A Rude Beast in the West Bank

The headlines are reporting another sighting of the rude beast that is slouching toward Bethlehem, to borrow yet again the often-borrowed words of Yeats.

When Ehud Barak, foreign minister of Israel, issued a public denouncement of “a string of violent attacks by criminal groups of extremists,” he was referring to the radical settlers who attacked an IDF base in the West Bank, occupied an abandoned army post on the border with Jordan, and injured an IDF commander by throwing a brick at him. 

These outrages against the IDF will not be surprising to readers of Gershom Gorenberg’s provocative but important new book, “The Unmaking of Israel,”