A couple of readers have pointed out that the IDF has suspended the soldiers who exposed their buttocks to Palestinian shepherds outside of Hebron. Good for the Israelis. Though I wonder how many other incidents of this character take place…
The other day LA Times Op-Ed editor Nick Goldberg said that he gets many more letters of complaint from readers supporting Israel than from any other group. Sometimes it’s an “assault.” I know whereof he speaks. When I attended a…
One of my themes on this blog is that our policymaking in the Mideast will stay broken until Jews have the courage to openly describe and, if they need to, challenge the construction of Jewish identity. The problem with the…
Justin Elliott has a nice piece on Obama’s navigations re the Jewish state following his terrible faux pas last year in Iowa when he said that Palestinians are suffering worse than Israelis. Rest assured, Obama’s in the tank. Marty Peretz…
Roland Popp, the scholar who sent me the Nixon memo where RMN inveighed against “domestic political considerations” when it came to Mideast policy, has sent me two other letters in a related vein, ones he picked up at the LBJ…
Here is a cool memorandum written by Richard Nixon in ’69, to his Secy of State William Rogers and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. It was sent along to me by scholar Roland Popp, who dug it up in the…
A smart reader from Virginia has pointed out that my “shock” yesterday over the statement in a Condi Rice biography that the war was “promoted” to help Israel is callow. Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay writes: I agree that the war was not…
Here is Michael Lerner, on why Obama’s Israel straddle is going to give him a political hernia: In recent days, we at Tikkun magazine have had hundreds of emails from young Jews distraught at the television images of tens of…
Dan Fleshler exults that the great Rob Malley is an adviser to Obama. Martin Peretz says, with relief, that he is not: There are all kinds of spooky rumors that a man named Robert Malley is one of Obama’s advisers,…