JJ Goldberg reported, via Israel’s Channel 10, that Prime Minister Netanyahu “has instructed his cabinet ministers to stick to a single message regarding the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement [announced last week and signed today in Cairo]…The message: “there is no possible positive component in the reconciliation agreement.†That’s right: Cabinet ministers are forbidden even to speculate […]
Arab-Israeli conflict
Why the Jewish right is terrified by J Street’s conference
J Street, the political arm of the American Jewish pro-Israel, pro-peace movement, will convene its second national conference on Saturday night. There will be an enormous turnout. An organizer told me that about 2100 people are pre-registered (at their last conference, only 850 people were pre-registered but 1500 people showed up). There will be about […]
Mubarak and the alternate universe of Israel’s vicious critics
Events in Egypt have reinforced my sense of living in a different universe than the one inhabited by Israel’s most vicious critics (let’s call them IMVCs) in the blogosphere. Oh, we have a few things in common. Like them, I am inspired by the Egyptian crowds demanding the overthrow of a tyrant. Like them, I […]
“Not All Criticism Of Israel Is the Same”
My op-ed on the campaign against the “anti-delegitimization” of Israel was just posted on the New York Jewish Week web site. The far left won’t like it. The far right won’t like it. I don’t know what the centrists will think… Here it is: Not All Criticism Of Israel Is The Same In an article […]
Is there any hope?
We’ve been here before, of course. We’ve been here so many times I’ve lost count. Most of what needs to be said about the upcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace talks was expressed in a poem written nearly sixty years ago by the late, truly great Yehuda Amichai. In The U.N. Headquarters Headquarters in the High Commissioner’s House […]
NY Times perpetuates myth that American Jews are single-issue voters
More and more Jewish voters are deserting the Democratic party, according to a Pew Research Center poll. The survey shows that 33% of American Jewish voters now identify or lean Republican, up from 20% in 2008. That’s interesting and troubling to a died-in-the-wool Democrat like me. But Charles M. Blow’s take on the poll in […]
Will the Americans drive Bibi “crazy?”
Troll around the Web and you will find many, distinctly different ways of looking at Bibi Netanyahu’s recent announcement of a ten-month settlement freeze. Here are four that interest me: 1) IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE, GREATER ISRAEL FANS. Netanyahu has been telling the right wing that the freeze is only temporary and that construction […]
The kids are alright at J Street
It was Palestinian suffering that got me engaged with Israel and concerned about its future. I had attended Habonim camp and had grown up in an ardently Labor Zionist household. But when I was in my twenties, I didn’t have much to do with Israel until the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla […]
The pro-Israel peace camp cares about America, too
As it prepares for its first national conference this weekend, J Street, the political arm of pro-peace, pro-Israel American Jews, is being assailed by those who don’t want it to take positions independent of the Israeli government. Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli National Security advisor, castigates the J Streeters’ “presumptuousness†and claims they think they […]
Guest Column: A new “grand bargain” in the Middle East
What follows is a column by Thomas Mitchell, lightly edited. We often read and hear comparisons between Israel and South Africa under apartheid. Mitchell finds lessons to be learned from South Africa, but not the most familiar ones. Instead, he focuses on diplomatic efforts to end South Africa’s occupation of Namibia and its confrontation with […]