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Go Home Benjamin Netanyahu: Why the U.S. Can’t Make Peace in the...

THE VITAL CENTER JUNE 16, 2011

Benjamin Netanyahu: Why the U.S. Can’t Make Peace in the Middle East

BY WILLIAM GALSTON

Jerusalem, Israel—I’ve spent the past week in Israel listening to as many voices as I could. Based on what I’ve heard, a rough summary of the situation is this: Benjamin Netanyahu offers no viable alternative to the status quo, and the opposition offers no viable alternative to Netanyahu. Until Mahmoud Abbas recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, the prime minister says, serious talks are impossible. And besides, negotiating with a coalition that includes Hamas is unthinkable. For their part, the Palestinians are insisting that serious talks can’t begin until the Israelis endorse the “1967 borders with agreed-on swaps” principle that President Obama articulated last month. Meanwhile, the once-dominant Labor Party is all but defunct, and Kadima is riven by debates over such momentous matters as their leader Tsipi Livni’s alleged mismanagement of party funds. While Netanyahu is hardly a giant, he bestrides the Israeli political scene like a colossus. The near-certain consequence of these realities is continuing stagnation.

The skeptics, of course, love to object that “the status quo is unsustainable.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve encountered that phrase over the past 44 years, I could retire tomorrow. The majority of Israelis actually seem comfortable to the point of complacency with today’s de facto truce and limited Palestinian autonomy. The Palestinians are anything but comfortable, of course, but what can they do? If they choose to take their case to the United Nations General Assembly this fall, they’ll get a symbolic vote of support that changes nothing on the ground. To be sure, non-violent demonstrations could mobilize sympathizers around the world while further isolating Israel. But the Israelis are working quickly to deploy more effective crowd control weapons and tactics and to create a more seamless allocation of responsibilities between the IDF and the police. Unless they drop the ball, they should be able to avert a repetition of the army’s heavy-handed and needlessly lethal response to recent breaches of the line of demarcation between Syria and the Israeli-held Golan.

Many retired generals and former intelligence officials, for their part, regard Netanyahu as a reckless adventurer guided more by dogma and short-term political calculations than by a sober analysis of long-term national interests. They may well be right. But Netanyahu clearly thinks of himself as a principled visionary with time on his side. In a recent interview, he referred to the decades it took for the conflict over Northern Ireland to yield to fruitful negotiations. He’s waiting for the Palestinian equivalent of Sinn Fein’s abandonment of armed struggle and willingness to accept a divided Ireland. The Palestinians believe they’ve made that transition without getting much in return; Netanyahu disagrees. Some worried Israelis think that it’s stupid to antagonize the government of the United States; Netanyahu thinks that his current strategy will enable him to dominate American as well as Israeli politics. And there matters stand.    

I wish I had more confidence that the United States can make things better. But our influence in the region is at a very low ebb, and even supporters of the Obama administration concede that its efforts to date have been counterproductive. Each time the administration enunciates more “even-handed” policies, the Palestinians adopt them as preconditions for renewed talks while the Israelis dig in their heels. I would have thought that the art of diplomacy is not to say what you think to be true, but rather to use all instruments of national power, including verbal evasion, to get the parties themselves to act in accordance with that truth. Speeches can be tools of diplomacy; they are not substitutes for it. The administration is running out of time—may already have run out of time—to get it right.

William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor for The New Republic.

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171 comments

Galston seems to be complaining about the success of Netanyahu's policies. And he admits that the Israeli opposition can offer "no viable alternative to Netanyahu". Nobody likes the status quo, but the alternatives look worse. There needs to be a real revolutionary change of consciousness, not in Israel, but in the Muslim world. Galston is rather credulous when he says, "The Palestinians believe they’ve made that transition without getting much in return."

- amidut

June 16, 2011 at 7:11am

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I'm a supporter of the Obama Administration, some of the time, and I don't "concede that its efforts to date have been counterproductive." The Administration has slowly been moving away from the knee-jerk support of Israel that right-wingers in the U.S. seek to make inseparable from "patriotism." Of course, the weaker the Administration is, the more slowly it moves. But U.S. Likudists like William Kristol and, of course, Marty Peretz are beginning to worry that reflexive U.S. support for Israel is beginning to ebb. Even Republicans like Mitt Romney are starting to sound squishy. Disturbing!

- AlanVann

June 16, 2011 at 8:35am

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Quick words on my solution: empower the Palestinian pragmatists, convince as many ordinary Palestinians to side with them, subdue the rejectionists. If you insist on dealing with official entities exclusively, you will never achieve the first item.

- sighthnd

June 16, 2011 at 9:58am

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Galston sort of admits that Obama has badly mismanaged his middle eastern policy (actually he sidesteps the Big O's most egregious errors) and then blames Netanyahu. And I thought Galston had a modicum of intellectual honesty. Silly me. There is a reason that a only a whopping 12% of Israelis think Obama is pro-Israel. And it's not because his middle name is Hussein (that was widely regarded as a crude insult here). It would behoove Galston and other Obamanoids to actually listen a broader range of Israelis and face-up to Obama's failings than they apparently are if they want to try to rescue the situation. An example of Galston's apparent selective hearing and questioning: "Many retired generals and former intelligence officials, for their part, regard Netanyahu as a reckless adventurer guided more by dogma and short-term political calculations than by a sober analysis of long-term national interests." Yes there are many such retired generals and former intelligence officials. But there are many other retired generals and former intelligence officials who think that Netanyahu is pulling off a delicate and difficult balancing act, preserving Israel's vital interests and recognize the critical importance of negotiating without any preconditions and/ or that the Pals must sooner or later recognize Israel as a Jewish state that has legitimate historical rights to the region. And there are other retired generals and former intelligence officials who think that Bibi has already caved-in to Obama & the Pals way too much. Essentially Galston is basing his argument on cherry-picking those retired generals and former intelligence officials whose views support his own pre-conceived notions. There is actually a very broad consensus on these points as exemplified by the very broad support Bibi received in Israel for his response to Obama and speech to Congress. One of the few of the US leftwing pundits who sort of understood that Bibi really was speaking for a broad range of Israelis was Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (here), who took his Israeli au pair -- who voted Livni / Kadima -- to hear Bibi at AIPAC & in the Congress. Fear not, Milbank did not cross-over to the dark side of the Force. He faithfully invoked the necessary stereotypes and inane P.C. terminology & phraseology ("hard-liners" for the evil "rightists" -- does that make Milbank's oh so favored "moderates" lily-livered or spineless?). But nonetheless, he did show some long-overdue insight. Hershel Ginsburg Jerusalem / Efrata

- ginzy

June 16, 2011 at 10:53am

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It is ironic that Galston, like many other elite liberals in the United States, cannot abide Netanyahu, the Israeli politician most fluent in American language and culture. AlanVann warns of "knee-jerk support of Israel". Perhaps he and other members of the liberal-left should rethink their knee-jerk disdain for Israel. Perhaps the Israelis do have an implacable enemy: Islam, which assigns a subordinate and degraded place to the Jewish people and other minority groups in the Middle East. Islam does not respect liberal values. Treaties with the infidels are meaningless. Vide the Treaty of Hudaibiya. Vide the Islamist rallying cry: "Remember Khaybar, O Jews!" That is why Jewish sovereignty is anathema to them. Liberals often do not wish to recognize such unreason and religiously-sanctioned bigotry. Otherwise they would have to do something about it.

- amidut

June 16, 2011 at 10:54am

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I can't see any serious restart of negotiations till the upheavals taking place in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere work themselves out. I doubt that the Palestinian will be brave enough to agree to any deal without the authorization of Damascus and Cairo. It would also be a mistake for Israel to agree to any deal until it is sure that no hostile regime will take power in Egypt, one that will abandon the peace treaties.

- arnon

June 16, 2011 at 11:44am

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Two other insightful pieces on the current middle eastern impasse: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/15/obamas-pressure-won%E2%80%99t-undermine-bibi/ and http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/16/obama-israel-pay-un-veto/#more-757901 What is clear is that Obama has created a situation in which the Pals have no reason to negotiated. Why should they? They are getting what they want without having to give up anything in return. But maybe that's exactly what Obama intends. hg

- ginzy

June 16, 2011 at 11:59am

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"Galston sort of admits that Obama has badly mismanaged his middle eastern policy (actually he sidesteps the Big O's most egregious errors) and then blames Netanyahu." As a columnist on TNR he is not allowed to blame Obama for anything, especially vis a vis Netanyahu. Obama is the most etrogiest etrog in American media. He is not to be doubted or defied. The virtue of his understanding and knowledge cannot be questioned. He is in that respect in a better position than the pope.

- noga1

June 16, 2011 at 12:59pm

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"But maybe that's exactly what Obama intends." I agree. I think Obama has appointed himself the representative of Palestinians. But as I repeated many times before, this can only be expected from someone who got his education about the conflict from Rashid Khalidi.

- noga1

June 16, 2011 at 1:03pm

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Chait: But the plain fact is that the Mitt Romney who's running for president is sane and rational only by the standards of his crazed opposition Perhaps what's needed is to entertain the concept that perhaps Abbas is a reasonable pragmatist only by the standards of Hamas.

- sighthnd

June 16, 2011 at 2:58pm

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I'm inclined to agree with Galston that public statements of longer-term perspectives are a component of diplomacy rather than a substitute for it, but there is a potential negative trade-off to always speaking in code, too. Sometimes, a public statement is needed to set out where the parameters are in, say, a government's thinking on a major national or international issue. The problem arises if two or more separate languages (in the broader sense of the term) come into conflict, e.g. a culture with a pragmatic framework converging on a culture with a strong inclination to ritual and symbol, or a sensibility geared to the future crossing one infused with remembering the past as a central act. Disclaimer: No languages were injured in the formulation of the above post.

- ironyroad

June 16, 2011 at 3:24pm

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"Disclaimer: No languages were injured in the formulation of the above post." No, only I got a bit of a headache trying to de-code what it is you are trying to say in this comment. (Failed, btw).

- noga1

June 16, 2011 at 4:29pm

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irony, every once in a while could you step it down a bit for the the slower fellahs, like me, around here.

- basman

June 16, 2011 at 4:33pm

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Galston cannot break the rigid TNR editorial line or he will be castrated and then drawn and quartered. (It doesn’t work the other way ‘round.) Therefore, to keep body and soul together he cannot find any fault in Obama. TNR now has the proposition under consideration whether it’s permissible to venture any comment about the Great Man without His say so.) Should Galston breach proscription and criticize Obama in relation to Netanyahu, he risks irreparable injury to his wife, children and the family goldfish. Further, Obama is now, with about to-be-announced TNR editorial support, planning enactments in violation of the Establishment Clause to have the Church of Coltrane (officially St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church) expropriated, renamed the Church of St. Barack and established as the official shrine to America’s national religion—Obamashananaism. Since such enactment can’t pass Congress, it will be done by executive order. His church will have a Pope and a Pupick—Rashid Khalidi and Khalid Meshal, respectively. And it will be good. Apparently, Galston, if his worship stays fervent enough, is in the close running for head altar boy. All of these happenings are neither apparent to the naked eye nor the plain mind. One must have innate Gnostic antennae to divine these portents in even the most nondescript pieces of prose scattered throughout only TNR, Hustler, Popular Mechanics and The New England Journal of Medicine. We owe a debt to those brave souls –you are welcome—who are not afraid to proclaim their divinations, not afraid, that is to say, to reveal further the revealed truth.

- basman

June 16, 2011 at 5:10pm

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Ironyroad “I'm inclined to agree with Galston that public statements of longer-term perspectives are a component of diplomacy rather than a substitute for it,” This is unclear. Do you mean public statements by officials or do you mean statements that reflect public opinion? Also are you referring to Israel or to all regimes in the Arab world? “but there is a potential negative trade-off to always speaking in code, too. Sometimes, a public statement is needed to set out where the parameters are in, say, a government's thinking on a major national or international issue.” Again, this is too abstract and it suggests that you are dealing merely with government to government business. If this is the case, then I don’t see why speaking in code is a problem if each government can decipher the code. It’s not the use of code that would be the problem but in being able to figure out the context (parameters) of the utterances. In any case, apropos what are you saying this? I don’t think I have the key to your own code. “The problem arises if two or more separate languages (in the broader sense of the term) come into conflict, e.g. a culture with a pragmatic framework converging on a culture with a strong inclination to ritual and symbol, or a sensibility geared to the future crossing one infused with remembering the past as a central act.” This little paragraph seems to reverse what you have said thus far. When speaking of cultural interpretation alludes to more than just government officials. Also pragmatic versus symbolic decoding rules out the possibility of a unitary code with a shared key to decipherment. You don’t seem to be speaking of different languages but of different modes of representation. “Disclaimer: No languages were injured in the formulation of the above post.” Perhaps not, but your formulations succeeded in activating only an enigmatic speech act.

- arnon

June 16, 2011 at 5:11pm

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“Benjamin Netanyahu: Why the U.S. Can’t Make Peace in the Middle East” By Middle East I assume he means peace between Israel and the Arab States. If so no one can “make” peace between parties who don’t want to live in peace. I would suggest that as long as Arab leaders are unwilling to recognize the existence of a Jewish State which is a fact, there will not be peace between the parties even if Israel withdraws to the 67 border lines, which is unthinkable and even if it gives half of its capital city to the Arabs. Some people (not Obama) are proposing to erase nearly half a century of history in the Middle East. They are proposing that Israel start from the position it was in 1967 when the Arabs tried to destroy it. This is like asking Europeans to go back to the map of 1939 before the start of WW2, or the Americans to the map of 1846 at the start of the Mexican American war. Not just Netanyahu (whose politics I don’t agree with) but any Israeli PM will never agree to it.

- arnon

June 16, 2011 at 5:26pm

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arnon, I concede that I was being ambiguous on the question of whether what we are discussing are government to government communications or statements for a larger or more diverse audience. I assume that direct g-to-g exchanges are more likely to have a set of agreed parameters and references, even if the societies are very different in their make-up, than a more public type of communication with multiple audiences (but does anyone think that the U.S.-Pakistan g-to-g chat, even with decades of experience and background, is going well at this moment?) That said, however, I am not sure in turn what kind of communication Galston means in his own concluding paragraph. I assumed he meant something broadcast, rather than confidential exchanges office to office. To that extent, the question is whether a leader can or should make a public statement -- e.g. as Obama did, as Netanyahu did -- which has potentially multiple audiences and can be open to various angles of interpretation (including malicious ones) and, if s/he does, to what degree it helps or hinders diplomacy. My own position is that it's worth the risk to set out in public your context for future diplomatic/political action, but the risk/profit calculation becomes murky if there is -- unlike g-to-g exchanges -- more likelihood that different assumptions come into play, and reactions that perhaps haven't been foreseen. The disclaimer thing was just a joke.

- ironyroad

June 16, 2011 at 5:32pm

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Speaking of ambiguities, perhaps Obama has something else on his mind. When he says "67 borders' what does he mean? What does he mean when he says "67 borders"? Because the year "67" is not clear enough. There is the June 4, 1967 borders. And there is the June 11, 1967 borders. So, when Obama says going back to the 67 borders, which borders does he mean? Does he mean the 67 borders with Jordan, which were re-adjusted with the peace agreement? Does he mean the borders with Egypt?

