60 Minutes on the Plight of Palestinian Christians
Last night’s 60 Minutes segment about the plight of Christians in the West Bank has gotten a lot of attention, in part because of the attempt by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren to intervene with CBS brass while the segment was being put together. (See the 11-minute point in the video above, where CBS correspondent Bob Simon confronts Oren with this fact.)
You can see why Oren might rather the piece hadn’t aired. Things that Palestinian Muslims routinely say about the Israeli occupation may get more traction in America when Palestinian Christians say them. Such as this, from a Christian clergyman: “The West Bank is becoming more and more like a piece of Swiss cheese, where Israel gets the cheese — that is, the land the water resources, the archaeological sites, and the Palestinians are pushed in the holes.”
Also, Oren clearly doesn’t want this document, mentioned by Simon, to get attention. In it an interdominational group of Middle Eastern Christian clergy — Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant — refer to the occupation as “clear apartheid.” (Oren hints that they’re anti-Semitic.)
Finally, the 60 Minutes piece complicates the post-9/11 Israeli narrative according to which Israel and Judeo-Christian America are involved in a common struggle against Islamic radicals, and the occupation should be viewed in that context. Hence the importance of the moment when Oren insists Christians are leaving the West Bank under duress from Islamic radicals, not because of the occupation, and Simon presents testimony to the contrary.
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![Crowdsourcing an Israeli-Palestinian Border
A new interactive tool allows you to decide how many Israeli settlers to annex and what constitutes a viable Palestinian state.
One day after the Palestinians successfully upgraded their state at the United Nations General Assembly, the Israeli government announced “preliminary zoning and planning preparations” for a plot of land just outside of Jerusalem known as E1. Many were quick to condemn the move as a significant blow to the already-gridlocked peace process, perhaps even more so than other settlement construction announcements, since construction in E1 would separate the major Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon decried the plan as “an almost fatal blow to remaining chances of securing a two-state solution,” while The New York Times declared that “If such a project were to go beyond blueprints, it could prevent the creation of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.”
[Image: S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace/SAYA/Is Peace Possible?]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_memkizGR0I1qcokc4o1_1280.png)
![Conor Friedersdorf: Is One Man’s Terrorist Another Man’s Freedom Fighter?
In his new book, The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg goes on a rant against the phrase, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” writing, “It is simply absurd to contend that because people may argue over who is or is not a terrorist that it is therefore impossible to make meaningful distinctions between terrorists and freedom fighters.” Is that what those who invoke the phrase are saying? Like a lot of cliches, it doesn’t really make literal sense and is probably best avoided, but I suspect what many people mean when they use it is something like, “As a descriptor, terrorist is almost never applied rigorously and consistently to describe the tactics a group is using — rather, it is invoked as a pejorative to vilify the actions only of groups one wishes to discredit. People who agree with the ends of the very same groups often don’t think of them as terrorists, the negative connotation of which causes them to focus on what they regard as the noble ends of allies they’re more likely to dub freedom fighters.”Put more simply, it’s possible to rigorously determine who is a terrorist if you go by the actual meaning of the word, but in practice the term is almost never applied in accordance with a strict definition.And today I can alert you to an especially Orwellian example.
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[Image: Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan’s car, in which he was killed by an explosion, via Reuters]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4519xeMXE1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![What the U.S. Can (and Can’t) Learn From Israel’s Ban on Ultra-Thin Models
On March 19, the Israeli parliament passed legislation ubiquitously known in the country as the Photoshop laws. The new regulations on the fashion and advertising industry ban underweight models as determined by Body Mass Index and regulate Photoshop usage in media and advertising. Abroad, the laws have opened new discussion on a government’s right to intervene in these two industries.
The legislation focuses on two elements of the fashion industry that have long drawn criticism for their effects on women and, especially, girls: ultra thin models and the use of Photoshop to make women appear impossibly thin in advertisements. The measure has been controversial within Israel for raising the question of where free speech bumps up against the fashion industry’s responsibility — and its possible harm — to its customers’ psychological wellbeing. It has also raised the question of whether other countries might consider similar measures to address what many activists consider a root cause of an epidemic of anorexia and other eating disorders.
Read more. [Image: AP]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3rb5orKQc1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
