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The safety question: Jewish existential dilemmas in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s hilarious ‘Long Island Compromise’
Long Island Compromise
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
(Random House)
Of the three middle-aged Fletcher siblings whose perspectives are told in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s extremely funny-yet-serious second novel—which was published on July 9, 2024—it pains me to admit that I am a Nathan. Nathan’s the worrier, ramped up to 11 for art’s sake, but I see where Nathan’s coming from. You never know if an old tree that’s been there for hundreds of years might fall on you, is the sort of thought Nathan expresses in Long Island Compromise. That I can relate to. I have wondered about trees. Whereas his kid brother, nicknamed Beamer, stoned out of his mind on drugs some of which I’d never heard of, behaves in ways so irresponsible it’s almost painful (in a good way, as in, the writing is impressive) to read about them.
Nathan and Beamer are a yin to a yang, or more like two sides of a black-and-white cookie. Beamer is a man overflowing with what the biological determinists would call testosterone: no risk untaken, no woman unavailable to him. All id. Nathan’s a little weenie—a Nathan’s—afraid of his own shadow.
There is also a sister, Jenny. She’s the scholar, the rebel, the nose job rejecter. (Rhinoplasty was evidently de rigueur in wealthy Jewish circles on 1998 Long Island; my memory of 1998 Manhattan is that they were viewed among otherwise similar Jews—snobbishly—as very Long Island, so it tracks.) She seems like the sort of person who’d extract herself from a narrow, cossetted suburban upbringing and do great things, but she flounders because… well, because of a family curse.
Carl Fletcher, their mega-rich factory-owner father, was briefly kidnapped for ransom when Beamer and Nathan were young, and just before Jenny was born. This seems like a spoiler but is how the book opens. The siblings’ curse is an impossible-to-disentangle mix of growing up with their traumatized father never reckoning with his experience, and the trust funds making it so that they never need to work. That financial necessity is the mother of getting your act together, to borrow and botch an adage, is, superficially, the point of the book. But there’s far more to it.
***
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a New York Times journalist, known for her celebrity profiles, though the piece of hers I think about the most is an essay on The Rules, the 1990s dating guide advising women to pretend not to be into men so as to seduce those men. I remember enjoying her 2019 novel, Fleishman is in Trouble, but not to this extent. I don’t remember basically hurling it at everyone being like, read this immediately.
Long Island Compromise picks up on some of the same themes as Fleishman, including marital woes and the resentments the merely upper middle class can feel towards the rich. It’s the story of the Fletchers, a massively wealthy Reform Jewish family living in something like Great Neck that isn’t Great Neck, told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator who grew up with the Fletchers, but without their means. The narrator has a distinct voice and doesn’t shy away from an editorializing comment or fact-check, but only brings in a first-person I near the end, just the once. All the reader knows of the storyteller is that this is someone with a scoop on the Fletchers. It’s fiction, but with real-life inspiration: the 1974 kidnapping of Long Island, NY steel factory owner Jack Teich; Brodesser-Akner knows the family, and she wrote about the story as a form of advance promotion for this novel.
I wrote about the real-life 1974 kidnapping of Jack Teich — the one that inspired my new novel, Long Island Compromise — and the way that trauma holds on. It changes, and, if you’re lucky, it morphs. But in my experience, it never really goes away. https://t.co/B4GcjJ7YWL
— Taffy Brodesser-Akner (@taffyakner) July 7, 2024
There’s a nostalgia to the book, with its quaintly pre-2020 preoccupations. Daughter Jenny introduced as uninterested in shopping and primping, in what seems like a hint of a gender-topics plotline to come. She is instead a garden-variety (albeit depression-prone) straight woman, vacillating between the draw of the nice boy next door and that of the charismatic cad. And there’s a plot arc around the fact that what the Fletchers got rich producing—polystyrene, known as Styrofoam—now has a terrible environmental reputation. I kept expecting Jenny—a lefty labour organizer—to take a Greta Thunberg turn and denounce her family specifically for making Earth-destroying microplastics, but environmentalism is at most an afterthought.
