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Comment and Opinion

Times of Israel: The peace process hasn’t brought peace. The case for moving on, by Haviv Rettig Gur

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The most popular new book in Israel is not a crime thriller, a romance or a military sci-fi romp, and contains not a single teenage wizard or vampire. It’s a political treatise written by a professor of medieval philosophy. And it’s making a lot of people very angry.

Its author, Micah Goodman, is an affable 42-year-old famous among his students for his enthusiasm in the classroom. Courteous and disarmingly talkative, he seems an unlikely candidate for the role of iconoclastic upsetter of Israel’s frenetic national debate about the future of the West Bank.

But upset he has. Over the past few weeks, Goodman’s Hebrew-language book “Milkud 67,” or “Catch-67,” a play on Joseph Heller’s iconic “Catch-22,” has angered some of the most respected dons on right and left. It drove the 75-year-old former general and prime minister Ehud Barak to pen his first-ever book review, a sprawling, scathing 4,000-word critique in Haaretz that depicts Goodman as “saturated with right-wing ideology.” And it drove the editor of the highbrow right-wing Makor Rishon newspaper, Hagai Segal, to write a column charging that Goodman was a closet leftist who had “adopted the left’s central moral premise – the claim of occupation.”

It is being read in Israel’s halls of power — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was seen carrying it in the Knesset’s corridors with a bookmark peeking from its pages — and by many top officials involved in administering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. IDF Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Roni Numa bought copies for his top officers.

Read the full article at Times of Israel.