Shaul Arieli

The Netanyahu government is burrowed up on the beach, refusing to see the menacing waves of discontent heading toward Israel.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef wrote to President Shimon Peres, raising the fear of a civil war if everyone in society must share the burden.

'Five Broken Cameras' provides a naked look at the painful results of this ongoing occupation. Some of these results have been inscribed in acts of overt violence, and others on the troubled faces of some of the soldiers forced to “star” in this film.

Anyone who examines the Israeli reality with both eyes open cannot escape its complexity. On the other hand, those who shut their eyes will be forced to imagine that reality and, operating within that imagined space, will seek to impose fanciful solutions.

Will Israel's government realize that the partition idea, which enables Israel's existence as a Jewish democratic state, is possible only if a 'Palestine' rises beside it in the West Bank and Gaza?

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sees the UN bid as his last, best chance to negotiate with Israel.

Two decades of negotiations have taught us that any attempt to build solutions by adopting the sides' narratives leads to failure because of the wide gap between them.

Settlements have driven a network of wedges between the clusters of Palestinian villages in the West Bank over the years, but these wedges have not created a Jewish dominance that would make unilateral annexation possible.

Physical and mental walls that we have erected enable us to focus, until November 6, on the "bomb or bombing" dilemma.

Should the Israeli government adopt the committee's recommendations, it would further prove the political blindness that seems guide this government in its management of the conflict with the Palestinians.

How did it happen that Israel is endangering the solid Jewish majority that lives in 78 percent of the area of the Land of Israel, because it wants to annex another 3 percent in the West Bank?

Israel is in need of a physical barrier between it and the Palestinian territories in any scenario, whether confrontation or negotiated agreement.

Unilateral moves may actually postpone achieving the strategic goal - an agreed-on separation from the Palestinians - which would grant Israel the legitimacy to stand up for its rights.

Like the Palestinians in 1948, we are misreading the political map and the international mood.

The huge budgets required for settlements alongside a nonexistent welfare policy inside Israel is becoming clearer to leaders of the social protest movement demanding a new sharing-out of sacrifices and resources.

The Jewish people must decide whether it is also a 'living people' that knows how to propose and accept compromises.

Online comments - in which the reader can add his/her views to an authored piece - offer the concrete potential for dialogue, for mutual encouragement of ideas and for correcting errors.

We need an Israeli leadership that will realize there is no alternative but partition for the national and cultural existence of the two people in the same land.

The evil spirit that is blowing from the corridors of the Knesset and government is based on supra-state principles - the biblical promise to the Jewish people trumps the Palestinians' terrestrial rights.

The upgrading of the Palestinians' diplomatic status after their application to the United Nations, and in the absence of a diplomatic process, Israel might find itself forced to deal with new and prolonged waves of protest.

Should Israel be a democracy in which a minority enjoys equal rights, or an ethnocracy for Jews who believe that their right to the Land of Israel is greater than any other human right?

A regional peace deal, including normalization, as promised by the Arab peace initiative, would confer more security than a few thousand dunams in the Jordan Valley.

Israel has long borders, and it lacks the ability to deploy for prolonged periods the number of troops needed to deal with infiltration attempts.

As Abbas sees it, around September 2011, states which have recognized Palestine will be prepared to carry out a daring policy initiative, whose gist will be sweeping recognition for the Palestinian state in the United Nations.

The Palestinian criticism of Abbas stems from the fact that he agreed to grant Israel much more than what was considered the accepted Palestinian interpretation of UN resolutions.

The prime minister has not disclosed to the public the extent of an agreement with the Palestinians that has already been formulated.