- noga1

June 16, 2011 at 5:47pm

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Hypocrisy: http://www.unwatch.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=bdKKISNqEmG&b=1313923&ct=10877547 One wonders, how does Obama's representative to the UN deal with this breath taking hypocrisy? Perhaps with soothing statements geared towards cultures with "with a strong inclination to ritual and symbol"??

- noga1

June 16, 2011 at 5:55pm

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Where's the hypocisy? There are two clear principles at work: (1) Arabs being killed by Jews is a brutal and shocking international crime that demands the world's attention; (2) Arabs being killed by Arabs is an unfortunate but all-in-all generally unproblematic occurrence that is often exploited with malice by western governments (often under the control of Jews) to deflect attention from (1).

- ironyroad

June 16, 2011 at 6:28pm

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BTW I'd just like to say that I think, personally, that Susan Rice has been a very good ambassador at the UN and has done some impressive work on both Iran and Libya.

- ironyroad

June 16, 2011 at 6:48pm

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I guess we agree, then, that Rice's achievements at the UN are fueled by Obama's view of the Islamic world. We differ in our attitudes. I consider it no less a hypocrisy than the kind exhibited at UNHR council. You consider it a work of perspicacious genius. http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5i5lpAQeMg-l-DaOyKD2m5y_YdXwQ?docId=7133323

- noga1

June 16, 2011 at 7:10pm

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Oops. I don't understand how that link got there. I meant to link to this: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/21/white-house-vetoes-unsc-vote-and-then-throws-israel-under-the-bus/

- noga1

June 16, 2011 at 7:15pm

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"The status quo is unsustainable..." -- well, as you say, apprently it IS sustainable. This is the best status quo we've had in decades, after all. I agree, living next to a group of people who won't recognize your right to exist is very difficult to sustain -- yet the Israeli's have been sustaining it since 1973, give or take a suicide bombing and an Intefada or two. If it's not "sustainable", at least it's reduced the number of people dying every day. Maintain that long enough and it doesn't matter what label you put on it. I also agree with the comment above that Netanyahu is executing a very delicate balancing act, quite successfully. Having Obama come in like a clueless elephant tromping around destabilizes the situation more than it does anything positive. I also agree as long as the 'Arab Spring' is proceeding, it's not the time to try to implement permanent solutions that neither side wants.

- AllanL5

June 16, 2011 at 9:07pm

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this is as bad as Hertzberg using New Yorker's Talk of the Town to spew his bias of PM Netanyahu, but nice to have a thread with such fine company of commenters. The only point I can add is that Galston reveals his "I still want to be invited to Likud-bashing dinner parties" in the way he states "...avert a repetition of the army’s heavy-handed and needlessly lethal response to recent breaches of the line of demarcation between Syria and the Israeli-held Golan. ..." wtf? Assad's minions rented buses to send those palestinians (still denied any path to Syrian citizenship) to breach the armistice line of the Golan. And after, when the palestinians tried to protest about being used this way, they were greeted with heavy-handed response from the thugs who run their 'eternally a refugee' camps. Funny how Galston fails to notice that Hamas vetoed Fayyad as Prime Minister in their "unity" government, Abbas's term expired 28 months ago, and Egypt is on the verge of economic collapse. So, who is Netanyahu supposed to negotiate with? Maybe Obama should run for president of Egypt...

- K2K

June 17, 2011 at 1:26am

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Noga: "I guess we agree, then, that Rice's achievements at the UN are fueled by Obama's view of the Islamic world. We differ in our attitudes. I consider it no less a hypocrisy than the kind exhibited at UNHR council. You consider it a work of perspicacious genius." I don't understand your comment. The Obama administration has gotten UNSC sanctions on Iran tighter than anything over the last couple of decades. They managed to get Arab League support for the initial Libya no-fly-zone proposal that represents the first time that the AL actually came out to endorse, at least by voting action and UN follow-up, a popular rebellion against a fellow leader. They are trying to develop a battery of support for pushing back against the Palestinian nationhood gesture. How is this 'hypocrisy'? I thought your initial accusation -- unless I misread you -- arose from the fact that the HRC was engaging in a hypocritical exercise due to Syrian complaints about Israel coming at a time when Syrian security forces are shooting their own people. Was this not the case?

- ironyroad

June 17, 2011 at 1:36am

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Susan Rice made it very clear how distasteful she found her vote against the condemnation of Israel. Read her apologizing speech for standing with Israel to get the level of the hypocrisy. And another thing, if, as she declares "But the only way to reach that common goal is through direct negotiations between the parties", why is Obama acting like he represents the Palestinians when he sets out new parameters for the start of the negotiations? I see no coherence between principle and action, and a very reluctant support for Israel. Netanyahu had no choice but to thank Obama for this gesture but let me tell you, I don't feel much gratitude. He is objecting on one hand while nodding and winking at the Arabs on the other hand. Of course the universally acknowledged truth in this matter is that Obama is being held hostage to the Jewish Lobby. You should hear how some Canadians speak about him. Poor Obama, he has his heart in the right place (with the Arabs); it's not him, it's them. If he were a real sincere supporter of Israel, people would not try to make these excuses for him, excuses that border directly on antisemitism. As for Libya, I thought the going narrative was that Obama was actually responding to the Arab League's request for humanitarian intervention. Not the other way around. And once that intervention was launched, Amr Mussa, predictably, had a change of heart. So I can't see how that can be counted as a great diplomatic coup for Obama.

- noga1

June 17, 2011 at 7:33am

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To come back to a central problem in these negotiations (and general views) is the denial of history. This is modern problem and it's not just about ignorance of history. For some it is that, for others it's the denial that historical facts even exists, while for some it is an attempt to legitimate positions that any acknowledgement of history would contradict. This is also a problem in general culture. Remember the Woody Allen debate? Jonathan Alter rightly sees his films as a symptom of the problem: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-17/historical-ignorance-warps-american-politics-jonathan-alter.html While Alter concentrates on American politics, the problem is also present in international political discussions.

- arnon

June 17, 2011 at 10:44am

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http://www.hudson-ny.org/2207/hamas-just-the-beginning Khaled Abu Toameh highlights what Galston (in his lemming-like Netanyahu bashing) never mentions: "The Palestinian Authority and Egypt's new military regime are begging Hamas to agree to the appointment of Salam Fayyad as prime minister of a Palestinian unity government. The main reason the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority wants to keep Fayyad in power is that they are afraid that the US and EU will suspend financial aid to the Palestinians. ..." Obama really needs to stop trying regime change in Israel. It is as if Netanyahu is a surrogate for Bush43-hatred. of all the elected leaders of the world, Netanyahu certainly gets a disproportionate disrespect from Obama, who must be really trapped in "what will the Saudis do?" syndrome.

- K2K

June 17, 2011 at 10:59am

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Noga, I'm not sure what "the" narrative is supposed to be about Libya, but pretty much all reporting I read made the assumption that negotiations between the various parties including the Arab League made it clear that the AL would have to do more than make concerned noises about Ghaddafi. This time, if they wanted something to happen, they would have to come out and say so. Whether it was Rice, Clinton, or the president, or two or all three working this, I can't say myself. Nevertheless, it was a crucial diplomatic step in the Libya deal and potentially useful for the future. Whether Rice "felt" the one thing or the other thing when she was casting a particular U.S. vote is hardly important: (a) it's a wildly subjective proposition on your part, and (b) the vote belongs to the United States, not to her personally. And there's Iran, which you ignored. So, no hypocrisy (which again, you originally meant as manifesting itself on the part of the Syrians right? How did it come to be about Obama? Oh why bother asking!)

- ironyroad

June 17, 2011 at 11:02am

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"How did it come to be about Obama? Oh why bother asking!)" It was in response to your irresistible need to provide accolades to Rice's UN performamnces: "BTW I'd just like to say that I think, personally, that Susan Rice has been a very good ambassador at the UN and has done some impressive work on both Iran and Libya." Which I do not consider to be great achievements, ethically speaking, and I explained why I thought they weren't, which is where "hypocrisy" came up again. I know you don't consider her speech following the veto in the UN to be hypocrisy but it is. Or perhaps you can think of a more appropriate term. I suggested "nudge/wink" but you ignored it completely. Easier to cast aspersions upon my (according to you) irrational leaps of logic. Let's suppose someone accuses you of something terrible, like being a rabid Leftist. Not so, I say in your defence, against a chorus of posters who adamantly insist that you are no better than some Rubashev. Not so, I say, in your defence, and I make sure to add: even though I personally often think ironyroad can be pretty dogmatic, infallible, and tethered to some leftist principles more suitable to red Danny's 1968 radicalism. What would you call this double position? On the one hand but on the other hand... Is this coherent? Is this rational, when I purport to object -- to OBJECT!-- to what the mob's position is?

- noga1

June 17, 2011 at 11:50am

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http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/16/obama-israel-pay-un-veto/ "Obama administration officials are in Israel this week for more talks with Israel and the Palestinians. Their goal isn’t simply to try and get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bend to the president’s demand Israel accept the 1967 lines as the starting point for future negotiations, though that is certainly on the top of their agenda. It is to force Israel to make concessions that will somehow convince the Palestinians to abandon their effort to have the United Nations recognize an independent Palestinian state inside those same 1967 borders. The Americans are pretending the purpose of the president’s controversial Middle East policy speech and the subsequent diplomatic hammering of Israel by Secretary of State Clinton and envoy Dennis Ross is to revive the long stalled peace talks with the Palestinians. But no one seriously believes the Palestinians are interested in negotiations. They have had several opportunities during the two and a half years of the Obama administration but have consistently refused. Now the Palestinians have decided the Third World anti-Israel majority in the United Nations will eliminate the need for them to even go through the charade of negotiations. UN recognition will mean they can have their state without recognizing Israel’s legitimacy or agreeing to end the conflict. This is a recipe for more bloodshed and an end of American influence in the region. Which is why any U.S. administration, even one as unfriendly to Israel as that of Obama, must veto such a resolution. But the president, who pines for the love of the Arab world in vain, doesn’t want to do it. So he is putting all of his effort into making Israel bribe the Palestinians into dropping the UN initiative."

- noga1

June 17, 2011 at 1:25pm

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Obama is a slow-motion disaster in the Middle East. He has failed to stop Iran. He's not even an economically progressive Democrat. His party needs to look at alternative Presidential candidates in the 2012 primaries and convention. I'm certainly not voting for Mr. O.

- amidut

June 17, 2011 at 7:57pm

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Noga, I understand your criticism of Rice but I have to say that I don't see the "hypocrisy" as that accusation seems to just ignore the obvious fact that diplomats including UN ambassadors often have personal opinions at variance with the political positions they take on behalf of their governments. It may be the case that Rice is not particularly sympathetic to Israel but her job is to reflect US government policy, not engage in a personal emoting session. If you don't see the Iran or Libya achievements as important, that's your privilege, but I think you're allowing hostility to cloud your judgment unnecessarily. The hypocrisy of Syria is of course something else, and embodies a complete and morbid divergence of domestic and international action -- indeed a divergence especially aimed at occluding the domestic events. I am dogmatic, I am rarely infallible (I leave that to you), and I certainly have trouble identifying the leftist principles from 1968 that I'm accused of holding. Unless, of course, free love is one of them. Cohn-Bendit turned out to have quite an interesting career, incidentally.

- ironyroad

June 17, 2011 at 10:15pm

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"I am dogmatic, I am rarely infallible (I leave that to you), and I certainly have trouble identifying the leftist principles from 1968 that I'm accused of holding. Unless, of course, free love is one of them. Cohn-Bendit turned out to have quite an interesting career, incidentally." ironyroad, for all your ironical airs and stratagems, you sometimes exhibit such a literal turn of mind! I did not accuse you of anything. I was merely making up a story to illustrate why I thought Rice's position about Israel was hypocritical. And since I was speaking to you I decided to make you the hero of that story. But if you have a more suitable term for it, I'm open to revising my language.

- noga1

June 17, 2011 at 10:42pm

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Given the chaos in the Middle East, the widespread violence, wrenching change and also, the prospects for the future - demographically, economically, environmentally - reducing "peace in the Middle East" to a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians is really kind of simplistic. Indeed, seeing a vast and highly variable region through this one prism is such a huge failure of imagination I'm surprised anybody has bought into it at all, let alone the concept that Israel = THE PROBLEM, instead of looking clearly at all the many issues confronting the region from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the eastern borders of Iran, and beyond, into Central Asia. No wonder we keep failing. We are looking at the problem upside down and inside out.

- Sophia

June 18, 2011 at 2:57am

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sophia: "...No wonder we keep failing. We are looking at the problem upside down and inside out. ..." Some of us would prefer to NOT be included in that "we". From everything I have read, Obama, who so frequently uses "I", bears most of the responsibility for his failures in "Peace in the Middle East" although I am not ruling out Hillary as his enabler. They are doing what the Saudis want, especially since the exit of Mubarak. amidut: no one is going to challenge Obama for the Dem nom in 2012 unless he decides to withdraw, which could still happen if the fundraising is as bad as the various news reports.

- K2K

June 18, 2011 at 7:54am

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"I'm surprised anybody has bought into it at all, let alone the concept that Israel = THE PROBLEM," Why the surprise? It's the easiest posture to buy into. And I blame Obama for propagating this view with his speeches to the Arab world, with his historical revisionism, with his, indeed, lack of historical acumen and solid knowledge. He has been educated to regard "Israel = THE PROBLEM" and so far has acted in everything he did and say as someone who has not been at much pains to re-evaluate his own concepts.

- noga1

June 18, 2011 at 8:20am

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http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/17/can-this-presidency-be-saved/ Walter Russell Mead: "...Nobody at this point really knows what the President stands for – at home or abroad. ... He has given his opposition valuable gifts, setting goals for himself which he then fails to meet: that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent, public demands for Israeli concessions he failed to achieve, the promise that his health care proposals wouldn’t effect anyone who liked their current insurance, and the infamous “days not weeks” prediction about the Libya campaign. These and similar blunders have two things in common: they are unforced errors, ..." Mr. Mead certainly has been hammering away at Obama recently, yet still hoping somehow a better Obama will be revealed. noga - you will enjoy the comment by wigwag, who expands on Obama's foreign policy failures :)

- K2K

June 18, 2011 at 12:08pm

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Leon Wieseltier has a ridiculous column in Haaretz about Israel and the "Arab Spring." http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/learning-to-trust-our-neighbors-1.367788

- arnon

June 18, 2011 at 3:19pm

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Leon Wieseltier preaching to Israelis to divest themselves of ghettoish hang ups, isn't that rich. Talk about projection! Never mind condescension. He never stops to consider that perhaps he is not really in any position to preach to Israelis in whom to trust. Or why. Or how.

- noga1

June 18, 2011 at 4:19pm

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I don't think he convinced too many people even on Haaretz.

