Speaking of Condi Rice, I am reading the superb new biography, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, by Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post. On page 242, in describing Rice’s shifting rationales…
Speaking of how our Israel policy is made, here is an excerpt from an interview by an Israeli TV reporter of Sec’y of State Condoleezza Rice two weeks ago. What is remarkable in this interview is that Gil Tamary, the…
A friend just got the latest YIVO bulletin, which is not available at the Yiddish institute’s website, and reports the following: It includes a full page diatribe against Walt-Mearsheimer that concludes that W and M “presented a one-sided version of…
Is there an Israel lobby? Barry Lando, a former producer for “60 Minutes,” writes: A few years back I did a report on AIPAC for “60 Minutes” with Mike Wallace. One after another, all the congressional offices I contacted confirmed…
From what I saw and read of the Dems’ debate last night, Israel/Palestine was not mentioned. The blackout continues. Indeed, the only reference I’ve seen in presidential politics to what I consider the most important issue the country faces was…
A reader has pointed out to me that the neoconservative thinktank I wrote about last night, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, is intimately connected to the illegal colonization of the West Bank. As I reported, Tony Gelbart–the board member…
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…
One of the best things in Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book, They Knew They Were Right, is his analysis of the children of the neocons. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz had struggled to attain prominence. They had varied careers, generally on…