 Report Institutionally Antisemitic Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the...
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October 2020
Fathom Report | Institutionally Antisemitic: Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party
By Alan Johnson
This major Fathom report finds the Labour Party is now ‘institutionally antisemitic’ as the term is defined in...
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March 2019
Rabin’s 1989 Peace Initiative – When The Security Hawk First Displayed His Dovish Peace Policy
By Joel Singer
Joel Singer is the former Legal Adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry under the Yitzhak Rabin-Shimon Peres Government. He...
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October 2020
The Poverty of 'Anti-Zionism' and the Renewal of Zionism
By Alex Ryvchin
‘Anti-Zionism’ writes Alex Ryvchin, ‘has spawned White Papers that locked Jews in a Europe intent on killing them,...
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October 2020
Diary from Tel Aviv | Thinking in Quarantine
By Dahlia Scheindlin
Dahlia Scheindlin is a leading international public opinion analyst, a political consultant and a policy fellow at the Century Foundation; she...
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October 2020
CALL FOR PAPERS: Fathoming UK-Israel2021
By Fathom Editors
In 2021 Fathom will publish a set of articles about the UK-Israel relationship, to be collected into an eBook, and perhaps a...
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October 2020
Images of Israel in India
By Khinvraj Jangid
Dr Khinvraj Jangid is Director of the Centre for Israel Studies at Jindal School of International Affairs, OP...
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October 2020
Rereadings | The Arthur Hertzberg / Hugh Trevor-Roper Controversy about Antisemitism
By Bernard Harrison
Fathom is continuing its series of Rereadings, in which writers revisit classic texts, with Philosopher Bernard Harrison on...
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October 2020
Diary from Tel Aviv | Among the Furious Tribes in Lockdown Israel
By Calev Ben-Dor
Fathom is introducing a new kind of voice to our readers. From time to time we will publish...
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October 2020
Peter Beinart’s Grotesque Utopia
By Shany Mor
Peter Beinart’s essay ‘Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine’ saw him give up in the two-state...
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October 2020
Fathom eBook | Rescuing Israeli-Palestinian Peace: The Fathom Essays 2016-2020
By Fathom Editors
Fathom's new eBook, Rescuing Israeli-Palestinian Peace: The Fathom Essays 2016-2020, contains over 60 articles, reports and interviews. The editors believe it is the most comprehensive...
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September 2020
The UAE-Israel Deal: Like a Bridge Over Troubled Sands
By Koby Huberman
Koby Huberman is co-founder of the Israeli Regional Initiative Group, which advocates a regional approach for a two-state...
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September 2020
Communists for the Jewish State: British Communists and the Daily Worker in 1948
By John Strawson
'The British Mandate in Palestine is now ended and the Jewish State of Israel has been proclaimed …...
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September 2020
Opinions | What Bibi learned from Arik. And why it might still not be enough.
By Calev Ben-Dor
The prime minister is using Ariel Sharon’s old playbook to manage multiple crises: keep your hands on the...
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September 2020
Fathom Book Reviews
By Fathom Editors
The Fathom editorial team are seeking reviewers. If you would like to review one of the books below for Fathom,...
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Article
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Fathom eBook | Essays on the British Mandate in Palestine, 1920-1948
By Fathom Editors
Fathom has published a new eBook to mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the British Mandate,...
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August 2020
‘Balancing the liberal and the national was the genetic code of the movement Jabotinsky and Begin founded’: Dan Meridor on...
By Dan Meridor
Dan Meridor served at various times as the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, Minister of Justice...
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July 2020
Israel and Diaspora Jewry: Is the Coronavirus Crisis an opportunity to redesign the relationship?
By Shira Ruderman
Shira Ruderman argues that the coronavirus virus has presented Israel, the Nation State of the Jewish people, with...
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July 2020
Opinions | And the Walls Came Tumblin’ Down?
By Shaul Judelman
Rabbi Shaul Judelman is the Israeli co-Director for the NGO Roots, a unique network of local Palestinians and Israelis...
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July 2020
Mandate100 | The ‘Antisemite Ernest Bevin’ and the day Britain recognised the State of Israel
By Ronnie Fraser
Ronnie Fraser was working in the Israel State archives when he came across a lengthy and confidential document...
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July 2020
Mandate100 | Palestinians and the Partition Plan
By Mustafa Kabha
The editors thank Bloomsbury Academic (US), an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., for permission to reprint this chapter, a...
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July 2020
Opinions | The Wisdom of Peter Beinart’s Grandmother
By Lyn Julius
Lyn Julius is the author of Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished...
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July 2020
Opinions | How Not To Quote Ze’ev Jabotinsky: A Reply to Peter Beinart
By Yisrael Medad
Yisrael Medad argues that Peter Beinart’s quoting of Ze’ev Jabotinsky in his recent essay, as in his earlier...
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July 2020
'The unilateral application of Israeli sovereignty is necessary to move the peace process forward’: An Open Letter to Boris Johnson...
By Yossi Kuperwasser
On 1 July the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote an op-ed in the Israeli press, titled ‘As...
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July 2020
Dore Gold, Amos Gilead and Ghaith al-Omari: Three views on annexation / applying Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank
By Fathom Editors
BICOM-Fathom Webinar with Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Amos Gilead on implications of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and Israel's...
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July 2020
Mandate100 | ‘A dangerous people to quarrel with’: Lloyd George’s Secret Testimony to the Peel Commission Revealed
By Oren Kessler
Oren Kessler reveals the secret 1937 testimony given by David Lloyd George to the Palestine Royal Commission. Lloyd...
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July 2020
Opinions | What John McDonnell Still Does Not Understand
By Eve Garrard
For John McDonnell to pretend that Rebecca Long-Bailey lost her shadow cabinet job because she criticised Israel is...
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July 2020
The Lie That Will Not Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
By Dave Rich
This is Dave Rich's introduction to the forthcoming second edition of The Lie That Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols of the...
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July 2020
Book Review | Palestinian Refugees After 1948
By Simon Waldman
The Palestinian refugee problem has attracted the attention of many scholars from a variety of disciplines. When a...
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July 2020
Israel’s Annexation Policy – Why Now and What Next?
By Calev Ben-Dor
Deputy Fathom Editor Calev Ben-Dor offers Fathom readers a comprehensive review of the Israeli debate about, and likely...
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June 2020
Zeev Sternhell (1935-2020)
By Alan Johnson
Fathom Editor Alan Johnson reflects on the life and work of Zeev Sternhell who died this week. Obituary notices...
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June 2020
Mandate100 | The Year 1939: Why did Britain Abandon the Two-State Solution on the Eve of World War Two?
By Yaakov Lappin
Using documents in the National Archive, including German documents photographed and sent to Whitehall by an American spy,...
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June 2020
Rereading Past Continuous: Revisiting Yaakov Shabtai’s ‘Revolution’ in Hebrew Prose
By Liam Hoare
Liam Hoare launches a new Fathom series in which our writers re-read classic texts. Past Continuous, Yaakov Shabtai’s...
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June 2020
Book Review | The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace
By Alex Ryvchin
There is perhaps no aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is subject to greater distortion than the so-called...
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June 2020
Why Memmi Matters
By Susie Linfield
Albert Memmi, who died recently, was a Jew, an Arab, a Zionist, an anti-colonialist, a secularist, a socialist,...
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June 2020
The Yom Kippur War and British Politics
By Robert Philpot
Thousands of posters of Golda Meir appeared in the windows of Jewish homes; money poured in to fundraising...
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June 2020
The Soldiers are Still Talking
By Tal Kra-Oz
Soldiers' Talk: Protective Edge (2019) is a set of interviews with those who served in Gaza in 2014....
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June 2020
Book Review | Arafat and Abbas: Portraits of Leadership in a State Postponed
By Khinvraj Jangid
The Palestinian national movement has been in disarray for a long time. The failings of its political leadership...
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June 2020
From Gil Troy to Susie Linfeld: Fathom writers share their favourite films and books about Israel (Week 8)
By Fathom Editors
Each fortnight Fathom writers have been recommending Israel-related books, films or podcasts to help our readers through the lockdown. This...
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June 2020
Intersectionality and Antisemitism – A New Approach
By Karin Stögner
Karin Stögner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Passau, Germany and co-ordinator of the Research Network...
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May 2020
Mandate 100 | ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’: S. Yizhar's and Amos Oz’s Stories of Jewish Struggle in the British...
By Liam Hoare
S. Yizhar is often called the founding father of Israeli literature and Amos Oz was for many the...
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May 2020
‘Seventy years we’ve been told we’re brothers in arms! Why not brothers in the economy, brothers in life?’ The Druze...
By Daniel Klein
Recent angry protests by Israel’s Druze citizens are about much more than shekels, argues Daniel Klein. Druze MK...
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May 2020
From Matti Friedman to Einat Wilf: Fathom writers share their favourite films and books about Israel (Week 7)
By Fathom Editors
Each fortnight Fathom writers have been recommending Israel-related books, films or podcasts to help our readers through the lockdown. This...
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May 2020
Book Review | Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad
By Kyle Orton
Early in his new book, Your Sons Are At Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad, The Washington Institute’s...
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May 2020
Mandate 100 | ‘Negating the Diaspora’? Theory and Practice in Yishuv-Diaspora Relations during the Mandate
By Donna Robinson Divine
Donna Robinson Divine was the President of the Association for Israel Studies. In this careful and empathic account of...
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May 2020
Yair Lapid is now the leader of Israel’s ‘democracy camp’
By Paul Gross
Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid’s recent 6,000-word essay set out a centrist vision of Israel’s future and warned...
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May 2020
Let us be Social Democrats. There is a way back for the Israeli Labour Party.
By Tal Harris
Tal Harris is a member of the central committee of the Israeli Labour Party and was among the...
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May 2020
Book Review | Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality
By Yisrael Medad
This slim volume traces Ian Lustick's thinking on why the two-state solution, which he terms the TSS, has...
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May 2020
BICOM Staffers Book and Film Lockdown Recommendations (Week 6)
By BICOM
Each week Fathom writers have been recommending Israel-related books, films or podcasts to help our readers through the lockdown. This...
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May 2020
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Mandate100 | Perfidious Albion or Strategic Realpolitik? Reassessing Britain’s 1939 White Paper
By Ben Crome
As part of Fathom’s series of essays marking the 100th anniversary of the British Mandate, Ben Crome examines...
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April 2020
Book Review | MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman
By Paul Iddon
Ben Hubbard’s new book is a biography of Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, popularly referred...
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April 2020
From John Strawson to Lyn Julius: Fathom writers share their favourite books and films (Week 5)
By Fathom Editors
Each week five Fathom writers will recommend Israel-related books, films or podcasts to help our readers through the lockdown. This...
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April 2020
Why the world needs to worry about the expiration of the Iran arms embargo in October 2020
By Ezra Friedman
Ezra Friedman warns that the expiration of the Iran arms embargo in October 2020 will allow Iran not...
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April 2020
Book Review | A State At Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion
By Azriel Bermant
In a recent interview with Fathom, Tom Segev, the distinguished journalist and historian and author of A State...
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April 2020
From Eve Garrard to Dave Rich: Fathom writers share their favourite books and films about Israel (Week 4)
By Fathom Editors
Each week Fathom writers will recommend five Israel-related books, films or podcasts to help our readers through the...
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April 2020
A Pandemic of Anti-Zionist Signification: Exploiting Gaza for Ideological Gain
By Cary Nelson
‘Close and unprecedented’ was how the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied...
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April 2020
Mandate100 | ‘Neither a Jewish State nor an Arab State’: How Zionist Bi-Nationalism Tried and Failed to Change the Face...
By Ben Reiff
In a penetrating study that draws on extensive archival research Ben Reiff asks why the small but vociferous...
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April 2020
Remembering Robert Fine
By Philip Spencer
The late writings of Robert Fine, who died in 2018, can help us understand the manifold connections between...
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April 2020
Book Review | The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology
By Donna Robinson Divine
It is hard to imagine a more fitting time for a study of Abba Ahimeir, not only because...