- arnon

June 18, 2011 at 4:44pm

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Wieseltier wasn’t just addressing Israelis. He was mostly writing about the Jewish people. It’s here that he was spectacularly wrong. Most Jews welcomed democracy when it was real democracy but it existed in very few places in the modern era and it was of recent vintage. When democracy was first established in say France it didn’t change the mind set of most Frenchmen towards Jews. This happened after the Catholic Church stopped preaching antisemitism. There is no democracy in the Arab world and when it comes it may take a generation or two before it filers down to the people. Most people, as in Egypt, have been inculcated with a profound and murderous type of hatred against non Muslims (read about the fate of the Copts there today). The hatred of Jews is even more general and runs deeper. I suspect that it will take a lot of unlearning before the masses will accept Copts and especially Jews. Still, most Jews do support democracy even though they know that attitudes to will not change overnight, if ever.

- arnon

June 18, 2011 at 5:48pm

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/17/no_savior?page=full "The West's lofty expectations for Salam Fayyad went far beyond what he was ever able to deliver." for those of us who, unlike Leon W, notice that the palestinians are still not in the room, and with Fayyad being rejected by Hamas, who will the pundits and politicians in the US and EU be able to keep funding?

- K2K

June 19, 2011 at 8:41am

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I don't think you understand, K2K, that the paradigm has shifted as regards Israel and Palestinians. And Obama is the greatest promulgator of this paradigm shift: it is now America for Palestine, wrong or wrong, never mind history, or Arab relentless violence against the Jewish state for the last nearly one hundred years.

- noga1

June 19, 2011 at 9:53am

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noga1 "I don't think you understand, K2K, that the paradigm has shifted as regards Israel and Palestinians. And Obama is the greatest promulgator of this paradigm shift: it is now America for Palestine,...." Where do you see the shift to "America for Palestine" occurring? How did Obama accomplish this?

- arnon

June 19, 2011 at 11:01am

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I used to regard Glick as something of a Cassandra. Not any more: http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/06/a-do-or-die-moment.php "Given Hamas's maintenance of its annihilationist goals toward Israel and Fatah's inability to convince Hamas to accept its minimal demands, it is obvious that Hamas is the stronger force in the Palestinian unity government. It is also clear that this government will not under any circumstances agree to make peace with Israel. AND YET, in the face of these realities, US President Barack Obama is intensifying his pressure on Israel to agree to the now-powerless Fatah's preconditions for negotiating. Indeed, he has adopted Fatah's preconditions as his own. Obama is demanding that Israel agree to surrender its right to defensible borders by insisting that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accept the pre-1967 boundaries - that is the 1949 armistice lines - as the starting point for future negotiations. Since Obama surely recognizes that a Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority will not accept Israeli control over anything from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley, he knows that he is requiring that Israel surrender its right to defensible borders before it even begins negotiating."

- noga1

June 19, 2011 at 1:07pm

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Going to third party articles, especially those of Ms. Glick doesn't prove that Obama has "abandoned" Israel. "Obama is demanding that Israel agree to surrender its right to defensible borders by insisting that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accept the pre-1967 boundaries -" I also see no evidence that Obama is pushing Israel to accept "indefensible borders." Here is Obama on Israel and Hamas: "BO: I think that the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea, given not only world history but the active existence of anti-Semitism, the potential vulnerability that the Jewish people could still experience. I know that that there are those who would argue that in some ways America has become a safe refuge for the Jewish people, but if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens. That makes it a fundamentally just idea. That does not mean that I would agree with every action of the state of Israel, because it’s a government and it has politicians, and as a politician myself I am deeply mindful that we are imperfect creatures and don’t always act with justice uppermost on our minds. But the fundamental premise of Israel and the need to preserve a Jewish state that is secure is, I think, a just idea and one that should be supported here in the United States and around the world." Here he is on Hamas: "BO: My position on Hamas is indistinguishable from the position of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I said they are a terrorist organization and I’ve repeatedly condemned them. I’ve repeatedly said, and I mean what I say: since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements." http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2008/05/obama-on-zionism-and-hamas/8318/ This was in 08. Do you have any evidence that he has changed his mind about either Israel or Hamas?

- arnon

June 19, 2011 at 1:30pm

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I go to third party articles, arnon whoeveryouare, because I have very little incentive to take the trouble to respond to your belligerent questioning. Considering that you believe there is no paradigm shift in Obama's policies towards Israel (perhaps it would be more accurate to say: no paradigm shift in America's policies towards Israel, since I don't think Obama's paradigm has shifted; it's just more visible now and getting increasingly more so by every new exchange between him and Netanyahu or their representatives), let's just agree that you and I disagree about where this is going. And try to avoid speaking to each other as much as possible. I am not impressed by your line of commentary or engagement or even levels of knowledge and understanding. And I concede to you the right to reciprocate in kind as regards to myself. OK?

- noga1

June 19, 2011 at 2:00pm

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Mead undermines his credibility with his ignorant and pointless jibe about health care in the middle of a piece essentially about foreign policy. Mead is a classic example of someone who brings a kind of "functionalist" understanding to more complex matters than his equipment can deal with. VD Hanson is a nastier version of this, but Mead is so irritating because you know he knows the issues are more complicated and difficult to evaluate, but somehow he can't integrate that into his thinking. It's like some guy arguing for the flat tax. I don't say that he's stupid or anything like it, because it seems to me he chooses this perspective, rather than being the victim of some inadequacy.

- ironyroad

June 19, 2011 at 5:13pm

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“And I concede to you the right to reciprocate in kind as regards to myself. OK?” Ok what? Anyone who asks for proof is belligerent in your eyes. I expected nothing less from you. You hardly ever go beyond offering an opinion. No, I don’t want to respond in kind, btw. You don’t matter to me. Whatever you say is motivated by your private passions and much of it is demonstrably false. Anyone who thinks that Obama has “abandoned” Israel doesn’t know what he is talking about. There have been leaders who have abandoned countries they pledged to work with and support. There is a way of verifying such a proposition. And nothing I have read here or anywhere has shown that Obama has done so. I don’t agree with all his policies foreign or domestic but he is no de Gaulle a leader who did abandon Israel in its hour of greatest need. Those who accuse Obama of being anti-Zionist or antisemitic are insane.

- arnon

June 19, 2011 at 5:50pm

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“Mead is a classic example of someone who brings a kind of "functionalist" understanding to more complex matters than his equipment can deal with. VD Hanson is a nastier version of this,” How is this book by Hanson a “nastier version” of Mead’s article? http://www.amazon.com/War-Like-Other-Athenians-Peloponnesian/dp/1400060958 Hanson is a classic scholar who has done terrific work on ancient Greek culture. I haven’t read Mead’s article above and I have no idea what you mean by his bringing a ‘functionalist understanding” “more complex matters?” Can you explain?

- arnon

June 19, 2011 at 6:14pm

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"Anyone who thinks that Obama has “abandoned” Israel " "Those who accuse Obama of being anti-Zionist or antisemitic are insane." I wonder, since arnon's comment starts by quoting a statement I made, whether the above two statements are also attributed to me, and if so, why? What I said was this: "hat the paradigm has shifted as regards Israel and Palestinians. And Obama is the greatest promulgator of this paradigm shift: it is now America for Palestine, wrong or wrong, never mind history, or Arab relentless violence against the Jewish state for the last nearly one hundred years." Only an insane person would translate being pro-Palestinian (even 100% so) as "anti Zionist" or "antisemitic". To be anti-Zionist is to work, inexorably and openly, towards the cancellation of the state of Israel. What is arnon's proof that I accused Obama of being anti-Zionist or antisemitic? At worst, perhaps, he could be labelled as "non-Zionist". But that has not yet manifested itself explicitly.

- noga1

June 19, 2011 at 6:20pm

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"I wonder, since arnon's comment starts by quoting a statement I made, whether the above two statements are also attributed to me, and if so, why?" This is a typical Noga rebuttal. Her post has no merit and is a simplistic exercise in "tu quoque." I said: "Anyone who thinks that Obama has “abandoned” Israel " And it means anyone, this would include me as well as Noga, if I had said such a thing. "Those who accuse Obama of being anti-Zionist or antisemitic are insane." This too is a general comment and could include Noga as well as me or anyone else.

- arnon

June 19, 2011 at 6:33pm

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Oh, so your statements were not meant to describe my position, as your imagination arranges it, eh arnon whoever? I wonder you bothered to make such silly declarations, then, since no one on this thread suggested that Obama was anti-Zionist or antisemitic. Except you, that is. Why fulminate about something that was not even alleged? What have you gained from it? How have you added to the discussion by making these baleful assertions? Silly person.

- noga1

June 19, 2011 at 8:56pm

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06/19/2011 - 9:53am EDT | noga1 "I don't think you understand, K2K, that the paradigm has shifted as regards Israel and Palestinians. And Obama is the greatest promulgator of this paradigm shift: it is now America for Palestine, wrong or wrong....." You are a mendacious little cuss, Noga.

- arnon

June 19, 2011 at 9:29pm

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"You are a mendacious little cuss, Noga." And you just proved that for all your intellectual pretensions, you are no more than a garden-variety bully, throwing badly aimed spitballs. And that's an understatement. You've got to do something about those tantrums, arnon.

- noga1

June 19, 2011 at 10:28pm

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Mendacious and a nut.

- arnon

June 19, 2011 at 11:48pm

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Sorry, I should have made it clear that I didn't mean Hanson's books -- in fact I admire A War Like Any Other -- but rather his punditry, op-eds and the like. What I mean is that I sense often a barely-disguised hatred for Obama in some of Hanson's commentaries.

- ironyroad

June 20, 2011 at 12:32am

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OK, Ironyroad.

- arnon

June 20, 2011 at 12:39am

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I didn't explain that "functionalist" remark but what I mean is a type of approach that begins with the assumption of one particular U.S. foreign policy goal (or set of goals) that apparently everyone agrees on (nobody could differ) and therefore it's only a matter of applying the correct tools to get there. Then you simply evaluate the president and/or administration on whether they did or didn't do so, and grade their end product. This approach simply cannot accept that there may be fuzzy or ambiguous objectives, that have some advantages for the U.S. but also some disadvantages, and that it can be difficult to always get it right; this approach also blanks out the reality that Americans may not even agree on such goals or, if they do, on how to reach them. I think Mead is sometimes guilty of just assuming that nobody could have any disagreement on these matters.

- ironyroad

June 20, 2011 at 1:09am

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06/19/2011 - 9:53am EDT | noga1 "I don't think you understand, K2K, that the paradigm has shifted as regards Israel and Palestinians. And Obama is the greatest promulgator of this paradigm shift: it is now America for Palestine, wrong or wrong....." Actually noga, I understood the paradigm shift in the Obama presidency when (March 2009) he had Hillary publicly try to humiliate Netanyahu over the announcement of future apartments in Ramat Shlomo, which I continue to describe as a neighborhood in NORTH Jerusalem that was, prior to 1967, a rocky hillside used for arab goat grazing. I knew (March-June 2008) Obama the candidate was pro-palestinian because of what was going on inside his official campaign website. While I do not necessarily believe Obama's position was fixed over dinners with Khalidi and Rev Wright etc, I DO believe his policy, as president, towards Israel is based on 1) underlying dream of Livni instead of Netanyahu because Obama really feels insecure in the presence of Netanyahu and foolishly ignores the real changes in Israel's demographics and attitude since the pullout from Gaza, 2) incredible pressure from the Saudis and now King Abdullah of Jordan (was just reading http://www.hudson-ny.org/2209/jordan-bedouin how the bedouin of Jordan are squeezing him to strip the majority palestinians of their Jordanian citizenship), and 3) the foolish belief that 78% of American Jewish voters actually voted for him, based on that snapshot of an exit poll. Guess he was never shown the actual voting results in Rockland and Nassau Counties of New York, where McCain won. Even the die-hard Dem liberal Jews that I know privately tell me they just did not cast a vote for president, while voting in the down-ticket contests. If my health was not failing, and I was not quagmired in the real estate catastrophe, I would be making aliyah to Ariel or a settlement on the Golan (I am extremely heat intolerant and need a cold climate), and polishing my Glock. While I consider Obama's I-P policies his greatest failure, I have never seen him as qualified for the presidency, have known his disinterest in the domestic economy since March 2008, think the Dems really blew their majorities on a badly mangled health insurance "reform", and see no leadership from Obama on anything of consequence while the Democratic Party purges all of their fiscal conservatives, and descends into a caricature of hyper-partisan identity politics. His presidency has been an eye-opener as to what happens when a post-modern transnational multiculturalist sits in the Oval Office. Before 2008, I never had Israel as a top-five issue when casting my vote for the president or members of congress. The die-hards like irony will always think any Dem is great, or blame those of us who criticize him as racist. Guess Mr. Mead is lucky to be labelled "functionalist" I cann not explain arnon except to suggest that he start reading the WSJ as often as he reads the NYT.