There are some brief nods to contemporary culture wars, with #MeToo alluded to as on the horizon, and in the painful scene where Beamer thinks he’s written a brilliant script but finds himself facing a sensitivity reader of sorts who alerts him to the problematicness and cultural appropriation and such. Beamer pivots to deciding that he will write about oppression in an #OwnVoices manner, because everyone agrees that Jews are oppressed, right? Poor Beamer, never did stand a chance.
***
The number of times I thought, this, this is the funniest line in the book, is substantial. We learn, of a secondary character who has spent the previous section berating Jenny for being rich and hiding this fact about herself, “Andrew left New Haven soon after he was fired and went to work at his father’s hedge fund.” Any other writer would have said something about how it turned out Andrew was a hypocritical (not to mention antisemitic) rich kid himself, but Brodesser-Akner just drops this detail with utmost elegance. Boom, Andrew interlude over.
We learn that the town of Middle Rock had been called Duty Head, but that it lost that name “immediately when the mayor went to cut the ribbon and that new train station and heard someone say the name Duty Head aloud.” There are passages about families having, or not having, microwaves that would alone be reason to read this book.
Being a woman myself, I cannot speak to whether Brodesser-Akner has cracked the supposedly uncrackable code and entered the minds of male characters, a la Adelle Waldman with The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. She gets details about the menfolk right from what I’ve observed, particularly the stuff where Beamer (who, recall, puts anything and everything into his own body) is quietly judging his wife for getting work done on her face. He thought she was so much prettier before, when they first met! So like a man to forget that, cosmetic interventions or not, women’s faces shift away from conventional ideals as we age.
And the novel’s title, and what it refers to, suggests we no longer need to sit around wondering who will be the next Philip Roth.
***
To speak of the Jewishness of the novel is expected, certainly in this venue. And here I realize the thing to do is to enumerate the references to Reform temple and to Orthodoxy, to the rabbi character, to Hadassah, to the Holocaust, to Israel Bonds, to the way that, much like trauma, the propensity to give out sports-team-themed yarmulkes crosses generations. Bar mitzvah scenes serve the function that a wedding will on a Midsomer Murders. Intermarriage, dybbuks, eating bacon, not eating bacon, it’s all in there.
There are also Jewish in-jokes, at least I think there are. Is the Fletcher patriarch “Zelig” because of the 1983 Woody Allen movie of the same name? (Would have to be, given the role of impersonation in Zelig Fletcher’s origin story.) Does Jenny, in a bout of listlessness, consider “marine biologist” as a career possibility in reference to George Costanza’s fake career? (A stretch, but I like it.)
But it’s impossible to read the book and not see it as being about the hostages. Yes, even though it is not, objectively, about that, because it couldn’t be.
As a strictly chronological matter, Brodesser-Akner started writing Long Island Compromise well before Oct. 7, 2023. But books are published into the worlds that exist when they appear, and it is now all but inevitable that a book about how you can think you’re safe—specifically, that you, as a Jew, as a Jewish family, have found safety—and then all of a sudden someone sneaks up at you and the next thing you know, you’re kidnapped and tortured. Kidnapped and tortured by someone who sees your comfort as at their expense. (Carl’s kidnappers claim to be working on behalf of Palestinian liberation, but this turns out to be part of what is effectively gibberish. The enemy is within, is all I’ll say.)
There’s a passage in the book (more than one, but it’s one in particular coming to mind) about the precariousness of it all, about how the Holocaust and associated horrors and desperation are always lurking. No, the individual Oct. 7 abductees were not Styrofoam gazillionaires, but they were Israelis or others present in Israel who thought they were secure in Israel, who couldn’t have known what was coming for them, and indeed who’d have seemed paranoid if they’d anticipated anything of the kind. And no, being held hostage for over a year is not the same as being locked up for ransom for a week, but the thematic question of the impact on an individual and those close to them resonates.
