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…
The brilliant ‘n bold Tony Judt has again put it all together. In the latest London Review of Books, he demonstrates how the liberal intelligentsia have provided crucial support and cover for Bush’s misadventures in Iraq and the “war on…
The effort to marginalize Chuck Hagel for saying fairminded things about Israel/Palestine is really among the most hateful/disastrous aspects of the Israel lobby’s effect in this country. So let’s connect the dots. Note that on the Haaretz panel that is…
Ha’aretz’s Shmuel Rosner has gathered a panel to rate American presidential candidates on a scale of 1 to 10 on whether they are good (10) or bad (1) for Israel. No surprise that Hillary and Rudy Giuliani are near the…
How amazing that the Conservative Party leader in Britain, David Cameron, is now lashing out at American neoconservatives and denouncing Tony Blair’s “slavish” relationship to the U.S. So the neocons are identified there with Labor. As they have found a…
On Friday, the Nation magazine hosted Yizhar Be’er, who directs a media monitoring organization in Israel called Keshev. (The group’s president is David Grossman, the writer, who lost his son, a tank commander, in Lebanon last month.) The theme of…
Last night James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, interviewed author Lawrence Wright on C-Span about his Al-Qaeda book, The Looming Tower, and alas made a hash of it. The best thing about After Words, the book interview show,…