- K2K

June 20, 2011 at 10:19am

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apologies to Dow Jones if copying this is copyright infringement, but maybe Galston will read this from today's WSJ: JUNE 20, 2011.What If Jews Had Followed the Palestinian Path? Postwar Jewish refugees left everything they had in Europe—no 'right of return' requested.. By WARREN KOZAK "It is doubtful that there has ever been a more miserable human refuse than Jewish survivors after World War II. Starving, emaciated, stateless—they were not welcomed back by countries where they had lived for generations as assimilated and educated citizens. Germany was no place to return to and in Kielce, Poland, 40 Jews who survived the Holocaust were killed in a pogrom one year after the war ended. The European Jew, circa 1945, quickly went from victim to international refugee disaster. Yet within a very brief time, this epic calamity disappeared, so much so that few people today even remember the period. How did this happen in an era when Palestinian refugees have continued to be stateless for generations? In 1945, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors living in DP Camps (displaced persons) across Europe. They were fed and clothed by Jewish and international relief organizations. Had the world's Jewish population played this situation as the Arabs and Palestinians have, everything would look very different today. To begin with, the Jews would all still be living in these DP camps, only now the camps would have become squalid ghettos throughout Europe. The refugees would continue to be fed and clothed by a committee similar to UNRWA—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (paid for mostly by the United States since 1948). Blessed with one of the world's highest birth rates, they would now number in the many millions. And 66 years later, new generations, fed on a mixture of hate and lies against the Europeans, would now seethe with anger. Sometime in the early 1960s, the Jewish leadership of these refugee camps, having been trained in Moscow to wreak havoc on the West (as Yasser Arafat was) would have started to employ terrorism to shake down governments. Airplane hijackings in the 1970s would have been followed by passenger killings. There would have been attacks on high-profile targets as well—say, the German or Polish Olympic teams. By the 1990s, the real mayhem would have begun. Raised on victimhood and used as cannon fodder by corrupt leaders, a generation of younger Jews would be blowing up buses, restaurants and themselves. The billions of dollars extorted from various governments would not have gone to the inhabitants of the camps. The money would be in the Swiss bank accounts of the refugees' famous and flamboyant leaders and their lackies. So now it's the present, generations past the end of World War II, and the festering Jewish refugee problem throughout Europe has absolutely no end in sight. The worst part of this story would be the wasted lives of millions of human beings in the camps—inventions not invented, illnesses not cured, high-tech startups not started up, symphonies and books not written—a real cultural and spiritual desert. None of this happened, of course. Instead, the Jewish refugees returned to their ancestral homeland. They left everything they had in Europe and turned their backs on the Continent—no "right of return" requested. They were welcomed by the 650,000 Jewish residents of Israel. An additional 700,000 Jewish refugees flooded into the new state from Arab lands after they were summarily kicked out. Again losing everything after generations in one place; again welcomed in their new home. In Israel, they did it all the hard way. They built a new country from scratch with roads, housing and schools. They created agricultural collectives to feed their people. They created a successful economy without domestic oil, and they built one of the world's most vibrant democracies in a region sadly devoid of free thought. Yes, the Israelis did all this with the financial assistance of Jews around the world and others who helped get them on their feet so they could take care of themselves. These outsiders did not ignore them, or demean them, or use them as pawns in their own political schemes—as the Arab nations have done with the Palestinians. I imagine the argument will be made that while the Jews may have achieved all this, they did not have their land stolen from them. This is, of course, a canard, another convenient lie. They did lose property all over Europe and the Mideast. And there was never an independent Palestine run by Palestinian Arabs. Ever. Jews and Arabs lived in this area controlled first by the Turks and then by the British. The U.N. offered the two-state solution that we hear so much about in 1947. The problem then, and now, is that it was accepted by only one party, Israel. No doubt, the situation of Arab residents of the Middle East back then may have been difficult, but it is incomprehensible that their lot was worse than that of the Jews at the end of World War II. We don't hear about any of this because giving human beings hope and purpose doesn't make great copy. Squalor, victimhood and terror are always more exciting. Perhaps in the end, the greatest crime of the Jews was that they quietly created something from nothing. And in the process, they transformed themselves. Golda Meir is credited with having said that if the Jews had not fought back against the Arab armies and had been destroyed in 1948, they would have received the most beautiful eulogies throughout the world. Instead, they chose to stand their ground and defend themselves. And in winning, they received the world's condemnation. Meir said she would take the condemnation over the eulogies." Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009). > http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304432304576371771855162448.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t [irony: save the criticisms based on Kozak being published by Regnery Press - I will not respond to you]

- K2K

June 20, 2011 at 10:26am

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I wouldn't expect the kind of complexity from a politically driven article that you might get from a long study. WRM has written more complex articles and books. For example: "Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World" http://www.amazon.com/Special-Providence-American-Foreign-Changed/dp/0415935369 Still, it seems strange that you would expect "fuzzy or ambiguous objectives" in an article assessing Obama's performance. Here is Mead in the essay you found insufficiently complex and too "functional" "But the President has failed to meld that image and the symbolic weight of his office to a compelling policy vision. He takes strong individual stands — from support for health care reform to the bombing of Libya — but between the moves and the counter moves, the rhetorical claims and the policy reversals, the President’s image has become fuzzy and perplexing. Did he abandon the concept of stimulus and cast himself as a deficit cutter because he believes it, or was the shift a tactical calculation? What does he really believe will get the economy going again? In particular, he has said nothing memorable about the crisis that is shaking the global economy and undermining the American middle class. The meltdown of the blue social model is the great and inescapable fact of our time. In what many voters will feel as a sign of financial apocalypse, the AARP has dropped its opposition to cuts in Social Security benefits. At home, Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Jerry Brown are slashing budgets and attacking the perks of public sector labor unions almost as industriously as Republicans like Scott Walker and Mitch Daniels. Abroad, Socialists like Greek Premier George Papandreou is cutting as hard as the Conservative David Cameron. Germany has passed a balanced budget amendment; France is debating its own version. Economic turmoil is shaking the political foundations; rising food prices helped set off the Arab Spring, the price of gold has gone through the roof, and China and other foreign creditors are increasingly skeptical about the long term value of their dollar-backed assets." To me what stands out is a lack of originality his his critique. Others have said similar things. Moreover, his claim about the AARP are not accurate. There was an article in the NY Times claiming that they dropped their opposition to cuts in programs. The AARP has since denied that they did so. In any case, Mead is writing about ongoing an changing events and the weakness of his article as I see it is that it's too early to assess Obama's performance in office from a dispassionate and neutral point of view though I don't disagree that Obama has articulated yet a clear vision, either foreign or domestic, that drives his policies. He reminds me of Bush the elder who also had a problem with "the vision thing."

- arnon

June 20, 2011 at 10:28am

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"I cann not explain arnon except to suggest that he start reading the WSJ as often as he reads the NYT." I read the WSJ just as often, K. This is good for a laugh, K: " I DO believe his policy, as president, towards Israel is based on 1) underlying dream of Livni instead of Netanyahu because Obama really feels insecure in the presence of Netanyahu and foolishly ignores the real changes in Israel's demographics and attitude since the pullout from Gaza,..." What a far reaching and psychologically astute critique, K. O "feels" insecure in the presence of N. Why didn't I think of that.

- arnon

June 20, 2011 at 10:38am

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K2K: I don't think we need to resort to psychological reasonings to understand Obama's pro-Palestinian inclinations, even if there is some merit in what you claim (I've read a few pundits suggesting the same, so yours is not as far-fetched a critique as arnon whatsis would like it to be. Netanyahu has gained himself the respect of global economic experts for the way he extricated Israel's economy from recession during his service as Israel's Finance minister, as much as his heavy-handed policies at the time made him thoroughly unpopular with the Israelis). In my view, Obama's intimate dinners with Mona and Rashid Khalidi provide a sound enough explanation as to where he got his education and primary assumptions about the I/P conflict. And it's not just Khalidi but the milieu, such as Edward Said, Abunimah, and a few others. My favourite Arab blogger, the chronically angry prof. As'ad AbuKhalil, mentions Obama and Khalidi in one of his posts: http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2008/12/rashid-khalidi-talks-togizelle-khuri.html "Rashid spoke about Obama: said that he was ambitious from early on and thus would not commit himself to controversial positions even in private, but that he would listen. He said that Obama is very knowledgeable about the world. He said something that I don't read in the press here: that the biggest influence on him is Michele Obama, whose influence is underestimated here in the US. He said that he would not want to discuss whether he heard from Obama (regarding the campaign of villification against Rashid) but that he "heard" that he was upset with the negative campaign against Rashid. (My interpretation: Obama never called him to apologize and never communicated with him, but would do so not one day before he leaves office). Rashid at one point slipped--perhaps--and refferred to Bill Ayers as "mutual friend" with Obama. " As I read this report (with all allowances made for the usual hyperbolic hatefulness of the author), I found that my initial thoughts about Obama were not denied but rather confirmed.

- noga1

June 20, 2011 at 12:02pm

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K2K: "[irony: save the criticisms based on Kozak being published by Regnery Press - I will not respond to you]" ?????? Certainly. I had no intention of responding to you anyway, but I always appreciate an extra nudge. :)

- ironyroad

June 20, 2011 at 2:39pm

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What's the problem with "Regnery Press"?? Is it affiliated with Der Sturmer?

- noga1

June 20, 2011 at 4:48pm

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Ben Smith is certainly no Democrat: "Official: Good turnout for pro-Israel fundraiser" "President Obama is headed tonight to a top-dollar fundraiser aimed at the Jewish community, and despite recent angst over Israel, the mega-donors seem to be coming through for the dinner whose official theme is "in support of a strong US-Israel Relationship." http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0611/Official_Good_turnout_for_proIsrael_fundraiser.html# A Democratic Party official said 80 people are expected at the dinner, for which tickets range from $25,000 to $38,500 $35,800. The official said the event is 50% "over goal." DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will aslo appear at the event at the Mandarin Oriental in Washington, D.C."

- arnon

June 20, 2011 at 7:35pm

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"The Audacity of Hope" getting ready to sail. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/144733 "Khalidi wrote in an e-mail over the weekend that while he had not known that Obama’s book would be the inspiration for the ship’s name when he signed on as a sponsor, he does not view it as a potential embarrassment for Obama. “If the name is a problem for the administration it can simply insist publicly that Israel lift the siege: end of problem, end of embarrassment,” Khalidi wrote in the e-mail . “That of course would require it to respond to the systematic mendacity of those in Congress and elsewhere who support the siege, and indeed whatever else the Israeli government does,” Khalidi said." ________________ "The U.S. branch of the flotilla project is endorsed by several Obama associates, including Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, who reported helped raise $370,000 to finance the purchase of a U.S. ship for the cause. WND was the first to report on Obama's close relationship with Khalidi, who has been tied to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and who has described Israel as a "racist" state with an "apartheid" system." Read more: Gaza flotilla 'emboldened' by Obama's Mideast speech http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=305213#ixzz1PrcO672a Such are the views and actions of the man whose conversations inform Obama's understanding of Israel.

- noga1

June 20, 2011 at 8:00pm

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noga: ok, no more psycho-babble, but my observation is that there is a genuine physical discomfort when Obama has to be next to Netanyahu (which I attribute in part to Netanyahu's military service). Watching Obama's body language with other world leaders is very interesting. As to Debbie's DC fundraiser? Well, that about covers part of what the DNC and Obama have lost from Saban. Interesting that only the US, and EU are still in the Gaza flotilla (lost track of Canada), and Turkey's IHH pulled out. The USS George H W Bush carrier group is somewhere near Naples, Italy. Read somewhere that there are more naval warships and their support ships in the Med at any time since WW2, so I would not want to be on a small ship headed for Gaza :) Regnery Press publishes only conservative writers.

- K2K

June 20, 2011 at 8:41pm

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"my observation is that there is a genuine physical discomfort when Obama has to be next to Netanyahu (which I attribute in part to Netanyahu's military service). Watching Obama's body language with other world leaders is very interesting." Laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair. Yes, Obama is obviously a physical coward in thrall to Benny boy's military experience. It would have nothing to do with current Israeli policy, or N's total lack of respect on oh-so-many fronts. No, it's Ben's famous heroics. Oh, wait, that was his brother.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 20, 2011 at 9:07pm

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"there is a genuine physical discomfort when Obama has to be next to Netanyahu " When I sit next to a person I dislike profoundly but still have to maintain some semblance of civility, I assume I exude some kind of physical discomfort. In Obama's case, it has more to do with what he has been taught to think and feel with regard to Bibi Netanyahu, the Likud, Israel's occupation, etc., the kind of contempt and condescension a sample of which can be glimpsed in MollySimon's comment. I doubt Obama is even remotely aware of Netanyahu's military record, or his bother's sacrifice in Entebbe, or his father's awesome scholarship on the history of the Jewish people. I get the impression that he is very incurious about such subjects.

- noga1

June 20, 2011 at 9:32pm

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""The Audacity of Hope" getting ready to sail." All this shows is that the Pals are desperately trying to enlist Obama to their cause. The Tea party would be more successful in getting his help then these Pals. On the other hand the Obama haters will use any ridiculous news item to smear him.

- arnon

June 20, 2011 at 9:33pm

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Noga, notice how K2K ignores your question about Regnery that was triggered by K2K's own post? The answer is, of course, no, no affiliation with Der Sturmer. Smiles of relief all around. But having assumed that I would raise some issue (what, I don't know), and being disappointed, K2K is left with the collapsing soufflé of his/her own silly assumptions.

- ironyroad

June 20, 2011 at 9:39pm

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Here is the story from the non Democrat Ben Smith: "The good ship Audacity sails for Gaza This should cement the high regard in which Obama is held in Israel: 'A group of Americans hopes to break Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip in the coming days when it joins a flotilla of ships sailing with aid to the Palestinian territory. Nearly half of the 36 Americans who'll sail on the U.S. flagged boat "The Audacity of Hope" attended a Monday news conference announcing they're flying later in the day to Athens to prepare for the journey.' That the kind of activists who set sail for Gaza typically consider Obama a hopeless AIPAC sellout doesn't help matters all that much." http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0611/The_good_ship_Audacity_sails_for_Gaza.html I'd like to know what Smith is referring to here: "That the kind of activists who set sail for Gaza typically consider Obama a hopeless AIPAC sellout doesn't help matters all that much." Doesn't help whom, the idiots sailing the ship, or Obama?

- arnon

June 20, 2011 at 9:48pm

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"Noga, notice how K2K ignores your question about Regnery that was triggered by K2K's own post?" K2K answered my question: "Regnery Press publishes only conservative writers." I believe K was actually correct to assume you might find something distasteful about the source being of the conservative kind. I remember how dismissive you were about Pajamas Media which you described as a conservative source. Mind you, I would be equally dismissive of a source that can be traced back to "counterpunch", or the Guardian's "comment is free" for example. I don't know anything about "Regnery" and I can't be sure I'm not slandering it by analogizing it to Counterpunch or CiF..

- noga1

June 20, 2011 at 9:57pm

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You think that's an answer? -- you think that K2K's attempt to twist me into in an entirely invented argument which I neither accepted nor entered is ok? -- you believe that I am against conservative writers or publishers merely because they are conservative? -- you think that I confuse taste with analysis? Maybe you do. So let me be direct: K2K, you are a smart person but you run the danger of looking like a blowhard and an evasive coward because you attack people without grounds. You assumed that I would have something negative to say about Regnery without the slightest basis in fact. Your assumption was wrong, and (so far) you wouldn't even address your mistake. Stop making assumptions, is my advice to you. Especially about me.

- ironyroad

June 20, 2011 at 10:06pm

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since Galston joins in the Netanyahu-bashing that is so personal, it is worth wondering why Galston "the vital center" joins the left on this one activity. noga: I have been very ill since December and find myself killing time by watching certain movies and tv, very skewed to military. Just watched "A Few Good Men" twice in the last week. Aaron Sorkin screenplay from 1992. There is one exchange that made me think of the difference in worldviews between Obama and Netanyahu. Two of the defense JAG lawyers about the two young Marines on trial: "...Galloway(played by Demi Moore): Why do you hate them so much? Lt. Weinberg (played by Kevin Pollak): They beat up on a weakling, and that's all they did. The rest is just smoke-filled coffee-house crap. They tortured and tormented a weaker kid. They didn't like him. So? They killed him. And why? Because he couldn't run very fast! [pause] Lt. Weinberg: Why do you like them so much? Galloway: Because they stand upon a wall and say, "Nothing's going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch." " http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/quotes ok irony, whatever you want. no more pre-emptive strikes :) must be memories of other threads where you pick one point to argue and bulldog same point to exhaustion. and, no need for you to personally attack me - we already know that I confound you by not following any ideology, irritate you by openly criticizing Obama on both domestic and foreign policy, and find your bulldogging of no interest. Bulldogging means 'biting and not letting go' BTW, the first time I encountered Regnery Press was when I was writing a paper on the Coolidge Presidency in 2004 (grad class on History of the Presidency and I wanted an excuse to visit the Pioneer Valley where his library is a single room in Northampton's Forbes Library. In 2004, one of the few Coolidge biographies was published by Regnery. At the time, I had never heard of them, so I checked their 'pedigree', which then made me very cautious in how I viewed that source. But, I would not put Regnery in the same universe as the always doctrinaire, frequently libelous, counterpunch.

