A few comments about Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with Bibi Netanyahu yesterday.
–Looking thru his book Prisoners, I was freshly irritated by Goldberg's line near the end of the book that he and his Palestinian counterpart in his story are "two entirely powerless individuals, working at the subatomic level." This is irritating because Goldberg is the most important Jewish journalist in the world. Goldberg was granted an important interview with Obama last spring in order to make him kosher to American Jews, and was granted this belligerent interview with Netanyahu (Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran or I will) on the same basis. (And by the way, Goldberg says the Israel lobby is powerless, too.)
–In the Netanyahu interview, we get these comments about reverse aliyah: the astounding numbers of Jews leaving Israel, usually for the U.S.
plans to drop a nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv, should it find a means to
deliver it. The first-stage Iranian goal, in the understanding of
Netanyahu and his advisers, is to frighten Israel’s most talented
citizens into leaving their country. “The idea is to keep attacking
the Israelis on a daily basis, to weaken the willingness of the Jewish
people to hold on to their homeland,” Moshe Ya’alon said. “The idea is
to make a place that is supposed to be a safe haven for Jews
unattractive for them. They are waging a war of attrition.”
I urge Goldberg to look into his heart on this issue. Born in the U.S., he moved to Israel in the 80s out of love for the Jewish state. Then, despite his belief that the U.S. is an anti-Semitic place, unsafe for Jews, he returned here some years later. He had failed to make himself an Israeli, he says in his book, because he found life in Israel coarse and because he'd fallen in love with an American woman who wasn't wild to join him there. I think an unstated reason is ambition. Goldberg had places to go in the United States– and good for him.
This post better go somewhere. Here is the point: What are the real reasons that Israelis are leaving Israel? Doesn't it have a lot more to do with the unpleasant aspects of Israeli society, for instance, Netanyahu and Lieberman, than with Iran? And doesn't Goldberg actually know better on this score (Thanks to Jack Ross for the headsup.)
