Mondoweiss

What Obama Told Goldberg, Behind Closed Doors

Jeffrey Goldberg's piece yesterday in the Times is very important. Goldberg is someone many Jews look to for guidance, and his piece is the green flag to the American Jewish community to have open war over Israel and the lobby. At last. On one side, the Adelsons and Perles who want Israel in all of historic Palestine. On the other, the Jews against occupation, the Aaron David Millers who want to divide the land and share Jerusalem. Time for a robust debate, the piece declared (giving an imprimatur to a demand Walt and Mearsheimer and MJ Rosenberg have been making for months). And it was obviously an expenditure of Goldberg's political and personal capital: what will happen to his many friendships with the likes of Bill Kristol?

The big question I have about the piece is Whether Goldberg discussed it with Obama.

We Are All Mearsheimerites Now: Jeffrey Goldberg Joins the Anti's

Jeffrey Goldberg, surely the most powerful Jewish print journalist in the country right now, wrote a vicious review in The New Republic last fall of Walt and Mearsheimer's book, The Israel Lobby that I never blogged about because I found it so unpleasant. The piece said that the two scholars were anti-semites who had purposely put themselves in the tradition of Father Coughlin and David Duke. The tone was supercilious, the name-calling was unrelenting and sophomoric. They were "tourists" in the area of Israel policy, knew nothing about Washington, on and on and on. A Nazi reference or two. And always putting himself forward as sager...

Well, we are all Keynesians now. We are all Mearsheimerites.

Today on the Times Op-Ed page, Goldberg adopted Walt and Mearsheimer's line. He said that the only thing that can save the Jewish state is the two-state solution, and the only thing that can save the two-state solution is if the stranglehold of the Israel lobby is broken. 

what’s needed now is a radical rethinking of what it means to be pro-Israel. Barack Obama and John McCain... should be able to talk, in blunt terms, about the full range of dangers faced by Israel, including the danger Israel has brought upon itself.

But this won’t happen until Aipac and the leadership of the American Jewish community allow it to happen.

This is the same Goldberg who last fall said W&M were crazy to ascribe such stupendous power to the lobby. And here he states that the lobby licenses what our most powerful politicians are "able" to say. His target is "The leadership of the American Jewish community" What does that mean? Is he attacking the Jews? The same vagueness that he denounced last fall as Jewish conspiracy theory in Walt and Mearsheimer, Goldberg employs in the Times:

These Jewish leaders, who live in Chicago and New York and behind the gates of Boca Raton country clubs, loathe the idea that Mr. Olmert, or a prime minister yet elected, might one day cede the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to the latent state of Palestine.

And he does so necessarily. For it is no easy thing to pin these Greater Israel types down. It is an easy thing to say, Aipac, but another to describe the spidering network behind Freedom's Watch with any precision.

I welcome Goldberg's new line, and his stark opposition to the lobby. It is a sign of hope for the Jewish community, a sign that the monolithic orthodoxy is splintering, as I say here so often. So why did Goldberg change? Here are my reasons:

--Israel is truly in crisis. This is, Olmert says, the last gasp for the 2-state solution. After this comes a binational state or apartheid. But Olmert needs to communicate this to American Jewry. Ergo, Goldberg.

--The lobby itself is splintering. J Street and MJ Rosenberg and Dan Fleshler and IPF have been saying in anguish for months that now is the time to push a 2-state solution and defy the lobby--well, weeks in J Street's case. Rosenberg spoke of a "seismic shift" in the Jewish leadership a few months back. Now Goldberg, the most powerful Jewish journalist and a true believer in the necessity of a Jewish state, has shifted into the anti's camp...

--Nakba commemoration has shadowed the 60th birthday stuff the way that Tibetan protesters have shadowed the Chinese Olympics, and has scared Zionists. The Nakba narrative, of ethnic cleansing and landgrab in '47-'48, has gained traction, even among progressive Jews here, because that narrative is proved on a continuing basis by Israel settlement policy, the unending landgrab and cleansing. In this piece, Goldberg is angry about the settlements, saying they have "entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians..."

--The Obama Effect. Obama's example is a rebuke to all states with lousy records on minority rights. The zeitgeist is about to change, and make Israel look very very yesterday.

--Walt and Mearsheimer really have changed the discussion. I say that the MSM has tried to marginalize them. And it has. But it hasn't succeeded. Influential people have read the book, many of them surreptitiously, and it has given  permission to criticize Israel. There has been a great awakening, for which W&M deserve credit. They paved the way for Daniel Kurtzer, who is Obama's adviser, and Aaron David Miller to write books showing that Nothing is going to happen in Israel till the power of the Israel lobby is stanched.

Not that Goldberg will give W&M credit. No, he spent last fall smearing them. So even here he must distance himself from W&M, saying they were wrong to say that the lobby is not in America's best interest--it is not in Israel's best interest! This is misrepresentation. One of W&M's big themes is that the lobby doesn't act in Israel's best interest. They say so in the introduction of their book, on two or three occasions in the text, and here in the LA Times, a piece on "Israel's False Friends" in which they argue that the presidential candidates "see a significant political payoff in backing Israel to the hilt, even when it is pursuing a policy -- colonizing the West Bank -- that is morally and strategically bankrupt." W&M like Israel and are for a 2-state solution. They are Goldberg's natural allies; Goldberg needs them.

Another Sign of Progress: Abe Foxman Bewails the (Alleged) Nakba Coverage

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League complains bitterly in the Jerusalem Post that Israel's 60th birthday prompted absolutely equal coverage in U.S. newspapers of the Nakba, featuring "Palestinian[s]-of-the-day." Gosh, I wish I'd seen all those stories! The Nakba narrative, says Foxman, leads Palestinians away "from responsibility for building a nation."

Notice the sudden desperation about the 2-state solution. Interesting...

Tom Friedman Advances the Lone-Gunman Theory of Iraq War

Tom Friedman has a good piece about the peace process and Israel today, or a halfway digestible one anyway. It is influenced by the goodnatured Aaron David Miller. But Friedman persists in offering the lone-gunman theory of Iraq:

The rise of Iran as a threat to Israel today is directly related to Mr. Bush’s failure to succeed in Iraq

Mr. Bush's failure to succeed. In other words, it was a great idea to invade and occupy a country that did not attack us. It is always Bush. But Friedman was an important proponent of the ideas that gave us this war, as were a great number of Washington intellectuals (yes most of them Israel-lovers--including Friedman, who wrote on Slate that it was a good thing to smash Saddam to answer the thinking behind suicide bombers in Tel Aviv pizza parlors). When will the neocons and fellow travelers come down off their grassy knoll and admit their responsibility?