- K2K

June 21, 2011 at 8:02am

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Go Navy! I am so glad the Truxtun crew got to visit Jerusalem. http://navaltoday.com/2011/06/20/guided-missile-destroyer-uss-truxtun-departs-haifa-israel/ "Guided-missile destroyer USS Truxtun (DDG 103) [with 96 Tomahawk-class missiles - watch out Syria!] departed Haifa, Israel, after a successful port visit, June 16.[2011] The two-day port visit gave Sailors an opportunity to enjoy liberty while learning about the culture and its various traditions within the region. “Haifa has enjoyed many years of successful visits by ships from the U.S. Navy,” said Cmdr. John H. Ferguson, USS Truxtun commanding officer. “It is a fantastic port for us to visit, and I think it will enjoy many future visits by U.S. ships.” During the visit Ferguson had the opportunity to speak with Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav, who welcomed Truxtun to the city and expressed his thanks for visiting Haifa. Sailors also had the opportunity to explore Israel’s historical background during visits to the West Wall, Temple Mount and various places of historical religion, as part of a tour provided by the ship’s Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) program. “Just going to Jerusalem was phenomenal for me,” said Yeoman Seaman Recruit Jonah Al Calimee. “You read about all the places, but you never imagine yourself being there and the Navy made that possible for me.” “I think this visit was unmatched in its ability to expose the crew to a very rich history,” said Ferguson. “Most of the crew took the opportunity to visit as much of Haifa and surrounding Israel as they could.” Truxtun is deployed as part of the George H.W. Bush Strike Group, comprised of Carrier Strike Group 2 staff, Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 8, Destroyer Squadron 22 staff, USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), guided-missile cruisers USS Gettysburg (CG 64) and USS Anzio (CG 68), and guided-missile destroyers Truxtun and USS Mitscher (DDG 57)."

- K2K

June 21, 2011 at 9:58am

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Yes, K2K, but your example is also a good illustration of how Obama regards Israel (beating up on a weakling), a view he got, I repeat with utter conviction, from his buddy Rashid Khalidi. The Arabs are incapable of seeing that Israel is the 6 milllion Jews standing, literally, on a wall, warding off the millennial hatred and revengism of 400 million Arabs supported by 1.4 Billion Muslims. Perhaps Obama has a faint clue about the real situation but it is so faint that you may very well never glimpse it. I'm sorry to hear that you are so sick. I can't offer prayers but I can send you my bestest vibes:) Here is something to amuse and delight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW62iIgdgp0 It's in Hebrew. Can you guess what it is?

- noga1

June 21, 2011 at 11:17am

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To people like K2K any criticism of Netanyahu amounts to a personal attack. More reasonable readers of Galston's column will find in it a critique of Obama's diplomatic style as well as the Palestinian reaction. "Each time the administration enunciates more “even-handed” policies, the Palestinians adopt them as preconditions for renewed talks while the Israelis dig in their heels. I would have thought that the art of diplomacy is not to say what you think to be true, but rather to use all instruments of national power, including verbal evasion, to get the parties themselves to act in accordance with that truth. Speeches can be tools of diplomacy; they are not substitutes for it. The administration is running out of time—may already have run out of time—to get it right."

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 11:23am

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Ok, K2K, but you went for me first, pre-emptively as you say. Do you confound me? No, sometimes I agree with you and generally I defer to you on matters naval. However, I regard myself also, as far as it goes, as not following any ideology, if by ideology you mean rigid and dogmatic categorizing of the world (while realizing, too, that the completely value-free thinking person is a beast that can't exist). Like you, Noga, and everyone I have some notions/tastes that come into play even when I'm trying to be objective, which may render such objectivity less than obvious to others. I suppose the bulldog element is there -- but I'm also very generous when it comes to the re-set button and reaching a new understanding with people if they are prepared to take steps too.

- ironyroad

June 21, 2011 at 1:52pm

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"To people like K2K " And what kind of people are those, arnon? Not like you, I presume, you being such an open-minded, objective, thoughtful, gracious, elegant, infallible, knowledgeable, civil participant in the discussion, eh?

- noga1

June 21, 2011 at 2:50pm

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http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/21/obama-jewish-donors-weaken-u-s-israeli-alliance-but-only-a-little/ "Marilyn Victor, a supporter at the fundraiser, characterized the attitude of Jewish donors thusly: “We support you, but we’re a little insecure, so make us secure.” “We were very reassured,” said Randi Levine, who attended with her husband, Jeffrey, a real estate developer in New York City."

- noga1

June 21, 2011 at 3:39pm

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Noga :"And what kind of people are those, arnon?" Another self righteous post by Noga. It's people like you, as if you didn't know. People who are reflexively anti-Obama and treat hims as a kind of Amalekite. All because the pro Republican Commentary magazine tells them so. The same people who supported Bush in Iraq and supported calls for democratization in the Mid East. Now that it's happening they ar aghast and blame Obama for bringing it about. Many of them have no idea what they are doing. They don't seem to see that a Republican party dominated by Tea party types and Libertarians will not support Israel in any meaningful way.

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 4:54pm

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"People who are reflexively anti-Obama and treat hims as a kind of Amalekite." "Amalekite" ?? Oooh. And where did you get this kind of "Knowledge"? @Rense? I have not yet come across a more antisemitic comment than this on these boards. Next you'll be quoting from the Hamas Charter about Israel's ambitions to extend from the Nile to the Euphrates..

- noga1

June 21, 2011 at 5:00pm

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noga1, as I said above you are a paranoid nut case. An example of a Noga's reflexive anti Obama comment: noga1 "Yes, K2K, but your example is also a good illustration of how Obama regards Israel (beating up on a weakling), a view he got, I repeat with utter conviction, from his buddy Rashid Khalidi." Now, how is Obama "beating up on a weakling? Never mind.

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 5:24pm

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How did Bush help Israel? By forcing it to withdraw from Gaza? By arranging for "free elections" that brought Hamas to power? If Noga is pro Israel god help the Jewish State.

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 5:26pm

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Noga's intemperate and crazy comments reminds me of a comment on the Forward website to an article by Deborah Lipstadt on the regrettable Yale decision to cancel a popular Center for the study of antisemitism. http://forward.com/articles/138715/ She both regretted and supported the decision calling for another more rigorous program to take its place. Yale did agree to this. http://www.forward.com/articles/138894/ Now there are good arguments on both sides of the issue: http://forward.com/articles/138910/ But this was not enough for some posters there who called Deborah "an antisemite." This is as ridiculous as calling the Martin Luther King an anti-Black racist. Anyone who knows anything about Deborah Lipstadt would know this to be the case, but there are some people out there who just can't tolerate opposing view points. Same is true here with people like Noga. (No I don't wish at this point to include K2K since while ai disagree with some of her opinions (her attacks on Obama for example) she doesn't strike me as being as nutty as Noga.)

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 5:46pm

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Half my post was lost and I don't feel at this point like reconstructing it.

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 5:47pm

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Well here is the other post countering Lipstadt: http://forward.com/articles/138910/ Ben Cohen was also attacked by pro Palestinian posters. Now, while they are wrong it wasn't unexpected given their own biases. But, calling Deborah an antisemite is as ridiculous as calling Martin Luther King an anti-Black racist. For those who don't know who Ms. Lipstadt is here is a link to her work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Lipstadt

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 5:57pm

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Yeah, Arnon, no more references to Amalekite. Because, you know, someone here (God knows who) may not get it. Damn you and your elitism. Actually, Noga, it's Netenyahu who refers to his enemies as Amalek. Reported as such somewhere in the New Yorker, I believe, but perhaps elsewhere. I just love Noga's idea that Obama doesn't think for himself--that this "naif" graduate of Columbia and Harvard is under the influence of some Arab puppeteer. Or other such "teachers." What's so funny is how much this thinking mirrors the anti-Semitic trope of Jews and their puppet strings. Yeah, Noga, you "exude" alright.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 21, 2011 at 7:35pm

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What's even funnier is that Noga and her ilk think of themselves as free thinkers and those who reject reflexive condemnation of Obama as puppets. However, if you take an even cursory look you will see that Noga and her ilk are not original at all and where they seem original they are invent incidents and comments to support their position. They also follow orders from blogs in places like Commentary as Noga does. Here is another article from Commentary that only a brain dead idiot could take seriously: “Obama to Jewish Donors: I’m Going to Weaken U.S.-Israeli Alliance, But Only a Little” by Omri Ceren http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/21/obama-jewish-donors-weaken-u-s-israeli-alliance-but-only-a-little/ I defy anyone to show were Obama said that he intends to “weaken the US-Israeli” alliance. The closest the author pretends that he implied it is in this quote: “Marilyn Victor, a supporter at the fundraiser, characterized the attitude of Jewish donors thusly: “We support you, but we’re a little insecure, so make us secure.” “We were very reassured,” said Randi Levine, who attended with her husband, Jeffrey, a real estate developer in New York City.” The rest of the article goes off on a tangent and doesn’t even deal with the announced topic. This is the type of garbage you get from Commentary blogs. (Some of their magazine article are better. I like some of their reviewers.) Notice how this author goes on to say that: “Also, dwelling on Jewish politics might distract from the sheer geopolitical incoherence of Obama’s continued efforts to detonate the U.S.-Israeli alliance.” But here again does he offer some proof that Obama is aiming to detonate the US Israel alliance? Nope. Then he goes on : “Now it’s worth noting the President did promise never to fully break the alliance, limiting himself to predicting there would be tension if the Israelis didn’t accept the parameters of his goalpost-moving, agreement-abrogating, security-undermining Winds of Change speech. So everybody keep that in mind. No breaking. Just weakening. Weakening with absolutely no hope of a payoff when we’re down to one stable ally in the Middle East – but just weakening.” This article is both incoherent a pure fabrication. It is meant to appeal to the in crowd: those Jews who will vote Republican no matter what. What have the Republican done for Israel? They brought “democracy” to the Middle East, they generated the so called Arab Spring (which, btw, will never arrive.) It is their policies of bringing “freedom to the oppressed Arab masses” in Iraq and elsewhere. I feel sorry for anyone who accepts this cynical garbage.

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 8:16pm

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Again, I lost half my post. Here it is: I defy anyone to show were Obama said that he intends to “weaken the US-Israeli” alliance. The closest the author pretends that he implied it is in this quote: “Marilyn Victor, a supporter at the fundraiser, characterized the attitude of Jewish donors thusly: “We support you, but we’re a little insecure, so make us secure.” “We were very reassured,” said Randi Levine, who attended with her husband, Jeffrey, a real estate developer in New York City.” The rest of the article goes off on a tangent and doesn’t even deal with the announced topic. This is the type of garbage you get from Commentary blogs. (Some of their magazine article are better. I like some of their reviewers.) Notice how this author goes on to say that: “Also, dwelling on Jewish politics might distract from the sheer geopolitical incoherence of Obama’s continued efforts to detonate the U.S.-Israeli alliance.” But here again does he offer some proof that Obama is aiming to detonate the US Israel alliance? Nope. Then he goes on : “Now it’s worth noting the President did promise never to fully break the alliance, limiting himself to predicting there would be tension if the Israelis didn’t accept the parameters of his goalpost-moving, agreement-abrogating, security-undermining Winds of Change speech. So everybody keep that in mind. No breaking. Just weakening. Weakening with absolutely no hope of a payoff when we’re down to one stable ally in the Middle East – but just weakening.” This article is both incoherent a pure fabrication. It is meant to appeal to the in crowd: those Jews who will vote Republican no matter what. What have the Republican done for Israel? They brought “democracy” to the Middle East, they generated the so called Arab Spring (which, btw, will never arrive.) It is their policies of bringing “freedom to the oppressed Arab masses” in Iraq and elsewhere. I feel sorry for anyone who accepts this cynical garbage.

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 8:18pm

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Yeah, I looked at that article and thought the same thing. He had the headline but no article. To go off on a tangent, speaking of the metaphor "Arab spring," it seems like whatever spring there was has turned into what we here in Los Angeles know as "June gloom." Basically the month that should be the advent of summer is notoriously dreary and overcast in southern California. Perfect metaphor for the current situation, I think.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 21, 2011 at 8:58pm

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"Basically the month that should be the advent of summer is notoriously dreary and overcast in southern California. Perfect metaphor for the current situation, I think." Perfect, but without the bullets.

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 9:21pm

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"noga1 "Yes, K2K, but your example is also a good illustration of how Obama regards Israel (beating up on a weakling), a view he got, I repeat with utter conviction, from his buddy Rashid Khalidi." Now, how is Obama "beating up on a weakling? Never mind." arnon: Let me re-write it for you the better to comprehend: "... but your example is also a good illustration of how Obama regards Israel ( as beating up on a weakling), a view he got, I repeat with utter conviction, from his buddy Rashid Khalidi." Israel is not a weakling. Israel knows what it is doing and only someone who can speak in terms of Amalekites would have us believe Israelis needs to suck up and cringe to Obama's strange notions of peace-making in order to maintain its security and prosperity. Talking of paranoids and what not: "Israel faces similar challenges across the spectrum—Iran’s nuclear program, Hezbollah and Hamas rockets, neighboring regimes falling, flotillas, protesters willing to die, international pressure, and terrorism, to name a few. Outnumbered by hostile forces, both on the ground and in the international community, Israel is further restricted by an ethical code that limits its responses to enemies for whom all Israelis are legitimate targets. Somehow, Israel usually manages to find a balance, striking a blow to its adversaries while remaining within the bounds of military and Jewish ethics. This is no easy feat. Though its responses often seem haphazard and excessively violent, the long view indicates that Israel’s mix of diplomacy, deterrence, and force keeps its citizens safe and minimizes extended bloodshed. In a reality in which there are often no good options, Israel just might know what it’s doing."

- noga1

June 21, 2011 at 10:44pm

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What an idiotic reply. "arnon: Let me re-write it for you the better to comprehend: '... but your example is also a good illustration of how Obama regards Israel ( as beating up on a weakling), a view he got, I repeat with utter conviction, from his buddy Rashid Khalidi.'" Any proof that Khalidi influenced Obama's views on Israel?

