Sublime

Brenner, complex though he was, was perhaps the cultural icon of the Second Aliyah. His work, still considered brilliant, surfaced issues with which Israel continues to wrestle. He would have undoubtedly done even more than he managed in his brief life, but he was murdered by an Arab mob in the 1921 Jaffa riots.

WITH THE GAZA EVACUATION complete, getting Israel disentangled from Palestinians on the West Bank was next on Sharon’s docket. To smooth his political path, he left the Likud and in November 2005 formed his own party, Kadima Yisrael (“Forward, Israel!”), recruiting centrists from both Labor and Likud. But four months after the Gaza disengagement, S

the years of 2000 to 2004 turned Israelis into centrists. They agreed with the Left that creating a Palestinian state was critical for Israel, so that Israel would not continue to rule over millions of Palestinians. Yet they also agreed with the Right that creating a Palestinian state would put Israel in grave danger.21 They were stuck. ON NOVEMBER

The diminished ideological passion of secular Zionism created a vacuum that afforded religious Jews an opportunity to become Zionism’s new leaders, the pioneers of Israel’s third decade. If previous Jewish religious leaders had assailed Zionism because it was overly secular and had sought to create a new Jew, after the war, some religious leaders a

challenges us to rethink the classic bright-line distinction between combatants and noncombatants. This line, which lies at the core of the international law of war, has been exploited in the interest of terrorism.