'Birthright' Should Welcome Non-Jews (and Other Reflections on the Obama Effect on Identity)

For the second time in a year, a study has come out showing that young American Jews don't care about Jewishness and Israel nearly as much as the last generation. Chaim Waxman, a Rutgers professor of sociology emeritus, presented a paper at the recent Jewish People Policy Planning Institute conference (hope I got that right) in Israel. It says that Jews are growing alienated from their communal leadership and names a few factors, including the internet, which allows people to associate in new ways, and more important, the changing understanding of identity in America in which young people see their identities as "pluralistic and fluid" and don't see ethnic identity as holding great value.

The Obama Effect, writ large. "The fluid state of identity," he wrote in his first book, marks "modern life."

Professor Waxman's response is a conservative one; he wants to "charge up" young Jews by getting them to join birthright trips, the free trips to Israel available to Jews-only, up to age 26 (one of my relatives who went on this trip was encouraged to join the Israeli army). Cohen and Kelman made the same point in their landmark (and parochial) study of last year: that "ethnic cohesion (Jews relating to Jews)" was needed to strengthen Jewish identity and support for Israel. Alas, 62 percent of Jews under 35 are marrying non-Jews. Charles Bronfman, who underwrote that study, called the study's findings "disheartening" and also called for more birthright trips.

My first thought was that these studies are reactionary.  Young Jews are distancing themselves from Israel for progressive reasons: antisemitism is all-but meaningless in their professional and social realities, meanwhile the Jewish state forces millions of Arabs under occupation to use separate road systems and uproots their olive trees and poisons their goats and pours raw sewage on their land.  

I talked to my (non-Jewish) wife about it over dinner and she said I was being too hard on the studies. Of course religious groups will do such things when they see their numbers falling. "It would be shocking if they didn't respond that way." I guess she's right. Then she said: "Why don't the 'birthright' people let anyone go on the trip for free? Maybe that would work better." I said, "But see, you are the kind of person who would have leapt at the chance; and they don't want gentiles riding the buses with Jewish kids for two weeks, then marrying them."

My wife, who majored in anthropology, said that tribal affiliation is a comfort in life. Recently a childhood friend of hers from Chestnut Hill (a WASP section of Philly) moved to our area, and my wife hangs out with her. "It's so easy," she says. Their manners are so similar. "It's easier than hanging with you," she said. Our manners are different. Lately, for instance, my wife found herself, in a conversation with her mother, asking her persistent questions to get at specific points her mother was raising. "Who is doing that? What did they say?" she asked; and her mother was a little taken aback, and my wife thinks that this is my Jewish manner that has rubbed off on her. In the culture she grew up in--of "vodka and needlepoint," she puts it-- if you are having a conversation and miss something, or someone is vague, you just let it pass and try and figure it out, or not, as the conversation goes on.

My wife doesn't regret marrying me; what I find so interesting is the complexity of these relations. Affluent Americans have great freedom. We can visit Africa, visit Europe, even visit our roots, and then go back to associating as equals with other multicultural half-rooted empowered people. That's how things have worked out in the blue states. A remarkable thing about Obama's progress is that fluidity. His first book (1995) was all about his blackness. The book honored the black side of his family more than the white side; in one scene he all but mocked a stepbrother he met in Kenya, also half-white, who didn't feel very black and was trying to make it in a white world. Obama then worked alongside Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a community organizer of poor blacks. And he married a black woman who in college in 1985 had written angrily against "assimilation," saying it was a chimera that actually kept her at the "periphery" of society.

Well, society changed. Michelle Obama is not at the periphery. Obama's speeches now mention his white ancestors more than his father. And when the Obamas are in the White House, they will be both black and not black, and their White House won't discriminate on that basis.

I am trying to say that fluid identity is a bewitching byproduct of American meritocracy, affluence, and multiculturalism. Yes, it is assimilation, but a new kind. The Bronfmans and Waxmans are, maybe understandably, trying to get the toothpaste back in the tube. The way to reinvigorate American Jewish identity is for American Jews to acknowledge the Nakba and stop thinking of themselves as the foreign ministry of a state that practices apartheid with 3 million people under its power.

And let gentiles take the "birthright" trip too. Who knows what would happen.

(Thanks to Richard Silverstein, who has a link to the full Waxman paper here. And note that Norman Finkelstein has observed the same trend as the sociologists, but identified its progressive basis:  "I think you see the erosion in particular among college students because they study and they're better informed, and they see that all of this stuff Israel is doing has now become morally indefensible. And so there's some who are just embarrassed, and they have become, as it were, indifferent; and then there are those who have become completely hostile, in an active way.")

How Can Bush Support a Palestinian State If His Crony Wants 'All Arabs to Disappear'?

Israeli writer Nahum Barnea penned a sharp attack on choleric Sheldon Adelson, third richest man in America, describing him as a bully and heavyweight who is messing disastrously in Israeli politics. (The piece was picked up from Yediot Aharanot by Mojo.) Two data points:

"[Adelson] would like all the Arabs to disappear," another activist for a Jewish organization told me. "It seems that he thinks that the Arabs are gambling chips."

This is shocking. Bush says he is for a Palestinian state. Yet Adelson was Bush's guest of honor, the top name on his list for his speech the other day. OK, it was alphabetical. Still, what does this mean politically? Adelson is regularly covered in the U.S. press because of his backing of the pro-Iraq-war Freedom's Watch, but his true agenda, supporting birthright and Netanyahu and colonies and destroying the possibility of a Palestinian state, is never visited here. Only by Israelis. Why aren't American journalists interviewing Adelson about his aims for the West Bank--as well as everyone else in Bush's prayer circle?

Then this: Adelson got angry with another American Jewish activist, met him in Vegas.

The meeting at Adelson's office, in the Venetian hotel-casino, was a stormy one. Adelson took out a written list of accusations, many of them childish. You hosted (PA prime minister) Salam Fayyad, he said. He is a terrorist with blood on his hands. He is one of the founders of Fatah. Salam Fayyad was never involved in terrorism, his interlocutor said. He is not a member of Fatah. Where did you get these accusations from?

