Barack Obama is like any candidate for president in that he’s opted for the politically expedient at the expense of a higher principle – most notably when he thumbed his nose at the same public financing system that he’d long championed. Not surprisingly, his supporters shrugged that one off and echoed their candidate’s rationalizations. Better to implement real reform as president than to stand on principle and lose an election, he and they both reasoned.

That logic also explains why so many of his supporters on the left have remained silent, save for some grumbling among themselves that occasionally spills into the blogosphere, while Mr.  read more »

"Tony Judt is in favor of the complete dissolution of the state of Israel... the total dissolution of the state of Israel," said Dershowitz.

Second, Dershowitz's characterization doesn't seem fair to me; he is using eliminationist rhetoric to suggest that Judt is a kind of Nazi or antisemite, who would sweep Jews into the sea. In fact, if you read Judt's groundbreaking essay, you understand that his position is being caricatured. Yes, Dershowitz is right; Judt's vision would result in the end of the Jewish state. But his tone is pained, realistic, and even idealistic: it is a recovery of the old Judah Magnes/Elmer Berger/Anglo-American Inquiry Commission position that partition is racialist, that Arab and Jew should learn to live together in historic Palestine—because god knows, they haven't done a very good job of living with partition.  read more »

1. The Arab Question. "By 1944.. she had come to see it as the 'most important' challenge. Without 'Arab-Jewish co-operation,' she wrote in 1948, 'the whole Jewish venture in Palestine is doomed.'"

3. Some Zionists' definition of Jewishness, as a people or nationality, was a "volk" concept that recalled the racist German definition of Jewishness. Writes Robin: "In 1948, the leader of Herut, Israel's Revisionist party, travelled to America. Arendt drafted a letter of protest to the New York Times, which was signed by Einstein, Sidney Hook and others. Herut was 'no ordinary political party', she wrote. It was 'closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties'. It used 'terrorism', and its goal was a 'Fuhrer state' based on 'ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority'. The letter also decried those 'Americans of national repute' who 'have lent their names to welcome' the Herut leader, giving 'the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel'. The leader of Herut was Menachem Begin."

Back when Jimmy Carter was young, they used to have literacy tests to keep black people from voting. The black person would go to the polls and have to take a literacy test in order to vote. The pollworkers would ask the black person questions like, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" When the black person couldn't answer, they couldn't vote.

The literacy test has worked. It's sharply narrowed the mainstream discourse on Israel/Palestine. Democratic discourse is supposed to be contentious: You get a lot of views, and everyone makes some mistakes. Big deal; it's the ideas that count. But intimidated by the literacy test, a lot of liberals won't go near this issue, people who would be shocked to see what goes on in the Occupied Territories. Tony Kushner first explained this to me months ago. Even if you're sickened by what you see on TV, you're made to feel you're an idiot and not allowed to open your mouth till you know the difference between the Anglo-American commission and the Peel report and U.N. partition and Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration and Transjordan and a ton of other historical debris. How many bubbles in a bar of soap?

They're wrong; but don't listen to me. Ali Eteraz is an important blogger: a liberal humanist Muslim who lives in New York. One of the things Eteraz believes, along with Wieseltier and Pollack, is that the Palestinian issue gets way too much attention in the Islamic world. But that doesn't mean you can dismiss it.

Psychologically I find myself at a precarious position because I have very rarely seen a way of criticising Israel, and its policies, without that criticism simultaneously connected to a latent anti-Semitism. Having often been victimized by blatant Islamophobia, I have very little interest in assisting in having Jews subjected even to a more latent version of prejudice.

[But] from a pragmatic position, [America's] unchecked support of Israel hinders the project that I am most interested in: empowering Muslim reformists. I think it is particularly tragic that Israel/Palestine gets so much more play than the multitude of other human disasters in the world. However, that is reality, and one off-shoot of that reality is that one Palestinian death, or one additional Israeli settlement, or one additional story of exclusionary actions by the IDF, does more to set back the efforts of Muslim reformists (especially in the Arab world), than anything else. It gives to the fundamentalists and extremists a way to keep bringing the discourse to a polarizing dead-end...I wish [your blog] would recognize it explicitly: The vast majority of ills in the Muslim world are due to the profusion of tyrants. The tyrants, if removed, will inevitably be replaced by democratic Islamists. The most likely "wing" of the Islamists which will acquire power will be the hardliners because they have the ability to play the Israel Card.

If American realists and pragmatists take away that card from the hardliners by not treating Israel like the golden calf, we can assure that when (and it is inevitable) the democratic Islamists come to power, it will be the moderate, and one hopes, the reformist element of the community. We need to see more... measured and reality-based non-rhetorical non-polarizing discussions about certain acts of Israeli hubris. A vast majority of the Muslim world a) does not want to push the Jews into the sea, b) doesn't even want the one-state solution, and c) is quite content with the idea of a return to the '67 borders and a bi-state solution. However, if that doesn't happen -- and it can only happen if the United States permits it -- the vast majority of the Muslim world will remain susceptible to the Israel Card. I really wish it was possible to engage in Islamic reform without having at all to deal with the issue of Israel and Palestine, but I am increasingly realizing that it is not so possible. People like me are in need of people like you. I hope that you will talk about Israel in a manner that is so honest and so fair and so humanist that people will be persuaded of your position without the fear of an anti-Jewish backlash. I hope that is not too much pressure.