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April 2020
From Stephen De Wijze to Matthew Levitt, Fathom writers share their favourite books and films (Week 3)
By Fathom Editors
Each week Fathom writers will recommend five Israel-related books, films or podcasts to help our readers through the...
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April 2020
Fighting Back Against COVID-19 in Israel’s Bedouin Community
By Ruth Ebenstein
Ruth Ebenstein examines the vulnerability of Israel’s Bedouin community during the pandemic and explores both the self-help measures...
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April 2020
Mandate100| 1920: A Pivotal Year Reexamined
By Yisrael Medad
Fathom is marking the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the British Mandate with a series of essays....
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Article
Book Review | Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East
By Michael Wegier
Yadgar’s book was born out of a difficulty he found while teaching at Berkeley of recommending reading that...
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April 2020
From Jo-Ann Mort to Donna Robinson Divine: Fathom writers share their favourite books and films (Week 2)
By Fathom Editors
Each week Fathom writers will recommend five Israel-related books, films or podcasts to help our readers through the...
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April 2020
Keir Starmer is UK Labour’s new leader. Will he set a new course on Israel and Antisemitism?
By Luke Akehurst
Sir Keir Starmer has been elected as the British Labour Party’s new Leader. Luke Akehurst, a former member...
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April 2020
Mandate100 | ‘A Clean Cut’ for Palestine: The Peel Commission Reexamined
By Oren Kessler
In this fascinating dive into the archives Oren Kessler reveals the dramatic exchanges that shaped Lord Peel’s 1936...
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March 2020
COVID-19: Blaming the Jews for the Plague, Again
By Lev Topor
From state television to the dark web, antisemitic conspiracy theories are being used by Islamists and white supremacists...
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March 2020
Book Review | Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel’s Most Important Leaders Shaped Its Destiny
By David Rodman
Israel faces a fateful decision. What should be the final status of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria...
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March 2020
From Hamutal Gouri to Andrei Markovits: Fathom writers share their favourite books and films about Israel (Week 1)
By Fathom Editors
Each week Fathom writers will recommend five Israel-related books, films or podcasts to help our readers through the...
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March 2020
Mandate100: A Fathom Special Issue
By Fathom Editors
Over the next several months Fathom will publish articles, interviews and book reviews to mark the 100th anniversary of...
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March 2020
Mandate100 | ‘People say I am a post-Zionist, but I am a non-ideological person, committed to storytelling’: Tom Segev on...
By Tom Segev
The Israeli historian Tom Segev’s books One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (2000) and...
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March 2020
Book Review | The Decline of the Left Wing in Israel: Yossi Beilin and the Politics of the Peace Process
By Colin Shindler
In an epoch of reaction, racism and populism, many ask how did Israel lose its way? Why did...
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March 2020
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Zionist Responses to the Trump Peace Plan (1): The Failure of the Old Paradigm
By Yossi Kuperwasser
According to Brig.-Gen (Res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, the real paradigm change in the Trump plan is that 'it deprives...
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March 2020
Zionist Responses to the Trump Peace Plan (2): Trump’s plan is mad, bad and dangerous to all
By Jack Omer-Jackaman
Jack Omer-Jackaman is the author of Caught Somewhere Between Zion and Galut: Israel, Zionism and Anglo-Jewish identity 1948-1982...
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Article March 2020
Book Review | Erdogan’s Empire: Turkey and the Politics of the Middle East
By Simon Waldman
Soner Cagaptay is the director of the Turkish Research Programme at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy...
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March 2020
Fraternal Enemies: Israel and the Gulf Monarchies | An interview with Clive Jones
By Clive Jones
Fraternal Enemies: Israel and the Gulf Monarchies by Clive Jones and Yoel Guzansky is a revealing history of the complex and...
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March 2020
Arab Council Takes Aim at Arab Laws Banning Contact with Israeli Citizens: an interview with Mostafa El-Dessouki
By Mostafa El-Dessouki
At a watershed event in London last November, 32 prominent civil society figures from 15 Arab countries publicly...
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March 2020
Book Review | Antisemitism and the Labour Party
By Sarah Brown
Antisemitism and the Labour Party is an anthology of reissued articles and essays which sets out to provide...
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March 2020
Third Time Lucky, the Crown Still Belongs to King Bibi
By Jack Omer-Jackaman
Those disappointed by the seeming victory of the Likud leader in the 2 March 2020 elections should take...
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March 2020
Israel and the Soleimani assassination
By Yossi Alpher
In 1979, as the Mossad’s chief Iran analyst, Yossi Alpher discussed with the head of Mossad a request...
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March 2020
The ‘Anti-Deutsche’ and Israel: A Reply to Ha’aretz
By Stefan Frank
On 23 January Haaretz published an article by Ofri Ilany titled ‘Germany's pro-Israel Left Has a New Target...
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March 2020
Democratic Socialism, Israel and the Jews: An Interview with Michael Harrington (1975), with new preface by Mitchell Cohen (2020)
By Mitchell Cohen and Michael Harrington
The interview reproduced below, with Michael Harrington (1928-1989), the leading US democratic socialist of the second half of...
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March 2020
Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad's Fake Diving Resort: an interview with Raffi Berg
By Raffi Berg
One of Mossad's most daring operations was the creation of a diving resort to rescue thousands of Ethiopian...
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February 2020
Four things I learned talking to the world’s diplomats about Israel
By Jeremy Havardi
Jeremy Havardi is the Director of the B’nai B’rith UK’s Bureau of International Affairs (BBLBIA). In this candid...
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February 2020
Al-Wasatia: Reviving the Palestinian Peace Camp | an interview with Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi
By Mohammed Dajani Daoudi
The great grandfather was the custodian of David’s Tomb and Daoudi, in reference to King David, was added...
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February 2020
Book Review | The Kurds of Northern Syria: Governance, Diversity and Conflicts
By Paul Iddon
Following the infamous, and seemingly unstoppable, rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and its bloody takeover of large...
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February 2020
Feminism in Israel | Feminism and Israeli-Palestinian Peace: an interview with Sarai Aharoni
By Sarai Aharoni
Sarai Aharoni is Assistant Professor at the Gender Studies Programme, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and one of...
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February 2018
The Last Dove: an interview with Ehud Olmert
By Tal Kra-Oz
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was one of Ariel Sharon’s closest political allies; in 2005 the two...
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February 2020
IsraelVotes2019 | Understanding the blocs
By Dahlia Scheindlin
Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin is a public opinion expert who has advised five national campaigns in Israel and in...
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August 2019
The genesis of the Trump plan lies in the Israeli Left | An interview with Efraim Inbar
By Efraim Inbar
Professor Efraim Inbar tells Fathom deputy editor Neri Zilber about the delusions of the Oslo Peace Process, the...
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February 2020
Fathom Book Reviews
By Fathom Editors
The Fathom editorial team are seeking reviewers. If you would like to review one of the books below for Fathom,...
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Article
Israel70 | Schooling for Peace: an interview with Dr Nava Sonnenschein
By Ruth Ebenstein
Dr Nava Sonnenschein is one of the founding members of the binational egalitarian community, Neve Shalom – Wahat...
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May 2018
Three views on the Trump Plan: (1) Palestinians choose ‘the cause’ over statehood
By Alex Ryvchin
Alex Ryvchin, co-Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), argues that the Trump Plan...
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February 2020
Three Views on the Trump Plan: (2) A deal that drains the two-state solution and the very idea of peace...
By John Lyndon
John Lyndon is Executive Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP). He argues that the Trump...
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February 2020
Three Views of the Trump Plan: (3) Building a Better Trump Plan
By Michael Koplow
Michael J. Koplow is Israel Policy Forum’s Policy Director, based in Washington, DC. He argues that Instead of...
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February 2020
In Defence of the IHRA Definition
By Bernard Harrison and Lesley Klaff
Correction: In an earlier version of this article, the authors claimed that Sir Stephen Sedley, writing in the...
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January 2020
British Christian Zionism (Part 2): the work of Laurence Oliphant
By Philip Earl Steele
The literary, diplomatic and direct organisational efforts of the British Christian Zionist Laurence Oliphant were central to the...
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January 2020
Book Review | We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel
By William Kolbrener
Daniel Gordis’s We Stand Divided is the latest book on the growing rift between American Jews and Israelis....
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January 2020
The Old Left is Dead. Israel Needs a New One.
By Etan N. Nechin
When Israel goes to the polls for a third time in a year, the Labor party might well...
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January 2020
Emily Landau (1960-2020): A Tribute
By Azriel Bermant
Azriel Bermant pays tribute to Fathom advisory editor Emily Landau who died 6 January 2020. It was with...
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January 2020
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Thucydides Goes to Washington: an interview with Michael Doran about US Grand Strategy in the Middle East
By Michael Doran
Michael Doran is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. specialising in Middle East security...
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November 2019
The UK Election 2019 | Corbyn’s legacy is that political antisemitism has re-entered the British mainstream
By David Hirsh
David Hirsh, author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism argues that Corbyn’s movement has left behind many thousands of people...
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December 2019
The UK Election 2019 | In Stoke North, Labour voters saw Corbyn as a wrong ‘un
By Jane Ashworth
Jane Ashworth is a Labour councillor in Stoke and the co-founder of Engage, the anti-racist campaign against left...
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December 2019
The UK Election 2019 | The roots of left antisemitism go deeper than Corbynism. They lie in the fatal partnership...
By Peter Mason
Peter Mason is the National Secretary of the Jewish Labour Movement, and a Labour Councillor in the London...
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December 2019
The UK Election 2019 | Antisemitism is not the preserve of the left. This right-wing victory carries its own dangers...
By Sacha Ismail
Sacha Ismail is a supporter of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, a small radical socialist group which has...
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December 2019
The UK Election 2019 | Britain has escaped political paralysis. To do the same, Israel must dislodge Netanyahu
By Toby Greene
In 2019 both the UK and Israel have been politically paralysed. Like or loathe Boris Johnson, Thursday’s election...
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December 2019
The BDS Faith: Judaism without Zion
By William Kolbrener
Jews don’t know what antisemitism is because they don’t have the right definition of Judaism. Such is the...
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December 2019
Book Review | After ISIS: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East
By Brandon Marlon
We’ve encountered the toponyms repeatedly in the headlines: Sinjar. Raqqa. Kirkuk. Kobane. Baghuz. But we’ve done so from...
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December 2019
‘If we insist on 100 per cent of the land, we will end up like Lebanon: it will be an...
By Ephraim Sneh
Ephraim Sneh is a former Deputy Defence Minister of Israel. He was a member of the Knesset for...
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December 2019
Book Review | Social Justice and Israel/Palestine
By Donna Robinson Divine
In the introduction to Social Justice and Israel/Palestine, Aaron J. Hahn Tapper and Mira Sucharov reflect on their...
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December 2019
Gas and foreign policy: how Israel is leveraging energy to stabilise the region and advance geostrategic objectives
By Ezra Friedman
Ezra Friedman writes that the discovery of gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean has given Israel, long perceived...
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December 2019
Book Review | Doves Among Hawks: Struggles of the Israeli Peace Movements
By John Lyndon
Plays tend to have three acts. In his excellent and very timely ‘Doves Among Hawks: Struggles of the...
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December 2019
Book Review | Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State
By Eve Garrard
This is a horrifying book. Not because it's a bad book – on the contrary, Cary Nelson has...
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November 2019
Obama, Trump and the collapse of the American position in the Middle East
By Kyle Orton
The disastrous foreign policies of two presidents are bringing about the collapse of America’s position in the Middle...
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November 2019
Zeruya Shalev: On ‘Pain’ And Her Role As Israel’s Literary Therapist
By Liam Hoare
The translation of Zeruya Shalev’s 2015 novel Pain should be the moment she assumes ‘her rightful place in...
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November 2019
The case for a Minority Government to end the deadlock in Israel
By Assaf Shapira
Assaf Shapira of the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) argues that if the choice is between a minority government...
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November 2019
The ‘Martyrdom’ of Saint Philoumenos: the anatomy of a modern antisemitic ritual murder libel
By David Gurevich
During the medieval epoch, Christian antisemitism spread the libel that Jews engaged in the ritual murder of non-Jews,...