From Steve Emerson, said the billionaire. Emerson is an American Jew who often analyzes terror matters.

It has always seemed to me that the only real motivation of Steven Emerson, the "terror analyst" who regularly appears on cable television, is to rationalize everything Israel does by vilifying Arabs. Finally a little evidence.

Osama: Palestinian Cause Was 'Main Factor'

Hardworking James Morris directs my attention to the latest Osama statement in which OBL describes the centrality of the Palestinian cause to the 9/11 attack:

Bin Laden began his message by telling listeners that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has always been the primary cause for friction between the West and the Muslim world - a struggle which he said was getting more difficult due to European policies biased in Israel's favor.
"The Palestinian cause has been the main factor that, since my early childhood, fueled my desire, and that of the 19 freemen (Sept. 11 bombers), to stand by the oppressed, and punish the oppressive Jews and their allies," the al Qaeda chief said.
"We shall continue the fight, Allah willing, against the Israelis and their allies, in order to pursue justice for the oppressed, and we shall not give up one inch of Palestine, as long as there is still a single true Muslim alive."

Maybe some of this is retrospective on OBL's part, he is trying to get in on the Nakba wave, but again it must be asked Why our press cannot deal with this simple confession? Why must the Why they hate us? question always be answered with psychological hooey: that those boys had no opportunity in Arab dictatorships and had seminal backup from being on the losing end of the polygamy hierarchy so they took it out on western freedom. Max Rodenbeck in NYRB was honest about the Palestinian issue, reading OBL's works. Francis Fukuyama was halfway direct. But the 9/11 Commission was dishonest about it, and I have the impression that Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower was deceptive, or self-deceptive, about this too, and even Peter Bergen in his biography of the loony tower.

The answer to Why the press can't say why they hate us goes to ideology. If the Palestinian grievance is acknowledged or valorized, rather than dismissed out of hand, well that opens the door on the Nakba, on the dispossession, on the many landgrabs of the Jewish state and inevitably casts doubt on the inherent goodness of Zionism and the justice of the occupation, theirs and ours. It opens the door on deeply disruptive ideas, the construction of Jewish identity and of the U.S. establishment. So there goes the neighborhood. Better to torch Iraq. Will Obama reckon with Osama? Kill him, then deal with his ideas. We did that with Timothy McVeigh.

Iraq Is Just a Rainy Day at the Beach in American History, Shrugs Robert Kagan

Yesterday I saw the neoconservative Robert Kagan on Charlie Rose. It was an astonishing performance, as it suggested the psychic torment that those who pushed the Iraq war are evidently now undergoing and suppressing at the same time.

Kagan's message re Iraq was, Look Charlie, it's nothing new for the U.S. to get a bad image in the eyes of the world. Guess what, these things are inevitable when you are powerful. Yes Abu Ghraib and the mishandling of the occupation have made us look bad, but we've been there before.

His specific claims: from 1968 to 1974, the U.S. was also hated worldwide, from Vietnam to Kent State to Watergate. We were "far from perfect" then also. The latest cycle of hatred of the U.S. actually began in '98 and '99, when Samuel Huntington wrote that we have become the "lonely superpower" and a French minister called us a "hyperpower." I.e., Iraq came along much later and was merely another pretext for disliking the big guy on the block. And let us be clear: by Iraq War, Kagan seems to mean only Abu Ghraib and the "mishandling" of the occupation. The invasion itself was a brilliant idea. Bush and Rumsfeld screwed it up. (Personal message to Donald Rumsfeld: I hear you have chosen to give away all the money for your book. You have my great admiration for that decision. I hope you tell us all about the geniuses you listened to in the runup to the war).

I found Kagan's performance astonishing because he was doing his offhanded utmost to market arrogance as a humane trait (hundreds of thousands dead through the abuse of power), and of course to avoid getting tagged for the error he made. But it is Out damn spot time. It seems apparent that like McNamara and Bundy and the other Vietnam thinkers, Iraq is now and forever The only thing the neocons have ever done; and they will be twisting and turning over that mistake for the rest of their lives. Though it is a marvel they still get a platform to do so. Kagan's intellectual airshow is the exact opposite of the performance by the brave young men who served in Iraq and went to Congress to tell about the nightmares they have experienced. 

I believe I heard Kagan call himself a "progressive" too, trying to evade the neocon label. Charlie Rose is a smart guy, he should have confronted Kagan over Iraq. As it is, the commenters on Charlie Rose are raising  the usual questions about Kagan's Israel-views.

Arendt and Kissinger Both Feared that Israeli Intransigence Would Generate Antisemitic Violence

From time to time commenters on this blog say that American Jews are risking anti-semitic retaliation because of their unwavering and selfish support for Israel. I don't like this line of argument. It seems vicious, or a veiled threat. Yes, the Jewish leadership has been selfish in its unending contempt for Palestinian human rights; but I see hope that the next generation of Jews will lead my tribe out of the parched desert of parochialism.

That said, it appears that Henry Kissinger and Hannah Arendt, both German-born Jewish Holocaust survivors, expressed the attitude I find lamentable. Let's go to the videotape.

A historic volume of Arendt's Jewish writings was published last year. She was an unbelievable writer. In 1952, mourning her dear friend Judah Magnes, the founder of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who often opposed political Zionism, she wrote that his stature had only grown in the four years since he died:

Magnes was the conscience of the Jewish people and much of that conscience has died with him--at least for our time. Magnes's protest rose from the Zionist ranks and its validity lay in this origin. He raised his voice primarily on moral grounds, and his authority was that he was a citizen of Jerusalem, that their fate was his fate, and that therefore nothing he said could ever be blamed on ulterior motives. He was a very practical and a very realistic man; it may be that he, like the rest of us, was also inspired by fear for coming generations of Jews, who may have to suffer for the wrongs committed in our time. But this was not his primary motive. He passionately wanted to do the right thing and had a healthy distrust of the wisdom of our Realpolitiker; and if fear did not really touch him, he was very sensitive to shame. Being a Jew and being a Zionist, he was simply ashamed of what Jews and Zionists were doing....