That's a humbling statement. It shows how much I can improve my own politics by not losing sight of Islamic tyranny. And it shows how vital we are as the new center: American pluralists who do not demonize Arabs and call for evenhandedness across the region.

2. The "Peace process" is an industry that spends billions of dollars on the same idea over and over again with no clear results. "There is a fantasy of separation, that the other side can be made to disappear, either behind a wall or through the existence of a Palestinian state."  read more »

Oh, those evangelical Christian Democrats—I guess Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer raise tons of money at private parties in Dallas and Boise!

And I'd counter the Times' dismissal of Jewish influence as a canard that goes back to the 40s with the work of a former Timesman, Peter Grose. A gentile, a longtime foreign correspondent for the Times, later associated with the Council on Foreign Relations, Grose in 1983 published a book called Israel in the Mind of America (Knopf) that dissected the political support in the U.S. for the Jewish state, and described the birth of the lobby, which he terms the "Jewish lobby," in the mid-1940s.  read more »

Though, rest assured, the Times is careful to dismiss Walt and Mearsheimer's paper on "The Israel Lobby" as an antisemitic canard:

Former Israeli ambassadors to Washington like Mr. Rabinovich, Mr. Arens and Mr. Shoval all scoff at the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis, which echoes criticisms of Jewish influence as far back as the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

Wait—why stop at Truman? Pro-Israel forces in the U.S. have played a crucial role in the life of the settlement and state, going back to the Wilson administration. Saying so doesn't make you an Israel critic. It might even make you a dispassionate scholar:

Leading State Department professionals came to resent bitterly what they considered a Jewish power so great that It was able to contravene completely the established role of the State Department. A most striking case in point was the meeting in Washington, D.C., in May 1917 between [British foreign secretary] Balfour and Justice Brandeis [lately appointed the first Jew among the Supremes]. Although he was close to President Wilson, Brandeis had no official authority to speak on foreign relations. Nevertheless, he communicated to Balfour a strong American support for the ideas of Zionism. Historian Peter Grose has commented that "as an illustration of back-channel diplomacy at its most effective, the Balfour-Brandeis meeting was exceptional. A Foreign Minister seeking understanding on a delicate political issue turned not to his official opposite number, the Secretary of State, or even to the other foreign policy advisers known to be close to the president." [Grose, Israel in the mind of America] Of course Balfour had every right, even obligation, to seek out spokesmen for American Jewry on such an issue. What is remarkable is that State Department officials, including the secretary of state, were totally ignored...

2. Melvin Urofsky and David W. Levy [of Virginia Commonwealth U. and Oklahoma U], in The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis:

Following the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, American Zionists pleaded with President Wilson formally to endorse the pledge that there would be a Jewish homeland in Palestine after the war. The State Department, however, adamantly opposed this request, pointing out to Wilson that the United States was not at war with the Ottoman Empire. Wilson finally decided to yield to Jewish requests and, without consulting the State Department, addressed a Jewish New Year's greeting to the Jewish people through [Reform rabbi] Stephen Wise, dated 31 August 1918. In the letter Wilson approved the Zionist program..."

The fascination here is the extent to which the Balfour declaration of 1917 in England, granting a homeland to Jews in Palestine, and Wilson's affirmation of it a year later, grew out of the only thing Jews had going for them then: access to power of highly-successful men of wealth or learning. In England it was the great chemist Chaim Weizmann. Here it was men like Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter (later to be appointed the third Jewish Supreme Court Justice) and Jacob Schiff, the N.Y. banker.

Call it a good thing or a bad thing, call it influence, help, a back-channel, requests, or a lobby. Call it anything you like; just don't pretend that it is a fantasy.

He is also intellectually corrupt. When he says that America's biggest job is to reach "hearts and minds" across the Arab world and says that this is to be achieved by imposing democracy in Iraq, he has learned nothing from a bloody and horrifying experiment that has weakened America. He knows better. There's one thing that America can do tomorrow to reach hearts and minds across the Arab world, and that is to listen to what those Arabs say they want: for the U.S. to commit itself to a peace process in Israel/Palestine that will end the humiliation of the Palestinians and end attacks on Palestinians and Israelis. That commitment by American leaders might even help in the eventual stabilization of Iraq, indeed in reforming Islamic dictatorships.

The former Israeli soldier, blue-eyed, his shirt sleeves pushed up around his biceps, said, "In Hebrew we have a word, Amal. It means, I have nothing to add. I agree with her completely."

The news from Israel/Palestine these days is desperate. For the second time in a few months an "errant" Israeli mortar shell has destroyed an innocent Palestinian family in Gaza—  read more »