Mondoweiss

'Morally, we are what we do, not what we say we meant' (Bromwich)

I did a post yesterday, in the moment, foolishly giving Obama a break, prospectively, if Israel is to bomb Iran. Two of my intellectual betters demurred. Jack Ross:

I'm closer to Antony Loewenstein than to you on this one.  If it happened, Obama's responsibility would depend on how one defined the word; what might matter more is how he responded after the fact. Biden was just trying to speak diplomatese and doing badly, with Mullen coming in to do it better.  As a rule in all things, I totally don't get why a large section of the media, especially on the right, jumps up and down hysterically whenever Biden has a senior moment.

David Bromwich:

If Obama commands or consents to the bombing of Iran, he is responsible. Moral judgment is only intelligible as moral if you infer the motive from the action. You can't read in the motive you are comfortable with "against the very grain of" actions. That way lies a no-fault system of self-justification. It is the same argument the apologists for the Iraq war use to justify Bush. (Obama in Iran, of course, would be not a whit less guilty than Bush in Iraq, who also had the lobby to contend with). A version of the same argument has been offered by willfully sympathetic liberals to palliate the monstrous acts ordered by Cheney, Addington, Haynes, etc., on the ground that these men did what they did out of a "deep concern for their country." Obama unhappily is one of the people who have spoken that excuse for them. But, morally, we are what we do--not what we say we meant. And this must hold so long as moral identity has any meaning. If I do a thing but later say that I did not mean to and would have preferred not to, the person who extends his approval to me for my good intentions has drained the word "I" of all meaning.

the hard intellectual labor of sorting out Marty Peretz, Alan Dershowitz and Norman Podhoretz

Jack Ross writes:
Dershowitz is still, at least half-heartedly defending Obama--Commentary's take with a link to the column. I'm not sure quite what to make of it.  On the one hand, Dershowitz takes pretty much the same position as Norman Podhoretz, that Obama isn't any real danger to Israel proper, before he descends into the paranoid line about Iran and that any effort to accommodate Iran is an "existential threat".  On the other hand Dershowitz is clearly reluctant to go as far as Marty Peretz has in the last month, but at the same time clearly suspecting it will only be a matter of time.  I am genuinely puzzled as to what accounts for this difference.

Even Balfour supported equal rights for Palestinians

Jack Ross takes on Professor Eliav Shuchtman's belief that Israel should not be a state of all its citizens:

The references to Israel not being "a state of all its citizens" as a principle of international law are clearly alluding to the Balfour Declaration.  Though it is probably dubious to take for granted the standing of a 90-year old British imperial declaration, the actual text is worth considering in this connection:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

The second half is what interests us here.  The two qualifying principles have obviously been violated in perpetuity since 1948 and probably longer.  If the declaration is still binding in international law, and it is far from clear that it is, therefore, whatever the precise meaning of "a national home for the Jewish people" notwithstanding, for Israel/Palestine to not be "a state of all its citizens" is a direct violation of the Balfour Declaration.

the banality of the Nakba

Jack Ross, first on Obama's game, then on the Nakba:

It's important to cut through the smoke and mirrors of biblical references - which is not to say that Netanyahu's "Amalek" mindset isn't real and threatening. But the sense of mysticism reflected by Jeffrey Goldberg seems to confirm that the bottom line is that Iran has become a scapegoat for all of Israel's problems.  I think Obama knows this, which is why he's publicly countered "no Palestinian state until Iran is disarmed" with "no helping you on Iran until a Palestinian state". 

On the neocons' Munich comparisons

Jack Ross responds to Robert Kaplan's suggestion that Iraq was Nazi Germany, and so we could not appease it.

When considering the idea that Israel will be "the new Czechoslovakia", we must remember that Czechoslovakia, like Israel, was a state that should never have come into existence. 

Jack Ross: you can't take the Judaism out of Jewishness

Jack Ross responds to my posts about "bad Jews" reclaiming secular Jewish identity. He begins by taking on the embrace of AIPAC by the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, which triggered my original post:
First off, the Conservatives are hemmorhaging membership, and they are clueless if they think it's a good thing to celebrate their relationship with AIPAC, which is a big part of the reason why it's their kids who have in such huge numbers become disillusioned and are intermarrying.  There is even serious talk of the progressive bloc in the movement-- which is significant and disproportionately represented in groups like Rabbis for Human Rights-- bolting.

Second, it is worth making a historical point: more or less, the whole history of the official Jewish community is of the takeover by Zionists of local Jewish philanthropy, which is almost uniformly aligned with the Conservatives.  Resistance to this is a major theme of the post-1948 history of the American Council for Judaism, the Reform group which opposed the creation of a Jewish state.

As to your reclaiming your identity as a "bad Jew": Why do you think I go to shul and am determined to marry a nice Jewish girl and deeply resent your more militantly leftish-atheist friends who give me grief for it?  Because I know I need to be a "good Jew" in order to be taken even remotely seriously as a commenter of any kind of Jewish issue, and more importantly, I do personally feel for myself that I'm not entitled to be in any way at the ramparts if I'm truly a "bad Jew". 

'Huffington Post' appears to have gone almost all the way over to the other side on Israel/Palestine

A piece that might have been titled "Jews are better; Jews don't hate," by David Suissa--on the 459th-ranked site on the internet, which has lately gotten substantial financing. Writes Jack Ross: "What we're seeing in Huffington Post now is an unholy alliance between the blogosphere hardcore and The New Republic."

Maybe Obama wants to do like Brits in '48, and walk away from the mess

Jack Ross responds to MJ Rosenberg's report of an imposed two-state solution:

Mortimer Zuckerman aligns himself (and Huffpo) with the rightwing settlers' movement

The problem isn't Lieberman (c'ted)

Jack Ross writes:
There's a problem neither you or any of the reporters pointed out - it's Netanyahu, not Lieberman, who's more intractably opposed to a two state solution.  It is precisely Lieberman's support for a Greece-Turkey style population transfer which has made him tolerable to the pro-Israel "left" represented by The Forward and the URJ leadership in that it is ostensible support for a two state solution, whereas it is Netanyahu who has, in not so many words, come out in favor of a formalized apartheid.  What that transcript exposes more then anything else is the shallowness with which Lieberman has become a scapegoat for so many liberals, perhaps along with the establishment generally, for the emerging crisis between America and Israel.