It has happened that the last years of his life coincided with a great change in the Jewish national character [foundation of state of Israel and "flight," Arendt believed, of the Arabs]. A people that for two thousand years had made justice the cornerstone of its spiritual and communal existence has become emphatically hostile to all arguments of such a nature, as though these were necessarily the arguments of failure. We all know that this change has come about since Auschwitz, but that is little consolation. [italic emphasis is Arendt's; bold is mine]

Beautiful. Safe travels, Hannah.

Now the Realpolitiker himself: Kissinger. First, a little explanation. In his history of the peace process, The Much Too Promised Land, Aaron David Miller writes of Kissinger's exasperation with the Israelis in 1975, when the U.S. was trying to get Israel to disengage from the Sinai. This was a tortuous process, in good measure because of the Israel lobby in the U.S. Kissinger, who was then sec'y of state, felt doublecrossed by Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and attributed "Rabin's refusal to make concessions... to domestic politics, which, he observed scornfully, was really all there was to Israel's foreign policy." Kissinger meant that Rabin was able to call on Jewish allies here in order to nullify Ford Administration policy. Indeed, at that time, when President Ford, fed up with Israeli intransigence, said that the U.S. was reassessing its Middle East policy (Miller reports), the "reassessment provoked a furious response": a letter signed by 76 senators, which Miller says he believes AIPAC had drafted--warning Ford that he must be responsive to Israeli needs. A letter delivered, a Maryland senator wrote, "although no hearings had been held, no debate conducted, nor had the administration been invited to present its views"!

Kissinger worried that Israel's hardline hijinks would cause the U.S. to lose power to the Soviet Union at an upcoming Geneva conference and endanger Anwar Sadat in Egypt. These were not trivial risks. He warned the Israeli negotiating team:

"'That's my nightmare--what I now see marching toward you. Compared to that, 10 kilometers in the Sinai is trivial.' Harold Saunders [then deputy assistant secretary of state] recalls that after Kissinger unloaded on the Israelis, the secretary of state confided that Israeli shortsightedness concerned him seriously: 'Well, you know when they act like this I worry about the future of my son as a Jew in America.'"

Arendt fled a German internment camp in 1940. Kissinger lost 13 members of his family in the Holocaust.

Israel Warns UN and Palestinians to Cleanse Their 'Lexicons' of a Word. Guess Which One

Haaretz reports that the UN Sec'y-General used the word "Nakba" yesterday, angering Israel.

The [UN's official] report said the UN chief telephoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to express his solidarity with the Palestinians on the day they mark the "nakba," the Arabic word meaning "catastrophe" that is used in reference to the founding of the state of Israel.
 
Danny Carmon, Israel's deputy ambassador to the UN, told Israel Radio that the term "'nakba' is a tool of Arab propaganda used to undermine the legitimacy of the establishment of the State of Israel, and it must not be part of the lexicon of the UN."

Apparently it's the first time the UN has used the word, Nakba. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni made the same point re Nakba in a speech yesterday, per Ynet:

"with the establishment of a Palestinian state, we wish to see the end of the conflict. The Palestinians will be able to celebrate their independence if on that same day they also strike the word 'Nakba' from their lexicon."

Now close your eyes and for just one second imagine how I'd feel if you told me not to use the word "pogrom" to describe what happened to my ancestors in Russia.

 

 

Peretz and Goldberg Get Obama to Renew the Balfour Declaration

I'm still mulling Marty Peretz's longish phone conversation with Obama about Israel, also Jeffrey Goldberg's longish interview with the candidate. One of the weird things about both conversations is the sense that Goldberg and Peretz are extracting a promise from Obama to the Jewish community. Indeed, Goldberg establishes himself as a Jew who is a guardian of Jewish "worry". In a sense, neither is that interested in what Obama really thinks--both men behave less like journalists than petitioners, trying to get Obama on the record expressing his support of the Jewish state as an answer to the Jewish problem. "I’m curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?" Goldberg asks. Then: "Do you think that justice is still on Israel’s side?"

The whole thing feels like a reprisal of the Balfour Declaration, 91 years on, with Peretz and Goldberg reenacting the roles of Chaim Weizmann and Lord Rothschild, and Obama playing the role of the British ruler. Here's why the analogy fits, and why it is actually helpful in understanding Israel/Palestine:

Jeffrey Goldberg Says American Politicians Can Say 'Whatever They Want About Israel'

Marty Peretz and Jeffrey Goldberg are powerful journalists; Obama lately talked to both of them about Israel. Peretz had a "longish" conversation, Goldberg did an interview. Why did Obama go to them? He obviously believes that they have the keys to the Jewish leadership, or a large segment thereof. Maybe they do. Joe Lieberman is inaccessible to Obama, so are Malcolm Hoenlein and Chuck Schumer, Anthony Weiner and Anne Lewis. Go where you can get it, as my guru likes to say.

I find the Goldberg conversation with Obama weird. There's a general atmosphere of Goldberg, a former Israeli soldier, vetting Obama in his capacity as a representative of Jews who are outsiders in American society and who "feel Jewish worry." No other people's interests or worries are invoked in this interview. Not the American interest, not a word about the life and suffering of the Palestinians (though yes a question about settlements). This is surely a sincere reflection of Goldberg's parochial concerns, but it makes you wonder why he gets to write for the New Yorker and the Atlantic about Middle East matters. Two years ago at Yivo, J.J. Goldberg, the Forward editor, said that Jeffrey Goldberg had distorted an aspect of  Palestinian politics in a piece to serve a rightwing agenda. (Bill Kristol stood up for Jeffrey Goldberg, and no wonder; these guys as much as anyone produced "the mindset" that gave us Iraq, which Obama is sworn to change.) I wish the Goldberg boys would have this out; it's the Iraq soul-searching the Jewish community needs.

Goldberg says here that Jimmy Carter said Israel was turning into an "apartheid" state. No, Carter only made this claim with respect to the West Bank. Goldberg says at the top that Obama is fighting to win over Jewish voters in Florida. Is that really why Obama is making obeisance to Jews? It's much broader than that. It's about money and media and cultural power; "Jewish voters in Florida" is now the media's euphemism for this larger sociological reality, and it's a form of disinformation.

Then there's Goldberg's requirement that politicians respond to Jews in their "kishkes," or guts:

if Jews know that you love them, then you can say whatever you want about Israel, but if we don’t know you –- Jim Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski –- then everything is suspect. There seems to be in some quarters, in Florida and other places, a sense that you don’t feel Jewish worry the way a senator from New York would feel it.