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November 2019
Book Review | The Impact of Zionism and Israel on Anglo-Jewry’s Identity 1948-1982: Caught Somewhere Between Zion and Galut
By Azriel Bermant
Jack Omer-Jackaman’s book could not be more timely given the challenge facing Diaspora Jewry today, with heightened concerns...
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November 2019
With Sovereignty Comes Responsibility: East Jerusalem and Liberal-National Values
By Noa Lazimi
Noa Lazimi, former research coordinator at the Institute for Zionist Strategies (IZS) proposes a new approach to tackling...
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November 2019
Book Review | Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, The Party & Public Belief
By Sarah Brown
Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, The Party & Public Belief sets out to reveal ‘the reality behind the...
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November 2019
UK Labour and Israel: the little-noticed shift in party policy
By Luke Akehurst
While the four-year long controversy over antisemitism in UK Labour has monopolised media attention, the 2019 UK Labour...
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October 2019
Can new leaders salvage the EU-Israel Relationship?
By Margaux Nijkerk
With leadership changes on the horizon in both Brussels and Jerusalem, both Israelis and Europeans will have the...
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October 2019
Book Review | Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel
By Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
A better title for this book would have been Original Sin: Britain’s Embrace of the Zionist Movement. In...
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October 2019
The Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar Affair - what we learned about the Democratic Party
By Yossi Kuperwasser
Regardless of whether Israel’s policy was wise, the most important aspect of the affair was what it revealed...
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October 2019
The BDS mindset is a challenge to liberal democracy here, as well as in Israel. Centrists must defend a precious...
By William Kolbrener
William Kolbrener is professor of English Literature at Bar Ilan University and the author of several books including Milton’s Warring...
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October 2019
Book review | Erdogan Rising: The Battle for the Soul of Turkey
By Michael Sercan Daventry
When the US announced that it was pulling out of northeast Syria and Turkish forces began pouring in,...
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October 2019
Understanding Online Antisemitism: Towards a New Qualitative Approach
By Matthias J. Becker
Matthias Becker is a research fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at TU Berlin and the...
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October 2019
Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
By Michael Walzer
Michael Walzer is editor emeritus of the democratic left magazine Dissent and an advisory editor of Fathom. He...
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October 2019
Book Review | Behind the Mask: The Antisemitic Nature of BDS Exposed
By Cary Nelson
‘The world would be soooo much better without jews man.’ This post from a social media account appears...
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October 2019
Special Offer from The Jewish Review of Books
By Fathom Editors
A special offer for our friends at Fathom: Get a digital subscription for 70% off of the list...
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Article
Jerusalem: the contours of a possible agreement
By Meir Kraus
Meir Kraus was the head of the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research between 2009-2016 and is currently a...
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October 2019
Why Israel’s year of elections has left a foreign policy hangover
By Joshua Krasna
Joshua Krasna is a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Programme on the Middle East and a...
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October 2019
Book Review | Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief
By Stan Crooke
This review first appeared in the British socialist newspaper Solidarity. In February of this year, Chris Williamson, Labour...
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October 2019
Primo Levi and Israel
By Alvin Rosenfeld
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Irving M. Glazer...
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October 2019
Book Review | A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
By Izabella Tabarovsky
One of the best-known antisemitic slogans of the August 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ white supremacist rally in Charlottesville,...
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October 2019
To fix the Israel-Diaspora relationship, make our communal organisations genuinely representative
By Jay Ruderman
Jay Ruderman is the President of the Ruderman Family Foundation, which focuses on the inclusion of people with...
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October 2019
Revital Amiran and Yisrael Medad: A Final Exchange on the Israeli Left
By Revital Amiran Yisrael Medad
The following exchange brings to a close the dispute between Revital Amiran and Yisrael Medad on the standing...
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October 2019
The Special Relationship: Shoring Up Declining Sympathy for Israel among Democrats
By Jonathan Rynhold
Jonathan Rynhold relates that while Democrats overwhelmingly hold a favourable view of Israel, the special relationship increasingly rests...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Israel elections: ‘With Lieberman you can never know for sure what he will do next.’ Analysis from...
By Lahav Harkov
Over the last few elections Israelis have gotten used to the idea that the Likud and the Right...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Israel elections: ‘Benjamin Netanyahu may be down but he’s certainly not out.’ Analysis by Shalom Lipner
By Shalom Lipner
Last week’s election results dealt Benjamin Netanyahu a major blow, but although he may be down, he’s certainly...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Third Elections are Israel's No Deal Brexit
By Eylon Aslan-Levy
Israelis who are completely certain there will not be a third election after just holding a second vote...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | ‘People say he who wields the dagger rarely sits on the throne. Lieberman sees things differently’ |...
By Anshel Pfeffer
Anshel Pfeffer is a leading Israeli journalist and the author of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | What should be the priorities for the new government?
By Yossi Kuperwasser
Yossi Kuperwasser argues that whoever forms the next government should adopt a ‘Yes, but’ response to the expected...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | The Knesset and the Court: is this Israel's override election?
By Yohanan Plesner
Yohanan Plesner is President of the Israel Democracy Institute. From 2007 to 2013, he served as a Member...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Caught between delegitimisation and non-participation in government: the dilemmas of the Arab voter seeking influence in Israel
By Afif Abu Much
Influenced by Netanyahu’s delegitimisation campaign, the Centre-left is making a critical mistake in not reaching out to the...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Arab Voters and the 2019 Elections
By Eihab Kadah
Eihab Kadah, Director of Research in Arab society at Midgam Consulting and Research, assesses how Arab voters have...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | The Robbed Cossack and the Imaginary Reality of the Right: a rejoinder to Yisrael Medad
By Revital Amiran
A sharp rejoinder from Revital Amiran to Yisrael Medad’s critique of her Fathom article ‘The Zionist Left is...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | ‘The Likud understand that they will have to approach Gantz’: an interview with Tal Schneider
By Tal Schneider
Tal Schneider is diplomatic and political correspondent for Globes in Israel and is a former DC correspondent for...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Israelonomics: an interview with Avi Weiss
By Avi Weiss
Professor Avi Weiss is the former Chief Economist and Deputy Director of the Israel Antitrust Authority and now...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Another Israel is possible. But not until Israelis wake up.
By Hamutal Gouri
Hamutal Gouri is the former executive director of the Dafna Fund and the founder of consult4good, a feminist...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | 'The Left is finished in Israel.' A reply to Revital Amiran
By Yisrael Medad
Yisrael Medad writes a weekly media column for the Jerusalem Post and serves as a foreign press spokesperson for...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Netanyahu isn’t just a Prime Minister; he represents a paradigm that is here to stay
By Doron Matza
While some analysts believe Israel is approaching a ‘post-Netanyahu era’, Doron Matza argues that regardless of Netanyahu’s personal...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Ayman Odeh has made Jewish-Arab political partnership possible. The centre left should seize the opportunity to win...
By Ron Gerlitz
Ron Gerlitz, the Co-Executive Director of Sikkuy, The Association for Civic Equality in Israel, argues that only a...
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September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | To renew itself, the Left must give up the two-state solution and embrace civil rights and economic...
By Emanuel Shahaf
Emanuel Shahaf is Co-Chair of the Federation Movement which proposes a federal citizen state in Eretz-Israel/Palestine, excluding the...
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September 2019
Poisonous Pedagogy: Israel Hatred and the Collapse of Liberal Education
By William Kolbrener
Professor William Kolbrener reflects on the corrupting and ideologised pedagogy in higher education that is creating ‘a moral...
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September 2019
Fathoming the 2019 Israeli Election: The Sequel
By Fathom Editors
When, back in April, the Fathom editors produced a 130 page eBook Fathoming the 2019 Israeli Election, we...
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August 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Nitzan Horowitz: The New Leader of the Israeli Left
By Liam Hoare
When Meretz, Ehud Barak’s Israel Democratic Party, and Labor’s Stav Shaffir created the Democratic Union, Nitzan Horowitz became...
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August 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | The Zionist Left Is Renewing Itself
By Revital Amiran
‘If the public leans left, how come it keeps turning its back on the left at election time?’...
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August 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Understanding the blocs
By Dahlia Scheindlin
Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin is a public opinion expert who has advised five national campaigns in Israel and in...
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August 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Whatever happened to electoral reform in Israel?
By Professor David Newman
As Israel goes to the polls for the second time in six months, it is time to revisit...
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August 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | The Accidental Wisdom of Israel’s Maligned Electoral System, Revisited
By Shany Mor
In late 2013 Shany Mor was commissioned to write an article about Israel’s much-criticised proportional electoral system for...
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August 2019
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2017 Fathom Interview with Naftali Bennett
By Naftali Bennett
‘Forming a Palestinian state along the lines that many readers of Fathom believe is the way forward would...
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Winter 2017
‘The Zionist Left needs to understand that change is impossible without us’: an interview with MK Ayman Odeh
By Ayman Odeh
21 per cent of Israel’s citizens are Arab-Palestinians. Since 2015 the leader of the Joint List – an...
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Autumn 2017
Israel70 | ‘Leadership is telling your own people things that are difficult to hear’: an interview with Yair Lapid
By Yair Lapid
According to the latest polls, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid is Israel's most liked politician after the Prime Minister....
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May 2018
As economic crisis worsens, Iran threatens to reactivate nuclear programme
By Yaakov Lappin
In this essay, military and strategic affairs analyst Yaakov Lappin analyses the rationale behind the US ‘maximum pressure’ campaign,...
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June 2019
UK Strategy in the Middle East (1) | Alistair Burt on the UK’s regional role: is policy fit for purpose?
By Alistair Burt MP
On 2 July 2019 the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) organised a one-day conference to explore UK strategy...
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July 2019
UK Strategy in the Middle East (2) | Toby Greene on why populisms of left and right will prevent the...
By Toby Greene
On 2 July 2019 the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in collaboration with the Britain Israel Communications and...
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July 2019
The UK in the Middle East (3) | Emman al-Badawy on UK strategy and the region’s youth quake
By Dr Emman El-Badawy
On 2 July 2019 the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) organised a one-day conference to explore UK strategy...
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Article July 2019
The Word Crimes Controversy (6) | A personal reflection by John Strawson
By John Strawson
John Strawson was a contributor to the Word Crimes issue of Israel Studies Journal. He also taught in...
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July 2019
The Word Crimes Controversy (1) | Cary Nelson Reviews Word Crimes
By Cary Nelson
Editorial Introduction: The controversy sparked by the publication of Word Crimes: Reclaiming The Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the...
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May 2019
The Word Crimes Controversy (2) | Gershon Shafir responds to Cary Nelson
By Gershon Shafir
Editorial Introduction: The controversy sparked by the publication of Word Crimes: Reclaiming The Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the...
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July 2019
The Word Crimes Controversy (3) | Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler: A rejoinder to Gershon Shafir
By Paula A. Treichler and Cary Nelson
Editorial Introduction: The controversy sparked by the publication of Word Crimes: Reclaiming The Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the...
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July 2019
The Word Crimes Controversy (4) | Ilan Troen responds to Gershon Shafir
By Ilan Troen
Editorial Introduction: The controversy sparked by the publication of Word Crimes: Reclaiming The Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the...
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July 2019
The Word Crimes Controversy (5) | Donna Robinson Divine replies to Gershon Shafir
By Donna Robinson Divine
Editorial Introduction: The controversy sparked by the publication of Word Crimes: Reclaiming The Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the...
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July 2019
Explaining Failure: How Palestinian economic potential was denied during Oslo
By Mohammed Samhouri
Dr. Mohammed Samhouri is a former senior economic advisor in the Palestinian Authority, and a former senior research...
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July 2019
Israel and the Left: Three Studies of the Crisis: (1) IfNotNow and The Dyke March Controversy
By Daniel Kalick
IfNotNow’s support for barring the Jewish Pride flag from the Dyke March was another example of its failure...
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Article July 2019
Israel and the Left: Three Studies of the Crisis: (2) Jewish Voice for Peace’s antisemitic Deadly Exchange campaign
By Miriam F. Elman
The Deadly Exchange campaign falsely blames Israel and its Jewish American supporters for fueling discriminatory policing practices against...
