A few years ago over coffee, an acquaintance told me that his family always treated Israel differently from all other places. As a child, he was encouraged to use his critical judgment on every topic except Israel. On Israel, he knew exactly how he “had to” feel.

That clearly didn’t sit right with him. And he believed his discomfort with Israel resonated with many other people he knew.

Given this story and many others like it, I was not surprised to read the recent study on American Jews and Israel by Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman, Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and their Alienation from Israel. Airtight analysis and manifold charts demonstrate incontrovertibly a declining attachment to Israel among younger generations. Hardly the news most Israel supporters wanted to hear on the eve of the country’s 60th anniversary.

continue reading "Israel and You – Perfect Together?"

At first glance, the two books inhabit different worlds. One, carrying the imprint of a prestigious publisher, is riding high in the Amazon bestseller chart. The other, from a tiny publisher in Atlanta, would not make a bestseller list on Amazon or anywhere else. The first book is splendidly printed and bound, reflecting the gravitas of the authors. The second looks and feels cheap, like a trinket from a murky political gathering.

And yet this is one instance where packaging tells us very little. What counts is that the two books – Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, which everyone is talking about, and James Petras’s The Power of Israel in the United States, an unabashedly conspiratorial tome unnoticed by the reviewers – focus upon the same subject. What counts even more – lest readers should think that my purpose is to damn by association – are the arresting similarities between the two books in terms of argument.

continue reading "Mainstream or Just Extreme?"

Decades ago a criminal defense attorney offered a credo for the zealous defense of a client: “Contest everything, concede nothing, and when defeated allege fraud.”John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their new book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, go to similar lengths to defend their thesis that Israel is a strategic liability.

While The Israel Lobby is a more nuanced effort than their earlier London Review of Books article, the main problem is the same: Walt and Mearsheimer genuinely believe that U.S. interests in the Middle East are overwhelmingly tied to the Arab states, not to Israel. They are at a loss to understand why what seems obvious to them is lost on the majority of Americans, including those who make policy decisions.

continue reading "When All Else Fails: The Israel Lobby"

A seasoned observer of the British trade union scene put it to me in stark terms. “You’d be hard put,” he said, “to find a union in the UK that isn’t sympathetic to the boycott of Israel.”

His observation was made in a conversation which took place a few days before the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) voted, at its conference, to back the boycott of Israel. That vote, on July 4th, brings the number of British unions supporting the boycott campaign to four: journalists, academics, public and voluntary service workers and now the union representing those working in an array of industries from transportation to food.

The TGWU’s debate reproduced the same themes which emerged at the other union conferences. Firstly, the portrayal of Israel as country forged in colonial sin and therefore solely responsible for all the conflicts in the area, including the recent bout of intra-Palestinian bloodletting in the Gaza Strip. Secondly, the indignant protest that a boycott of Israel can never be, by any stretch of the imagination, antisemitic.

continue reading "Laboring the Boycott"

Already in its death throes after seven years of futile struggle against Israel, the Palestinian national movement suffered a fatal blow last week, when Gaza fell in the hands of Hamas. Now, instead of a state-in-the waiting, Palestine is two failed states, under two governments at war with one another.

Hamas in Gaza might still pursue its fight against Israel; and Fatah in the West Bank might still voice the rhetoric of grievance against Israel as the occupier. But the two are now locked in a deadly struggle. Anti-Zionist rhetoric has been waving the ghost of a one-state solution - implying that Israel might disappear, replaced by a united binational state comprising the West Bank and Gaza as well as present Israel. It now looks as though there will be a one-state solution after all - Israel, alongside two failed states, both Palestinian, and fighting each other.

continue reading "Two Failed States"

A few years ago an American Indian friend phoned me, absolutely perplexed. He could not reconcile two stories in his morning paper – one in the news section, the other in sports. Both were about major Florida universities.

The first story reported universal outrage at and severe sanctions on a fraternity which had hosted an event where participants dressed in blackface. The leadership of the university spoke in strong language about not tolerating racism, the hurt of stereotypes, the psychological impact of dehumanization, and the incompatibility of such offensive behavior with the standards of a university.

The second noted, without comment, that the leadership of another Florida university (which had an Indian mascot) was encouraging students to show up at a major sporting event in red face.

continue reading "Israel as the N-word"

As international news networks were reporting Hamas’s onslaught against Fatah, I began trawling the internet to see what, if anything, the various pro-Palestinian websites and blogs had to say about the brutal civil war raging in the Gaza Strip.

The short answer: not much.

Over at the Electronic Intifada (EI) commentators were undisturbed by the fragmentation of Gaza into a burning enclave reminiscent of Afghanistan or Somalia. Just at the moment when Hamas was blasting its way towards an intra-Palestinian version of the two-state solution, the talk at EI was of a single state between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.

continue reading "Gaza’s Agony and the Anti-Zionists"

It’s tempting to view the movement to boycott Israel as a peculiarly British affliction. The University and College Union vote marked the third time in three years that British academics have opted for a boycott policy. And that decision came barely a month after the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted, at its annual conference, for a boycott of Israeli goods.

The UCU boycott dents the prestige of British academia just as the NUJ boycott tars the British media. But none of that matters to the boycott activists.

They believe if they demonstrate concrete results by pushing Israelis off conference platforms and out of the pages of academic journals, other sectors with similar clout will follow. In that regard, they can point to the boycott calls issued by groups of British doctors and British architects, all of whom accuse their Israeli counterparts of, as the UCU would say, “complicity” in the supposed crimes committed by Israel.

continue reading "Britain is Not the Only Battleground"

The U.S. ambassador in Israel (I wish I could have said, in Jerusalem) fell into a trap last week—one that he could easily have avoided with a modicum of foresight. It was not the type of ambush laid with roadside devices and a hail of bullets, but it did carry explosive implications, and produced a painful embarrassment for both governments—thus serving a reminder that the Pollard case is still not only an irritant but an active issue for many Israelis.

Speaking at a conference (which I attended) on U.S.-Israeli relations at Bar-Ilan University—Israel’s only university under Orthodox auspices, offering, as such, an honorable and respectable diversity of opinion and being a stronghold of the more scholarly elements within the religious right—Ambassador Richard Jones answered a question about Jonathan Pollard. (Someone should have told him that in almost any room with a good number of knitted skullcaps, a discussion of U.S.-Israeli relations would sooner or later lead to the Pollard case.) The question in itself was triggered by the book published by former CIA director George Tenet, in which he reports that he stood up to President Bill Clinton and prevented him from keeping his promise to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as part of the Wye River Agreement of 1998, to release Pollard in return for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians.

What Jones now said, in effect, was that Pollard would never be released.

continue reading "An Ambassador Ambushed: Richard Jones and the Pollard Case"

Cross-border exchanges between Israel and Hamas this past week served as the latest occasion for the New York Times to cover, and cover some more, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

True to form, Friday May 25th’s front-page featured prominently, for the second time in a week, a color photo of an Israeli strike against a Hamas compound in Gaza. Inside the front section, a major article detailed Israel’s crackdown on Hamas, focusing on the arrest of 33 Hamas officials in the West Bank.

The latest Israeli-Palestinian violence, as well as the intra-Palestinian violence, is certainly newsworthy.

The Times’s extensive coverage, however, overshadowed an exceptionally significant development in Lebanon: intense fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam, an Islamic terrorist group.

continue reading "Some News Is Fit to Print"