One big price exacted by the Israel lobby is that it tries to shut down free debate when Israel’s motives are questioned. This is the lesson of the furore over comments on CNN by Tom Ricks, the Washington Post’s Pentagon…
In the Houston Chronicle, Professor Michael Desch makes the argument that Israeli withdrawals from occupied territories save Israeli lives. Israeli Foreign Ministry figures reveal that while Qassam rocket attacks increased marginally from 2004 to 2005 (309 to 377), the total…
I have a fantasy about Chris Matthews. It’s the 1980s and the height of the violent “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and Hardball is on. Matthews goes to political turf he knows well, Irish Boston, and gathers a group of American…
While visiting my mom, I took in a fine talk on U.S. dilemmas in the Mideast by Retired Ambassador William A. Rugh. The talk was sponsored by a local peace group and was remarkable to me for the use Rugh…
The Forward has a great editorial this week that makes the 1973 analogy. The humiliation to Israel of the 1973 Yom Kippur war led to the peace treaty with Egypt, and the humiliations to Israel of this latest war might…
Chris Matthews is on fire these days. Joe Lieberman’s loss has freed him to offer pitiless critiques of Democrats who voted for the war. Last night he said that they knew it was a bad decision in 2002 but went…
The death the other day in Lebanon of Uri Grossman, 20, an Israeli soldier and the son of the novelist David Grossman, who has been a peace activist in Israel, underscores a big difference between Israeli society and ours: In…
The abduction of Jill Carroll in Baghdad in January, along with the murder of her interpreter, Alan Enwiya, was an important event. Her ordeal demonstrated that the Islamic world has friends in the WestÂpeople like Jill Carroll, people who went…
In a great piece in the Times last week, Neil MacFarquhar reported from Damascus that the disastrous Iraq war, chased by Israel’s Lebanon war, has set back the cause of reform in the Arab world. An Arab moderate is afraid…