The other night at the Union League (which I would have assumed in my youth to be a bastion of anti-etc, but which reflects the new establishment as much as any other institution) Michael Hirsh of Newsweek asked Dan Senor, the neoconservative tv commentator and Israel lobbyist, about Elliott Abrams’s extremist view that Obama has abandoned Israel over the flotilla disaster.
While Senor said he too wants to ring the alarm bells about Obama’s treatment of Israel, it’s OK to criticize Israel for the way it handled the flotilla attack, and another to abandon Israel, a big no-no:
Look there’s a lot of disagreement over this issue among people who tend to be very supportive of a strong US-Israel relationship. One point of major disagreement is, Did Israel screw up? Some [say] — Israel did nothing wrong. They did what they had to do. Israel had to defend itself. I don’t think that it’s that black and white actually. There are probably about eight different ways you can stop an attempt to break through a blockade, and Israel, the navy, chose about the most confrontational way to do it. Could there have been other ways to disassemble the ship, perhaps. Since Israel had a lot of advanced notice… could they have prepared for it differently? …. If they had more numbers… would they have been able to suppress it without its going sideways as quickly as it did? Some are saying that the chief of the navy in Israel will not survive this, ‘this was a huge screwup.’ I think those are all legitimate discussions about whether or not there was at a tactical level, there were major mistakes made. But: Israel’s right to defend itself.. Israel’s right to enforce a blockade… etc.
I put this in the same category as Wieseltier abandoning Netanyahu over the attack. American Zionists are restive.
