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US Policy in the Middle East

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BBC News last night featured an interview about Iran with a highly-presentable young specialist at Hopkins, Trita Parsi. The interview was startling to me for a word that Parsi used. Now that the neocon moment seems at last to be…

Alexander Cockburn, in the latest Nation, tells the story of the first time he wrote about Israeli violence against the Palestinians—yes, in retaliation for (lesser) Palestinian violence—and it was removed from the Village Voice, in 1973, in an “unwonted act…

Finally someone has done the article I wanted to read long ago: What is Harvard’s reaction to the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on the Israel lobby (which was half-produced on the shores of the Charles, where co-author Walt was a dean). The…

I’m always talking about how smart people on the internet are, what about how stupid they are? A commenter called Ludwig Von Schaffner uses my latest take on my Jewish problem to say that Jews are responsible for gas chambers….

A month after he did so, I learn that Vice President Cheney gave a long toast to the neoconservative scholar Bernard Lewis at a lunch in Philadelphia. As usual, Cheney’s speech is significant for what it doesn’t tell us: anything…

The historic piece on the Israel lobby in the London Review of Books in March continues to reverberate. The latest LRB contains a dispute between the paper’s authors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, and the former executive director of the…

Three weeks ago, Tony Judt, a professor of European studies at N.Y.U., published a devastating piece in the Israeli daily Haaretz. Titled “The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up,” it argued that Israel’s contempt for world opinion of its actions had…

A few months ago I went to Syria as a tourist, to visit my wife’s cousin, who is teaching in Damascus. I had a very good time (in stark contrast to an unpleasant trip to Morocco) and since then I’ve…