Finding Common Ground Between Israelis and Palestinians

The fog of war currently shrouding Hamas and Israel is not the only fog obscuring a path forward in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While each side’s worst trauma has been triggered by Hamas’s depraved mass slaughter and Israel’s scorched-earth counter-attack—for Jews the Holocaust, for Palestinians, the Nakba—the fighting has also exposed a fundamental divide between two sets of grievances: what I call 1948—when the modern state of Israel was established; and 1967—when the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began. 1948 challenges Israel’s right to exist as a…

Palestinians Are Using Bitcoin to Transact Across Borders Amid Conflict

For a small but growing community of users in the occupied Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, bitcoin has become a lifeline. Ahmed Ismail, a financial analyst in Gaza, estimated there are at least 20 unofficial “exchange” offices there dealing cryptocurrency to local users. Ismail himself helps 30 clients use bitcoin to purchase investments abroad, such as stocks, since there aren’t any local alternatives for putting money to work. One such currency dealer in Gaza, Mohammed, told CoinDesk over the past four years he helped up…