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David Shulman

David Shulman is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab–Jewish Partnership. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in February. (June 2017)

IN THE REVIEW

Israel’s Irrational Rationality

Israeli policemen removing a protester during the eviction of Jewish settlers from the illegal settlement of Amona in the occupied West Bank, February 2017

The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East

by Guy Laron

The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine

by Nathan Thrall
This June, Israel is marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War. Some Israelis, including most members of the present government, are celebrating the country’s swift victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria as the beginning of the permanent annexation of the entire Palestinian West Bank; others, like me, mourn it as the start of a seemingly inexorable process of moral corruption and decline, the result of the continuing occupation of the West Bank, along with Israel’s now indirect but still-crippling control of Gaza. As it happens, my own life in Israel coincides exactly with the occupation.

Israel: The Broken Silence

Popular Protest in Palestine: The Uncertain Future of Unarmed Resistance

by Marwan Darweish and Andrew Rigby

Return: A Palestinian Memoir

by Ghada Karmi
Israeli human rights activists and what is left of the Israeli peace groups, including joint Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations, are under attack. In a sense, this is nothing very new. But open attacks on the Israeli left have now assumed a far more sinister and ruthless character; some of them are being played out in the interrogation rooms of Israeli prisons. Clearly, there is an ongoing coordinated campaign involving the government, members of the Knesset, the police, various semiautonomous right-wing groups, and the public media. Politically driven harassment, including violent and illegal arrest, interrogation, denial of legal support, virulent incitement, smear campaigns, even death threats issued by proxy—all this has become part of the repertoire of the far right, which dominates the present government and sets the tone for its policies.

At the Heart of Hinduism

Roberto Calasso in his house in Milan with a sculpture of an Indian snake, 1989

Ardor

by Roberto Calasso, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon
Every year, on a certain Tuesday in October, worshipers of the Golden Goddess, Paidi Talli, gather in a grove of trees somewhere outside the small town of Vizianagaram in southern India. Which grove is chosen depends on the goddess, who will have appeared to her main priest in a dream …

NYR DAILY

Submerged in the Cosmic Kingdom

Guge was once home to a major inner-Asian dynasty whose artists and craftsmen produced a plethora of masterpieces over some five centuries—including some large-scale murals and exquisitely carved and painted sculptures depicting Buddhist visions of the cosmos and its deities. Little known in the West largely because of Guge’s inaccessible location, the works have now been richly and systematically documented in the photographer and art historian Peter van Ham’s astonishing new book, Guge: Ages of Gold.

Palestine: The End of the Bedouins?

Abu Rasmi Ayyub amidst the ruins of al-Hammeh, 2016

Today, most of the Jordan Valley, undoubtedly one of the most ravishing landscapes on the planet, is situated in what is known as Area C of occupied Palestinian territory. This means that, with the exception of the ancient city of Jericho and its surroundings (which are in Area A, under Palestinian rule), the valley is under direct and exclusive Israeli military, legal, and political control, and also that large parts of it are taken up by Israeli settlements or by lands that have been reserved for future Israeli settlement. It also means that a Palestinian population of some 15,000 Bedouins who are settled in the valley is tacitly targeted for expulsion.

Jerusalem: Why Should Things Not Get Worse?

Palestinian demonstrators attempting to break the barrier separating parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Israel, Jerusalem, October 28, 2015

Fear, also hate, makes for a light finger on the trigger, especially in an atmosphere of rabid nationalism that is deliberately fanned by government spokesmen and the prime minister himself. Army intelligence predicts the current violence will get worse; already, Hamas is said to have directed its forces on the West Bank to carry out suicide bombings. And why should things not get worse?