Week-off notes: What to read this week

After almost a month of constant traveling and reporting it's time for me to take a week off. Thanksgiving is coming, the week is already cut in half, so it's basically only the first half of it that I'm taking. However, I wouldn't dare leaving without leaving you with some recommended reading material. I'll be back next week. So here we go:

Dialogs

Our last 3 dialogs were fabulous, and I highly recommend that those of you who didn't yet have a chance to read them try again.

Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker discussed his book Prisoners and other issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "When you're talking about more moderate Palestinians, however -- and I include in this group a certain number of Fatah figures - then I do believe that personal friendship does bring with it certain benefits. The goal, of course, is to get enemies to recognize the human in each other. Islamists (and Kahanists, and probably most settlers) are incapable of acknowledging the existence of pain outside the boundaries of their tribes. Islamists, of course, tend to see Jews as sub-human. The average settler doesn't view the Arabs as sub-human, but they do see them as something akin to barbarians, and assume, wrongly, that the Palestinians all revel in death, the deaths of Jews, and the deaths of their own children who die while killing Jews. I can say with certainty that many Palestinians loathe the Moloch-like aspects of their society."

Rabbi David Saperstein was our guest for the election week, and accordingly has focused on politics: "It should be remembered that Jewish interests and values are best represented in America when they are felt across the political spectrum. Good moral Jews are as likely to be Republicans as Democrats. It is Jewish Republicans who helped lead the efforts to prevent the Pat Robertsons and Pat Buchanans from taking over the Republican Party. It was Jewish Republicans who helped end the traditional strand of isolationism in the party (making it more pro-foreign aid than it had traditionally been). It was Jewish Republicans who brought Republican Members of Congress to Israel and moved the party to as strong a pro-Israel stance as the Democrats had been. Indeed, there have been no achievements which Jews have supported in the 20th century that happened because of purely partisan votes in Congress. Achievements for labor, civil rights, the anti-war movement, the environment, Israel, Soviet Jewry, abortion rights, fighting anti-Semitism - all the good things that happened did so because of bipartisan coalitions of decency on Capitol Hill and Jewish Republicans helped make this happen."

Rob Satloff just published a new book of Arabs who saved Jews during the Holocaust, and was discussing the book and Arab anti-Semitism in our dialog last week: "It is important to remember that the Holocaust has itself been used as a weapon in the ideological war between Arabs and Israelis. To deny or minimize the Holocaust is a key feature of a larger strategy to delegitimize Israel. It has been used by secular nationalists (such as Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, whose doctoral dissertation - from which he has since distanced himself - questioned the numbers of Jews killed) as well as radical Islamists (including Hamas, which kept a clear statement of Holocaust denial on its website). Arabs and Israelis have a deep and painful political dispute WITHOUT invoking the Holocaust; acquiescing in such Holocaust denial or Holocaust relativism only makes it worse."


Politics

We updated our Israel Factor in the week of the election, and the first analysis I wrote dealt with our first question: comparing the candidates to Bush and Clinton.

Also, my election trip features are still available here. It has stories of the last week of the election from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky. You can see them all .

Time Savers

Both the Iran time saver and the Hamas time saver were updated during the weekend. With a new Palestinian government in the making, new European peace initiative looming, exchange of threats frightening, and reports making the case that the situation is not at all improving, there's plenty to read in our time savers.