Mondoweiss

Obamen and J Street (new nexus)

Ira Glunts writes:

Gabriel Schoenfeld is following us on Twitter, giving me a morning-- uh, brainwave

From The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, June 16, 1895:

I was indifferent to my Jewishness; let us say that it was beneath the level of my awareness. But just as anti-Semitism forces the half-hearted, cowardly, and self-seeking Jews into the arms of Christianity, it powerfully forced my Jewishness to the surface. This has nothing to do with affected religiosity.

Recently neocons Eli Lake and Gabriel ("That is why Iraq is such an important cause") Schoenfeld started following us on Twitter. Guys, if you substitute neoconservatism for anti-Semitism in Herzl's formulation (and the Bush Administration for Christianity), you find me--a happily-assimilating, intermarried Jew (and like Herzl, a feature-writer) who discovered the rock of his Jewishness when you guys pushed my country to incinerate an Arab society in the name of democracy and the sanctity of Israeli occupation.
Tell me, Why shouldn't Herzl, a political visionary if ever there was one, be a role model to young integrated American Jews? Why shouldn't they respond to the real conditions of their lives, as he did when he confronted anti-Semitism, by consulting their Jewishness and coming up with new political ideas for the Middle East to replace your blueprint for permanent war?

His resume featured 'millions' of deaths, still McNamara retained stature. Why?

Steve Walt eulogizes McNamara. This one's hard to excerpt:

Neocons-- read McNamara's obit. Reread. Again. Repeat, for 40 years

I keep meaning to do a post on Robert McNamara's very long persecuted old age and what that example holds for the neoconservatives, who if Richard Perle keeps his lipids down in the south of France, and Elliott Abrams gets ahold of his blood pressure, face an unending groundhogs day of roasting conscience over the Iraq error. Scott McConnell beat me to it:

I am always somewhat interested in the amount of angst the Vietnam war caused Robert McNamara-- though he never could quite unambiguously  admit he was a key originator of tragic bloody mistake.
Regrets over Vietnam  was a major factor in the final decomposition of the Wasp establishment--those men who had supported the war lost their faith in it, and in many cases found it breaking their  their relationships with their sons and daughters, even their marriages.  Out of it grew an ambivalence about power which the neocons soon capitalized upon--harping on the Wasp "failure of nerve" and presenting themselves as tough-minded enough to lead America during a seemingly dangerous passage of the Cold War. It was an attractive posture--or it certainly seemed attractive to me when I was twenty five or so.
I wonder if Paul Wolfowitz suffers from the same sleepless nights.  I doubt it, but don't rule it out entirely.  I'm unaware of any major  "second thoughts"  from the neocons over Iraq, though Lawrence Kaplan has written the war was a  mistake, and reached out to some antiwar writers (Andy Bacevich, me) in the magazine he edits, World Affairs.

Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks describes paper's unreconstructed neocon op-ed page as 'insane'

How has the internet liberated journalists? Tom Ricks works at the Washington Post. He also has perches at Foreign Policy and some thinktank. Here a genius post at Foreign Policy about the Post op-ed page titled, Stop the Insanity! In its entirety (Ricks understands the attention span of the internet).

Hardly a day goes by without the op-ed page of the Washington Post carrying an article by a veteran of the Bush Administration holding forth on foreign policy. Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and policy advisor, even has a regular columnist gig. And today Yosemite Sam [evidently a snarky reference to John Bolton's mustache] advocates bombing Iran. It's as if in 1969, the people who brought us to disaster in Vietnam were constantly writing on how to build on their success-and expand the war to Thailand, Malaysia, and Burma. 

P.S. Note that Foreign Policy blog is part of the Slate Group, which is part of the Washington Post. Sophisticated media.

Obama initiative on 2SS is dead in the cradle till he says 'settlements are illegal'

Wonderful piece of analysis of the hateful colonization program, from Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett at Foreign Policy, showing that Obama has accepted pro-Israel premises inherent in George W. Bush's doomed roadmap project:

the road map's most significant flaw comes in its third and final phase, where not a single word is presented regarding the parameters for resolving the "final status" issues -- borders, Jerusalem, and Palestinian refugees -- at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We all know what these parameters are: 1967 boundaries will be the starting point for negotiating final borders, with the possibility of marginal and mutually agreed adjustments. Jerusalem will be shared as the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with special arrangements for the holy sites in the center of the Old City. Whatever arrangements are made to recompense and resettle Palestinian refugees, perhaps even with the theoretical acknowledgement of a "right of return," those arrangements will not be implemented in a way that threatens Israel's Jewish-majority character.

