The daughter of some friends wrote the following on her Bat Mitzvah program. It has the ring of something a very smart, self-aware 13-year-old would write, rather than a presentation that has been sanitized and edited by grown-ups. That is why I find it moving: I am going to donate 10% of the money I […]
Author: Dan Fleshler
Help wanted: Jr. editor, 3+ years pub. experience, track record of utterly mad conspiracy theories req.
Received the following email this evening from the gentleman who runs Ziopedia. I stumble upon gems from the coherent, seemingly lucid paranoid fringe all the time and don’t do much with them. But I have never seen a coherent, seemingly lucid, paranoid want ad before. There are many out-of-work editors and reporters out there. Perhaps […]
The best post by MJ Rosenberg…ever
The latest “IPFriday” from MJ Rosenberg was obviously written in a kind of white heat. It is engagingly furious about the “Status Quo Lobby.” Nobody does fury better than MJ. Here he is on Eric Cantor’s speech at the AIPAC Policy Conference: The crowd adored Cantor who managed to invoke the Holocaust, gas chambers, and […]
A ray of hope: maybe Bibi has no principles
Under normal circumstances, we want the world’s leaders to have moral and ideological consistency and to know who they are. Perhaps, under current circumstances, it is better for Israel to be led by a man who doesn’t have the faintest idea of who he is and relies on others to define him. “Nothing has changed […]
Why neoconservatism is [almost] dead — Notes on the J Post review of my book
Initially, I was delighted to read Jonathan Schanzer’s vicious attack on my book in the Jerusalem Post. Until then, the few reviews out there had been been quite positive (See essays by Jerome Chanes, the History News Network’s Murray Polner, and Thomas Mitchell), and I was hoping and praying for controversy of some kind, as […]
Poll: many Israelis no longer accept a key part of the Zionist narrative
A surprising poll shows that many Israelis no longer agree with the most simplistic versions of the Zionist narrative. If the past is predictive, it will take about 5 years before it becomes respectable to air any of these opinions in much of the organized American Jewish community. But perhaps the “Diaspora lag” might not […]
Peres won’t try to stop “natural settlement growth;” Will Obama?
Eventually, Obama and his team may well press the Israeli government to make hard decisions on the West Bank settlements, presumably as part of a comprehensive diplomatic plan in which each side will need to sacrifice cherished principles and stop habitual behavior. We got an inkling of Israel’s predictable but disturbing response to a key […]
Baker and Biden at AIPAC: A Tale of Two Speeches
At the AIPAC Policy Conference 20 years ago, Secretary of State James Baker made a widely publicized speech that, if I’m not mistaken, was written by Aaron David Miller. He told the throng: For Israel, now is the time to lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel. Israeli interests […]
Americans for Peace Now’s sensible take on new Iran sanctions bill
New Iran sanctions legislation is now in the House and Senate (S. 908 and HR 2194). No doubt it will be the major focus of AIPAC’s lobbying efforts this coming Tuesday, after AIPAC”s Policy Conference, when literally throusands of its members will descend on Capitol Hill. According to a contact at Americans for Peace Now, […]
Poll: Growing majority of Americans oppose new Israeli settlement construction
Just in time for this weekend’s AIPAC conference and the Netanyahu-Obama meeting on May 18th, a new poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org indicates that three-quarters of Americans think that Israel should not build settlements in the Palestinian territories. This is up 23 points from when this question was last asked in 2002. One third of Americans show […]