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Articles by Oded Na’aman
A Menacing Silence
It is Saturday morning in Tel Aviv. 147 days have gone by since the morning of Saturday October 7. Nothing can be said without mentioning the number of dead but nothing seems more meaningless. We say these numbers and do not understand what we say.
Letter from Israel
It is now 1 p.m., Wednesday, October 18, and I am at home, in Tel Aviv. Eleven days have passed since the October 7 attack on Israel. At least 1,400 people were killed in one day, mostly civilians, and there are around 200 Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip. Israel has since launched its deadliest attack on Gaza so far: around 3,500 Gazans have been killed, about 1,000 of them children. Hamas still manages to fire rockets at Israel, mostly toward towns closer to Gaza, but some toward Tel Aviv.
Oded Na’aman
Oded Na’aman Oded Na’aman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a longtime member of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organization of veterans that collects testimonies of Israeli soldiers from the occupied Palestinian territories. His essays and works of fiction have appeared in Haaretz, Alaxon, Ma’ayan, The Guardian, The Nation, Le Monde, Huffington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The Point.
December 2023
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Letter from Israel
It is now 1pm, Wednesday 18 October, and I am at home, in Tel Aviv. Eleven days have passed since the 7 October attack on Israel. At least 1400 people were killed in one day, mostly civilians, and there are around 200 Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip. Israel has since launched its deadliest attack on Gaza so far: around 3500 Gazans have been killed, about 1000 of them children. Hamas still manages to fire rockets at Israel, mostly toward towns closer to Gaza, but some toward Tel Aviv.
Letter from Israel
It is now 1 p.m., Wednesday, October 18, and I am at home, in Tel Aviv. Eleven days have passed since the October 7 attack on Israel. At least 1,400 people were killed in one day, mostly civilians, and there are around 200 Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip. Israel has since launched its deadliest attack on Gaza so far: around 3,500 Gazans have been killed, about 1,000 of them children. Hamas still manages to fire rockets at Israel, mostly toward towns closer to Gaza, but some toward Tel Aviv.
Having Done Wrong
Editors’ Note: This essay was written, edited, and prepared for publication before the October 7th attack on Israel. The decision to proceed with publication of it should not be interpreted as a response, by the author or the editors, to that event. About twenty years ago, I did some horrible things. I should not have done these things. I have not denied doing them nor did I resume my life as if I had never done them.
Imagine the Worst
…we need your help. Confronting the many challenges of COVID-19—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. In Thinking in a Pandemic, we’ve organized the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it.
Imagine the Worst
How philosophical thinking can make truthfulness possible even when the truth can barely be fathomed. Image: adaptation of Benjamin West’s The Meeting of Lear and Cordelia This essay is featured in Boston Review’s new book, Uncertainty. We are fine, for now. What to do with the prospect of future ruin? The question seems to bring our end ever so closer. Try to think about other things. Look outside. Listen to your breath. Read a book. Work. Watch television. Look online for something.
How Israel Weaponizes International Law
The country has manipulated rules of engagement to serve its colonialist project in Palestine. Legal scholars must face this fact head on. In an article published last winter in the Harvard International Law Journal, legal scholar Naz K. Modirzadeh criticizes contemporary scholars working on the laws of war for their “distanced, remote, and abstract” work. Often devoid of both political context and historical background, such scholarship, Modirzadeh laments, often makes “no reference to . . .
How We Speak About the Failure of the PLO
Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton, and Yasser Arafat at the White House, signing the Oslo Accords. Image: Wikimedia A recent Foreign Affairs article gets history wrong and obscures a robust Palestinian discourse.
Against Moral Purity
Apr 22, 2020 6 Min read time Vengeful anger is not a morally correct response to wrongdoing. Start at the end: “We can’t be good in a bad world.” Agnes Callard’s main claim is that the right moral response to injustice is a kind of anger that involves committing wrongs, sometimes very serious wrongs.
Choosing Violence
…we need your help. Confronting the many challenges of COVID-19—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. In Thinking in a Pandemic, we’ve organized the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it.
Choosing Violence
An Israeli soldier patrols the outskirts of Hebron. Image: Israel Defense Forces War is almost always a choice—a madness we go along with. As a child brought up in the Jewish-Israeli educational system, I was taught that none of Israel’s wars was a war of choice. Like most Israelis, I believed that Israel uses its military might only to defend its citizens from imminent danger. This is the Israeli ethos of necessary violence: peace is our yearning; war is our plight.
Former Israeli soldier: The occupation of Palestine “is the institution of war as a way of life”
This video, from the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, may seem, at first, straight forward. A masked Israeli soldier attempts to detain a 12-year-old Palestinian kid, whose left arm is in a cast. The solider places the boy in a chokehold and eventually positions his body on top of him, slapping away the kid’s sister, mother, and aunt. There is much alarm and helplessness, but eventually the soldier gives up and walks away, albeit not before throwing a tear gas grenade into the gathering crowd.
How Not to Talk about Gaza
Talking about Gaza is like talking about God: we face the ineffable and cannot talk about what we see. ONE Talking about Gaza is like talking about God. We face the ineffable. We cannot talk about what we see. Or if we do, we are accused of lacking common sense, failing to take a realistic approach to an unmanageable problem. What is that problem? Palestinians are the problem.
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