Without such final-status parameters, there can be no credible political horizon for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But their omission was no accident. Again, during 2002 and early 2003, Flynt Leverett argued vociferously within the White House that such parameters were essential. But President Bush and his senior national-security team believed them to be unfairly demanding of Israel, and refused to include them.

By explicitly declaring Israeli settlements illegal, Obama could have transcended this fatal flaw in the road map. If settlements are illegal, then no negotiating process grounded in international law could take any starting point other than the 1967 boundaries for negotiating final borders. Similarly, if settlements are illegal, then any negotiating process grounded in international law would have to start from the premise that all of Jerusalem cannot remain under exclusive Israeli control.

Zellnik: make 2 democratic states (and then dream about one state)

Lately we've been conducting an informal roundtable on the challenge, Offer readers a forward-looking solution in Israel/Palestine. The following is a response from David Zellnik, a leading young playwright, and non-Zionist Jew.

Actions are more important than words, as in Joseph Dana’s eloquent reply to you; his entry about how the group Ta'ayush skipped potentially-frustrating wordsmithing in favor of direct engagement strikes me as the right approach.

That said, I'll try to answer you, because direct action is not always an option... And also because one desired result of direct action is to create a situation where the kinds of conversations you are having become unavoidable.

When a Zionist asks me if I believe in a Jewish state I say, I believe in a state that treats all its citizens equally. I try and counter a positive with a positive.

Usually the person is Jewish, and usually I continue: Look, a lot of Jews now live in Israel, there is a vibrant exciting Hebrew culture that didn’t exist 100 years ago. I’m all for that. Whatever solution is needed – and there are people dying daily for lack of a solution – we can agree the solution needs to include and preserve that. Also there are religious Jews – I’m not one – but there are those who believe god gave us the land. Great. Plenty of Mormons in the US have a charged belief about certain places in America/Utah but here’s what’s different: they don’t get to be privileged citizens because of what their holy book tells them. The reality is Jews are living in a land that has a strong indigenous Arab population and Israel is not allowed to discriminate against them simply because there’s anti-Semitism in the world or our holy book tells us the land is ours.

Ask them what a Jewish state MEANS to them. Does it mean a place where Jews have a strong connection to the land/history, a place where holidays are Jewish? None of that has to change. Does it mean a place where non-Jews are discriminated against in jobs, housing, education, with both de facto and de jure discrimination in the name of the Jewish state? That’s what the Jewish State means right now. Talk about the Present absentees, the unrecognized villages, etc., make them see that the words “the Jewish State” don’t just mean self esteem/affirmative action for Jews, they mean on the ground awfulness that no Jew would put up with as a minority in the West or anywhere.

As you can see, I have avoided the Occupation in this.

'Forward' piece touches on dual loyalty as motivator for Iraq war

The best line in Nathan Guttman's piece in the Forward about the Justice Department's effort to prove that a pro-Israel spy ring was operating inside the Pentagon, AIPAC and the Israeli Embassy came from Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC lobbyist whose indictment on espionage charges the Justice Department recently dropped.

In 2003 the Justice Department stung Rosen. Here is how it went down. The feds had flipped a Pentagon analyst named Larry Franklin, who had been passing along secrets to Rosen and fellow AIPAC'er Keith Weissman. And in June 2003 they gave Franklin a fake cable saying that Israeli agents in Kurdistan were in mortal danger. Franklin brought the paper to Weissman at a restaurant. Weissman went back to AIPAC. Rosen promptly told an Israeli diplomat. 

Franklin told the Forward that the AIPAC guys' actions crossed a line. The Forward got in touch with Rosen, who bridled.

"Franklin did not expect us to warn the Israelis that they would be kidnapped and killed? That’s like telling officials of the NAACP that there is going to be a lynching, but don’t warn the victims, because it is a secret.”

Larry Franklin says Justice Department was gunnin for Feith

Hardworking Nathan Guttman gets the first interview with Hawaiian-beshirted Larry Franklin, the former Defense department analyst who was the only man to go down in the investigation of AIPAC lobbyists Rosen and Weissman:

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.