Dan Sisken of Mideast Brief has corrected my spelling of the Arabic word “nakba,” referring to the disaster of ’48. I spelled it “naqba.” I think it’s important to try to use accurate transliterations of Arabic. It should be “Nakba”…
I keep thinking about things that the historian Ilan Pappe said in a forum on Israel/Palestine at Oxford last summer. He said that peace could not be achieved in the Middle East until the three A’s occur: Acknowledgement, Accountability, and…
One of the most important reporters on neoconservatism, Jim Lobe of IPS, has an item on Freedom’s Watch in which he notes the mainstream press’s lazy and fearful shorthand re neoconservatism–“strong supporters of Israel.” Why don’t those reporters spell out…
This weekend I had my first houseguest, a critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and he passed on a rumor that he had picked up from an academic, that John Mearsheimer had said privately, or in so many…
Last month the executive director of the American Jewish Committee attacked Walt and Mearsheimer in a speech in Germany for the usual reasons. They’re not antisemitic or they’re antisemitic, they sure smell antisemitic, that whole thread. But here are some…
Amazing news from Israel. Richard Silverstein passes on the information that the novelist A.B. Yehoshua has called on the Bush Administration to remove our ambassador till the Israelis begin to dismantle the settlements. And, notes JTA, Yehoshua lashed out at…
I’ve often written that the neoconservatives became far less transparent about their devotion to Israel once they attained power. It was one thing to write as Jewish intellectuals about Middle East policy in books and little magazines in the 1970s,…
Did I say nice stuff about Mike Huckabee? Please forget it. What follows is an exchange he had with Wolf Blitzer on CNN a few weeks back (I can’t make the link work, so I’m not including it) in which…
My friend Garrett Eisler informs me that film director Mike Leigh’s new play, Two Thousand Years, which has sold out in London, has come to off-Broadway, and is all about stuff I talk about on this blog: Jewish identity around…