This sounds like a tribal shibboleth. Goldberg is basically saying, So long as you say you love Israel,  you can say whatever you want about Israel. Can he point to one politician or official who says whatever he wants about Israel? I don't know what world he's living in. Jimmy Carter says whatever he wants and he's vilified by among others Goldberg. Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel ventured recently that the Israel lobby "intimidates a lot of people" on Capitol Hill. Will that comment disqualify Hagel from being Obama's VP?

A Nakba Memorial, of Sorts

The Etzel Museum, commemorating the Irgun, is itself housed in a former Palestinian home in Jaffa.

And check this out: several demonstrations by No Time to Celebrate Jews, including 10 openly-identified "anti-Zionist" Jews outside a "birthright" event in New York. The great Hannah Mermelstein was there...

Bush Suggests Obama's an Appeaser at Knesset--the Israel Lobby Finally Enters Our Political Discourse

Today's a great day. George Bush's crazily craven speech at the Knesset, a naked obeisance to the Israel lobby, has caused Chris Matthews to charge that Bush and Hillary, with her "obliterate Iran" talk, are competing for a "domestic political" constituency. Why is Israel the "Hyde Park" of American politics? Why is this issue "the podium of American politics?" he asked.

Good questions. He cannot ask them seriouslywithout having John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt, who advanced this subject more bravely than anyone else, on his show. If not now, a year from now.

Oh and let's not forget Obama. He had a "longish" conversation with Marty Peretz on the telephone re Israel. And also provided slavish answers re Israel to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic. It's a party, come on down!

Wait-- not you, you're not invited.

P.S. Just now on NBC Nightly News, John Yang said the Bush speech was aimed at a "key" American "voting bloc."

Jaffa Is Still Contested Space (Even in Jewish Hearts and Minds)

Against Commentary Magazine, a reader has offered me this Jaffa blogger. Her name's Yudit, an artist. I want to believe she's Jewish. Oh my god, there are some beautiful Jews in the world! She says Jaffa, once  "bride of the sea" to the Arab population, is now a slummy suburb of Tel Aviv. She resists continuing efforts to push Arabs out, and describes a demonstration the other night at the Etzel Museum, a museum of the Irgun, right in historic Jaffa: 

At the etzel museum a small audience listens to a sound & light heroism performance,
We are kept at "a safe" distance, but using old pots and sticks as well as small flutes we raise a lot of noise. Banners tell the story of the naqbe in Jaffa, of the acts of terror carried out by Etzel against civilians. Sixty years ago, the naqbe.

Reuven Abergil tells the story of how that happened, while the Brits and the Hagana conveniently looked in the other direction. They controlled the road blocks on the way to Jaffa and the Etzel people dressed to look like local Arabs, passed through with their weapons and explosives. Bombs hidden inside a watermelon cart and a truck exploded in Jaffa's market. Children and women were murdered. The aim was to create terror and make the population want to flee away.

Neocons Don't Have Time for Golf. Or Didn't. Maybe Now They Do?

Scott McConnell comments on Bush's promise of giving-up golf while the war's on:

There’s also a more complicated sociological point to be made here: that the WASP establishment which ran the country’s foreign policy rather decently in the years after World War II has been nudged from the central halls of power, and one is now more likely to find its scions working on their handicaps or plotting elaborate middle age man getaways to this historic courses of Scotland than clawing their way up the ranks of the foreign affairs intelligentsia.

I agree, and wonder why there isn't any journalism on the subject of the new establishment. The answer, my friend, is: the fear of another Holocaust if we talk about Jewish power. So journalists betray their mission of informing the public on the grounds that the public is not to be trusted, and then tell themselves that the public is too stupid to notice this anyway. But people aren't too stupid. They know that significant changes have taken place in the sociocultural makeup of the establishment, especially the foreign-affairs branch; but they get little information about it, and the result is that commenters on my blog can claim that Jews run America, when obviously it's not that simple...

'Commentary' Ignores Palestinians' Eyewitness Testimony in Denying that Zionists Drove Arabs From Jaffa in '48

Last week I blogged about Commentary's piece denying the Nakba, which was underwritten by the chairman of the New-York Historical Society-- a landmark of Nakba denial, published in what was once a glory of Jewish intellectual tradition: Commentary, the magazine I grew up with, stacks of it, my parents didn't throw it away. The article demonstrates how fealty to Israel is eroding Jewish intelligence, as it has forced some of the smartest people on the planet to devote themselves to alchemy, coming up with elaborate proofs that black is white.

One paragraph that particularly disturbed me said that "huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven [Commentary's emphasis] from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces.. In Jaffa, Palestine's largest Arab city, the [Arab] municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea..." In making this assertion, author Efraim Karsh denied the New Standard View, that the Zionists forced the Palestinians from Jaffa. He offered no evidence.

Having just attended a speech on the Nakba by Lila Abu-Lughod, an eminent anthropologist at Columbia University, in which she stated that her father had been "driven" out of Jaffa by Zionists, I posted about the Commentary piece, and a couple days later Commentary published an annotated version online, including the following footnote to support Karsh's claim re Jaffa:

One Cheer for Olbermann's Latest Bush/Iraq Tirade

Tonight I watched one of Keith Olbermann's trademark rants against George Bush. It went on for 15 minutes of vituperative outrage, generally surrounding Bush's politico interview, and his decision to give up golf while the Iraq War was going on...

The first thing you have to say is that it's completely impressive that Olbermann gets to hold forth with such fury, it's a proof that we still have a democracy, even on commercial TV. Good for him. He's surely ignored a lot of responsible people telling him to Cool it. The second thing is that Olbermann's analysis is a little cheap. He blames Bush for the Iraq War. Good, so do I. He says that Bush is a nincompoomp. Agreed. There are suggestions that Bush is doing it for business interests. There is anger that Bush overruled the "realists." If you're going to talk about realists, you have to talk about neocons, and you have to talk about ideas. This war was built on bad ideas. Yes George Bush showed the worst judgment in American history, but he is a nincompoop, he doesn't have time to read books. Guys who read books came up with this war and he was swayed by their arguments post-9/11. Of course it's his fault, but it's also the fault of the guys who read and wrote books.  Blame the intellectual agents of this horror, or you are going to have more like it.

