http://tonykaron.com Analysis and commentary by Tony Karon Fri, 09 May 2008 04:55:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I. The Fact of Israel Israel at 60 is an intractable historical fact. It has one of the world's strongest armies, without peer in the Middle East, and its 200 or so nuclear warheads give it the last word in any military showdown with any of its neighbors. Don't believe the ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/05/08/israel-is-alive-zionism-is-dead-what-now/ Guest columnist: Uri Avnery. On the day of the first seder, the legendary Israeli peace campaigner Avnery mailed out a fascinating piece deconstructing some of the "Exodus" mythology, and examining its nationalist purposes. I'm glad he's agreed to me republishing his work. Pesach is a time of asking questions, of ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/21/of-matzoh-balls-and-mythology/ Passover is a time of asking questions, and I have a few. This year, though, the furor that surrounded Barack Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his sermons that dared to suggest that this Christian nation may actually be earning God's wrath and damnation for some of its behavior, reminded me ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/18/who-owns-passover/ For a few years, I've wondered why Haaretz, an otherwise excellent newspaper, gives such an expansive platform to the infantile right-wing nationalist doggerel of Smuel Rosner, apparently their blogger-in-chief. But I think I've begun to understand it: With the right-wing nationalist cranks of CAMERA and other shock troops ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/17/rosner-haaretzs-itchy-beard/ Carter with Noam Shalit, father of Hamas captive Gilad You could say Jimmy Carter was tempting fate by meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal -- after all, his entirely appropriate evocation of apartheid in reference to the regime Israel has created on the West Bank earned him the label "Holocaust-denier" from ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/15/jimmy-carter-and-the-art-of-growing-up/ The International Monetary Fund warns that spiraling food inflation threatens the survival of 100 million people; the World Bank warns that it could bring down some 33 governments. As I wrote on TIME.com last week, The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/14/there-goes-the-washington-consensus/ The testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker this week -- and the ensuing congressional debate -- were so utterly predictable, so bland and so basically unchanged from what we heard a year ago, that I thought I'd check in on what I wrote a year ago on ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/10/iraq-aint-a-damn-thing-changed/ Israeli activists from Zochrot join Palestinian Nakbah survivors in commemorating a lost village With the 60th anniversary of Israel's birth -- and of the Palestinian Nakbah (catastrophe) -- which are, of course the same event, almost upon us, I was reminded this week that April 9 was also the 60th anniversary ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/09/healing-israels-birth-scar/ The idea of the starving masses driven onto the streets to demand bread, and then being forced by the violent response of the state to seek its overthrow, had seemed impossibly quaint for decades -- the stuff of a distant epoch, kept alive in Broadway musicals and Warren Beatty ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/09/a-revolutionary-moment-in-egypt/ Anywhere you look in the media covering Iraq today, you'll find tales of the U.S. and Iraqi government forces targeting not the Mehdi Army of Moqtada Sadr, but the "Special Groups." This capitalized designation refers, ostensibly, to "rogue" units of Sadr's army, who have been taken over by Iran. Ambassador ... http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/07/what-makes-groups-special/