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June 2019
Israel and the Left: Three Studies of the Crisis: (3) Israel Denial and the University
By Cary Nelson
A system is now in place to grant inaccurate and exaggerated ‘anti-Zionist’ claims credibility by giving them a...
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July 2019
Book Review | West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics, and the Cold War, 1965-1974
By Norman J.W. Goda
Acknowledging German guilt for the Holocaust, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer helped initiate in the early 1950s a relationship with...
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July 2019
Israel and the ‘Crisis of the Arabs’ | an interview with Asher Susser
By Asher Susser
Professor Asher Susser spoke with Fathom Deputy Editor Samuel Nurding on the eve of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty...
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June 2019
Book Review | The Great Betrayal: How America abandoned the Kurds and lost the Middle East
By Paul Iddon
The thesis of David E. Philips’ book The Great Betrayal: How America Abandoned The Kurds And Lost The...
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June 2019
Reflections on Jabotinsky’s 1906 pamphlet ‘The Bund and Zionism’
By Yisrael Medad
Yisrael Medad is deputy editor of the forthcoming critical English-language edition of the writings of the revisionist Zionist...
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June 2019
British Christian Zionism (Part 1): George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
By Philip Earl Steele
The impact of George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda was central to the coalescence of the first Zionist...
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June 2019
Book Review | Understanding Israel: political, societal and security challenges
By Jacob Eriksson
Israel represents a collection of seeming contradictions. Though Theodor Herzl’s vision was a thoroughly secular one and the...
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June 2019
Zionism and the Left: an interview with Susie Linfield
By Susie Linfield
Susie Linfield is the author of The Lions' Den. Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam...
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June 2019
Albert Memmi: Zionism as National Liberation
By Susie Linfield
With kind permission from Yale University Press, Fathom brings you an extract from 'The Lions' Den: Zionism and the...
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June 2019
‘The Jewish State is a must. Democracy is a must’ | An interview with Elyakim Rubinstein
By Elyakim Rubinstein
Elyakim Rubinstein is the former Attorney General of Israel and served as the Vice President of Israel’s Supreme...
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June 2019
Ten ways the Palestinians failed to move toward a state during Oslo: Yair Hirschfeld's critique of Seth Anziska's Preventing Palestine
By Yair Hirschfeld
Yair Hirschfeld was one of the two original architects of the Oslo accords. In this extended critical review...
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June 2019
Not so reluctant: Menachem Begin and the Israel-Egypt peace negotiations
By Ziv Rubinovitz and Gerald Steinberg
Gerald M. Steinberg, Bar Ilan University and Ziv Rubinovitz, Sonoma State University are the authors of Menachem Begin...
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June 2019
The Cultural Revolution at the National Library of Israel
By Ruth Ebenstein
There are signs of a revolution at the National Library of Israel. One is an 8 x 7...
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June 2019
The Re-emergence of the Jewish Question
By Shalom Lappin
The Jewish communities of Europe and the US increasingly find themselves caught between the rising forces of the...
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May 2019
Removing certain kinds of Jews from anti-racist protection is wrong
By Keith Kahn-Harris
Keith Kahn-Harris’s book Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity is published in June 2019 by...
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May 2019
Radical Social Theory and the ‘Jewish Question’: The Priceless Legacy of Robert Fine (1945-2018)
By Dan Davison
Dan Davison writes a fitting tribute to the radical social theorist and political activist Robert Fine, who died in 2018....
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May 2019
Book Review | Marxist Perspectives on Palestine/Israel
By Stan Crooke
‘A totalising perspective that can grasp the [Israeli] violence as an expression of the capitalist world... an analysis...
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April 2019 Article
How Israel Misread Palestinian Intentions
By Evan Gottesman
Last weekend’s brief and bloody spat between Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Israel obscured another simmering crisis in...
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May 2019
We are paralysed by the failed search for a final peace. For now, let’s reduce the experience of occupation without...
By Micah Goodman
Discussing his best selling book 'Catch 67', Micah Goodman tracks the evolution of the debate within Israel over...
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May 2019
The US has always had a blind spot about the Palestinians. Now it is worse | An interview with Khaled...
By Khaled Elgindy
American academic Khaled Elgindy is a non-resident fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution....
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May 2019
The Peace Process is Stuck. Israel Must Take the Unilateral Option | An interview with Asher Susser
By Asher Susser
Asher Susser believes that while the status quo is not sustainable, a final status agreement is currently unattainable:...
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May 2019
Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism
By Izabella Tabarovsky
For many decades, virulently antisemitic forms of ‘anti-Zionism’ were central to the cold war propaganda of the Communist...
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May 2019
In His Novels, And His Columns, Sayed Kashua Examines His Divided Self
By Liam Hoare
‘I wanted to say to my wife that this is really the end, it’s finished,’ the Arab-Israeli writer...
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May 2019
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Fathom Report | Institutionally Antisemitic: Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party
By Alan Johnson
This major Fathom report finds the Labour Party is now ‘institutionally antisemitic’ as the term is defined in...
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March 2019
How the BDS movement is poisoning academic discourse: a case study of Henry Maitles and Critical and Radical Social Work
By Philip Mendes
The academic Left, influenced by the Boycott, Divestment and Sections (BDS) movement, is abandoning core academic standards when...
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February 2019
Leon Trotsky’s Long War Against Antisemitism
By Alan Johnson
All his life Trotsky was a consistent fighter against antisemitism. – Joseph Nedava, Trotsky and the Jews, 1971....
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March 2019
Two states may be the only plausible solution but is it still feasible?
By Tony Klug
In January 1973 the Fabian Society published a pamphlet by a young British student, Tony Klug, titled ‘Middle...
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April 2019
Critical Reflections on the Trump Peace Plan | A conversation with Dennis Ross and David Makovsky
By Dennis Ross and David Makovsky
In late February, David Makovsky and Dennis Ross spoke at a BICOM/RUSI event in London about their upcoming...
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April 2019
Israeli Elections: What next for the likely Netanyahu coalition?
By Calev Ben-Dor
Calev Ben-Dor writes that the good news for Netanyahu is that his ability to form a coalition with...
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April 2019 Article
Book Review | Temperature Rising: Iran's Revolutionary Guards and Wars in the Middle East
By Paul Iddon
Nader Uskowi opens his first book, a concise but definitive account of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC)...
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April 2019
Fathom eBook | Fathoming the Israeli Elections 2019
By Fathom Editors
Election special 2019 FINALFathom has published a new eBook on the 2019 Israeli elections. This pamphlet brings together...
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April 2019
Israeli Elections: Three Takeaways and One Prediction
By Michael Koplow
Michael Koplow argues that Netanyahu’s indictments are preventing the establishment of a national unity government and believes that...
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April 2019 Article
Israeli Elections: Five Takeaways
By Hugh Lovatt
Hugh Lovatt believes that had the Joint List stuck together it may have potentially blocked Netanyahu’s path towards...
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April 2019 Article
IsraelVotes2019 | What should be the priorities for the new government?
By Yossi Kuperwasser
Yossi Kuperwasser argues that whoever forms the next government should adopt a 'Yes, but' response to the expected...
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April 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Why I’m voting Likud
By Rachel Broyde
Rachel Broyde credits Netanyahu's leadership with Israel's strong economic, military and diplomatic situation and argues that as a...
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April 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Why I'm voting Blue and White
By Yair Zivan
Yair Zivan believes Israelis have a choice between a Prime Minister indicted in three criminal cases and an...
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April 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Why I'm voting Labor
By Tal Harris
Tal Harris argues that while Benny Gantz can replace Netanyahu and remove his Kahanist allies from the public...
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April 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Israel’s Arab citizens and the election
By Eihab Kadah
In a conversation with Fathom, Eihab Kadah, director of research in Arab society in Midgam Consulting and Research...
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April 2019
IsraelVotes2019 (2) | Netanyahu isn’t just a Prime Minister; he represents a paradigm that is here to stay
By Doron Matza
While some analysts believe Israel is approaching a ‘post-Netanyahu era’, Doron Matza argues that regardless of Netanyahu’s personal...
Read more >
September 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | The National-Religious Camp: No Direction Home?
By Sara Hirschhorn
In some ways, the national religious community face the 2019 election without a traditional ideological home. Nevertheless, argues...
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April 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | The Elections and the Territories
By Yisrael Medad
With only one week to go until election day, the fate of the territories has barely been mentioned....
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April 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Yashar: a new grassroots Israeli political movement
By Eran Etzion
Eran Etzion is the former Deputy head of the National Security Council and Head of the Policy Planning...
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April 2019 Article
Book Review | Israel's Long War with Hezbollah: Military Innovation and Adaption Under Fire
By Rob Pinfold
The old adage that ‘generals are always prepared to fight the last war’ encapsulates the on-going exchange of...
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April 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Israeli-Palestinian relations and the 2019 Election
By Jonathan Rynhold
Israeli Jews are deeply sceptical, even incredulous, about the peace process, and are instead focused on maintaining security,...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Forget Left and Right. 'Declaration of Independence' or 'Nation-State Law' is now the real divide in Israeli politics
By Paul Gross
Paul Gross argues that the most fundamental difference between the main parties in the upcoming elections is not...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Understanding the blocs
By Dahlia Scheindlin
Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin is a public opinion expert who has advised five national campaigns in Israel and in...
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August 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | ‘We are at the end of the Netanyahu era': A Fathom Forum with Anshel Pfeffer
By Anshel Pfeffer
In this Fathom Forum, journalist and writer Anshel Pfeffer, author of The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | The need for political partnership
By Ron Gerlitz
Ron Gerlitz, the Co-Executive Director of Sikkuy, The Association for Civic Equality in Israel, argues that only a...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Towards a consensus on National Security issues?
By Jonathan Spyer
To what extent is the current Israeli election campaign dominated by national security issues, as has historically been...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Why the Israeli Labor party is dying
By Eric Lee
Why has the Israeli Labor Party failed to return to power for over 20 years? Eric Lee points...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | The country where the centre can hold
By Pinchas Landau
Pinchas Landau argues that the emergence of the new centrist party ‘Blue and White’ as the main rival...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | The Far Right in Israeli Politics
By Colin Shindler
Professor Colin Shindler argues that pragmatism by a Right wing government has often led to an ideological schism...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | The growing power of the 'independent' ultra-Orthodox voter
By Gilad Malach
Dr. Gilad Malach is head of the ultra-Orthodox program at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem. In a...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | With Gantz, has Israel’s centre found its feet?
By Toby Greene
Toby Greene argues that the merger between the Israel Resilience Party and Yesh Atid represents the third phase...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | It’s basic math. To win, the Israeli Centre-Left needs the Arab citizens of Israel
By Joel Braunold
Two-thirds of the Arab public want to see their representatives sitting in government. If the Israeli Centre-Left is...
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March 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | Fathoming the Israeli elections: an interview with Nahum Barnea
By Nahum Barnea
Nahum Barnea is a veteran Israeli commentator for Yediot Ahronoth who has covered Israeli domestic and foreign affairs...
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February 2019
'Telling Israel’s story in the 21st century will have a lot less to do with the Warsaw Ghetto than it...
By Matti Friedman
Journalist and author Matti Friedman talks to Fathom Deputy Editor Calev Ben-Dor about his acclaimed recent book, Spies...
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February 2019
IsraelVotes2019 | The Accidental Wisdom of Israel’s Maligned Electoral System, Revisited
By Shany Mor
In late 2013 Shany Mor was commissioned to write an article about Israel’s much-criticised proportional electoral system for...
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August 2019
Thriving in Adversity: the past and future of Kurdistan in Iraq
By Gary Kent
Combining clear-eyed political analysis with moving reportage, Gary Kent offers a comprehensive survey of both the multiple crises...
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February 2019
Anziska's 'Preventing Palestine': An Exchange (1) Joel Singer's Review
By Joel Singer
Joel Singer, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator, critically reviews Seth Anziska’s book, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from...
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February 2019
Anziska's 'Preventing Palestine': An Exchange (2) Seth Anziska Replies to Singer
By Seth Anziska
Seth Anziska replies to Oslo negotiator Joel Singers’s critical review of his book Preventing Palestine: A Political History...