Olbermann also gives a pass to the Congress, saying it was misled by mendacious Bush-fed intelligence. But Congress voted for this war; the Congress showed a disastrous lack of judgment when handed obviously-shaky intelligence. Barack Obama was a state senator then, in Chicago, and he knew it was a bad war, Lincoln Chafee knew it when he did the minimum and went to see the CIA guys. The weird thing about Olbermann's rant is that it's so focused on George Bush, and so trembling with operatic outrage, that it creates an odd sympathy for its nincompoop target. I'm glad MSNBC is airing this stuff. I just wish Olbermann was smarter.

Citing Israel and Obama, Chicago's Daley Quashes Anti-Iran-War Resolution

In '68, Mayor Daley's police force brutally broke up the antiwar demonstration in Chicago so as to preserve the dignity of the Democratic convention...

Forty years on, and Daley's son, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, has quashed a City Council resolution opposing war with Iran saying that it hurts  native son Obama. "Passing a resolution like that puts a... burden upon his candidacy and injects something that should not be injected” into the presidential campaign, Daley said. What's being injected? Daley brings up Israel. "Let's be realistic. The U.S. did [create Israel]," he says. I.e., we're joined at the hip. The resolution came after a hearing featuring realist John Mearsheimer and Scott Ritter. The Sun-Times account of course fails to point out the importance of Jewish votes in FL, let alone Jewish money to Obama...

Prophet Without Honor: 'Sydney Morning Herald' Prints American's Appeal for 1-State Solution

The Sydney Morning Herald has an op-ed by Chicago's Ali Abunimah saying that the one-state solution is gaining adherents worldwide. The two-state solution "has all but disappeared as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are caged into walled reservations by growing Israeli settlements and settler-only roads - a situation that resembles the bantustans of apartheid South Africa," Abunimah says, and points out that the number of Palestinians under Israeli rule is about to exceed the number of Jews, at 5 million.

The Herald is one of Australia's two leading papers, sort of the NYT of Aussie. A pity that Abunimah can express these views down under but not here. When does the author get invited on to op-eds here? Our journalism is broken, even as Abunimah is right, the one-state option gains adherents.

If Israel Is a Democracy, Why Does a Liberal Jewish Leader Forswear a Coalition With Arabs?

It's too bad that Huffington Post runs bellicose articles like this one by Amitai Etzioni, in which he rationalizes the Israeli occupation and dismisses the idea of separation between church and state as high-falutin' western values. I thought Huffpo was more enlightened than this.

I just heard Ehud Olmert speaking about democracy on television, introducing George Bush. I was in the barber shop, and had brought Righteous Victims, Benny Morris's book, with me to read while I was waiting. I came on the following episode, in Chapter 14:

Following elections in 1999, Ehud Barak, the Labor leader, wanted to create a new coalition to replace Netanyahu. Barak had 50 votes from Labor and four other centrist and left-wing factions, short of a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. "Another 10 votes, held by three Arab parties, could be expected to go along with Barak on the peace process, but the new prime minister was loath to induct them into his coalition and make it dependent on Arab consent," Morris writes. So Barak ended up making a coalition with the religious right, Shas. I.e., a center-left guy built his coalition with religious right Jews so as to escape the Arab grasp.

This is interesting for a few reasons. Barak failed at Camp David the following year to make a peace with Arafat. I generally blame Israeli intransigence (insistence on an undivided Jerusalem, on a security force on the Jordan river, and unjust appropriation of West Bank colonies) but Arafat surely also deserves some blame. Whatever-- If Barak had had Arabs in his coalition, would he have behaved differently? Would Arafat and the Arab world Arafat had to represent, visavis the holy sites in Jerusalem, have behaved differently?

Also, if Israel is a true democracy, why is there an objection to giving power to Arabs in a coalition dependent on them? After all, that is the character of a representative democracy: one man, one vote, and some day, some way, your vote may be the determinative one. Arabs were denied that opportunity by the Israeli left, in favor of Jewish parties. The same Jewish parties that are now forcing Olmert to build more illegal colonies. Imagine for a moment an American group being left out in the cold politically on a racial basis--it's unimaginable, especially in post-Obamaland. This just shows: Israeli-Arabs are second-class citizens.

Finally, I would note that Benny Morris is garlanded by the pro-Israel mainstream American press as a balanced sage. He is the darling of the New Republic, the New Yorker has lately written that he flatters no one's prejudices, least of all his own. Can you imagine an American historian, or an Arab one, passing along this disturbing information in such a matter-of-fact manner, without comment?

Chicago City Council, Leading the Nation Re Iran

Sorry, I meant to post this before the event! The Chicago City Council had an all-star panel today testifying on the dangers of going to war with Iran. John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Stephen Kinzer formerly of the NYT, someone from the Institute for Policy Studies. Good for Chicago. Will they post a video?

I assume this is like other road shows. It'll work out the glitches in the Midwest then come to the Council on Foreign Relations in a few weeks. I can't wait.

Bush's Jewish Guest List to Israel Bash Feels a Little Throw-Backy

Here's Bush's guest list at the 60th birthday party in Israel. I'm still learning my way around the politics of the Israel question, but here are my scores in the free-skating competition:

Sheldon Adelson, the biggest Republican donor, a Netanyahu guy, Iran/Iraq guy, very scary, now quizzed in the Olmert investigation. Kenneth Bialkin--his firm, Skadden, Arps hosted Ambassador Gillerman when the ambassador said Jimmy Carter had blood on his hands, an establishment CFR and ADL guy, I believe, and don't you ever dare impose a solution, while the settlements continue. Matthew Brooks of Freedom's Watch, neocon. Tony Gelbart of Nefesh b'nefesh and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Jewish nationalist, make sure the kids don't marry non-Jews. Rabbi Marvin Hier. Scary. Believes Jews to be "endangered," as Elie Wiesel does, who's here too. Michael Oren, military intellectual (by which I mean, military justice is to justice as military music is to music). Mort Zuckerman, Conference of Presidents, along with Malcolm Hoenlein. Abe Foxman, say no more. Leslie Wexner of the Limited, giving fellowships to build Israel's leaders and Jewish leaders here, too. Ethnocentric. Dan Senor, a neocon, allied with the Republican Jewish Coalition crowd, but also a little unfriendly to the Iraq bitter-enders. Leonard Sands and Matthew Brooks, more RJC people. Sands has moolah. Bill Safire, former Times columnist.