How are others not seeing this? According to The Forward reporter Mira Fox, “Even their trauma isn’t particularly Jewish; anyone could be kidnapped.” A sentiment I’d have agreed with on Oct. 6, 2023.
Must Jews be defined by trauma? Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s sharp new novel offers a surprising answerhttps://t.co/yJ8XfO2b68
— TheForwardFeed (@TheForwardFeed) July 8, 2024
Last summer, in his review for the leftist publication Jewish Currents, critic Mitchell Abidor argues that the book “struggles to say anything of substance about being a Jew in America today.” Did he and I read the same book? The safety question—are Jews safe, do Jews feel safe—is central to the postwar Jewish experience and so much more so of late.
In a review of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, Long Island Compromise, Mitchell Abidor argues that the book ultimately reproduces the nullity at the heart of contemporary American Jewish life.https://t.co/WU6LbXfHpj
— Jewish Currents (@JewishCurrents) August 2, 2024
Brodesser-Akner’s own main non-fiction interventions in this area are from the before-times—a 2015 Tablet essay about antisemitism and accusations of “Jewish privilege”; a 2021 New York Times review of Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus with insightful personal-political digressions—but you know what? That’s fine. Maybe some moments elude the essay, and are best processed through novels, even ones not directly written about them to begin with.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
The post The safety question: Jewish existential dilemmas in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s hilarious ‘Long Island Compromise’ appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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The Dreaded Moment Is Finally Here
A drone view shows Palestinians and terrorists gathering around Red Cross vehicles on the day Hamas hands over the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, seized during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
JNS.org – The moment we had all been dreading came to pass on Feb. 20, as four coffins draped with Israeli flags traveled from the Gaza Strip to Israel in a convoy led by the Israel Defense Forces. Two of the caskets were markedly smaller, in a heartbreaking confirmation that Ariel and Kfir Bibas, the two little boys abducted to Gaza with their mother, Shiri Bibas, during the Hamas-led pogrom on Oct. 7, 2013, did not survive their ordeal.
As I was writing these words, I received a video from my youngest son, who is studying in Israel, of two rainbows etched high in the sky above Tel Aviv’s Florentin district. As I choked back tears, I wanted to believe that this spectacle—God’s tribute to these two complete innocents—was a sign of hope for the rest of us.
But then I remembered that once again, Jews are on the defensive even as we grieve for these children, whose smiling faces became emblematic of the plight of the Israeli and foreign hostages seized on that terrible day. For it is impossible to grieve peacefully without remembering the sight of posters bearing the photos of Ariel and Kfir, as well as Shiri and their father, Yarden Bibas, being violently ripped from walls and lampposts by the antisemitic Hamas cheerleaders who have poisoned our lives. It is impossible to grieve peacefully without recalling the cruel barbs about the “weaponization” of the hostages issued by insidious pundits like Mehdi Hasan, the British-born Islamist antisemite who, shockingly and inexplicably, was granted US citizenship in 2020.
Most of all, it is impossible to grieve peacefully with the memory of the grotesque ceremony staged by Hamas before the coffins carrying the four bodies set off still fresh in our minds. Jaunty Arabic music blared through loudspeakers, and children posed with the guns carried by Hamas terrorists as their parents grinned and leered for the cameras.
Many hours later, an even more shocking development was reported. Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike, as falsely claimed by Hamas, but were brutally murdered in November 2023, as was the fourth hostage, 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz, according to the autopsies on the bodies undertaken in Israel. Forensic analysis also revealed that Hamas lied about Shiri being returned since the body in the coffin was not hers. The agony persists, and we continue to cry out, “Where is Shiri Bibas?”
The giant screen at the ceremony mocked Shiri and her children even in death—their images dwarfed by a vile, crude caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire, his fangs dripping with blood. Don’t be fooled by the apologists who will tell you that this representation of Netanyahu is merely trenchant criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza—a war that only erupted because of the monstrous atrocities of Oct. 7. It is better understood as a symbol of the sickness enveloping Palestinian society, which regards Jews as subhuman, and which liberally borrows from 2,000 years of anti-Jewish iconography to make that point.
