Director Dror Moreh tells Dave Davies about one of the reasons he made The Gatekeepers:

My son is going to the army in two weeks from now and for me to create that movie was the fear that he will have to be that young soldier running in those alleys, arresting people, going into their homes in the middle of the night. And what effect it will have on his soul? What effect it will have on his personality, a young boy that now just finished high school?

Image of Israeli tank by jfelse01/Flickr

Jewish settlers live under civil law. Palestinians in the West Bank live under military law. With the settler population growing at three times the rate of the Jewish population inside Israel’s original boundaries, at some point in the future, there will be too many settlers in the West Bank to actually extricate Israel from the West Bank, and at that point, Israel will become, in the words of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, an ‘apartheid state.’ And that would be such a tragedy for us.

— Peter Beinart, on today’s Fresh Air.

Yes, the left is correct about Israel never being a fully democratic country as long as there’s an occupation. But I think the right is correct in saying that solving the settlement issue won’t solve the larger Arab-Israeli conflict.

— Journalist Gary Rosenblatt explains why he thinks a boycott doesn’t solve the larger issues in the Israeli/Palestinian crisis.

We have to invest and spend our money in the original Israel, which offers the right of citizenship to all people, but I don’t think we should be spending our money in the West Bank, which is a territory where Israel’s founding ideals are desecrated,

— Journalist Peter Beinart has called for a boycott of goods produced in the West Bank. On today’s Fresh Air, he explains why. (And journalist Gary Rosenblatt explains why he disagrees with Beinart.)

On Tuesday’s Fresh Air, we talk to journalist Peter Beinart about his book The Crisis of Zionism, which argues that Israel cannot be a true democratic state as long as there are settlements in the West Bank, where Jews are citizens of the Israeli state and Palestinians are not. In his book and in a recent New York Times op-ed, Beinart has proposed a boycott of goods made in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

We also talk to journalist Gary Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt, the editor and publish of The Jewish Weekof New York, details the reaction to Beinart’s article and explains why he disagrees with the boycott proposal.

Any attack on Iran would probably have the effect of unifying a very divided country. It would bring up a nationalistic surge. It could force opposition politicians to side with the Mullahs. It could make a battle with Israel or the United States an issue in the streets of Tehran rather than seeing those protestors out, as they were in 2009, protesting against their own government.

— New York Times correspondent David Sanger, on what could happen if Israel or the U.S. attacked facilities in Iran.

The Obama administration has taken the position that if regime change is really Israel’s goal in Iran, then the bombing of the [nuclear] facilities would probably be the single most counterproductive step that they could take.

— On today’s Fresh Air, David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, talks about the ongoing nuclear standoff and details what could potentially happen if Israel decided to mount a military strike against uranium enrichment sites in Iran.

As someone who spent a lot of years living in Jerusalem, one of the great perks is that when you come back, and you get into these Israel arguments in your American-Jewish clan, you can really just silence them by saying ‘I lived there.’ So we used it like a bludgeon.

— Nathan Englander, on living in Israel.

I hope I’m wrong, I’ve made enough wrong predictions over the Arab Spring that maybe I’m wrong on this too — but my conviction is that President Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu cannot reach a deal for so many reasons, not just personal outlooks but politics on both sides.

— The West Bank has yet to see a democracy movement on the of level of those sparking dramatic changes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. It could have a huge effect on the region, were it to happen, says conflict resolution expert Robert Malley.

Tomorrow’s Fresh Air: Democracy movements are sweeping across the Middle East. But the dramatic changes in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria have not yet come to the West Bank. If and when that does occur, it could be a game-changer for Israel and the United States according to Robert Malley. He’s the program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group.

Journalist Thanassis Cambanis, on Hezbollah’s perpetual war against Israel: “They’ll engineer it at the moment that is most propitious to them. In their ideal world, they manage to engineer a situation in which Israel attacks and they can blame the beginning of the war on Israel. … They seem to feel like they’ve changed the balance of power between Hezbollah and Israel — not that they could defeat Israel — but they think they can inflict so much damage on Israel in another war with missiles on Tel Aviv, or much more destructive missiles on Haifa that [Hezbollah] will hold the cards.”

Nathaniel Frank, the author of Gays in Foreign Militaries 2010: A Global Primer, and today’s guest on Fresh Air: “Research has uniformly shown that transitions to policies of equal treatment without regard to sexual orientation have been highly successful and have had no negative impact on morale, recruitment, retention, readiness or overall combat effectiveness.”

John Powers on David Grossman’s novel To The End Of The Land: “Then again, if To the End of the Land were only about the soul of Israel, it would feel abstract and emotionally hollow. Instead, it’s enormously powerful.  Grossman has a feel for the fury and mire of domestic life, for the thrilling sound of the individual human voice. I’ve read few novels that capture so well the adventure of raising kids — Grossman has always been drawn to the magic of childhood — or the way that men’s bantering conversation can close out women, even a mother who loves them.”