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February 2019
The Era of Responsibility is over | an interview with Nadav Eyal on the Revolt against Globalisation
By Nadav Eyal
Nadav Eyal is the International Correspondent for Israel's Reshet News, Op-Ed contributor for Yedioth Ahronoth, and author of...
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February 2019
Fathom 22 | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
Welcome to Fathom 22. 2018 was a year of strong growth for the journal. Site visits increased sharply...
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Article January 2019
‘There is a window of opportunity to resolve our conflict with the Palestinians’: an interview with former Mossad Director-General Shabtai...
By Shabtai Shavit
Since 2013, Professor Cohen-Almagor has been conducting a comprehensive research project whose aim is to provide a detailed...
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January 2019
One More Dunam, One More Goat: Re-learning How Real Change Happens in Israel and Palestine
By John Lyndon
‘In Israel, the group which has sketched out its bold vision of the future most clearly, invested resources...
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January 2019
Book Review | Sinjar: 14 Days that Saved the Yazidis from Islamic State
By Paul Iddon
Download a PDF version here. Susan Shand’s book is a moving account of the Islamic State’s (ISIS) genocide...
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January 2019
Four strategic threats on Israel’s radar | a special briefing by former IDF intelligence head Amos Yadlin
By Amos Yadlin
Speaking at a private forum in late 2018, Director of the Institute for National Security Studies, Maj. Gen....
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January 2019
Amos Oz (1939-2018): Writer, Reader, Dreamer
By Liam Hoare
Liam Hoare writes in praise of Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist and public intellectual who died 28 December....
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January 2019
‘City of Oranges. An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa': an interview with Adam LeBor
By Adam LeBor
The acclaimed book City of Oranges: An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa has been published...
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January 2019
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In praise of compromise: Simon Round interviews Amos Oz
By Simon Round
Amos Oz has lived through every one of Israel’s wars and fought in two of them. He has...
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Spring 2013
1967 | Natan Alterman or Amos Oz? The Six-Day War and Israeli Literature
By Liam Hoare
Israeli writers were split by the Six-Day War. On one side was the poet Natan Alterman, whose Movement...
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Spring 2017
Israel70 | Amos Oz’s Israel
By Liam Hoare
While Amos Oz’s novels are often read reductively as political allegories, Liam Hoare suggests that Oz’s special subject...
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June 2018
Israel’s land policy (1) | What's in a War Crime? Khan al Ahmar, Land Policy, and International Law
By Naomi Kahn
Naomi Linder Kahn is Director of the International Division at Regavim, an NGO dedicated to the ‘preservation of...
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December 2018
Israel's land policy (2) | Khan al-Ahmar and 'state land' allocations in the West Bank
By Hagit Ofran
Hagit Ofran is co-director of Settlement Watch, a project of the Israeli peace movement, Peace Now. In this article...
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December 2018
Ending the 'Universalisation' of the Holocaust and the Wars Against Israel: The GDR People's Chamber Declaration of 12 April 1990
By Martin Jander
To ‘universalise’ the Nazi crimes is to deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the murder of the...
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December 2018
Pop Islam: How Germany is tackling the new Islamic antisemitism
By Daniel Rickenbacher
In 2018 Germany appointed the diplomat Dr. Felix Klein to the newly created post of Federal Government Commissioner...
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December 2018
The Long Read | Israel’s Jewish and Democratic Balance: A historian reflects on the Nation-State Law
By Arie Dubnov
Arie M. Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University. In this long read...
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December 2018
Book Review | Self-Determination, Statehood and the Law of Negotiation: The Case of Palestine
By John Strawson
Robert Barnidge’s important book seeks to persuade us to view the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the prism of what...
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December 2018
How Israel is turning its high-tech into global political power
By David Rosenberg
Israel's innovative ability and technological prowess is a source of its global political power that was unimaginable a...
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November 2018
Book Review | Israel’s Technology Economy, Origins and Impact
By Alex Brummer
The image of Israel as a nation of high-tech genius was framed by Den Senor and Saul Singer...
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Article
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
In July 2018, the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently asked’ in light of...
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November 2018
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? A Symposium | Simon Gordon
By Simon Gordon
In July 2018, an opinion piece in the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently...
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November 2018
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? A Symposium | Tamara Berens
By Tamara Berens
In July 2018, an opinion piece in the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently...
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November 2018
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? A Symposium | Mick Davis
By Sir Mick Davis
In July 2018, an opinion piece in the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently...
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November 2018
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? A Symposium | Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner
By Laura Janner Klausner
In July 2018, an opinion piece in the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently...
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November 2018
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? A Symposium | Keith Kahn-Harris
By Keith Kahn-Harris
In July 2018, an opinion piece in the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently...
Read more >
November 2018
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? A Symposium | Toby Greene
By Toby Greene
In July 2018, an opinion piece in the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently...
Read more >
November 2018
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? A Symposium | Hannah Weisfeld and Maya Ilany
By Hannah Weisfeld and Maya Ilany
In July 2018, an opinion piece in the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently...
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November 2018
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? A Symposium | Robin Moss
By Robin Moss
In July 2018, an opinion piece in the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently...
Read more >
November 2018
British Jews and Israel – how is the relationship evolving? A Symposium | Jonathan Hunter
By Jonathan Hunter
In July 2018, an opinion piece in the Jewish Chronicle identified ‘fundamental questions which must now be urgently...
Read more >
November 2018
Reading Hannah Arendt’s 'On Violence' in Israel
By Sarit Larry
In this thought-provoking essay, Sarit Larry examines Israel's discourse of 'security' through the prism of Hannah Arendt’s seminal essay...
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November 2018
‘I had planned to own a farm but I ended up in the Israeli political zoo’: an interview with MK...
By Sharren Haskel
From combat soldier to veterinary nurse to the youngest MK in the Knesset, Sharren Haskel has had an...
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November 2018
‘With every day that passes, we seem to be going further away from the values on which this country is...
By Alona Vinograd
Alona Vinograd is Director of the Center for Democratic Values and Institutions at the Israel Democracy Institute. Deputy...
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October 2018
Moving toward a new paradigm together? An Israeli responds to Hussein Agha
By Edward Rettig
In this cautiously hopeful response to Hussein Agha’s Fathom interview, Israeli Edward Rettig argues that his analysis of...
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October 2018
‘Israel needs social cohesion as well as nanotechnology’: an interview with Mike Prashker
By Mike Prashker
While Israel was never the harmonious campfire of legend, it is now an extremely crowded, contested and combustible...
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October 2018
This is a conflict over narratives. Israel needs to tell ours to Palestinians.
By Yossi Klein Halevi
Yossi Klein Halevi is senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the author of the recent New York...
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october 2018
David Grossman, the journalist
By Liam Hoare
Prizes have rained down on Israeli novelist David Grossman in recent years; the Israel Prize for literature in...
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october 2018
‘Ars Poetica was the explosion of me writing poetry’: an interview with Adi Keissar
By Adi Keissar
Haaretz called Adi Keissar the most influential poet working in Israel today. Her first book of poetry, Black...
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october 2018
Minding the gaps, connecting the dots: Seven steps towards a feminist funding eco-system in Israel
By Hamutal Gouri
Feminism aims to understand the root causes of gender inequality and its intersection with the other dimensions of...
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october 2018
‘The War Between Wars’: Israel vs Iran in Syria
By Yaakov Lappin
Yaakov Lappin is a Research Associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and a military correspondent. In...
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october 2018
‘Understanding the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa is the key to understanding the whole Middle East conflict’:...
By Lyn Julius
Earlier this year Fathom’s Grant Goldberg interviewed Lyn Julius about her new book, Uprooted, which documents 3,000 years...
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october 2018
Trump’s cuts are dangerous for Israelis and Palestinians: an interview with Dave Harden
By Dave Harden
Dave Harden is managing director of the Georgetown Strategy Group. He has led USAID programmes in Yemen, Syria,...
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october 2018
Why UNRWA is an obstacle to two states for two peoples: an interview with Einat Wilf
By Einat Wilf
Einat Wilf is the co-author of The War of Return (with former Haaretz journalist Adi Schwartz). She talked to Fathom...
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october 2018
Israel’s Nation-State Law and the three circles of solidarity: a round table with Ruth Gavison
By Ruth Gavison
Ruth Gavison is Professor Emerita of Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an Israel Prize...
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September 2018
‘A liberal society and respect for human rights are critically important for the well-being of the individual’: an interview with...
By Michael Sfard
Leading Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard talked to Fathom about his new book, The Wall and the Gate:...
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September 2018
What is Left antisemitism?
By Sean Matgamna
Contemporary left-wing antisemitism is first and foremost a denial of Israel’s right to exist and, as a result, a comprehensive hostility...
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September 2018
The Zionist Ideas: an interview with Gil Troy
By Gil Troy
Professor Gil Troy’s The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland―Then, Now, Tomorrow is a compilation of over...
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September 2018
The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland — Then, Now, Tomorrow
By Gil Troy
Reproduced from The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, and Tomorrow, edited by Gil Troy by...
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September 2018
Oslo25 | Israel and the Middle East after Oslo: Hope or despair?
By Yair Hirschfeld
Yair Hirschfeld was one of two Israeli academics (alongside the late Ron Pundak) who began unofficial and secret...
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September 2018
Oslo25 | Why are negotiations still stuck?
By Orna Mizrahi
Orna Mizrahi is the former Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser for foreign policy and a steering committee member...
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September 2018
Oslo25 | Twenty five years since Oslo: an insider’s account
By Joel Singer
Joel Singer was the Israeli delegation’s legal adviser to the Oslo talks. A confidant of Prime Minister Yitzhak...
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August 2018
Oslo25 | ‘We must liberate our thinking from the Oslo straitjacket’: An interview with Hussein Agha
By Hussein Agha
Hussein Agha has been involved in Palestinian peace negotiations for three decades. A senior associate member of St....
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August 2018
Fathom 21 | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
Oslo25 When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 the optimists hoped for peace and, in time, a...
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August 2018
Denial: Norman Finkelstein and the New Antisemitism
By Alan Johnson
In recent days the US polemicist Norman Finkelstein has injected a crude claim into the debate about antisemitism...
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August 2018
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Israel70 | Democracy against all odds, or at odds with democracy?
By Yohanan Plesner
Yochanan Plesner, President of the Israel Democracy Institute, argues that in order for Israel to secure a democratic...
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March 2018
Israel70 | ‘Israel is divided over what destination to put into our national GPS’: an interview with Tzipi Livni
By Tzipi Livni
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s former Foreign Minister and a leading peace negotiator, argues that Israel faces a hard choice:...
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March 2018
Why the Nazi Analogy and Holocaust Inversion are Antisemitic
By Alan Johnson
The following is an excerpt from ‘Antisemitism in the Guise of Anti-Nazism: Holocaust Inversion in the United Kingdom...
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August 2018
2017 Fathom Interview with Naftali Bennett
By Naftali Bennett
‘Forming a Palestinian state along the lines that many readers of Fathom believe is the way forward would...
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Winter 2017
Israel70 | Young Voices: time for the decision of the century in the West Bank
By Rob Pinfold
Rob Pinfold is a Neubauer Research Associate at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv...
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April 2018
Israel70 | Diaspora70: Reflections of an Old Zionist
By Michael Walzer
Michael Walzer is one of America's foremost political thinkers. To mark Israel’s 70th birthday he urges the embrace...
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April 2018
Israel70 | Innovation: Africa
By Sivan Ya'ari
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has visited African three times in the last 18 months, with the continent...
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July 2018
Israel70 | ‘Leadership is telling your own people things that are difficult to hear’: an interview with Yair Lapid
By Yair Lapid
According to the latest polls, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid is Israel's most liked politician after the Prime Minister....
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May 2018
‘To understand what makes Israel tick today you must understand who Netanyahu is and how he became the man he...
By Anshel Pfeffer
Anshel Pfeffer is the author of a major new biography of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In this...
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May 2018
Israel70 | Schooling for Peace: an interview with Dr Nava Sonnenschein
By Ruth Ebenstein
Dr Nava Sonnenschein is one of the founding members of the binational egalitarian community, Neve Shalom – Wahat...
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May 2018
Israel70 | A Light Unto The Nations Once More? The renaissance in Israel’s international development assistance programme
By Aliza Inbal and Ophelie Namiech
Israel was once a world leader in development assistance and a model for African states to follow. There...
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July 2018
Israel70 | Just don’t do it: The ramifications of a termination of the Oslo Accords
By Gilead Sher
Gilead Sher is a former Israeli senior peace negotiator and former Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Ehud...
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May 2018
From ‘intersectionality’ to the exclusion of Jewish students: BDS makes a worrying turn on US campuses
By Kenneth Waltzer
Kenneth Waltzer is the executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, a national US faculty organisation committed to...
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July 2018
Israel70 | Amos Oz’s Israel
By Liam Hoare
While Amos Oz’s novels are often read reductively as political allegories, Liam Hoare suggests that Oz’s special subject...
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June 2018
Where next for the Iran nuclear deal? A view from Israel
By Michael Herzog
Since the US withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear agreement in May, the other signatories have embarked on intensive negotiations...
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July 2018
Israel70 | The Global Enigma
By Sammy Smooha
In this careful mapping of the state of a country and a people at 70 the sociologist and...
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July 2018
Book Review | Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State
By Kyle Orton
Carter Malkasian sets out in Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State...
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July 2018
Book Review | Enemies and Neighbours; Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017
By Asher Susser
Ian Black has written a very well-researched, comprehensive and insightful survey of a century of Palestinian-Israeli conflict, from...
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Article
Israel70 | Towards a new model for religion and state in Israel
By Ruth Calderon
Dr Ruth Calderon is the former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and MK for the Yesh Atid party....
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June 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: The Israeli centre must seize the future
By Yair Zivan
Yair Zivan is Foreign Affairs Advisor to Yesh Atid Chairperson Yair Lapid. He argues that to answer the...
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June 2018
Israel 70 | Young Voices: Can Jerusalem become a capital of tolerance?
By Michal Shilor
Michal Shilor believes Jerusalem should be known as ‘the tolerance capital of the world.’ She works at the...
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June 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: Pipeline diplomacy and the emerging East-Med Region: a huge opportunity for Israel
By Elai Rettig
Elai Rettig is a PhD candidate at the School of Political Science in the University of Haifa, a...
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June 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: Reading Herzl’s Altneuland in 2018
By Asaf Yusufov
Asaf Yusufov is a former counsellor and manager at Tel Aviv’s Barnoar (an LGBTQ Youth Club) and is...
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June 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: Involving Arabs in political decision-making is right in principle and vital for Israel’s social cohesion
By Nasreen Hadad Haj-Yahya
Nasreen Hadad Haj-Yahya is Director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Arab-Jewish Relations Programme. She argues that as the...
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June 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: We must heal our divisions to redeem the world
By Daniel HaLevi
Daniel HaLevi is the director of a pre-military academy. He suggests that a guide to Israel’s best future...
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June 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: Zionism is now obligated to build bridges in culture, education and faith
By Yaniv Yitshak
Yaniv Yitshak lives with his wife Hadassah and their two children in the community of Yerucham where he...
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June 2018
Book Review | In Search of Israel: The history of an idea
By Colin Shindler
The renowned sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, a refugee from the anti-Semitic campaign in Communist Poland during the 1960s and...
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June 2018
Book Review | Days of the Fall: A Reporter's Journey in the Syria and Iraq Wars
By Michael Stephens
An eye witness to some of the most violent episodes in the history of both Iraq and Syria,...
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June 2018
Book Review | Being Kurdish in a Hostile World
By Paul Iddon
Ayub Nuri was born in the wrong place, or so he likes to quip. He comes from Halabja...
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June 2018
Burning money: the urgent need to rethink UNRWA
By Simon Waldman
Dr Simon A. Waldman is the author of Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1948-1951. In this opinion piece he...
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Article
Bernard Lewis (1916-2018): an intellectual giant
By Asher Susser
Asher Susser is senior fellow and former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at...
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May 2018
Israel70 | Israel’s grand strategy and the return of Russia as a Great Power
By Efraim Halevy
Former head of Mossad Efraim Halevy presents a sweeping overview of Israel’s strategic situation. He argues that the...
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May 2018
Book Review | Why Palestine Matters: The struggle to end colonialism
By Cary Nelson
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has published an ideological and political manual for anti-Israel organising ahead of its bi-annual...
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May 2018
Archive | Fathom Forum: Learning from Qassem Soleimani
By Jonathan Paris
Jonathan Paris argues that we underestimate the determination and the capacity of the Iranian regime to project power...
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May 2018
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Israel70 | Young Voices: time for the decision of the century in the West Bank
By Rob Pinfold
Rob Pinfold is a Neubauer Research Associate at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv...
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April 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: Israel's Arabs should be in Israel's government
By Tal Harris
Tal Harris is the spokesperson of MK Amir Peretz and a PhD candidate in sociology on urban migration...
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April 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: The moderate majority in Israel must find its voice in the decade ahead
By Tel Aviv Widrich
Tel Aviv Widrich is director of operations for Darkenu. Meaningful change in Israel, though desired by the moderate...
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April 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: A Plea for Civility
By Aaron Kalman
Aaron Kalman is a diplomatic adviser to Education Minister Naftali Bennett and former Jewish Agency Emissary to Australia....
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April 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: From the Kibbutz to the shared economy?
By Netta Geist
Netta Geist is a former Parliamentary Advisor to MK Stav Shaffir. She holds an MA in Public Policy...
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April 2018
Israel70 | Young Voices: Will a leader of Middle Eastern descent emerge to lead this Middle Eastern country?
By Hen Mazzig
Hen Mazzig is an Israeli writer, international speaker, social media activist and advocate. Hen’s family comes from Iraq...
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April 2018
Israel70 | How to keep the window open for the two-state solution
By Dennis Ross
As Israel approaches its 70th anniversary and the peace process at a low ebb, Dennis Ross, former Middle...
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April 2018
Israel70 | Palestinians are raising the alarm – the time to rescue the two-state solution is running out
By Ziad Darwish
Dr Ziad Darwish is a member of The Palestinian Committee for Interaction with Israeli Society – PLO (PCIIS)....
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April 2018
Israel70 | Forget ‘the ultimate deal’. For now, the status quo is the best option available
By Shalom Lipner
Shalom Lipner is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution....
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March 2018
Israel70 | How to fix the crisis in Israel-World Jewry relations
By Gidi Grinstein and Ari Afilalo
Gidi Grinstein and Ari Afilalo argue that on the eve of Israel’s 70th anniversary, it must reembrace its...
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April 2018
Anti-Zionism and the Humanities: A response to Saree Makdisi
By Cary Nelson and Russell Berman
This lengthy essay by two leading US professors challenges the world of academic publishing. They identify the symptoms...
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April 2018
Israel70 | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
Israel70 is a special bumper issue of the journal that maps the state of Israel at 70 years old and...
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March 2018
One-to-one | Towards the renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process
By Dahlia Scheindlin
On 22 March Fathom editor Alan Johnson sat down with Dahlia Scheindlin for the first of Fathom’s one-to-one interviews,...
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April 2018
Israel70 | Celebrating the argument
By Einat Wilf with Shany Mor
Zionism and the State of Israel are unique examples of a movement of national liberation, and a state,...
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March 2018
Israel70 | It is time for the minority to establish itself as a political actor in Israeli decision-making
By Mohammad Darawshe
Mohammad Darawshe is Director of the Center for Shared Society at Givat Haviva Institute and also served as...
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March 2018
Israel70 | Yisrael Aumann on gaming Israel's future
By Yisrael Aumann
Yisrael Aumann is an Israeli-American mathematician and a professor at the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality...
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March 2018
Book Review | Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine
By Cary Nelson
Sunaina Maira’s book Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine would not ordinarily be a publication of special...
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May 2018
The space between the Iraq-Iran border and the Mediterranean Sea today constitutes a single arena of conflict, by Jonathan Spyer
By Jonathan Spyer
Jonathan Spyer is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and a freelance security analyst and correspondent for...
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February 2018
‘As Jews who experienced the Holocaust, we have a moral obligation to help our neighbours': Talking to ‘Lt Col. E’...
By Elhanan Miller
Since 2016 the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has operated its Good Neighbour Project, which coordinates the transfer of...
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February 2018
Book Review | Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Anti-Semitism and Gender
By Colin Shindler
This important book is based on an international conference on Jews and the Left held in New York...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
Feminism in Israel is a special issue of Fathom journal that brings together the voices of 22 women from across...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Perhaps peace comes dropping slow: Rabbanit Tirza Kelman reflects on a trip to Northern Ireland
By Tirza Kelman
Two dozen religious Israelis met with an Irish priest. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Palestinian, Feminist, Peacebuilder: an interview with Huda Abu Arqoub
By Huda Abu Arqoub
Huda Abu Arqoub is Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), a network of civil society...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Meeting the challenges, making the changes: governing for women’s equality
By Rachel Azaria
Rachel Azaria is a Modern Orthodox Israeli politician, currently serving as a member of the Knesset for Kulanu....
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Haredi Feminism: an interview with Pnina Pfeuffer
By Pnina Pfeuffer
Pnina Pfeuffer is a leading figure in Haredi feminism and a regular columnist for Ha’aretz, Jerusalem Post, and...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Gender equality and the status of women in Israel: an interview with MK Aliza Lavie
By Aliza Lavie
Aliza Lavie is a member of the Knesset for Yesh Atid and a senior lecturer at the School of Communication at Bar-Ilan University....
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Feminism and the melodies of Judaism
By Elana Maryles Sztokman
The decision of Elana Maryles Sztokman, a long-time leading figure in US and Israeli Orthodox Jewish feminism to...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Feminism and Israeli-Palestinian Peace: an interview with Sarai Aharoni
By Sarai Aharoni
Sarai Aharoni is Assistant Professor at the Gender Studies Programme, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and one of...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Feminism and Jewish-Palestinian Solidarity can make another Israel possible: an interview with Fida Nara and Sarit...
By Fida Nara and Sarit Larry
Mahapach-Taghir is a grassroots, feminist, Jewish-Arab organisation that works for social change through education and empowerment in marginalised communities...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | Contesting social exclusion in Israel
By Michal Gera Margaliot and Miriam Zalkind
In this in-depth interview with Fathom deputy editor Calev Ben-Dor, the leaders of the Israel Women’s Network raise...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | ‘Pious men and dangerous women’: sex-segregation as a threat to women’s equality in Israel - an...
By Yofi Tirosh
Dr Yofi Tirosh is angry that she is still devoting ‘most of my time, energy, rage and despair...
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February 2018
Feminism in Israel | ‘There is a place for everyone in this feminist struggle for life’: an interview with Samah...
By Samah Salaime
Samah Salaime is the founder of Na’am/Arab Women in the Center. A social worker, she lives and works...
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February 2018
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Jewish votes and British foreign policy: The 1930 Whitechapel by-election
By Ronnie Fraser
At the Whitechapel and St. George’s by-election on 3 December 1930 Jewish voters directly influenced British policy on...
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January 2018
The Netanyahu Years: an interview with Ben Caspit
By Ben Caspit
In this exclusive interview, Fathom deputy editor Calev Ben-Dor sits down with Ben Caspit, a senior columnist for...
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Winter 2017
Why is there no Museum of Contemporary Israeli History?
By Liam Hoare
Israeli museums, argues Liam Hoare, are a terrain of political struggle over history and memory. ‘Until these arguments...
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Winter 2017
BICOM-JN Conference 2017 | Speech by Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry
By Emily Thornberry
This speech was delivered by the Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry at the BICOM-Jewish News Conference, held in...
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Autumn 2017
2017 Fathom Interview with Naftali Bennett
By Naftali Bennett
‘Forming a Palestinian state along the lines that many readers of Fathom believe is the way forward would...