- arnon

June 21, 2011 at 10:50pm

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She doesn't need proof. She's noga. She can smear with impunity, but God forbid anybody else try that. She'll sniff out a smear wherever it's not. Thank the lord she doesn't work for Kennedy's K-9 unit.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 22, 2011 at 1:09am

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You want Amalek, here's Amalek, straight from Netanyahu's assho--I mean, mouth: "KRAKOW - 'A new Amalek is appearing and once again threatening to annihilate the Jews,' Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned Wednesday, in a speech at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day." This is from a January 2010 Jerusalem Post article. Noga, June 21st, 2011, " . . . and only someone who can speak in terms of Amalekites would have us believe Israelis needs to suck up and cringe to Obama's strange notions of peace-making in order to maintain its security and prosperity. Talking of paranoids and what not . . . . " Yes, talking of paranoids and whatnots.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 22, 2011 at 1:30am

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Galston blames the impasse in I-P "peace" mostly on Netanyahu, and also on Obama. Why does he totally ignore the Fatah-Hamas unity (still stalled) pact and Hamas rejecting Fayyad? WHO is Netanyahu actually supposed to be in direct negotiations with? I expected more balance from Galston, whose blog is titled "The Vital Center" Some of us read Commentary's blog (I started in 2008) solely to get relief from the anti-Israel bias in so much of the western media, not because we buy into their knee-jerk GOP support. It would be too much for our critics to assume a few of us can sift through fact, opinion, and bias from any source. BTW, the NYT and CNN are boarding one of the Gaza flotilla ships, to provide live coverage. CNN is increasingly irresponsible in the way they cover international news, so I am hoping the Casey Anthony trial is still on during the flotilla. Or Turkey triggers a NATO war on Syria (read the NATO charter - if Turkey decides to retake Hatay province to provide a 'safe zone' and Syria attacks, then NATO, as a mutual defense treaty, comes to Turkey's side. Which is why the USS Truxton's shore leave in Haifa is so significant. ) based on the Netanyahu-bashing that prevails in America's center-to-left media, it almost seems to me that Bibi has become a surrogate for BushDerangementSyndrome. noga: thanks for your kind thoughts, alas, I am stuck (real estate and bad health stuck) in the black hole of Western Masachusetts where we still do not have cell phone coverage or DSL, although the landscape IS breathtaking. so, I have never seen anything on Youtube.

- K2K

June 22, 2011 at 9:32am

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M. S. Jews do have enemies who would like to destroy them, Ahmadinejad, for example. This is why it's so disgusting to treat Obama as if he were an enemy.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 9:35am

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/the-obama-administrations-incoherence-on-hamas/2011/03/29/AGZ9t4eH_blog.html?wprss=right-turn "So the Obama team is just going to pretend there is no unity government, invest Abbas with authority he does not possess and keep going? Or is this a “profound issue” that has to be resolved (kick Hamas out of the unity government or get Abbas’s partner to sign on to the Quartet principles) before we demand Israel sit down at the table? The answer to this question, unless the Obama team is contemplating a dramatic change in U.S. policy, should be simple: No negotiations until Abbas separates himself from the unity government or Hamas embraces the Quartet principles. And if the administration really wanted to score points with those who doubt it possesses minimal competence it would state the obvious: How can Israel sit down when we don’t even know the identity of the Palestinians’ representation? That liberal Jews can find “reassurance” in the sort of double talk voiced by “an senior administration official” should come as no surprise to those following the trajectory of this administration and its ability to mesmerize its Jewish supporters. As the Obama team becomes less cogent, its spinners touting Obama’s devotion to Israel become more frantic. You’d be too if you had to convert such gibberish into a reassuring message."

- noga1

June 22, 2011 at 12:08pm

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A MollySimon moment: "You want Amalek, here's Amalek, straight from Netanyahu's assho--I mean, mouth:" Poor Ahmadinejad, being called Amalek by that asshole, Netanyahu. As if wiping Israel off the map of the world is such a bad thing. As if Iran doesn't have the exact same right as Israel to develop nuclear weapons. Proof, that Israelis are paranoid and insanely biblical. Or whatever was her point. Perhaps arnon can explain it. I'm trying to reconcile Molly's Obamist frenzy with her more recent and much touted conversion into a believer in greater Israel, including the ethnic cleansing of all Israeli Arabs. I can't remember a more acute case of cognitive dissonance.

- noga1

June 22, 2011 at 12:18pm

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"including the ethnic cleansing . . . . " Yeah, right, "ethnic cleansing." Noga is all for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, until she can use it against someone else. Funny how it's never bothered her how many Palestinians are dislodged from their homes in East Jerusalem or the West Bank. But Noga is about scoring points, no matter how cheap the points are. And the idea that I think that Israel within the 67 borders would be better off without Arab Israelis can't be squared my admiration for Obama. Because anything outside of black and white would boggle a mind that is missing so many neural pathways. And I love how admiration turns into "Obamist frenzy." Smear away, little girl. I'm not sure you can help it. You really are a loathsome toad.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 22, 2011 at 12:32pm

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And of course Toad Girl turns Israel within its '67 borders into greater Israel. Sleazy, slimy Toad.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 22, 2011 at 12:36pm

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“That liberal Jews can find “reassurance” in the sort of double talk ……” There is no single ‘liberal” point of view (Jewish or non Jewish) as there is of conservative thought as we find it in Commentary, The National Review, or The weekly Standard.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 12:55pm

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Molly, don't let Noga goad you into views that you probably do not hold but articulate them to counter her argument. "Ethnic cleansing" is a loaded term and has its origin in the Bosnian conflict of the early 1990's. Other places where ethnic cleansing occurs such as the removal of Germans from Poland and other East European countries doesn't have the same value as it will later on in Bosnia. The same is true for other applications of the term. The PA jumped on it in order to claim that they too were the victims of ethnic cleansing. This is dubious for many reasons.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 1:03pm

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Jennifer Rubin in Noga's link used to write for for Commentary. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/author/jennifer-rubin/ Curiously the Washington Pos omits this fact form her bio: "Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective. She covers a range of domestic and foreign policy issues and provides insight into the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Rubin came to The Post after three years with Commentary magazine. Her work has appeared in a number of print and online publications, including The Weekly Standard, where she has been a frequent contributor. Prior to her career in journalism, Rubin practiced labor law for two decades. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and two sons."

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 1:08pm

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"Noga is all for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, " I'm sure you can provide SOME support for this claim, Molly. Let's see it. I take it you are denying having said what you recently proclaimed with much fanfare? Are you that out of touch with yourself? Arnon: Molly was not goaded into any views. She freely and openly stated them, in a conversation with roidubouloi. Pretty shocking stuff. "Jennifer Rubin in Noga's link used to write for for Commentary." I take it you adhere to Edward Said's worldview of Israel and her supporters. He, too, used to single out "Commentary" as a journal deserving the contempt of "true" liberal-minded people. It's not surprising that you would share his contempt, considering what you have shown yourself to be willing to allege about anyone and anything around here.

- noga1

June 22, 2011 at 1:54pm

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“I take it you adhere to Edward Said's worldview of Israel and her supporters. “ You can take what you like, but since I never mentioned Edward Said certainly not in a positive way you are completely and predictably wrong. You assume that A dislikes C and S dislikes C hence A and S must be the same. In fact said disliked TNR as well so what conclusion do you draw from that? I also didn’t say I had “contempt for Commentary. I specifically mentioned the blogs on line. I also said that I admire a number of their reviewers. “It's not surprising that you would share his contempt, considering what you have shown yourself to be willing to allege about anyone and anything around here.” Said’s world view is irrelevant to me, but apparently not to you. In any case your last sentence is a typical bizarre conclusion drawn by an illogical mind.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 3:02pm

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"Said’s world view is irrelevant to me, but apparently not to you. " Absolutely not to me. I consider him the spiritual/academic father of the likes of Rashid Khalidi, a relationship which may have some pertinence in the question of what kind of influences and thinking patterns bear upon and inform the Israel policies your president seems to espouse.

- noga1

June 22, 2011 at 3:11pm

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noga1 "Absolutely not to me. I consider him the spiritual/academic father of the likes of Rashid Khalidi, a relationship which may have some pertinence in the question of what kind of influences and thinking patterns bear upon and inform the Israel policies your president seems to espouse." The word "seems" shows the ontological status of your comment. It is pure fantasy held without proof. Show me how Obama was "influenced" by Said or Khalidi? Did he endorse a one State solution? Did he try to delegitimize the Jewish State? The opposite is the case. This is another inconvenient that the Commentary crowd can't deal with. Hence the portentous lies.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 3:40pm

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You can discern those influences in the way Obama revises Israel's history which is a direct reflection of the arguments that Said advanced when he attempted, successfully, to make the Palestinians the greater victims: The victims of victims. Thus you find Obama ignoring the birth of Zionism as a political national movement in the 19th century and half a century of immigration, investments, settlement and very hard work to attribute the establishment of the State of Israel to the horrors of the Holocaust, only. As if statehood was gifted to the Jews as compensation for their suffering. (That's also Ahmadinejad's contention, btw.) Do you really think you can make a case for Obama by claiming that all those who criticize him are liars who tell lies? What kind of an argument is that? Tedious, verbose, arbitrary, and incoherent. You can't even explain why you blame people who find Obama to be pro-Palestinian that they mean he is an antisemite. I don't think you can actually distinguish between the two positions which is why you make these accusations. And reinforce them by the added intellectual support of personal insult of the more disgusting type. You should stick to MollySimon; you seem to understand each other well.

- noga1

June 22, 2011 at 4:27pm

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noga1 "You can discern those influences in the way Obama revises Israel's history which is a direct reflection of the arguments that Said advanced when he attempted, successfully, to make the Palestinians the greater victims: The victims of victims. Thus you find Obama ignoring the birth of Zionism as a political national movement in the 19th century and half a century of immigration, investments, settlement and very hard work to attribute the establishment of the State of Israel to the horrors of the Holocaust, only. As if statehood was gifted to the Jews as compensation for their suffering." This is such nonsense. You are either ignorant or you are lying. Show me where Obama denied the history of Zionism? Where did he say that the history of Zionism didn't matter?

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 4:47pm

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While you are at it, Noga, you can also tell me where did Said "attribute the establishment of the State of Israel to the horrors of the Holocaust, only" if you can?

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 5:15pm

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Here is the conclusion to an article in the J.Post about European attitudes towards Israel. Europe is a problem for Israel, not Obama: "According to Ross, Obama understands that for Israel to take risks for peace, it must feel secure and able to defend itself, by itself, against all combination of threats. Ross, who pointed out that he has worked in five different US Administrations, said the “current support for, and cooperation with Israel,” on security issues “is simply unprecedented. And that is a fact.” A fact, he said that was not sufficiently noticed." http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=226157 Not what the Republican Commentary and their crowd wishes to hear.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 5:22pm

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such a dilemma to have to read Commentary and offspring Jennifer Rubin to try to decipher what the President of the United States, who conducts foreign policy under the Constitution, is doing when it comes to Israel. I never followed politics much while I was still working, and have only come to see the hyper-partisan divide in the media when it comes to Israel since 2008. So, I hesitate to share Elliot Abrams review of two books on the "settlements" because somehow Abrams is considered worthy of prison-for-neocons by most of TNR's readership. However, his review of Gadi Taub's "The Settlers: And the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism" has stimulated my interest in reading it, or at least other reviews. After I finish reading the 1960 "The White Nile" (history really does repeat itself in Egypt, Sudan, and East Africa!), and David Mamet's "The Secret Knowledge". http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67943/elliott-abrams/the-settlement-obsession?page=show&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kramerlinks+%28Linkage+by+Martin+Kramer%29 BTW, one of the reasons I lost my enthusiasm for Obama in March-May 2008 was being cyber-bullied by one of his pledged delegates from the Iowa Caucus who was very confident that an Obama presidency would pursue a One-State solution. A man who kept changing his screen names, someone from Iowa with palestinian ancestry who was a pledged Obama delegate out of the Iowa caucus. By the time I entered Obama's official campaign website, there were more than 10,000 Groups - more than 2,000 Groups just about Iraq. This delegate had silenced the three pro-Israel Groups that had started in 2007. Then he came after me because I had been asked to moderate the International Relations Forum Group by it's founder who wanted membership and blogposts to have a moderator, and I was blocking virulent anti-Israel posts. (I mean really virulent, worse than angryarab virulent). Then he started a private group completely under his control to develop policy points for the one-state solution. Whoever was running Obama's Official Campaign website was entirely supportive of all the anti-Israel blogposts and Group emails. I even had a few other Obama supporters asking me to join in reporting this stuff, but we were always ignored. It was only when Little Green Footballs blog started posting the screen shots that some of the worst of it disappeared. Whatever the original influence on Obama's worldview of the post-colonial world, the anti-war left that formed Obama's original base certainly buys into the "settlements are crimes" and AIPAC runs US foreign policy. And that is still Obama's core base. Kind of interesting that one of Hillary's big fundraisers, Lady Rothschild, raised $1.2 million at a dinner party last night for Jon Huntsman Jr.

- K2K

June 22, 2011 at 6:18pm

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"Where did he say that the history of Zionism didn't matter?" He doesn't have to say it. He indicates his position by ignoring it. As per his Cairo Speech.

- noga1

June 22, 2011 at 7:28pm

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noga1 "Where did he say that the history of Zionism didn't matter?" "He doesn't have to say it. He indicates his position by ignoring it. As per his Cairo Speech." Typical Noga crap. No evidence, not even conjecture, just pure fiction. The dummy is just parroting the worst anti-Obama's lies. Probably believes he was born in the US too. Here is Obama on Zionism in his own words: "JG: Do you think that justice is still on Israel’s side? BO: I think that the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea, given not only world history but the active existence of anti-Semitism, the potential vulnerability that the Jewish people could still experience. I know that that there are those who would argue that in some ways America has become a safe refuge for the Jewish people, but if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens. That makes it a fundamentally just idea. That does not mean that I would agree with every action of the state of Israel, because it’s a government and it has politicians, and as a politician myself I am deeply mindful that we are imperfect creatures and don’t always act with justice uppermost on our minds. But the fundamental premise of Israel and the need to preserve a Jewish state that is secure is, I think, a just idea and one that should be supported here in the United States and around the world.... JG: Go to the kishke question, the gut question: the idea that 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. BO: I find that really interesting. I think the idea of Israel and the reality of Israel is one that I find important to me personally. Because it speaks to my history of being uprooted, it speaks to the African-American story of exodus, it describes the history of overcoming great odds and a courage and a commitment to carving out a democracy and prosperity in the midst of hardscrabble land. One of the things I loved about Israel when I went there is that the land itself is a metaphor for rebirth, for what’s been accomplished. What I also love about Israel is the fact that people argue about these issues, and that they’re asking themselves moral questions." http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2008/05/obama-on-zionism-and-hamas/8318/

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 7:55pm

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So where did Said say that Zionist Israel is the result of the Holocaust, Noga?

