Two nights ago I went to a friend's 50th birthday on Long Island and stayed at the house of my wife's dear friend, Virginia Reath. In the morning I grazed her book collection, found a copy of Allen Ginsberg's Reality Sandwiches given to Virginia by a friend on her 17th birthday back in the 70s. Virginia's from an old Protestant family. I think she's related to Pocahontas and the Mayflower. Yet she's a freethinker in ...

Strict application of the Israel lobby theory would not have predicted Sarah Palin. Romney, Lieberman, anybody but. Palin's an unknown quantity and she likes to buck lobbyists. Culturally she's not tight with Jews; I wonder how many she's even met. I don't think Lieberman's well-heeled friends will be fond of her. So why not throw out the theory? For a few reasons. McCain is long since answered for. He went to Sderot and Jerusalem with ...

Jerusalem Post has a piece on Israel's coming demographic crisis: not enough Jews want to move to Israel. The Knesset has a committee on aliyah, or Jewish immigration, and one of the members seeks a "mental revolution" in aliyah. [S]ignificantly increasing aliya - or at least creating a deeper connection between Israel and the Diaspora - will require a new effort. "The Zionists said Israel is the only place in the world to which Jews ...

Andrew Bacevich had a good piece in the most forward-thinking op-ed page in the country, the LA Times, that talked openly about the Isr**l l*bby and which urged neocons to repent of their Iraq invasion error: McCain's national security team features a strong neoconservative presence, including pundits such as Max Boot and Robert Kagan, along with hawkish Washington insiders such as Randy Scheunemann and James Woolsey. All figured prominently among advocates of invading Iraq; none ...

McCain's surrogates, including Georgia boy Randy Scheunemann, are attacking Obama adviser Dan Kurtzer for visiting Syria to try and advance the Israel-Syria talks re the Golan. It's amazing that the neocon agenda still gets such a pass in American politics. A shame that someone as intelligent and sensible as Samantha Power is railroaded. And a tragedy that Rob Malley, who emerges from Aaron David Miller's book The Much Too Promised Land as seasoned and fair, ...

In the comments to my recent post on Antisemites being on my side of these issues, Richard Witty said that I had failed to demonstrate journalistic "due diligence" and had indulged in a "prejudicial journalistic exercise" in reporting from Hebron after a tour there with Breaking the Silence and not getting the other side of the story. Richard--what's the other side of the story? I invite you to defend the behavior of the landgrabbing racist ...

I just saw George Bush on the Olympics deploring the violence in Georgia and Russia, saying that he told Putin things must return to the "status quo ante" of August 6. Though he had trouble with "status quo ante." The Israelis are said to be on the Georgians' side... Debkafile, a site with Israeli intelligence sources, reports that Israeli advisers are aiding the Georgians to hold on to the breakaway provinces. 1000 advisers, says this ...

I just saw the "60 Minutes" piece on the Israeli Air Force and I'm stunned. The piece had the feel of pure propaganda. It was all about the mighty air force, with acrobatics, macho pilots, cool missiles and cockpit footage of the bombing of the Osirak reactor back in '81. Bob Simon, the correspondent, and his interviewees, repeated standard Israeli self-justification: Israel is a tiny country in a tough neighborhood, Israel's first losing war will ...

Jon Powers is an Iraq war veteran running for Congress in Buffalo as a Democrat. On his campaign website, the former army captain damns the administration's Middle East strategy: It is a choice between politicians who send other people’s sons and daughters to war without demanding accountability from government and someone who lived the consequences of Washington’s bad judgment as a soldier in Iraq. It is a choice between a Washington culture that puts the ...

Only in Haaretz. By Zeev Sternhell: The real reason for the settlements...was occupying the land... [R]ight and left were partners to the act. The nationalist-messianist fervor and the desire to end the War of Independence merged into the momentum for occupation: The entire right and most of the left - We have returned to the land of the Judges and the kings of the Davidian dynasty, said defense minister Moshe Dayan emotionally in the summer ...

I was making lunch and only caught about ten minutes of Bill Kristol's speech at the Young America's Foundation yesterday. But this is a blog, and ten minutes is enough for a post. I was surprised by how backward-looking and rueful Kristol seemed about the whole conservative enterprise. No one could have anticipated our victories, he said. We didn't really know which way history was going, we just committed and said what was right. Whittaker ...

One of my gurus is Nancy Horn, a therapist who lives in Central Pennsylvania and understands Israel/Palestine as well as anyone. She didn't like what I said today about Bruce Ivins (where I basically convicted him ex posthumo of the anthrax crimes). I'm going to provide our dialogue below. Nancy gets the last word. One comment ahead of time. The left wing blogosphere seems to have seized on this case as an American David Kelly--the ...

The old Israel lobby continues to delaminate. Yesterday Jeffrey Goldberg attacked Eric Cantor, the possible veep choice of McCain, for distorting a statement that Obama made. The attack is of a piece with Goldberg's important article attacking the Israel lobby in May, in which Goldberg, echoing Olmert, said that it was now or never for the two-state solution, and then came out against the Sheldon Adelsons of the world, the one-Jerusalem and Eretz Israel crowd--Eric ...

David Zucker is a movie producer who once demonstrated against the Vietnam War. Lately he's gone way right--the predictable way stations were 9/11, the Republican Jewish Committee, and Ahmadinejad--and making a movie, American Carol, that seeks to make fun of the left. The only problem is that as this tortuously long Weekly Standard cover article by Cheney amanuensis Stephen Hayes makes clear, the movie isn't that funny. James Baker recast as Neville Chamberlain. And a ...

I'm still reelin and rockin from Joe Klein's statement/confession that Jewish neoconservatives made the Iraq war happen. Of course the key word in it is Jewish. That's what's got the Foxmans and Commentary bloggers so upset. Because the essential understanding Klein offers is that the neoconservative ideas for Iraq have a Jewish origin, and are caught up with the Zionist religion that has overtaken the American Jewish mind in the last 60 years (including the ...

Six Israeli universities are challenging Defense Minister Ehud Barak over a quota that the military has imposed on the numbers of Palestinian students who can attend the schools: 60 a year, because any more threatens Israel's security. I remember how elite education lifted the Jews of my father's and my generations. I remember how upset Jews in the U.S. got over quotas. When are we going to demand of Israel the same minority rights we ...

Great scandal produces great characters. Lucianne Goldberg... Matt Drudge... Gordon Liddy... Ollie North... In spite of his best efforts to rehabilitate himself in print, Douglas Feith is emerging as the neocon fool, par excellence. In the interview I just blogged about, Joe Klein lands on Feith out of nowhere, saying "you want to throttle Doug Feith, you just want to whoop him upside the head" (and Jeffrey Goldberg, Feith's former amanuensis, says not a word ...

Jeffrey Goldberg has a great interview with Joe Klein on his blog, remarkable for a few things. First you see Klein unbound. He's really smart. He stands by his criticism of Jewish neocons as having dual loyalties and then sounds the realist when he says that Iran is seeking nukes as a deterrent against western threats:[M]y reading on the nuclear issue is, given the level of threats that they've been getting from the United States, ...

Uri Avnery comments on the bulldozer attacks in Jerusalem: From the utterances of the commentators this week, one can gather that they cannot even imagine the anger that accumulates in the mind of a young Arab in Jerusalem throughout the years of humiliation, harassment, discrimination and helplessness. It is easier and more amusing to go into pornographic descriptions of the 72 virgins waiting for the martyrs in the Muslim paradise - what they do with ...

So the greatest progressive candidate in American presidential politics in 40 years visits Israel and the occupation, and what happens the next day? Israel announces more colonies, "settlements." Why do they do so? Because they are arrogant, because they know they can, because they know Obama won't hold a press conference in Paris on the subject, as he should. Because they know what our press won't say, but Haaretz will (obviously influenced by the recent ...