There are a lot of names, and maybe I'm reading this wrong, tell me who I'm missing, but it seems like the Iraq bitter-ender Zionists aren't here. No Richard Perle or Dore Gold. What we have are mostly donor base and ethnocentric Jews like Gelbart, along with the U.S. and Israel are joined at the hip Jews, the Michael Oren types. Neocons by another name. I wish there'd been a few progressives. Why not a surprise or two, a Dem, an Ambassador Kurtzer. A Nakba Jew, just to shake things up. Guess I gotta wait for President Obama. Have fun, guys.

Obama's Obeisance to the Lobby Concerns Me Not

A friend is disturbed by Marty Peretz's renewed endorsement of Obama--"What Obama Said to Me About Israel", and by Obama's obeisance to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, who my friend points out served in the Israeli army in the 80s at a prison where Palestinians were tortured. How can you have such faith in Obama to change U.S. policy? Well I have faith.

First off, it's interesting that this shidduch, to use the Yiddish phrase for marriage or a deal, is happening right now. Obama has clearly won, and now he is getting a laying on of hands by a prince of the Israel lobby, actually two princes, who pronounce that he's kosher. My crowd has always said that the lobby is important, this just shows it. Expecting Obama to cut the lobby out is naive. It is not for nothing that he sold out Ali Abunimah in Chicago some years back; I wish he didn't but he did, and it was a necessary step to his advancing to the national stage.

I don't mean to suggest that Obama is insincere either. The great demand of Walt and Mearsheimer, and of others who support Palestinian right of self-determination, is that We be included at the table of foreign policy. We're not asking that Marty Peretz be thrown out, or Goldberg, or Dennis Ross even, no; we're saying that other Americans be included, from Ali Abunimah to Zbig Brzezinski to Rob Malley to MJ Rosenberg to Leon Hadar. Of course we seek a great weakening of the Israel lobby, but what I have always said is that a robust debate of what the American interest is visavis Israel is all that we need. When that takes place, Americans will exercise real fairness in our dealings, and the situation will change. And I do think this is happening: that an Obama administration will include Chuck Hagel and many realists who believe that Israel is damaging our position in the world, and that its allies are promoting a dangerous idea about Islamofascism... Obama is a real smart guy. I am sure he has read Walt and Mearsheimer's paper on line.

It doesn't even bother me so much that Peretz is claiming Obama. Peretz is a Washington type, he loves power, he likes to be at the table. He has good political values in some areas, he held Al Gore's hat for him for a long time. The greatness I see in Obama is a cold ability to weigh the arguments of petitioners without being beholden. He doesn't anger, he doesn't fall in love. His language is considered. He has the unique ability to triangulate the Palestinian position and Marty Peretz's and maybe bring about an understanding, the ability not to frighten Holocaust-era Jews. I have that faith.

The most important lesson of Aaron David Miller's book is that the greatest achievement by any president in the Middle East came through the efforts of a guy who really liked Arabs 30 years ago. Jimmy Carter: Camp David. Carter was a rich, rural man who adored Anwar Sadat and even Hafez al-Asad. And he threw himself at the problem, in defiance of the domestic considerations his aides kept warning him about, and was willing to toss his presidency aside to achieve something here. After all, Sadat gave his life for what Carter was merely sacrificing position or reputation to achieve.

The other Democratic paradigm is Bill Clinton, who didn't want to spend any political capital on the problem--no, he'd been impeached and wanted to rise again with his wife's presidency. Clinton's Camp David team was almost all Jewish, its chief negotiator acting as "Israel's lawyer" (per Miller); and it achieved nothing, and the second intifadah began. Ambassador Kurtzer has now written that the next president should have a diverse team, including Arabists.

I recite this history only to say that Obama is more in the Carter camp than the Clinton one. I've read his wife's thesis at Princeton and Obama's first book. These people entered public service because they wanted to change things. No I can't imagine that he will torch prospects of a second term over the issue, but I think he truly understands, as Carter did, that this is the great hidden secret of American politics, and the great challenge to a true statesman is to lead America out of this swamp. Jews are powerful; he needs Jews to get there.

Oren Shows, It's Not that Zionism Is Racist, It's that It's Selfish

This morning Michael Oren was on NPR's "Morning Edition," speaking of Israel's achievement, and Renee Montagne asked him what he hoped for in the next 60 years. Oren said, he wants an Israel at peace with its neighbors and at peace with itself. By peace with itself, he said he meant that it contained considerable diversity and that he hopes that it can reconcile that diversity with its own identity as a Jewish and democratic and Middle Eastern state. (That's pretty close; I'm paraphrasing because I don't want to have to listen to him a second time.) Montagne asked whether that meant a Jewish state. Oren said, Well I would "prefer" a Jewish state, as would most Jewish Israelis.

Two things leap out at me from the interview. First, Oren, who works at the Shalem Center in Israel, said he preferred a Jewish state, i.e., he was not absolute on this score. This seems to me a significant reflection of where things are going today. Even this Zionist, who moved from the U.S. to Israel, who has fought for Israel, as has his son, who has helped confuse the borders between Israel and the U.S. with all his work, and who has distorted U.S. history with a superficial book claiming that the U.S. has been religious and pro-Israel from the start, thereby claiming that these two countries are joined at the hip--even Oren is reduced to saying, I prefer. This is the Obama Effect. The world is moving past tribal distinctions, the western world is.

The other thing that leaped out was, Not a word about Palestinian self-determination in all his hoping. Not a word about a Palestinian state, not a word about the dignity of the Arabs under occupation, not a word about the futures of the people living in Gaza. No, Israel has not had peace for "a nano-second" since its founding, Oren said; and so presumably anything that befalls these people is their own fault. His indifference to Palestinian statehood was so stark in these comments it suggested that he still hopes for a Greater Israel. 

The other day a pro-Israel paper (Canada's National Post) likened Israel/Palestine to India/Pakistan in historical terms--partition and bloodletting--and then stated that, Ha!, there was far more bloodshed and ethnic cleansing in India/Pakistan than during the Nakba.  Maybe this is true; I should study that question. But as I have said before here, for 60 years Pakistanis have had a state, and for 60 years since the U.N. called for statehood, the Palestinians have had none. They've been disqualified for countless reasons, even as Israel gobbles land. What do I hope for? I hope that a stateless people who have no meaningful political representation be represented democratically, in a state that respects minority rights. Without that, there will be no peace.

