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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Rabbi Michael Lerner went to a conference on "dialogue" in Saudi Arabia and was impressed by the humanity of the Saudis. He has filed this long report on a dinner table conversation he had with several members of Saudi King Abdullah's cabinet. The highlight is when Lerner speaks of Israel's fears of being obliterated by the Iranians and the ministers are dumbfounded. Incredulously, they asked if any Jews in the US believed that that was ...

The other night I had one of my regular arguments with a liberal Jewish friend. I said that AIPAC is representative of Jewish opinion. He said it is not, Jews are more liberal. Rabbi Lerner makes the same point here, and Joe Klein has said something like this recently.These guys are wrong. First, it is hard to believe that the most educated and affluent community in the U.S. would allow itself to be so misrepresented. ...

Yesterday's Times printed a shockingly belligerent Op-Ed by the Israeli historian Benny Morris arguing for devastating strikes now against Iran so as to forestall an Israeli nuke strike, or better yet, nuclear war in the Middle East. Datelined Li-On, Israel, the fearful piece feels a little like being crammed inside a Cairo ministry in 1963 as Israel was weaponizing. Should the Times run such feverish stuff? Compare to Haaretz, which runs a truly-noble piece called ...

The new alternative Jewish lobby is proving its worth. Yesterday J Street released a detailed survey of American Jewish political opinion. J Street interprets this data in a favorable way to its own efforts, saying that overwhelmingly Jews vote Democratic, oppose Bush's actions in the Middle East, and want a two-state solution-- by 3 to 1. But you know me, I'm skeptical about progressive claims about Jewish opinion with respect to the Middle East, and ...

The effect of Joe Klein's comment re dual loyalty has been incredible. He's broken the seal. Here is Michael Scheuer writing on antiwar.com that for the neocons and Liebermans, it's Israel first last and always, and it's time for the U.S. to separate itself from their policies re the Arab world. Hallelujah. How did we get into this mess? It wasn't a one-stepper. It took a generation and more. It took Ben Gurion beating down ...

The Wall Street Journal piece on Sheldon Adelson is just OK. It says he's the cash cow for the Republican Party and says he's religious on Israel in a neoconservative kinda way. The piece doesn't move the ball down the field much from Connie Bruck's piece of two weeks back in the New Yorker (though it's better about Freedom's Watch), but together the pieces represent progress. At last the press is looking at the Israel ...