Who you callin' a 'settler?!'

City of Ma'ale Adumim (Google)

Ok. Now it's personal.


David Brinn, managing editor, Israel21c.org

Colleague, mentor, editor, music-reviewer and all-around great guy David Brinn weighs in (...finally, Dave...) about life as a "settler," in - oh, the horror! - Ma'ale Adumim. His riposte is in reply to a book review appearing in Haaretz that dissed him without a second, critical thought:

"I always bristle when I’m referred to as a ‘settler’. It happened recently in the national left-leaning daily paper Ha’aretz, all so innocently, in an article about my friend, author Matt Rees, who just released his first mystery novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem, about a Palestinian private eye.

"‘Rees lives with his wife in the Old Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem. He has organized an office where he can sit in front of the keyboard and look out at the city’s landscapes through the window. There is a guitar in the room. He is also a musician and plays bass guitar in an ensemble formed by some of his friends who live in Jewish settlements in the territories.’"

I just happen to be one of Matt’s band mates. And all right, I do live in Ma’aleh Adumim, a city situated three miles from Jerusalem, just over the ‘Green Line’ - that invisible boundary that separates Israel from the West Bank.

Read the rest.

(Full disclosure: David Brinn was my editor and bud over at Israel21c.org. Here's a partial list of articles that I wrote, and he edited. I also posted to their blog, Israelity). Here's a video slideshow I photographed and produced of an event co-sponsored by Israel21c: