Last night in a conference room at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, 20 students gathered to hear a young Palestinian woman and a former Israeli soldier, sitting side by side under the auspices of the peace organization One…
The Gates appointment to replace Don Rumsfeld is important: I think it might signal a shift in George Bush’s thinking (I know, that’s an oxymoron) re Israel/Palestine. Consider a few facts: Former Sec’y of State James Baker is now of…
My last post said that Americans were too quiet about the ascension of Avigdor Lieberman. Lara Friedman, director of government relations for Americans for Peace Now, points out to me that APN has been vigorous in denouncing Lieberman’s expulsionist beliefs….
Both the proof and the damage of the Israel lobby may be seen in a simple fact: In Israel, people can sharply criticize their government in the mainstream press; here the mainstream press excludes sharp criticism of Israel (because it…
Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, was influenced by Hannah Arendt to consider the relationship of Jews to the state, and in 1993 he published a book on the subject, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Marty…
I’ve been thinking about something Marty Peretz said at Yivo Institute last week. Following Niall Ferguson’s talk about Jews & Money, a lady in the second row asked whether the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government committed…
The Atlantic Monthly has just published a poll of “foreign-policy authorities” on U.S. support of Israel. I can’t get access to the whole poll but the teaser is exciting: 62 percent of these wise men say that the Bush Administration’s…
Hat’s off to the New York Times. Yesterday’s front-page profile of Philip Zelikow, a top aide to Condoleeza (help me, spellcheck) Rice and the head of the 9/11 Commission, referred baldly to a fundamental divide among policymakers between “realists” (Zelikow)…
The Yivo Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Ashkenazi Jews, has lately reprinted an important attack on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The attack was written in 1921 by the great English journalist Lucien Wolf, who…