Prime Minister Netanyahu still hasn’t given up on the idea of forging an “economic peace” with the Palestinians, Bloomberg reports. Last week, at a meeting in Washington, I heard Yossi Beilin tell some left-learning, pro-Israel American Jews that they –and the Israeli left– should take Netanyahu at his word. “If he wants economic peace, let’s […]
Israeli occupation
J Street poll: for some American Jews, “evenhandedness” doesn’t go far enough
There has been much ado about the latest J Street poll of American Jews. The most important finding, as noted in the survey analysis, is that “Jews want America to be much more aggressive in its Middle East peace efforts than it is today.” 87% of respondents said they supported the United States playing an […]
Jeffrey Goldberg laments the Jewish “Cossacks”
Jeffrey Goldberg appears to be the new punching bag of left-leaning bloggers and Walt/Mearsheimer realists who focus on Israel and the American Jewish community. After Goldberg opposed the Chas. Freeman nomination, my dear friend and fellow-traveller MJ Rosenberg (who wrote the Foreward to my breathlessly anticipated, long-awaited book) lumped Goldberg into the same category as […]
The inconvenient truth of two narratives
On Huffington Post, David Young offers a dialogue between an Israeli and a Palestinian, both of them composites (hat tip to Tom Mitchell). It’s a very useful summary of the current state of the two narratives. An excerpt: Avi:…We hated uprooting Gaza’s 8000 Jewish settlers; they spit on our own soldiers and called them Nazis. […]
What I learned at the Museum of Tolerance
Yesterday, I visited the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles for the first time, accompanied by my uncle. Both of us were struck by what was conspicuously absent from the interactive exhibits that are meant to fight racism, hate speech, human rights violations and genocide. There was virtually nothing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict […]
Why Albert Einstein can’t help the orphans of Gaza
Over at MondoWeiss, Adam Horowitz gives us a “Zeitgeist Alert” and proclaims that “The two-state solution is dead.” He quotes a piece by Sandy Tolan in the Christian Science Monitor that presents all-too-familiar arguments for why it is too late, there is no hope, the Palestinians have been deprived of a state of their own, […]
Time for shameless self-promotion: advance blurbs on my book
Here are some advance reviews. Pretty cool, huh? “This is a brilliant study of two intriguing contradictions pertaining to the story of America’s Israel lobby. One is the contradiction between the reality and limits of Jewish power, on the one hand, and the popular perception of that power, on the other. Another has to do […]
J Street: Support Bob Simon and “60 Minutes”
The J Street gang is trying to organize a response to the burgeoning smear campaign against Bob Simon of “60 Minutes,” whose segment castigating Israeli settlements on Sunday was a first for network T.V. Here is their message: Tell Bob Simon you thought his 60 Minutes segment on Israeli settlements was an accurate and thoughtful […]
Odessa, 1918 and the Gaza Strip, 2008-2009
My maternal grandmother, Pearl Weiner, used to tell me stories about her adolescence in Odessa, where, in 1918, she lived through the Ukrainian Revolution. In one year, Odessa was overrun with a succession of occupying armies and gangs, whom she invariably described as “the Bolsheviks, the Denekinovitches [followers of Anton Denekin, a White Russian General] […]
Why Niebuhr, Obama’s favorite thinker, was a Zionist
After years of shamelessly pretending to know what Reinhold Niebuhr wrote and thought when his name came up in conversation, I have taken the trouble to start reading him for the first time. There are two reasons. One is that our President-elect has indicated that Niebuhr has had a profound effect on his thinking. Andrew […]