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Winter 2017
‘The door won’t always remain open’: David Makovsky on the ‘Settlements and Solutions’ project
By David Makovsky
Fathom hosted a private briefing with David Makovsky, the Ziegler distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute and director...
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Autumn 2017
‘Trump is continuing Obama’s retreat from the world’: William Kristol on US foreign policy
By William Kristol
William Kristol is the founder and editor at large of the influential US political magazine The Weekly Standard....
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Autumn 2017
‘Whatever happens in the region must come from the region’: Sir John Jenkins on Islamism, Modernity and the Middle East
By Sir John Jenkins
Sir John Jenkins is a former UK Ambassador to Syria (2007-9), Libya (2011) and Saudi Arabia (2012-5). In...
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Autumn 2017
The Palestinian reconciliation agreement – context, consequences and open questions
By Michael Herzog
On 1 November, the Hamas movement began the process of handing over the three Gaza border crossings to...
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Autumn 2017
A Proposal for a Federal Republic of Israel
By Arieh Hess and Emanuel Shahaf
The Federation Movement advocates a new political approach to peace in which Israeli law is applied to the...
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Autumn 2017
The Suez Crisis and the Jews of Egypt
By Lyn Julius
‘There are few greater injustices than to say about something that happened, that it did not happen’ wrote...
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Autumn 2017
Fathom 18 | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
Fathom 18 is a bumper issue offering 30 pieces on four broad topics: the Middle East after ISIS,...
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Autumn 2017
Fathom eBook | Balfour 100: The Fathom Essays
By Fathom Editors
Fathom has published a new eBook to mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which you can...
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Autumn 2017
Fathom Forum | Reciprocal Radicalisation Hotbeds: how Islamist and far-Right extremism feed off each other
By Julia Ebner
The following remarks were made to a Fathom Forum in London on 3 October 2017. Ebner is a...
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Autumn 2017
Balfour 100 | Christian Zionism and the Balfour Declaration
By Gershon Shafir
Gershon Shafir argues that British Christian Zionism pre-dated practical Jewish Zionism and helped to ensure that, by the...
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Autumn 2017
Balfour 100 | 'Weizmann corralled the British government behind the Zionist movement': an interview with Jonathan Schneer
By Jonathan Schneer
Jonathan Schneer’s book The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict was praised by Simon Sebag Montefiore...
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Autumn 2017
After ISIS Symposium: Can ISIS really be defeated without legitimate local governance? | Kyle Orton
By Kyle Orton
Editorial Introduction to the Symposium: In this symposium, six experts – Kyle Orton, Aymenn al-Tamimi, Craig Whiteside, David...
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Autumn 2017
After ISIS Symposium: Where will ISIS regroup? | Ely Karmon
By Ely Karmon
Editorial Introduction to the Symposium: In this symposium, six experts – Kyle Orton, Aymenn al-Tamimi, Craig Whiteside, David...
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Autumn 2017
After ISIS Symposium: Will ISIS now target Egypt? | Michael Barak
By Michael Barak
Editorial Introduction to the Symposium: In this symposium, six experts – Kyle Orton, Aymenn al-Tamimi, Craig Whiteside, David...
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Autumn 2017
After ISIS Symposium: Why ISIS will survive the loss of its 'Islamic State' | Aymenn al-Tamimi
By Aymenn al-Tamimi
Editorial Introduction to the Symposium: In this symposium, six experts – Kyle Orton, Aymenn al-Tamimi, Craig Whiteside, David...
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Autumn 2017
After ISIS Symposium: Will the counter-insurgency tactics used to defeat ISIS help it recruit new fighters? | Craig Whiteside
By Craig Whiteside
Editorial Introduction to the Symposium: In this symposium, six experts – Kyle Orton, Aymenn al-Tamimi, Craig Whiteside, David...
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Autumn 2017
After ISIS Symposium: What is the scale of the threat to the UK from returning Jihadis? | David Wells
By David Wells
Editorial Introduction to the Symposium: In this symposium, six experts – Kyle Orton, Aymenn al-Tamimi, Craig Whiteside, David...
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Autumn 2017
BDS and DSA: the American Left loses its way
By Jo-Ann Mort
Dissent editorial board member Jo-Ann Mort, a cofounder of the Democratic Socialists of America and former vice-chair (and...
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Autumn 2017
Book Review | The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire
By Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
A book about the League of Nations, let alone one of its little known subsections, the Permanent Mandates...
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Autumn 2017
Book Review | The Endless Quest for Israeli-Palestinian Peace: A Reflection from No Man’s Land
By Lauren Mellinger
In his new memoir The Endless Quest for Israeli-Palestinian Peace: A Reflection from No Man’s Land former UN...
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Autumn 2017
Book Review | We Were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz
By Liam Hoare
Of all the aspects and institutions of kibbutz life, the children’s house is one that in particular continues...
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Autumn 2017
Book Review | The Left in Disarray
By Colin Shindler
Most of the time, the key terms of the anti-capitalist Left have no clear meaning, they express and...
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Autumn 2017
Book Review | The End of Jewish Modernity
By Philip Spencer
This is a sadly disappointing book. At one level, it is yet another example of a widespread failure...
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Autumn 2017
No Room for Small Dreams: How the Start-up Nation can help create the Start-Up Region
By Chemi Peres
Chemi Peres is the chairman of the Peres Centre for Peace and Innovation, founded by his father Shimon...
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Autumn 2017
Israel's diplomatic relations reconsidered
By Michael Koplow
There is a fundamental assumption undergirding the argument that people like me make about Israel needing to come...
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Autumn 2017
Southern Syria: How to stop the Iranian plan for regional dominance
By Michael Herzog
Michael Herzog served as head of the IDF’s Strategic Planning Division and chief of staff to Israel’s minister...
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Autumn 2017
Fathom Forum | ‘City on a Hilltop’? Sara Hirschhorn on the clash between liberal values and settler realities
By Sara Hirschhorn
Fathom was delighted to welcome Dr Sara Hirschhorn to a Fathom Forum in London to discuss her recent...
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Autumn 2017
The Israeli visa law and other own goals in the BDS wars
By Gerald M. Steinberg
It’s time to press reset on Israel’s confused response to the genuine threat of BDS and demonisation. A...
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Autumn 2017
‘The assumption that a conflict of over 100 years can be solved by a piece of paper is totally detached...
By Yair Hirschfeld
As the play Oslo opens in London, Fathom’s Calev Ben-Dor sat down with Yair Hirschfeld who was, with...
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Autumn 2017
Oslo | Staging the ‘White Man's Burden’
By Einat Wilf
To mark the Tony Award winning play Oslo opening in London this September, based on the Oslo Peace...
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Autumn 2017
A question of moral responsibility: an interview with Hagai El-Ad of B’Tselem
By Hagai El-Ad
Hagai El-Ad is the Executive Director of B'Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the...
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Autumn 2017
Human Rights and German-Israeli relations after the Gabriel Affair
By Gadi Taub
In April 2017 the social democratic German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel decided to meet with Breaking the Silence...
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Autumn 2017
‘The Zionist Left needs to understand that change is impossible without us’: an interview with MK Ayman Odeh
By Ayman Odeh
21 per cent of Israel’s citizens are Arab-Palestinians. Since 2015 the leader of the Joint List – an...
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Autumn 2017
‘We have to share the land somehow. But for peace, the Palestinians must change their narrative’: an interview with Yossi...
By Yossi Kuperwasser
Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser was chief of the research division in IDF Military Intelligence, and until recently,...
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Autumn 2017
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Fathom 17 | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
Fathom 17 is a special issue to mark the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. We have three...
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Summer 2017
Balfour 100 | The world of our founders: being Jewish in Palestine after Balfour
By Donna Robinson Divine
Donna Robinson Divine argues that the Zionist nation-building story, while inspiring, does not reflect the trials, pains and...
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Summer 2017
Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in West Germany in the 1970s: Lessons for Today
By Martin Jander
In this provocative analysis of discourse about Israel in West Germany in the 1970s, Martin Jander claims that...
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Summer 2017
A Deeply Rooted Anti-Zionism: Reflections from South Africa
By Milton Shain
While the degree of support for radical anti-Zionism in South Africa is often wildly exaggerated – the government...
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Summer 2017
The Left and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The path to righteous hatred
By Jamie Palmer
In this timely and eloquent essay, Jamie Palmer explores the impact on the politics of the Left of...
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Summer 2017
Book Review | All the Rivers
By Liam Hoare
It is hard to know how to talk about Dorit Rabinyan’s third novel, All the Rivers, an elegant,...
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Summer 2017
The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas: an interview with Grant Rumley and Amir Tibon
By Grant Rumley and Amir Tibon
Fathom Assistant Editor Samuel Nurding sat down with Grant Rumley and Amir Tibon to discuss their new book...
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Article
Book Review | Colonialism and the Jews
By John Strawson
Jews, like other peoples, have been much affected by the history of colonialism and empire. The Babylonian exile...
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Article
Trump is in danger of pulling a reverse Obama
By Ilan Goldenberg
A month ago after returning from a trip to Israel, I wrote that we may be on the...
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Summer 2017
A future for Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding
By BICOM
BICOM and Fathom have published a new research report, A future for Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding. It has been written...
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Summer 2017
Book Review | The Shell
By Kyle Orton
In Syria, the West has been keen not to repeat the mistakes of Iraq — defined as being...
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Summer 2017
Balfour 100 | ‘Mack’: Aaron Aaronsohn, the NILI intelligence network and the Balfour Declaration
By Efraim Halevy
NILI – an acronym for the biblical Hebrew phrase, Netzakh Yisrael Lo Yeshaker, meaning ‘The Eternal One of...
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Summer 2017
Balfour 100 | Repairing the World: why Britain should now recognise the State of Palestine
By Elias Zananiri
Elias Zananiri, Vice-Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Committee for Interaction with the Israeli Society, argues that...
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Summer 2017
Balfour 100 | We need to talk about the Balfour Declaration
By Toby Greene
2017 is the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s letter of support for the establishment...
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Summer 2017
Balfour 100 | British policy in Palestine 1917–1925
By James Sorene
Despite issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and subsequently obtaining the Mandate for Palestine from the League of...
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Summer 2017
Balfour 100 | Before Balfour: The Labour Party’s War Aims memorandum
By Ronnie Fraser
Ronnie Fraser tells the little-known story of the British Labour Party’s support for Zionism. Three months before the...
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Summer 2017
Balfour 100 | Chaim Weizmann, the Guardian and the Balfour Declaration
By Azriel Bermant
The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George believed that ChaimWeizmann would become ‘the one name that will be...
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Summer 2017
Book Review | Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman
By Neill Lochery
I must warn the reader at the start of this review of a couple of personal points that...
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Summer 2017
Book Review | Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
By Cary Nelson
Kingdom of Olives And Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, is a...
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Summer 2017
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Fathom 16 | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
On its 50th anniversary, this special issue of Fathom maps the causes, courses and consequences of a watershed...
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Spring 2017
Einat Wilf: Constructive ambiguity has not worked. Peace needs constructive specificity
By Einat Wilf
Einat Wilf is one of the most creative Israeli thinkers on the peace process. In this talk to...
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Article
1967 | How the Six-Day War is still transforming Israel
By Donna Robinson Divine
For most Israelis, the military victory of 1967 rescued the country from an existential threat. But for some,...
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Spring 2017
Fathom Forum | Professor Sammy Smooha: ‘Israeli Democracy in Comparative Perspective’
By Sammy Smooha
Sammy Smooha is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Haifa, and winner of the 2008 Israel...
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Article Spring 2017
1967 | 'A deal with the region should go through Ramallah’: an interview with Nidal Foqaha
By Nidal Foqaha
Nidal Foqaha is Director-General of the Palestinian Peace Coalition-Geneva Initiative in Ramallah. He served as an advisor at...
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Article
1967 | ‘The Palestinians won’t pay the price of peace, which is recognition’: an interview with Michael Oren
By Michael Oren
Michael Oren is a former Israeli ambassador to the US and currently serves as Deputy Minister for Diplomacy...
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Article
1967 | How Nasser’s vendetta against America led to the Six-Day War
By Gabriel Glickman
For 50 years historians have debated the question of what motivated Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s disastrous drift...
