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 […]
Palestinians
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ace reporter: American Jewish leaders are getting nervous about Obama
The well-connected and astute James Besser is hearing from American Jewish learders who are concerned that Obama will ignore conventional political wisdom and not worry (too much) about battling “the pro-Israel establishment.” He tells us: Last month Obama said “the status quo is unsustainable,†and he sounded like he meant it. For many pro-Israel leaders […]
New spin from Israel’s desperate foreign ministry
Imagine the consternation among the career staffers at Israel’s foreign ministry after their new boss, Avigdor Lieberman, said that Israel was not bound by prior agreements and explicitly mentioned Annapolis. It was hard enough for them to adjust a few years ago, when Tzipe Livni started to sound more like a Peace Now activist, ca […]
Why not call Netanyahu’s bluff on “economic peace?”
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 […]
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 […]