'Loathing Is Acceptable,' My Wife Said

I heard my wife on the phone saying, "Loathing is acceptable."

When she hung up, I got the story out of her. Turns out she was talking to a friend who's been married for 2 years. The friend was complaining about her husband, all this stuff she couldn't stand about him. "I hate him. Am I allowed to hate him?" That's when my wife said "Loathing is acceptable." You go through a lot of different moods with a spouse and you shouldn't try and push them down. If it gets past loathing to You want to kill him, or do a Lorena Bobbitt, that's when you should leave. So spake the wife. I'm going to keep my eyes open.

Was Dennis Ross Sincere When He Scanted Power of Israel Lobby?

This week George Bush is to speak at the "President's Conference" in Israel, which is titled "Facing Tomorrow" and being led by a thinktank called the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. One of JPPPI's chief concerns is the "erosion" of Jewish demography worldwide due to intermarriage and other factors. I.e., fewer Jews. This must be looked at "urgent"ly, JPPPI says, because of "the implications of  demography for Israel's standing in a prolonged situation of military and political conflict." My emphasis. This means, when there are not many Jews in America, the Israel lobby loses strength, and who will Israel turn to?  And what is meant by times of "political conflict"? All the time.

Dennis Ross is the chair of JPPPI. A year or so back I heard him argue, at Cooper Union in New York, [and here, on NPR] that Walt and Mearsheimer's thesis was bunk, and that maybe the Israel lobby affected Congress, but surely not White House policy. I never found Ross's argument to be believable. His thinktank's "urgent" concern suggests he doesn't believe it either. 

More Mainstream Voices Declare, Israel Can't Survive as Jewish State

I'm easily amazed. Maclean's Magazine has published a huge piece headlined "Why Israel Can't Survive" as a Jewish state if it wants to be democratic. (Chris Varley , who pointed the piece out to me, notes, that Maclean's is Time-magazine like, and "home to cranks like Barbara Amiel and Mark Steyn, and edited by Ken Whyte [very mainstream, formerly of the National Post], so publishes the usual agit-prop.") Christopher Hitchens in Slate is saying the same thing: Israel can't survive as a Jewish state. And I notice that Maclean's has a respectful interview with John Mearsheimer here too.

I'm sure the Israel lobby is watching this as closely as I am. The conventional wisdom is solidifying. What was once radical when Tony Judt proposed it five years ago is now a real option. Some day soon the Times and Washington Post will fall into line, and from there the networks, and then, finally, the politicians will question apartheid policies in the West Bank. Mearsheimer will then be embraced, because he is for a 2-state solution.

Why is this happening? You can blame Iraq, you can blame the bankruptcy of the peace process. But I say it's the zeitgeist. The times are changing; the left and its answers are coming in. And the Obama effect is going to change the air we breathe. I remember when a questioner at NYU challenged Judt, How can you oppose a Jewish state when we see the primacy of tribe at every hand.... Well, that feels like a long time ago; and we will soon have a postracial president.

Progress, Progress. MSM Flatly Refers to 'Cycle of Violence'

Dude, rub your eyes, it really is happening: the progressive voice re Israel/Palestine is breaking into the MSM. The always great Christian Science Monitor (as a commenter pointed out) gives Steve Walt the last word in a piece debating how much money we give to Israel:

Professor Walt maintains he's pro-Israel. The US refusal to put pressure on Israel to settle with the Palestinians on a two-state solution, he argues, is not helpful.

"Giving any country unconditional backing encourages irresponsible behavior," he says. It could lead to an apartheid state, or as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it, Israel facing "a South African-style struggle."       

And yesterday's Hartford Courant offered a long profile of a Jewish activist whose dreams of a shared Jerusalem have stirred opposition from other American Jews. The piece openly pits activist Yehezkel Landau against Hartford's Jewish establishment. Says one:

"Ultimately, I want the same thing Yehezkel wants — a Jewish state in Israel, an Arab state in Palestine and a shared capital in Jerusalem," Fuchs says. "But where we may not see eye to eye is judging just how sincere these peace offers are from Arab leaders. You have a government now in Gaza whose avowed goal is to destroy Israel militarily. There has to be a more concrete acknowledgment on their part of the right of Israel to exist."

Landau is an evolved guy, as gentle as Richard Witty, and his response is clearly the Courant's point of view:

"Because I have befriended so many Palestinians over the years. I can distinguish between the extremists and the pragmatists in the Arab community," Landau says. "I know that Palestinians suffer terrible consequences from the extremists because I see them as humans just like me. But too many Israelis live in isolation from their Arab neighbors and they can only see them as enemies." [provocative emphasis all mine]

...A regrettable result of the dispiriting cycle of violence in Israel has been a hardening of attitudes among many of America's strongest supporters of Israel, he says.

"The problem is that Jews, like any people under mortal threat, retreat into a kind of tribal bunker and become doctrinaire, one-sided," Landau says. "Our imagination is crippled by war."

Landau is talking in his gentle way about the Israel lobby. Walt and Mearsheimer, who support the 2-state solution, were described as inflammatory 2 years ago. Well, they blew the dam. The water's flowing.

Walt & Mearsheimer Must Be Brought Into the Mainstream (Just Ask Haaretz)

I've often argued that our journalism has done our country a real injury by marginalizing Walt and Mearsheimer. I say this anew because of two pieces I just read in (as usual) Haaretz. 1, Haaretz essentially echoed much of what Walt and Mearsheimer wrote about the stranglehold on policy in this interview with Haim Saban, the Israeli-American financier of the Brookings Institution and of the Democratic Party.

You said once that you are a one-note person, and that note is Israel. Why?
 
"You can't explain love."...
 
Do you still feel, as you once did, that America's attitude toward Israel is liable to deteriorate?

"At the moment there is no sign of a crisis. But we must not be complacent. The two pillars of the state are the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S.; Dimona [the site of Israel's nuclear reactor] and Washington. We must do all we can to maintain the alliance with America. A major crisis at the wrong time could be a disaster, a disaster." [emphasis mine]