The depiction of Netanyahu as a vampire is no accident, just as images of him dressed in a Nazi uniform are no accident. The Palestinians and their admirers are expert at selecting images that recycle the worst canards about Jews: that they have eagerly adopted the methods and ideology of their worst persecutors and that their collective goal is to suck out the lifeblood of non-Jews without mercy—to the point of sacrificing their own people should that turn out to be necessary, with the Bibas family on display as Exhibit “A.”
The association of Jews with blood dates back at least to the Roman era, spawning anti-Jewish “Blood Libel” riots from Norwich in England (one of the earliest examples) to Damascus in Syria (one of the more recent.) It has been embraced by both Christian and Islamic theologians, as well as by the more secular antisemites who asserted their hatred of Jews in the language of science rather than religion. In the literature and journals of the 19th and 20th centuries, the fictitious figure of the vampire emerged with unmistakable Jewish associations.
“It’s impossible to have this discussion without bringing up the blood libel, the unsubstantiated claim that Jews murdered gentile children to use their blood in rituals,” wrote Isabella Reish in a recent essay on the 1922 film Nosferatu. “Thus, European vampires of old are intrinsically linked to Jewishness.” In my view, that linkage is as true of Hamas now as it is of a Berlin salon in the dark years that ushered in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
We cannot live with this hatred, which has seeped from the Palestinians into the wider world, especially among Muslim communities in North America, Europe and Australia—nor should we be expected to. Combating it effectively means that we must be honest about the sources of the problem.
The main source is the Palestinians themselves. All the current discussions about the reconstruction of Gaza and the possible relocation of its civilian population miss the bigger issue. If Palestinians are to live successful, productive lives, then their society must be thoroughly deradicalized, foremost by challenging the antisemitic hatred that has consumed them. The United States, in particular, must prioritize the complete transformation of the Palestinian school system, installing and supervising a curriculum that will educate Palestinian children about Jewish history and religion, about the abiding, uninterrupted Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, and about the cynical manner their own plight has been exploited by Arab leaders happy to project internal unrest onto an external, “colonialist” enemy.
The second source is harder to pin down and cannot be dealt with in a school environment. I’m talking about the fans of the Scottish soccer club Glasgow Celtic, who waved banners urging “Show Zionism the Red Card” at a match in, of all places, the German city of Munich; about the Muslim and far-left vigilantes who last week descended on one of America’s most Jewish neighborhood, Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were gratifyingly confronted by local resistance; about the cowardly arsonists burning down synagogues and Jewish day-care centers in Canada and Australia. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to do more than just respond to each outrage. What’s required is a comprehensive global strategy aimed at rooting out these organizations, their communications networks and their propaganda outlets. No measures, including deportation and loss of naturalized citizenship, should be off the table, and no country—looking at you two, Qatar and Iran—should escape scrutiny for fueling these fires.
For decades, our elected leaders have cynically used Holocaust commemoration and education as evidence of their commitment to fighting post-Hitler antisemitism. That hasn’t worked very well, and as the black-and-white images of the Holocaust fade into history’s depths, replaced by decontextualized social-media video bursts of Gazans fleeing Israeli bombing, it’ll work even less so. If the soul-crushing pictures of the coffins bearing the Bibas children don’t result in a fundamental strategic pivot, then perhaps nothing will.
The post The Dreaded Moment Is Finally Here first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Is Religion Rational?
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – When it comes to religion, how much is belief, and how much is rational? Is Judaism a rational religion? Does being religious require a leap of faith?
Perhaps other faiths do. I mean, I respect everyone’s right to choose the religion they subscribe to and want to practice, but some religions do require extraordinary leaps of faith from their followers.
Judaism, on the other hand, is based not on any incredulous leaps of faith, but on the shared firsthand experience of an entire nation.
With other faiths, the starting point is a supposed revelation reported to have been experienced by the founder of that faith. You either believe it or you don’t believe it. Your choice.