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Spring 2017
1967 | The international media and the Six-Day War
By Meron Medzini
Professor Meron Medzini served as the Director of Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO) in Jerusalem during the Six-Day...
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Article
1967 | As long as the Arab world views Israel as a temporary aberration to be conquered, Israel will stand...
By Einat Wilf
To bring a permanent end to the Israeli military occupation of much of the territory acquired during the...
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Spring 2017
‘The situation in Gaza is much worse than prior to the war in 2014’: an interview with Giora Eiland
By Giora Eiland
Giora Eiland served in the IDF for 33 years, rising to Major General. He left the IDF in...
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Spring 2017
1967 | Internalising defeat – the Six-Day War and the Arab world: an interview with Kanan Makiya
By Kanan Makiya
Kanan Makiya is known for two seminal books - Republic of Fear, which called attention to the cruel...
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Article Spring 2017
Abbas in Washington: dancing in place or moving forward?
By Daniel B. Shapiro
Writing exclusively for Fathom, Daniel B. Shapiro, former Ambassador of the United States of America to the State...
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Spring 2017
1967 | Why more and more Israeli Jews think the settlements are in Israel
By Oded Haklai
Oded Haklai reports on research suggesting that for the generations of Israeli Jews born after 1967, the pre-1967...
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Spring 2017
Book Review | A Political Theory for the Jewish People
By Nahshon Perez
A Political Theory for the Jewish People is a fascinating book, offering a rich and nuanced discussion of...
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Spring 2017
Ken Livingstone and the myth of Zionist ‘collaboration’ with the Nazis
By Paul Bogdanor
In this meticulous rebuttal of the former Mayor of London’s charge that ‘you had right up until the...
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Spring 2017
Book Review | North Korea and the Middle East
By Jack May
At a recent conference Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman identified North Korea as the greatest threat to global...
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Spring 2017
1967 | The wisdom of Resolution 242
By Toby Greene
The logic of UN Resolution 242 – that this is a conflict of two sides with rights and...
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Spring 2017
Book review | Israel and Palestine Alternative Perspectives on Statehood
By John Strawson
It is extraordinary that 70 years after the UN partition resolution we are still discussing the future of...
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Spring 2017
New thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process: towards a hybrid approach
By BICOM
The peace process is currently at an impasse. Bringing the parties together for another intensive effort at reaching...
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Article Spring 2017
1967 | Don’t believe the hype: the settlers have not made the two-state solution unachievable
By Orni Petruschka and Gilead Sher
After 50 years of Israeli control over the West Bank, increasing numbers believe that a ‘two states for...
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Article Spring 2017
On Chaim Gans on the Jewish Diaspora
By Michael Walzer
Fathom has invited a series of writers to respond to Chaim Gans’s A Political Theory for the Jewish...
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Spring 2017
Response to Michael Walzer’s ‘On Chaim Gans on the Jewish Diaspora’
By Chaim Gans
Writing in Fathom Michael Walzer responded to the discussion of diaspora Jews in Chaim Gans’s book A Political...
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Spring 2017
‘I did not leave the Likud, the Likud left me’: an interview with Moshe Ya’alon
By Moshe Ya'alon
Moshe Ya'alon is a former Chief of Staff for the IDF and served under the Netanyahu government for...
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Spring 2017
1967 | Remembering the Six-Day War
By Michael Walzer
One of America’s foremost political thinkers, Michael Walzer wrote his seminal book Just and Unjust Wars in 1977....
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Spring 2017
1967 | The Six-Day War and Israeli society: an interview with Yossi Klein Halevi
By Yossi Klein Halevi
Yossi Klein Halevi is the author of the acclaimed book Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers...
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Spring 2017
1967 | Nasser’s Antisemitic War Against Israel
By Matthias Kuntzel
Matthias Kuntzel is the author of the award-winning book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of...
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Spring 2017
1967 | The Global Left and the Six-Day War
By Jeffrey Herf
Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park,...
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Spring 2017
1967 | Natan Alterman or Amos Oz? The Six-Day War and Israeli Literature
By Liam Hoare
Israeli writers were split by the Six-Day War. On one side was the poet Natan Alterman, whose Movement...
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Spring 2017
1967 | The Six-Day War was a watershed in Middle Eastern history
By Asher Susser
The Arab defeat in 1967 shattered the image of pan-Arabism as a vehicle of Arab modernisation. The Islamists...
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Spring 2017
Book Review | The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory
By Kyle Orton
Brian Fishman's The Master Plan provides a comprehensive history of the Islamic State’s (IS) strategic evolution, covering the...
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Spring 2017
Book Review | The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu
By Colin Shindler
Admiration and respect are not words usually attached to the persona of Benjamin Netanyahu by either friend or...
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Spring 2017
State and religion in Israel: An interview with Elazar Stern
By Elazar Stern
Elazar Stern is an Israeli politician and former soldier. He served as a Major General in the IDF...
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Spring 2017
Fathom Forum | Jeffrey Herf: Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left 1967-81
By Jeffrey Herf
Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maryland. His books include Nazi Propaganda for...
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Spring 2017
Seize the Moment – Build a New Regional Paradigm
By Koby Huberman
The two-state solution is the only viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet we need a new paradigm...
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Spring 2017
Fathom Forum | Gabrielle Rifkind: Fog of Peace: How to Prevent War
By Gabrielle Rifkind
Gabrielle Rifkind is director of the Oxford Process Programme at Oxford Research Group (ORG), an independent peace and...
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Spring 2017
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Fathom 15 | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
The 19th century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson was not slow to offer pieces of advice. Many ended...
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Winter 2016
Balfour 100 | We need to talk about the Balfour Declaration
By Toby Greene
2017 is the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s letter of support for the establishment...
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Summer 2017
How to change reality in Gaza and shape the evolution of Hamas: an interview with Grisha Yakubovich
By Grisha Yakubovich
Col. (res) Grisha Yakubovich spent the majority of his 30 years in the IDF in the Coordinator of...
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Winter 2016
What Trump should do with the Iran deal
By Emily B. Landau
Dr. Emily B. Landau is a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in...
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Winter 2016
Everyday Binationality in Jaffa: an interview with Daniel Monterescu
By Daniel Monterescu
Daniel Monterescu is the author of Jaffa Shared and Shattered: Contrived Coexistence in Israel / Palestine.[1] An anthropologist...
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Winter 2016
‘Cooperation between rivals’: a new paradigm for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian system (2006-2016)
By Doron Matza
Doron Matza proposes a new critical paradigm to understand the relationship between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships: ‘cooperation...
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Winter 2016
Justifying Israel: An interview with Chaim Gans
By Chaim Gans
Chaim Gans is a political philosopher and Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University. He is the author...
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Winter 2016
The BDS Disinformation Campaign in the Modern Language Association
By Cary Nelson
In this comprehensive essay, Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and co-editor...
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Winter 2016
Mamlakhtiyut, peace and the dangerous rise of populism: In memory of Shimon Peres
By Amir Peretz
Amir Peretz is a Member of Knesset (Labor Party), former defence minister and former minister for the protection...
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Winter 2016
Debating Israel’s Identity
By Ruth Gavison
Ruth Gavison is Professor Emerita, holding the Haim H. Cohn Chair of Human Rights, in the Faculty of...
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Winter 2016
Trump and the Middle East: Prospects and Tasks
By BICOM
At the 2016 BICOM-Jewish News Policy Conference, ‘UK-Israel Shared Strategic Challenges’, a panel of Middle East experts discussed...
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Winter 2016
Mosul: after ISIS, what next?
By Seth Frantzman
Mosul has suffered three jihadist takeovers since 2004. In a detailed mapping of the conflict and its actors,...
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Winter 2016
Book Review | Tragic Encounters and Ordinary Ethics: Palestine-Israel in British Universities
By Keith Kahn-Harris
The publication of this book could hardly be better timed. The disturbance at a Friends of Israel Society...
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Winter 2016
Book Review | Dreams Deferred: A Concise Guide to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
By Luke Akehurst
I tried to read Dreams Deferred in the conventional style, cover to cover. Bad idea. The book isn’t...
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Winter 2016
Book Review | Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East
By David Lowe
In 2013, shortly after his nomination for US Defence Secretary, then Senator Chuck Hagel purchased three dozen copies...
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Winter 2016
Book review | A Horse Walks Into a Bar
By Liam Hoare
A Horse Walks Into a Bar, an opening line to many a haggard joke, is not necessarily what...
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Winter 2016
Fathom Forum with Dr. Dalia Fadila: 'Q Schools: Educating for equality in Israel’
By Dalia Fadila
This September Fathom hosted Dr. Dalia Fadila, faculty member of the International School for Leadership and Diplomacy at...
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Autumn 2016
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Fathom 14 | Editorial
By Fathom Editors
Fathom 14 examines four challenges facing Israel: the challenge of creating a shared society, of creating a security system...
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Article Autumn 2016
Lessons from Cyprus for Israel-Palestine
By Dahlia Scheindlin
Cyprus has experienced a protracted, unresolved conflict for roughly five decades. Like Israel-Palestine, the conflict has ethno-nationalist and...
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Autumn 2016
Returning Jihadis: A Generational Threat
By Peter Neumann
Professor Peter Neumann’s new book Radicalised: New Jihadists and the Threat to the West, has been described as...
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Autumn 2016
The old ways have had their day. Peace-making will look very different in the era of Trump
By Claire Spencer
Claire Spencer is Senior Research Fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Programme and Second Century Initiative,...
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Article Autumn 2016
Trump, Israel and the Jews: What Happens Next?
By Shany Mor
Shany Mor is a former Director for Foreign Policy on the Israeli National Security Council. In these first...
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Autumn 2016
The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu: an interview with Neill Lochery
By Neill Lochery
Neil Lochery is the Catherine Lewis Professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Studies at University College London (UCL)....
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Article Autumn 2016
Opinion amongst the young is drifting. An International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace is urgently needed
By Joel Braunold John Lyndon
‘The best people to convince Israelis that Palestinians are not monsters, and to show the Palestinians that Israelis...
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Article Autumn 2016
The Israeli-Palestinian Arena – what could be done short of an agreement
By Michael Herzog
Michael Herzog has been a participant in nearly all Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since 1993. In this important essay, which...
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Article Autumn 2016
Dave Rich | ‘The Left's Jewish problem’
By Dave Rich
Dave Rich is deputy director of communications at the Community Security Trust (CST), associate research fellow...
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Article Autumn 2016
After Brexit (1): Jonathan Rynhold on Israel’s future relations with the UK and the EU
By Jonathan Rynhold
Fathom’s contributing editor Dr. Toby Greene sat down with Jonathan Rynhold, professor of Political Science at Bar Ilan...
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Autumn 2016
After Brexit (2): Azriel Bermant on Israel’s future relations with the UK and the EU
By Azriel Bermant
Azriel Bermant, a lecturer in International Relations at Tel Aviv University and a former research fellow at Tel...
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Autumn 2016
Book Review | The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism
By Philip Spencer
To say this is a timely book is something of an understatement. Over the past few months, evidence...
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Autumn 2016
Symposium | A security system for the two-state solution
By Kris Bauman & Ilan Goldenberg
Colonel Kris Bauman is Senior Military Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at the National...
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Autumn 2016
Symposium | Israel’s core security requirements in permanent-status negotiations
By Michael Herzog
As an official involved in most of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians over the last 23...
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Autumn 2016
Symposium | ‘Separation is not the answer’: Gershon Hacohen on Israel’s security
By Gershon Hacohen
Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen served in the IDF for 42 years, commanding troops in battle on the...
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Autumn 2016
‘Each must see the Other’: Education and mutual recognition in Israel – an interview with Ayman Agbaria
By Ayman Agbaria
Professor Ayman Agbaria is a Palestinian poet, playwright, scholar and activist. He is a senior lecturer in education...
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Autumn 2016
Fathom Forum with Dr. Dalia Fadila: 'Q Schools: Educating for equality in Israel’
By Dalia Fadila
This September Fathom hosted Dr. Dalia Fadila, faculty member of the International School for Leadership and Diplomacy at...
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Autumn 2016