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The direct line between Susiya and Duma
Hundreds of Palestinian, Israeli and international activists march into the Palestinian village of Susya, demanding that Israel not demolish it, Suysa, South Hebron Hills, July 24, 2015. (Oren...
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Women, a child, arms and a man in Nabi Saleh.
Palestinians scuffle with an Israeli soldier as they try to prevent him from detaining a boy during a protest against Jewish settlements in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah. Reuters...
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Fields and Facebook: Ta’ayush and the peace that will have come
I am posting here a link to an academic journal article that I have just published about Ta’ayush. Here is an abstract (outline) of the essay: Israeli peace activism has increasingly taken place on...
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Feeling demolition with your fingers: Ta’ayush in Wadi Ejheish, June 25 2016
Filed under: Anti-occupation, Coexistence
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Feeling demolition in your fingers
Wadi Ejheish, June 25, 2016 It is one thing to look at pictures of demolished homes. It is another to feel the rubble with your fingers. It is one thing to see a photograph of the wreckage of a...
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The Provocation: Ta’ayush and the Picnic
“Whose provocation?” asks the Ta’ayush activist who has recorded on video an Israeli soldier striking one of her fellow activists. Rightly, she says the provocation came from the soldiers who had come...
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Taxi Driver – A short peace.
Guest blog by Ariel Katz I’m returning to Be’er Sheva from Tel Aviv. I’ve been to the August 11 demonstration for equality to protest the controversial nation-state law in Tel Aviv. It’s late, so I hop...
View ArticleOpen letter to Rachel Reeves MP: Why I won’t vote Labour, though I hope for a...
Dear Rachel, You don’t know me but I’m one of your constituents and I wanted to take the time to explain why I won’t vote for you in this election, even though I hope to wake up on Friday morning to a...
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A vision of peace without imagination: Trump’s deal
By Norma Musih and Jon Simons The proposal of peace plans, for Israel-Palestine or anywhere, are opportunities for political imagination. Even when all that is imagined is the cessation of...
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Why don’t the Abraham Accords look like peace?
It has often been noted that it’s easier to represent war visually than it is to represent peace. When did you last go to see a peace movie? But peace agreements provide photo opps of the signing of...
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David and Goliath
[I am a posting some autobiographical blogs, I hope towards writing a book about how my ideas and beliefs about Israel-Palestine and the conflict have evolved over the years. I might start here.]...
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David and Goliath, Part Two
David and Goliath by Titian, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (between 1542 and 1544) From my perspective now, and while remaining thoughtful of and compassionate towards my eleven year-old self,...
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The trauma of October 1973
This is another autobiographical blog, an excerpt from Chapter 2 of a planned book about how my life has intersected with Israel-Palestine, the making and unmaking of a Zionist. On October 6th 1973 I...
View ArticlePodcast with Telos Press: Walter Benjamin, Rabbis for Human Rights, and the...
In this episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Jon Simons about his article “Divine Violence, Profane Peace: Walter Benjamin, Rabbis for Human Rights, and Peace in...
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Building the “New Jew”
In this excerpt from the third draft chapter of my book, I write about my experience working on kibbutz for five months as part of a ten month programme (like a gap year) in Israel, 1978-79. For the...
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On not seeing Kuwaykat
This is another excerpt from the third chapter of the book I am writing. This chapter covers the year I spent in Israel as part of a Zionist youth group, Habonim. The excerpt is about my time on...
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A Time for Mourning
It is difficult to throw off the sense of being trapped in a recurring nightmare, the same feeling of paralysis and powerlessness to prevent this happening again. If this is how I feel, far away and...
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Five steps towards ending the Occupation
Photo by Maya Levin / Flash90, December 2007 This blog is an unpublished letter I wrote for the Guardian in response to Jonathan Freedland’s opinion piece on 21st May, “Israel should take note: the...
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To Russia with love: Jewish Diaspora in the USSR
The Jewish community’s ongoing campaign to support Soviet Jews facing persecution was supplemented by an Israeli programme of sending UK Jews on Intourist holiday packages to the Soviet Union. A...
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‘The co-operative aristocracy of labour’: my break with Labour Zionist ideology
In my final undergraduate year (1981-82) I underwent another political shift in my thinking about Israel that was driven to some extent considerable by academic inquiry. But it was also a way of...
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