As I went downtown on the subway Thursday I wondered whether I wasn’t going to seem a fool for how excited I’d been in the days leading up to the debate. Then when I got there that selfconsciousness vanished, because…
I got home quite late from the Israel lobby debate and am on deadline for print, so I won’t get around to a full report till later, but thought it best to file a few impressions while the world is…
Tonight’s the big debate. I haven’t been so excited since Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag squared off over feminism. As a pipsqueak, I was on the wrong side then (Mailer’s), now I’m on the right one. One…
One of the great potentialities in tomorrow night’s SRO debate at Cooper Union lies in the fact that on one sideÂNo, Virginia, there is no Israel lobbyÂtwo of the three illusionists are bigtime Washington thinktankers, while on the other the…
One of the tables at Thursday night’s debate over the Israel lobby at Cooper Union will reunite three men who negotiated, unsuccessfully, at Camp David in 2000. Shlomo Ben-Ami negotiated for Israel. And Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk negotiated for…
An important piece in the Forward this week suggests that Bush is at last going to do something about Israel/Palestine so as to try and redeem his failed policies in the Middle East and restore American legitimacy in the world….
A lot of us are looking forward to the big debate over Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper next Thursday at Cooper Union. The ideas are finally coming where they belong: to New York. They were germinated in Chicago and Cambridge, broke…
Last week my father gave me a book of the English essayist Isaiah Berlin’s portraits. Berlin was a friend of Chaim Weizmann, the moderate Zionist and first president of Israel, whom Berlin often visited in Palestine during the tortuous years…
Why is it that the most important advances in American understanding of the Middle East can only appear in papers that spell neighbor “neighbour”? Lately it was Tony Judt in the London Review of Books. Before that the LRB gave…