But Judaism was founded at Mount Sinai where millions of Israelites, fresh out of Egypt, experienced the Revelation at Sinai. Each and every Israelite, personally, heard the Ten Commandments from the voice of God, not Moses! And it wasn’t virtual, it was personal. They were all there, and it was an in-body experience.
That’s not faith. That is fact. Not only Moses and his disciples but the entire nation of men, women and children—a few million in all—were eyewitnesses to that revelation. And this was handed down by father to son, mother to daughter, throughout the generations wherever Jews lived. European Jews and Yemenite Jews have the very same tradition, the very same Torah. Yes, there are differences in custom and variations on a theme, but the basic traditions are identical.
How? Because they all came from the very same source—Almighty God at Mount Sinai!
This week, we read Mishpatim, a Torah portion that deals with civil and social laws that are very logical. Everyone understands and accepts that society needs a code of law and justice to be able to function.
So, if your ox gores your friend’s ox, you will be liable for damages. If you’re making a barbecue and your negligence causes the fire to spread to your neighbor’s property and it burns down his house, you will be liable. And if you’re going on vacation and deposit your pet poodle at the Lords & Ladies Poodle Parlor for safe keeping and when you come back, they tell you they lost your poodle, then they will be responsible for paying you for your poodle. And so on.
But even the logical mitzvot have much more to them than meets the eye. There are layers and layers of depth, meaning, symbolism and profound spirituality behind every single mitzvah, rational or not.
There are only a handful of chukim, statutory decrees that we were not given an explanation of and for which we must take on faith, like kashrut or shatnez, the law of not mixing wool and linen garments together.
But the truth is that every mitzvah needs faith.
Why? Because without faith, we do something only humans are capable of. Do you know what that is? Rationalization.
Everyone understands that you’re not supposed to steal. And yet, studies have shown that no less than 59% of hotel guests steal from their hotel rooms. Now, I don’t think the hotel really minds if you take the shampoo. I imagine if you asked them, they would say it’s fine.
But no hotel will let you take the towels or the robes. And no hotel will let you take the TV. I was shocked to read that some guests even took home a mattress! (Apparently, in the middle of the night, they snuck it into the elevator, went down to the basement garage and stuffed it into the trunk of their car.)
If you ask these people, they will likely give you all kinds of reasons why their actions are justified. The hotel overcharged me. It calculates shrinkage into their price, so I actually paid for it. If I wear the hotel’s towel on the beach, I am advertising for them, so they should pay me.
This is classic rationalization.
So we do need faith after all, even for logical commandments like not stealing. Otherwise, we fail. Badly.
Interestingly, the very same Torah reading of Mishpatim, with its logical, civil laws also has the famous phrase, Na’aseh V’Nishma. These were the words of the Jewish people when asked if they would accept God’s Torah. They replied Na’aseh, “we will do” and only thereafter Nishmah, “we will listen” and understand. It is the core of simple, pure, absolute faith, beyond any logic or understanding.
And this explains why the Ten Commandments, which we read last week, begin with Anochi, “I am God,” the lofty, abstract mitzvah to believe in God. To have faith.
And then the other commandments go on to tell us the most basic laws that every low life knows he should keep. Not to murder, commit adultery, steal, lie or be jealous.
How did we get from the highest, metaphysical commandment of belief to the grossest of the gross in a few short sentences?
Because without faith, a human being is capable of justifying anything.
The accursed Nazis justified the Holocaust. REAL genocide, not make-believe South African genocide. How did they justify it? By saying Jews are scum, sub-human. We are doing the world a service by eliminating them. The world will be a better place for it. Rationalization.
Without the first commandment of faith in God, there can be no adherence to any of the other commandments.
Logic gets you pretty far but not far enough. As logical as Judaism may be, we still need the foundation of faith to do what we must do and avoid that which is tempting but wrong.
May we all embrace Judaism with knowledge and reason and by understanding its philosophy, without losing that pure and simple faith that every one of us possesses.