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 8:08pm

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Arnon, I know exactly what ethnic cleansing is. And I'm afraid I'm rather extreme on the point that Israel would be better off without Arab Israelis in its '67 borders. They are demographically exploding and will form a larger and larger minority. THis is not to say I think Palestinians should be shoveled into ovens, though the term "ethnic cleansing" certainly implies that. In my ideal world (which will never coincide with the actual world, sadly), Palestinians would be induced to live in the settlements that the Israeli Jews will at some point be forced to leave. Just which settlements these are is the question. But of course it's Toad Girl's way to twist everything. And of course, it's Toad Girl's way to allow the settlers to continue to grab land in the West Bank, siphon off water, kill livestock. That of course, by anyone's definition, would be ethnic cleansing. Whatever. My views of settlers in this instance may clash with yours. What can I say, I occupy both ends of the spectrum. Though I think Obama has the right idea. Start with the 67 borders, see what you can get from there. Keep the settlement "belt" as wide as possible. And no, I don't think the 67 borders are defensible. I say anyone with common sense knows that you make it as physically difficult for terrorists to penetrate the perimeter--whether with suicide bombers or bombs launched from the other side. And from that, I'll also assert that Israel needs to get out, but that a continued military presence would be a very good thing. My views on Israel in a simple nutshell. Though I'm willing to entertain the idea that Arabs within Israel are perhaps not the threat I see them as. After all, it's my impression that the suicide bombers came from the West Bank.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 22, 2011 at 8:24pm

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Your view Molly is like the view of the historian Benny Morris. He is a great historian (I don't agree with everything he writes, though) but I think it is too late to make Israel mono-cultural. I also think the Jewish State will be better off with a non Jewish minority. The demographic fear is just that a fear. It's not certain that the Arabs in pre 67 Israel will ever become a majority. In any case, this is an issue that will have to wait till there si some sort of understanding is arrived it with the Arabs on the West bank. It looks like the Oslo accords were a near disaster not because it would establish a two State solution, that would have happened in any case, but because it brought the PLO and made overlords of the West Bank. Israelis governments of right and left tend to arrive at decisions that in time of crises and often make the wrong decisions which at the time looks easier: Oslo accords, Lebanon invasion and later withdrawal, Gaza withdrawal, etc. At this point Israel needs to drive a hard bargain, but it needs to bargain. Obama I am convinced will be the right person to facilitate such bargaining. I don't think that any Republican President a year or two from now will be a better facilitator. The Republicans are in "isolationist" mode and that will not be good for the Jewish State. Let's remember too that the conflict is as much political as it is military. Israel is losing the political conflict because it thinks that only the military conflict matters.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 8:58pm

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"So where did Said say that Zionist Israel is the result of the Holocaust, Noga?" I think I more or less defined what Said's argument was a few comments ago. That the Palestinians' great misfortune is due to their being victims of victims. He has repeated this version of Zionism many times in many of his writings. Are you purporting to claim that he did not believe this to be true? In your frantic attempts to get Obama's thinking away from Saidian melodies, are you now trying to absolve Said of his historical revisionism? You are not saying much. And the little you are saying sounds shallow, uninformed and very noisy.

- noga1

June 22, 2011 at 10:06pm

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My understanding of Benny Morris is that he believes it would have been far better for Israel had the Palestinians be taken out of "Greater Israel" (that is, Israel be "mono-cultural" all the way to Jordan). When I first read that, I was shocked, but it slowly started to make sense to me. Yes, it's probably too late. Though I instinctively like your thought that Israel is better off with a minority, but I couldn't say why, except that the Arabs probably keep them, the Israelis, honest. They really grapple with their constitution.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 22, 2011 at 10:25pm

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Noga, I don't know why I or anyone else who knows anything about these things should answer you. You are as ignorant as you are passionate about your views. I doubt you ever read said's Orientalism. Had you read it you would not be writing the ignorant nonsense about Said. Phrase like historical revisionism while making you sound "knowing" mean nothing here. Said did not deny the Holocaust he denied the legitimacy of the Zionist project because he saw it as part of western imperialism. (Orientalism in his jargon) He could never (theoretically) put together the Holocaust and Israel. He could not even make room for the existence of antisemitism in European culture in relation to "orientalism" this is one reason why his book is such a mess. It's also the reason why Obama could not have been influenced by Said. As I said you and ignorant if not crazy little nut Noga who keeps repeating the same junk over and over again. I am guessing that along with your ignorance you are trying to convince others of things you yourself don't believe. In any case, you have no where shown that Obama a man who read Leon Uris was and is a disciple of Said. This is my last reply to you. Go post on Commentary. This liberal magazine is obviously not for you.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 10:27pm

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Commentary, the Weekly Standard, the national review are magazines where real readers have to check their brains in at the table of contents before they can go on reading those indoctrinate-ional pages.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 10:31pm

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What you wrote is one reason why I think Israel would be better off with a minority population, be they Arabs or Christians, or even Eskimos. I tend to think that minorities are good for democracy. Still, if it's a choice between a hostile minority and no minority, I'll take the latter.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 10:34pm

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What you wrote is one reason why I think Israel would be better off with a minority population, be they Arabs or Christians, or even Eskimos. I tend to think that minorities are good for democracy. Still, if it's a choice between a hostile minority and no minority, I'll take the latter.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 10:34pm

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What you wrote is one reason why I think Israel would be better off with a minority population, be they Arabs or Christians, or even Eskimos. I tend to think that minorities are good for democracy. Still, if it's a choice between a hostile minority and no minority, I'll take the latter.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 10:34pm

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What you wrote is one reason why I think Israel would be better off with a minority population, be they Arabs or Christians, or even Eskimos. I tend to think that minorities are good for democracy. Still, if it's a choice between a hostile minority and no minority, I'll take the latter.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 10:34pm

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What you wrote is one reason why I think Israel would be better off with a minority population, be they Arabs or Christians, or even Eskimos. I tend to think that minorities are good for democracy. Still, if it's a choice between a hostile minority and no minority, I'll take the latter.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 10:34pm

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What you wrote is one reason why I think Israel would be better off with a minority population, be they Arabs or Christians, or even Eskimos. I tend to think that minorities are good for democracy. Still, if it's a choice between a hostile minority and no minority, I'll take the latter.

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 10:34pm

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"Ross: Bold Steps Needed To Keep Israel Jewish and Democratic" By Barak Ravid "United States President Barack Obama’s special assistant, Dennis Ross said Wednesday that bold steps need to be taken to make sure that Israel remains a Jewish Democratic state, but emphasized that no one can force an agreement on Israel and the Palestinians. Speaking at the Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, Ross said the greatest danger Israel faces today is sitting aside and waiting for something to happen. In order to stop the delegitimization of Israel in the world, Ross said that Israel must return to the negotiating table. Ross and U.S. diplomat David Hale are due to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers to push for the renewal of Mideast peace talks." http://forward.com/articles/138997/

- arnon

June 22, 2011 at 11:20pm

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I just did a Google search on what Said said about the Holocaust, and mainly his point is that Israel cannot use the Holocaust to justify what he viewed as human rights abuses. That's hardly controversial, and please don't say anything is insinuated. It was a very straightforward article that I read, and he also forthrightly negates any kind of Holocaust denial. If you, Noga, can come up with anything that differs from this view, a QUOTE, say, please, let us know. And telling me you owe me nothing, yadda, yadda, yadda, we all know, is just your way of squirming out of an answer.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 23, 2011 at 12:09am

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Arnon, just to play devil's advocate vis a vis minorities, Israel, even without Arabs, is an extremely heterogenous culture. There are, one might say, enough Ethiopians to do the job of keeping Israel honest.

- MOLLYSIMON

June 23, 2011 at 12:15am

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I know. But an Arab minority is there and as long as they don't turn hostile there shouldn't be any problem with them as citizens.

- arnon

June 23, 2011 at 12:47am

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noga: worth reading by Jeffrey Herf: http://www.democracyjournal.org/21/threat-position.php?page=all "Threat Position: Progressives who preach declinism and restraint have forgotten that we still face dangerous enemies." assuming you have not walked away from the unfair, ill-informed, increasingly hysterical, attacks on you in this thread, e.g. from those who refuse to note that what Obama said in Cairo speech was different from what he said to Goldberg: written before Obama's political-timetable Afghanistan speech, which I deliberately missed because I am so appalled at so many left-to-right who would repeat history based on ignorance of Afghanistan's history, like the part about how Afghanistan between 1929 and 1979 was a stable monarchy with steady economic and social progress. I am soooo tired of this political shape-shifter that I really wish he would retire to polish his golf game and spend more time with his family.

- K2K

June 23, 2011 at 7:00am

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K2K, What does Herf's critique of Lieven's review of Charles Kupchan’s "How Enemies Become Friends" have to do with what we are discussing here. Who here would agree with Lieven's point of view? Galston? Does Obama support Lieven's point of view? Herf himself seems to disprove that, "President Obama’s decision to order the raid that ended in the death of Osama Bin Laden was clear evidence that however softly he has spoken about radical Islamist ideology, he was willing to use the full complement of American power to bring this Islamist terrorist and mass murderer to justice. It seems that there is more of the anti-totalitarian liberalism of FDR and Truman in Obama than either his supporters or critics expected."

- arnon

June 23, 2011 at 11:04am

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“…assuming you have not walked away from the unfair, ill-informed, increasingly hysterical, attacks on you in this thread, e.g. from those who refuse to note that what Obama said in Cairo speech was different from what he said to Goldberg: written before Obama's political-timetable Afghanistan speech, which I deliberately missed because I am so appalled at so many left-to-right who would repeat history based on ignorance of Afghanistan's history, like the part about how Afghanistan between 1929 and 1979 was a stable monarchy with steady economic and social progress. I am soooo tired of this political shape-shifter that I really wish he would retire to polish his golf game and spend more time with his family.” K your posts show that you are the hysteric. The Cairo speech, whatever its shortcomings, didn’t contradict anything he said to Goldberg. Your comment about Afghanistan is pretty silly, don’t you think? Do you believe that Afghanistan today could go back to a monarchical system? Maybe we should make the antisemitic Karzai the King of Afghanistan? You are pretty funny, K.

- arnon

June 23, 2011 at 11:11am

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K2k's friends: "Ben Smith catches the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition expressing concern over a report that Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman relies on “realists” of the George H.W. Bush school for advice. “@jonhuntsman look to Brent Scowcroft, Rich Armitage &Richard Haas for FP advice,” Matthew Brooks tweeted this morning. “Expect alarm in the Jewish community.” This isn’t about Israel per se: Few mainstream Republican (or Democratic) presidential candidates will express anything less than staunch support for the Jewish state. (“Israel is an ally, a strong ally, and a friend,” Huntsman recently said, and he asserted that President Obama should not have brought up the 1967 borders.) However, it goes further than merely Israel: Supporters of Israel see Scowcroft-style “realism” as a slippery slope toward isolationism, which is, in turn, bad for Israel. It’s why Rep. Eric Cantor’s trashing of much foreign aid (though not Israel’s) was quickly quashed; it’s why the RJC absolutely does not trust Ron and Rand Paul...." http://www.tabletmag.com/category/scroll/#post-70777

- arnon

June 23, 2011 at 12:58pm

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TNR threads are one way for noga and I to share links/books of interest to each other. in response to arnon's question about Afghanistan? Unlike Obama, who only bothered to read Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" after winning the 2008 election, which was fve years after Coll 's Pulitzer Prize winning history was in paperback, I have been studying the history of Afghanistan for the past eight years. And, I have long suggested that Hamid Karzai should have been made king. Karzai is the hereditary tribal leader of the Popalzai Durrani Pashtuns, which was the tribe of the first King of Afghanistan, whose map in 1747 is recognizable today except for the 1893 British Durand Line which divided the Pashtuns, and the odd finger of land that extends in the northeast, which was appended to Afghanistan by Britain, Russia, and China during the 19th century Great Game as a buffer zone where those three empires met. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Durrani http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durand_Line Karzai is a direct descendant of Ahmad Shah Durrani, and that is where Karzai's initial legitimacy came from, in 2002. I find it irresponsible when members of congress from both parties go on tv and now say that Afghanistan has never been a coherent nation. That is flat out not true. In particular, between 1929 and the Soviet invasion of 1979, Afghanistan was at peace, and making steady, modest progress towards a constitutional monarchy joing modernity. US Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas wrote "West of the Indus", a travel memoir of his road trip from Karachi to Istanbul in 1957. Quite a positive glimpse of Afghanistan, very comparable to Robert Byron's 1933 travel memoir "The Road to Oxiana" from Beirut to Kabul. In both travel memoirs, Iran/Persia is the unruly, dangerous, poorly governed place. As a registered Democrat, I find it unfortunate that Obama's antiwar left base has so much influence on what was once the party of Harry S Truman. Just as unfortunate that Grover Norquist's no tax pledge holds the GOP hostage. maybe arnon needs to take up boxing - a very good aerobic sport for venting animus, far preferable to ad hominem bullying attacks on real people who do not fit into any neat category.

- K2K

June 24, 2011 at 9:26am

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BTW, in addition to making Karzai king, I would also redraw the maps, and enable the Pashtuns the self-determination they have been fighting for since forever, but especially since the British partition of India. I would sever that little finger of mountains in the northeast and ask China to build a rail link into Afghanistan, and hand the whole country over to China, maybe get a trillion$ of debt forgiveness so that China can extract all of Afghnaistan's mineral resources. After all, China has a surplus of males, and the only successful foreign occupiers of Afghanistan were Tamerlane and the Moghuls, descended from the Mongols. I would like to see how the fanatical Islamists who call themselves the Taliban react to pork-eating aetheists who have no qualms about using force to suppress their occupations.

- K2K

June 24, 2011 at 9:34am

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K: ".. in response to arnon's question about Afghanistan? Unlike Obama, who only bothered to read Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" after winning the 2008 election, which was fve years after Coll 's Pulitzer Prize winning history was in paperback, I have been studying the history of Afghanistan for the past eight years." I see; so based on your supposition that Obama read only one book on Afghanistan you ought to be allowed to make decisions on how to deal with that country? There are a couple of little problems with this that the narcissistic Republican K doesn't know she ought to consider. How does she know what Obama read or reads on any issue? Is she aware that he gets up to date briefings on what is really going on in Afghanistan almost daily? Is K aware that no one elected her to make these decisions?

- arnon

June 24, 2011 at 11:35am

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"in addition to making Karzai king..." Karzi is already acting like he is a king. That's part of the problem in Afghanistan. In any case, whatever his legitimacy can only come from the tribes of that country. "I find it irresponsible when members of congress from both parties go on tv and now say that Afghanistan has never been a coherent nation. That is flat out not true." That would depend on what you mean by "coherent nation," doesn't it? Is Zimbabwe a coherent nation? Yet it is a nation. What about Syria, or Libya?

- arnon

June 24, 2011 at 11:41am

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"TNR threads are one way for noga and I to share links/books of interest to each other." I am sure you could find threads on some conservative web site to keep in touch! I don't care if you post here, but don't attack liberal on a liberal website. Sort of reminds me of the antisemites who hang around Jewish websites and attack Jews.

- arnon

June 24, 2011 at 11:43am

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Republican isolationism? "House Rejects U.S. Role in Libya" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304569504576405622532387708.html

- arnon

June 24, 2011 at 1:19pm

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KING ARNON DECREES: "I don't care if you post here, but don't attack liberal on a liberal website." how very NOT-liberal a decree by the one who would be king, of TNR...

- K2K

June 25, 2011 at 12:41pm

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K2K “KING ARNON DECREES: "I don't care if you post here, but don't attack liberal on a liberal website." how very NOT-liberal a decree by the one who would be king, of TNR...” Yes, it’s very non-liberal of me to protest the attacks on liberalism by anti-liberals on a liberal website.

- arnon

June 25, 2011 at 1:11pm

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"... attacks on liberalism " I agree, of course. arnon's positions define liberalism and any disagreement with them is an attack on liberalism. I forgot about this thread, K2K, until you reminded me of it at the other place. Too bad.

