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28 Jan “There Is No Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” (New York Times, Jan. 16, 2019)

Posted at 14:59h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

JERUSALEM — If you are reading this, you’ve most likely seen much about “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in the pages of this newspaper and of every other important newspaper in the West. That phrase contains a few important assumptions. That the conflict is between two actors,...

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06 Jan What Happens When a Holocaust Memorial Plays Host to Autocrats (New York Times, Dec. 8, 2018)

Posted at 11:40h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

Yad Vashem is both a memorial of a genocide, and a tool of Israeli realpolitik. By Matti Friedman, New York Times  Op-Ed Section JERUSALEM — The quiet campus of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and museum, sits atop a wooded hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem, removed...

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19 Oct A Train Ride Back to the Old Israel (New York Times, Oct. 17, 2018)

Posted at 11:46h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

It takes four times as long as the new high-speed rail. I take it anyway. JERUSALEM — Last month, the first section of a new high-speed rail line opened in Israel. When it’s fully operational a few months from now, passengers will board fire-engine-red carriages in...

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19 Oct The First Palestinian in Jerusalem’s City Hall? (New York Times, Aug. 10, 2018)

Posted at 11:43h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

Ramadan Dabash doesn’t care if you call him a collaborator. JERUSALEM — Western observers interested in Jerusalem can be forgiven for thinking the most politically significant building in this city is a low limestone edifice featuring American flags and Marines — the embassy opened in May...

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19 Dec “The Ties That Bind Jerusalem,” The Globe and Mail

Posted at 14:45h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

Published Dec. 15, 2017 The Ties That Bind Jerusalem Different religions have their own holy sites in Jerusalem, the city where I've spent my entire adult life. The place I believe to be among the most important, however, is a grubby swath of garages, welding shops and...

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19 Dec “War In 140 Characters,” Washington Post Book Review

Posted at 14:43h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

In war, the battle today is less on the ground than on social media Dec. 14, 2017 In the 1990s, I served as an infantryman at an obscure Israeli outpost in southern Lebanon whose claim to fame was a curious incident one Saturday morning in 1994: A...

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29 Nov My Forgotten War and Their Forgotten Graves (New York Times, Nov. 10, 2017)

Posted at 14:57h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

JERUSALEM — My most unsettling neighbors here in Jerusalem are Indians: Afzal Hussein Shah, Chulam Muhammad, Mansub Ali. They occupy a lot on a street near my home. You pass No. 22, then No. 24, but instead of No. 26 you find a rectangle of...

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19 Sep Distant Cousins (Jewish Review of Books)

Posted at 17:56h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

A short essay on a striking turn to Israel in American Jewish fiction this year, from the latest Jewish Review of Books: Distant Cousins Reading novels published in the last year by some of America’s best Jewish writers, I found myself struck by a recurring character—Israel. That...

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11 Jul Washington Post review of “Kingdom of Olives and Ash”

Posted at 14:37h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

A review (The Washington Post, June 23, 2017)  of a new collection of essays about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank: What happens when famous novelists ‘confront the Occupation’ in the West Bank By Matti Friedman Last year, the American novelists Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman and Dave Eggers led...

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13 May The Peculiar Language of Soldiers (The Atlantic, May 4, 2016)

Posted at 21:33h in Selected articles by Matti Friedman

JERUSALEM—“We have two flowers and one oleander. We need a thistle.” Listening to the Israeli military frequencies when I was an infantryman nearly two decades ago, it was (and still is) possible to hear sentences like these, the bewildering cousins of sentences familiar to anyone...

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COPYRIGHT MATTI FRIEDMAN, 2016-2019