The post Is Religion Rational? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli Security Control of Gaza Is an Existential Necessity
Orthodox Jewish men stand near a tank, ahead of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as seen from the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, Jan. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
JNS.org – Thursday was a national day of mourning, as the bodies of hostage Shiri Bibas’s children Ariel and Kfir, along with that of Oded Lipshitz, returned to Israel. Hamas also handed over a fourth coffin, falsely saying it held Shiri Bibas‘s remains, but it was subsequently determined that it contained the corpse of an unidentified non-Israeli woman.
Their dire fate, along with that of some 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, stand as an unbearable reminder of the consequences of allowing a genocidal, jihadist army to entrench itself on Israel’s border.
The sorrow that grips all Israelis, reinforced by months of war, adds up to a clear national imperative: Israel can never again allow Gaza to be a staging ground for an Iranian-backed terrorist army. Once Israel has exhausted all efforts to secure the release of its hostages, Hamas must be eliminated from the face of the Earth as a terror army. No one on Israel’s borders can be allowed to build an ability to send death squads and invasion brigades over the border in an organized manner.
Ensuring Israeli security control over Gaza is the only way to achieve this. This work cannot be outsourced to anyone; the idea that a foreign force or paid mercenaries would have the ability to deal with Hamas is absurd. Israeli security control of Gaza is not just a military necessity to prevent future Hamas barbarity, it is an existential imperative.
The ongoing professional inquiries by the IDF into the events of Oct. 7 aim to provide answers to the public, the bereaved families and affected communities about the multiple system failures of that darkest of days.
But these investigations are not just about accountability—they are about learning from history in real time. As one IDF official put it this week, Israel must “carry out the lessons learned during the war, not afterward, and prepare for future conflicts.”
The scope of the IDF’s inquiries is broad, covering four main areas: Israel’s long-term strategy regarding Gaza, intelligence failures leading up to the war, the decision-making process between Oct. 6 and 7, and the first 72 hours of defensive operations.
But even before their conclusions are published, likely in the coming days, it is possible to draw some key conclusions.
Not deterred, not a rational actor, not seeking prosperity
Before the attack, every day that Israel did not act to prevent Hamas from building its capabilities, and every day that Israel gave up on the idea of achieving security control over Gaza, was an opportunity for Hamas to develop further its murderous plans and prepare for the massacre.
The Western-oriented idea that Israel could afford to refrain from continuous security operations in Gaza, and that the IDF could stay back behind the border, was fueled by deluded concepts of Hamas being deterred, that it was a rational actor, and that it sought economic prosperity.
These delusions stem from a catastrophic inability to grasp the jihadist mindset of a fundamentalist Islamic death cult, and from the tendency that was rampant in the defense establishment and the political echelon before Oct. 7 to project Western thinking onto our enemies. This allowed Hamas the space and the time to prepare its attack. Those who wish to indefinitely delay Israeli operations to prevent Hamas from rebuilding these capabilities have returned to the pre-Oct. 7 misconceptions. The “day after” is today.
During the Oct. 7 attacks, Hamas behaved like an army intent on genocide. It seized land, executing civilians in the most brutal manner imaginable, and taking hostages to act as insurance policies for the survival of its leadership. It was only able to do these things because it controlled its own territory, giving it the ability to develop an arms industry, smuggle in weapons and develop its intentions with minimal interference.
Meanwhile, the chief of the IDF General Staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, who is due to step down on March 6, has spent recent days in the United States discussing strategic and operational issues with top American military officials.
Halevi visited the Pentagon to meet with Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with staff officers, and with Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the commander of CENTCOM (responsible for the Middle East), to discuss Lebanon and Iran, and ways to strengthen U.S.-Israeli cooperation.
But Gaza trumped the other arenas. Halevi expedited his return to Israel due to the agreement to return the bodies of the hostages.
No international diplomacy or security guarantees can obviate the necessity of full Israeli freedom of operation in Gaza for the foreseeable future. Failure to recognize this would invite, once again, catastrophe, and Israel cannot afford to repeat its mistakes.
The post Israeli Security Control of Gaza Is an Existential Necessity first appeared on Algemeiner.com.