Eyal Press

I have previously spoken about the blog Ta-Nehisi Coates recently but now I want to introduce it as a recurring feature on this blog. On January 5th, 2009 the main writer of the blog (which I am aware of - just found this blog) introduces a new writer named Eyal Press to write about the war in Gaza.

Here's Eyal in his own words:

Growing up, I visited Israel every summer, often traveling through the country with my cousin and his friends in Hashomer Hatzair, a progressive Zionist youth group. My attachment to the country runs deep. But I'm also among the many progressive Jews who went to the college when the first Palestinian Intifada erupted and who have come to view the occupation as a calamity. I'm not a pacifist but I've seen enough wars go awry (Lebanon in '82 and 2006, Iraq...) to be deeply skeptical.

My grandfather was a socialist-Zionist who fled Bialystok for Palestine in the 1920s. Had he not done so, he almost certainly would have shared the fate of relatives who stayed behind and didn't survive World War II, which is one reason I don't run with the crowd on the left that views Zionism simply and solely as a colonialist movement, forgetting the part about Jews being murdered and persecuted relentlessly for centuries on end. (It had a colonial element, to be sure, but it was also a liberation struggle.)

Anyway, I find this guy interesting and I'll be talking/analyzing what he and other commentators on that blog have to say. They seem to have a healthy discussion over there, unlike Mondoweiss.com, RichardSilverstein.com and even Digg.