I just returned from an eight-day trip to Israel and Palestine (specifically, the West Bank) with my 16-year-old son. We had attended a Tel Aviv funeral of an old friend, who died tragically, at a young age, from a freak brain bleed. To manage our sadness, we took a few…

In 1988, Israeli security forces engaged in a wide variety of repressive tactics aimed at putting down the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Rather than viewing these methods solely as products of instructions handed down from on high, this article regards Israeli tactics as emerging from processes of innovation and elaboration by military personnel. Rules stipulating the legal use of lethal force placed important limits on Israeli military behavior. Within those limits, however, soldiers were free to invent new methods of repression.

Human rights are universal, and everyone, in theory, should be supportive. However, when raising funds for human rights, the money tends to come almost exclusively from Western governments. Why is that? Read our piece in the Review of International Political Economy: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09692290.2015.1095780

In some parts of the world, people think that human rights organizations are agents of US imperialism rather than neutral purveyors of the truth or partisans for the poor and oppressed. In this piece in Political Studies Quarterly, my colleague and I look at results from our surveys around the world to see what average views about this really are: https://www.psqonline.org/viewContent.cfm?sk=28F4EBD3CBD41FEEC318C3CF3EA40ACD06CCE9AAB15E85C6BB90B7D7F0CFFE

What if the US can figure out how to bypass the Israeli-Palestinian standoff by bringing in the Saudis? Read more at https://www.jamesron.org/post/doing-an-end-run-around-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict

Despite all the anger and mistrust, Palestinians can’t afford to sit out the protests in Israel. Read more at https://www.jamesron.net/post/palestinians-shouldn-t-sit-out-the-anti-coup-protests-in-israel

I recently came across an old (2003 — is this old now?) book on my shelf, Show them No Mercy: Four Views on God and Canaanite Genocide, written by a group of Evangelical scholars. I remember the shock I felt when I first read this slim volume two decades ago. …

In 1985, I was drafted into the Israeli military for three years. Two of those were in the explosives company of the paratroop brigade, one of Israel’s more rigorous infantry units. Zeev Jabotinski, a right-wing Zionist thinker, once wrote that the Jewish community in Palestine would have to erect an…

I recently spoke with an old friend who directs a very large a humanitarian operation in Afghanistan. …