Tanya Reinhart
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Tanya Reinhart is an Israeli academic who writes frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She contributes columns to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and longer articles to the Counterpunch, Znet, and Israeli Indymedia websites.
Reinhart studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem as an undergraduate, where she later received an M.A. in comparative literature and philosophy. Between l972 and l976, she obtained a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her thesis supervisor was Noam Chomsky.
Reinhart is currently a professor of linguistics at Tel-Aviv University. She is also a guest lecturer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
For many years, Reinhart has been an outspoken critic of Israel's handling of the Palestinian problem. She argues that Israel should abandon the West Bank and Gaza:
Israel should withdraw immediately from the territories occupied in 1967. The bulk of Israeli settlers (150,000 of them) are concentrated in the big settlement blocks in the center of the West bank. These areas cannot be evacuated over night. But the rest of the land (about 90% - 96% of the West bank and the whole of the Gaza strip) can be evacuated immediately. Many of the residents of the isolated Israeli settlements that are scattered in these areas are speaking openly in the Israeli media about their wish to leave. It is only necessary to offer them reasonable compensation for the property they will be leaving behind. The rest -- the hard-core "land redemptions" fanatics -- are a negligible minority that will have to accept the will of the majority. [1] (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=50&ItemID=2595)
Reinhart points out that immediate withdrawal would still leave under debate between six and ten percent of the West Bank with the large settlement blocks, as well as the issues of Jerusalem and the right of return, and maintains that these should be the subject of "serious peace negotiations".
In 2002, Reinhart was heavily criticized in Israel for signing a European petition calling for a moratorium on European support of Israeli academia in protest of Israel's Palestinian policies.
The same year, she also published a book, Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948, in which she analyzed what she saw as the breakdown during the proceeding three years of constructive engagement over the Palestinian issue and the hardening of the Israeli position.
Further reading
- Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948, ISBN 1-58322-538-2
External links
- Reinhart's homepage (http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart/) (Tel Aviv)
- Reinhart's homepage (http://www.let.uu.nl/~Tanya.Reinhart/personal/) (Utrecht)
- Book info (http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100716180)
- Interview (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=50&ItemID=2595) (November 8, 2002)
- "Jenin: the Propaganda Battle" (http://www.counterpunch.org/reinhart0424.html) (April 24, 2002)
- "The guaranteed failure of the road map" (http://www.mediamonitors.net/tanya20.html) (May 16, 2003)