Opinion

This year is the first year that I hear Israelis remark that the State may be a temporary phenomenon: "I am happy to live in a Jewish state, to be alive at a time when Jews have a state. But the last state we had, the Maccabean one, two thousand years ago, lasted a hundred years, and this one will probably be shortlived, as well. We don't know how to be an autonomous people and live in a larger world. We are always overtaken by fanaticism," one Israeli told me.

On January fourteenth, as Americans prepare to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, will go on trial. He is accused of having twice stood in the way of Army bulldozers that had come to demolish the homes of two Arab families. In neither case were the demolitions prompted by acts of terrorism, nor intended to secure land for new public works; demolitions were ordered because the Palestinian families lacked building permits.