Jim Sleeper at TPM doesn’t like what I wrote earlier about Looking for Gandhi in Palestine: The blogger Phil Weiss, for example, has barricaded himself into an intellectual Masada that leaves no option I can find short of massive dispossession…
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…
I don’t like the Where’s the Palestinian Gandhi? talk in part because it’s so disingenuous, in a highminded Monty-Pythonish way. If the analogy holds, and Israel is India under the Raj, well darling, this must be England, and then why…
A curious report in the Nation by Barbara Crossette who tantalizingly speaks of the role of “an Israeli lobby” (gosh, dear, what’s that!?) in the destruction of former ambassador Chas Freeman’s career, and says the lesson is underlined by a…
One of my new themes is that many Americans hate Israel; it is a kind of groundswell. I don’t say this is good energy, it has a sometimes reactionary component. But it must be dealt with politically. Here are two…
A lot of hasbara and “softening” in this Netanyahu piece in the LA Times– two Israel lobbyists quoted, David Makovsky and someone from the American Jewish Committee. Where’s Brian Baird, or John Mearsheimer? While in Israel, the left shouts, It’s…
Bruce Wolman writes: Incoming Israeli P.M. Bibi Netanyahu tells Jeffrey Goldberg: “Iran is a composite leadership, but in that composite leadership there are elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist right now in any other would-be nuclear power in…
Bruce Wolman writes: An American gentile, Larry Franklin, goes to prison. But, according to Haaretz, his Israeli intelligence counter-party in crime (Uzi Arad, security aide to Netanyahu) will get a visa so as to visit the Obama administration. If this…
There’s a long piece on J Street by Noah Pollak in the forthcoming Commentary. I just read it. It’s a smart piece. Its essence is the claim that Jews are on the neocons’ side, and just look at Gaza. Barney…