One of the best lines in Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on the neocons, They Knew They Were Right, is that having been excluded by the old WASP establishment, young Jewish rightwing intellectuals of the 50s-70s burned with outsider resentment. And in…
A few months back at a party in New York, I met the wife of a prominent liberal journalist and mentioned that I had lately been in Hebron, in Palestine. This woman said that she had close relatives in the…
Yesterday in El Dorado, Kansas, Barack Obama told of his white lineage, and how his maternal grandparents had met and fallen in love (did people fall in love back then, or just hook up?) in Kansas. His mother was born…
On January 11, an Ohio volunteer for the interventionist group Christian Peacemaker Teams visited grazing lands of a Palestinian village in the South Hebron Hills where settlers from an illegal “outpost” settlement called Havot Maon had stopped Palestinians from grazing…
OK, maybe Walt and Mearsheimer were the first guys over the barbed wire, and they left their bodies there. No one’s allowed to touch their ideas now. They were bad and wrong. Worse: controversial. OK. Well, comes now Barack Obama…
The universalist impulse in Jewish and Arab life continues to be shut out of our press in favor of the parochial. You wouldn’t know it, but on Saturday, over 1000 Israelis–Israeli Jews and Palestinians–led a convoy of cars from Tel…
Remember when everyone used to worry about inflation? Now the problem is conflation. The Miami Herald reports that, campaigning for the Jewish vote for John McCain in Florida, Joe Lieberman has linked hawkish U.S. activities in the Middle East with…
Three straws in the wind: –Last night on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace”, Kai Ryssdal did a wonderful interview with Palestinian economist Youssef Dauod about prices in Rafah, in which Dauod was allowed to say that the Israelis had created a…
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”…