- noga1

June 25, 2011 at 4:45pm

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This is for Molly: After the Last Sky (1986): "There has been no misfortune worse for us than that we are ineluctably viewed as the enemies of the Jews. No moral and political fate worse, none at all, I think: no worse, there is none. With so much discussion recently of the Holocaust, I am centrally aware of the fact of the destruction of European Jews, an abomination which nevertheless I find hard to consider separately; there is always the connection made between Israel and the Holocaust, how one makes restitution for the other. I find myself saying that a generation later the Holocaust has victimized us too, but without the terrifying grandeur and sacriligeous horror of what it did to the Jews. Seen from the perspective provided by the Holocaust, we are as inconsequential as children on a playground; and yet - one more twist in the reductive spiral - even at play we cannot be enjoyed or looked at simply as that, as children playing games that signify little. Just by virtue of where we stand, every playground is seen as a 'breeding ground for terrorists', every pastime a 'secret plan for the destruction of Israel', as if our own destruction was not a great deal more probable. Something either pernicious or negligible can be attributed to us, no matter what we do, wherever we are, however we think or act." (p 134) This is key: "I find myself saying that a generation later the Holocaust has victimized us too, " Jews were the victims of the Nazis and Palestinians the victims of the Nazis's victims. On the scale of victimhood, you can't get any more victim than that.

- noga1

June 25, 2011 at 5:45pm

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noga1 "arnon's positions define liberalism and any disagreement with them is an attack on liberalism." It's rather that Noga like her conservative friends at Commentary and the Weekly Standard think of anyone who disagree with them as a "liberal."

- arnon

June 25, 2011 at 8:55pm

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06/25/2011 - 5:45pm EDT | noga1 “This is key: "I find myself saying that a generation later the Holocaust has victimized us too, "” How does this prove that Obama is a disciple of Said or anyone associated with Said?

- arnon

June 25, 2011 at 8:56pm

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"How does this prove that Obama is a disciple of Said or anyone associated with Said?" This was not meant as a "proof" for anything. It was meant to assuage some of Molly's pathological ignorance. But since you ask: Obama is a disciple of Rashidi who is a disciple of Said. There is a chain of mentorship and down the chain ideas percolate. He may not share in this particular idea, but its general spirit he agrees with. In his Cairo speech he pleads with the Arabs to have some compassion for Jewish suffering and immediately follows with Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Jews of Israel. If you cannot see the similar structure of the argument then you can't see it and you won't accept that 2+2 are 4 and not five. Here is what Abu Nimah tells Amy Goodman: "I remember, Amy -- I knew Barack Obama for many years as my state senator -- when he used to attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time. I remember personally introducing him onstage in 1999, when we had a major community fundraiser for the community center in Deheisha refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. And that's just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation. And just yesterday, he apparently sent a letter to Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador at the UN, to urge the US not to allow any resolution to pass criticizing Israel and saying how Israel was forced to impose this barbaric medieval siege on [Gaza]." That was in 2008. What had happened between the time that Abu Nimah remembers and Obama's ostensible change of heart? Had anything substantial occurred to force a change in his sentiments, to convince him that he was wrong to support the Palestinian narratives in this way? Do tell, arnon, what definitive event brought about a change in Obama's perception of the I/P conflict.

- noga1

June 25, 2011 at 11:41pm

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"It's rather that Noga like her conservative friends at Commentary and the Weekly Standard " You are not very bright, arnon. And when you use "conservative" as an insult, and a middle of the way magazine like "Commentary" as a suspicious source of information, you are shooting yourself in the foot. That is, no genuine liberal minded person would be saying such things at least not openly. A liberal person's pride is his openness to listening to arguments, records and facts, even when they are not comfortably aligned with his own furniture, such as it is.

- noga1

June 25, 2011 at 11:47pm

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noga1 “"How does this prove that Obama is a disciple of Said or anyone associated with Said?" This was not meant as a "proof" for anything. It was meant to assuage some of Molly's pathological ignorance. But since you ask: Obama is a disciple of Rashidi who is a disciple of Said.” You keep repeating the same mantra each time you are asked to prove your assertion that Obama is a disciple of Said and Rashidi. The Cairo speech you mentioned proves no such thing. In fact it proves the opposite. But you are too ignorant to see that.

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 12:13am

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noga1 “"It's rather that Noga like her conservative friends at Commentary and the Weekly Standard " You are not very bright, arnon. And when you use "conservative" as an insult, and a middle of the way magazine like "Commentary" as a suspicious source of information, you are shooting yourself in the foot. That is, no genuine liberal minded person would be saying such things at least not openly. A liberal person's pride is his openness to listening to arguments, records and facts, even when they are not comfortably aligned with his own furniture, such as it is." That Commentary is a conservative magazine is a fact. That is how they describe themselves. And “you middle of the way” comment makes as much sense as your belief that Obama is on the side of Said, Rashidi and Arafat just waiting for an opportunity to turn on Israel. Here is how Commentary describes itself: “COMMENTARY is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970s,…” http://www.tnr.com/article/the-vital-center/90048/israel-netanyahu-livni-palestinian-abbas?page=3#comment-329557 You are either pathetically ignorant or a pathetic liar. Which is it? I used conservative as a descriptive term and not as an insult. You are acting like a paranoid hysteric.

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 12:26am

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arnon. I repeat that my perception of you is that you are not very bright and therefore any insult that shoots from your proverbial mouth is bound to fall short. But I do encourage you to continue to use that methodology. Nothing endears a "liberal" to other like-minded "liberals" more than such language of persuasion.

- noga1

June 26, 2011 at 7:24am

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noga1 “arnon. I repeat that my perception of you is that you are not very bright and therefore any insult that shoots from your proverbial mouth is bound to fall short.” Noga, you are a mental case, and that is no insult. You don’t know what you write more than half the time and that too is no insult but an observation. One doesn’t have to be “very bright” to see through your insane obsessions. In any case, I am not interested in being “bright.” Sounding smarter than you isn’t my goal. You may think yourself a genius but here you come off as a self-satisfied self-righteous zealot who believes that he can impose his dogmatic views on anyone else. This is how conservatives like you have always operated. The saying credo quia absurdum is your motto. If they can get people to believe some absurd notion it can then become a sign that they are one of us. This is how their view that the Cairo speech by Obama had their origins in Said’s world view and the recent article in Commentary that posited the unproven and un-argued proposition that Obama will abandon Israel work. It will not work here, this is why you are so angry, so determined to discredit anyone who sees through your pathetic and paltry games. “But I do encourage you to continue to use that methodology. Nothing endears a "liberal" to other like-minded "liberals" more than such language of persuasion.” Your use of the term “methodology” gives your obsession with sounding clever away. Real liberals are persuaded by truth and not by attacks on conservatives. As usual you are projecting from your own experience. There is no need for a “methodology” in arguing against your lies. Just showing how they work and what they aim to do is enough. To do this is to use common sense. Of course to people like you “common sense” is something used by those who are not “very bright.” This is what drives your rage: that people you consider “not very bright” would question your assertions is something you can’t cope with. You are nothing if not hysterically neurotic.

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 10:48am

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I'm content to note that a short observation by me elicited a 360+ word rant from you. Noise to signal ratio is a reliable indicator of levels of rage in the speaker.

- noga1

June 26, 2011 at 12:04pm

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noga1 “Noise to signal ratio is a reliable indicator of levels of rage in the speaker.” An indicator only in the imagination of a hysteric, who lives on chimerical signs. “I'm content to note that a short observation by me elicited a 360+ word rant from you.” You are contented by very little, aren’t you Noga. What an admission of desperation.

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 12:13pm

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Noise to signal ratio is hardly a "chimerical sign". You ought to check it out.

- noga1

June 26, 2011 at 12:31pm

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Noga "You ought to check it out." You check it out. It's in your head.

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 12:54pm

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No, it's not. It's a term in physics which can be readily translated into evaluating types of discourse. The bigger the noise component relative to substance in a comment , the less sense, relevance and use that comment serve, except as ventilation , which has its own significance when it comes to comprehension and interpretation. Example: "Noga, you are a mental case, and that is no insult. You don’t know what you write more than half the time and that too is no insult but an observation. One doesn’t have to be “very bright” to see through your insane obsessions. In any case, I am not interested in being “bright.” Sounding smarter than you isn’t my goal. You may think yourself a genius but here you come off as a self-satisfied self-righteous zealot who believes that he can impose his dogmatic views on anyone else. This is how conservatives like you have always operated. The saying credo quia absurdum is your motto. If they can get people to believe some absurd notion it can then become a sign that they are one of us. This is how their view that the Cairo speech by Obama had their origins in Said’s world view and the recent article in Commentary that posited the unproven and un-argued proposition that Obama will abandon Israel work. It will not work here, this is why you are so angry, so determined to discredit anyone who sees through your pathetic and paltry games. “But I do encourage you to continue to use that methodology. Nothing endears a "liberal" to other like-minded "liberals" more than such language of persuasion.” Your use of the term “methodology” gives your obsession with sounding clever away. Real liberals are persuaded by truth and not by attacks on conservatives. As usual you are projecting from your own experience. There is no need for a “methodology” in arguing against your lies. Just showing how they work and what they aim to do is enough. To do this is to use common sense. Of course to people like you “common sense” is something used by those who are not “very bright.” This is what drives your rage: that people you consider “not very bright” would question your assertions is something you can’t cope with. You are nothing if not hysterically neurotic." ______________ You may note that there is no substance whatsoever in that comment. All noise. Like I said, completely useless, when measured by the noise-to-signal ratio. However, it does provide, by the absence of signal, some information about the nature of your thinking, or rather, lack thereof.

- noga1

June 26, 2011 at 1:06pm

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"You may note that there is no substance whatsoever in that comment. All noise. Like I said, completely useless, when measured by the noise-to-signal ratio." Noga must love noise, since she repeats obsessively that which she claims to be noise. This is how she operates: she repeats her assertions without offering any proof. Throughout this thread Noga hasn't bothered to offer proof for a single claim Noga made. Noga thinks that whatever she says is necessarily so. Noga shows no sign of understanding what she claims to be true, Noga shows no sign of having read the works of the many people she attacks (and defends). When challenged Noga becomes hysterical claims that all Noga hears is noise. To an absurd dummy everything is noise.

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 1:27pm

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Molly apropos of what we had discussed last week: “Israel: Part Itself from the Palestinians?” by Daniel Pipes June 21, 2011 http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2011/06/israel-part-itself-from-the-palestinians “Ha'aretz is admittedly not the most reliable source but if one believes Barak Ravid's report on what Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told his cabinet two days ago, June 21, it has important implications. According to Ravid, he surprised many of the participants in the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday when he embarked on a monologue praising the idea of parting from the Palestinians and in relinquishing portions of the West Bank. Netanyahu said the number of Palestinians and Jews between the Jordan River and the sea "is irrelevant" and that it's more important to "preserve a solid Jewish majority inside the State of Israel." Ravid quotes him saying of the Palestinians: "I have no wish to annex them into Israel. I want to separate from them so that they will not be Israeli citizens. I am interested that there be a solid Jewish majority inside the State of Israel." He adds that prime ministerial aides "asked all those present in the room to avoid disseminating the details" because of their sensitivity, while the Prime Minister's Office "refused to respond to questions on the issue or provide any quotes about the statements." Comment: I sympathize with this statement, having watched Lebanon fall apart because the Christians there had territorial ambitions and accordingly lost their majority. Land is an asset, all the more so when ancestral, but if it comes with resident enemies, it is not worth the price. (June 21, 2011)” As Daniel Pipes reports even Netanyahu is beginning to see the truth in what Obama and others have said to him.

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 2:18pm

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noga: I did not mean to tempt you to come back to this thread, but reallly appreciate your 11:41 pm post of what "Abu Nimah tells Amy Goodman" re: Illinois State Senator Obama circa 1999. Well, I am just about at the Battle of Omdurman in "The White Nile", which really does prove that not much ever really changes in the world of muslims, just history repeating itself in most of the same places. including some TNR threads where the rage always re-appears with yet another new poster. See you elsewhere :)

- K2K

June 26, 2011 at 8:07pm

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" but reallly appreciate your 11:41 pm post of what "Abu Nimah tells Amy Goodman" re: Illinois State Senator Obama circa 1999" Yea, another hearsay comment being used by Republican to smear Obama. And whose point of view is this: "And just yesterday, he apparently sent a letter to Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador at the UN, to urge the US not to allow any resolution to pass criticizing Israel and saying how Israel was forced to impose this barbaric medieval siege on [Gaza]." Did Obama use the phrase "barbaric medieval siege?" Or was it "Abu Nimah?" Here is a bit about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Abunimah#Views_on_Barack_Obama "Abunimah met Barack Obama on a number of occasions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Abunimah has said that Obama regularly attended pro-Palestinian events during this period, and that he introduced the future president on one occasion at a fundraiser for the Deheishe refugee camp. The last time they spoke was in 2004.[5] According to Abunimah, in the winter of 2004 while running for the Senate, Obama told him, "Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front."[6] This notwithstanding, Abunimah has also written that Obama gradually shifted to a pro-Israel position during his rise to the presidency, a process he says began as early as 2002. He has strongly criticized Obama's approach to Mid-East affairs, writing that the president has "entrenched" the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and has not contributed to "even the pretense of a serious peace effort."[7]" Notice that all the reference in the wikipedia article are to the same source: "Abu Nimah?"

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 9:13pm

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darn it, it happned again: the last part of my comment was cut off: I'll try to reconstruct it: Did Obama use the phrase "barbaric medieval siege?" Or was it "Abu Nimah?" Here is a bit about him: "Abunimah met Barack Obama on a number of occasions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Abunimah has said that Obama regularly attended pro-Palestinian events during this period, and that he introduced the future president on one occasion at a fundraiser for the Deheishe refugee camp. The last time they spoke was in 2004.[5] According to Abunimah, in the winter of 2004 while running for the Senate, Obama told him, "Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front."[6] This notwithstanding, Abunimah has also written that Obama gradually shifted to a pro-Israel position during his rise to the presidency, a process he says began as early as 2002. He has strongly criticized Obama's approach to Mid-East affairs, writing that the president has "entrenched" the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and has not contributed to "even the pretense of a serious peace effort."[7]" It's obvious that it was Abu Nimah who used that phrase.

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 9:17pm

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From the same source that Noga used to smear Obama: "ALI ABUNIMAH: Again, we saw Hillary Clinton, the moment her political ambitions became pronounced, shift. You’ll remember, when she spoke in the 1990s in favor of a Palestinian state, since then she has become one of the most anti-Palestinian hawks. For example, a couple of years ago, she went and staged a photo opportunity in an Israeli settlement by the apartheid wall and talked about how the wall was necessary. This wall, of course, which has been condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice, which has ordered Israel to tear it down, Hillary Clinton went and stood in front of it and endorsed it." I don't ever remember Hillary being anti Israel and pro-Palestinian. She did endorse a two State solution but that hardly makes her pro Palestinian. Abunimah is lying about her. He is a kind of Palestinian Chomskyite who uses to quotes to obfuscate.

- arnon

June 26, 2011 at 9:23pm

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