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Going meta with Matt Yglesias

By Ron Kampeas · February 9, 2010

Matt Yglesias doesn't like Leon Wieseltier's evisceration of Andrew Sullivan.

Which is fine -- although, I think the reason Wieseltier does not accuse Sullivan straight out of anti-Semitism is because he's not accusing him of anti-Semitism, he's accusing Sullivan of a creepy objectification of the Jews, of a thirst for "edifying Jews," as Wieseltier puts it. Anti-Semitism is one form of creepy objectification of Jews, but it is not the only one.

What irks me, though, is this attempt at I'm rubber, you're glue jiu-jitsu:

It’s worth noting the bonus smear on Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer:

"These days the self-congratulatory motto above his blog is “Of No Party or Clique,” but in fact Sullivan belongs to the party of Mearsheimer and the clique of Walt (whom he cites frequently and deferentially), to the herd of fearless dissidents who proclaim in all seriousness, without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea, that Jews control Washington."

This is just a lie. Niether Walt nor Mearsheimer nor Sullivan has said anything remotely resembling “Jews control Washington.” I know there seem to be special rules for Walt and Mearsheimer where it’s not required that characterization of their work bear any particular resemblance to what they’ve written, but this is really shameful stuff.

Wieseltier's claim is arguable, although not necessarily untrue: Claiming that the pro-Israel lobby was critical to the launching of Iraq war when the overwhelming evidence suggests it had nothing to do with the planning of the war, and nothing to do with its promotion beyond the pathetic deference every other estate paid the war lobby at the time, does add up to both "fantasy" and "conspiracy." Patch those notions into "pro-Israel" -- and let me make clear, I do not think Mearsheimer did so with a biased intent, although Walt has said some weird things about attachments -- and it's not unreasonable to raise "haunting histories."

No, even more irksome is Yglesias' claim that "there seem to be special rules for Walt and Mearsheimer where it’s not required that characterization of their work bear any particular resemblance to what they’ve written."

Au contraire: I've fashioned myself what is becoming a crazy-making industry of picking apart their fallacies. Not that they've ever bothered to rebut any of my deconstructions, but still, they're out there. Start here, Matt, and continue up to here. And God knows, I'm not the only one.

This is the meta smear: I'm not going to address my opponent's critical thinking by thinking uncritically, and accusing him of not thinking critically.

And casting Wieseltier's essay as so much old bad blood is just cheap. And geez, I'm with Kaus on this one, make the listserve public. We're journalists.

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Love, rancor, Sullivan, Wieseltier

By Ron Kampeas · February 9, 2010

I've dispensed plenty of rancor in recent days, and probably have miles to go before I sleep. It's one of those years.

I calmed myself a little by posting a lyric from the Ethnix classic, Tutim, on my Facebook page, and among the comments, Ori Nir directed me to this video of a full orchestral/choral rendering of the song outside Jerusalem's walls. I'm not sure of the date. It looks like an Independence Day celebration.

Here's a translation of the song's chorus:

A light is rising from the east, a new day has arrived, together, we will overcome fear

Strawberries, strawberries, let's buy nothing but strawberries, instead of more machines of war

I know songs longing for peace can be self-serving, a conscience salve -- "Look, see what we're singing. We really want peace. Ignore everything we do."

But that's not my point. My point is, this video is cheesy, off key, off kilter (here's the more tuneful studio recording).

It is also thrilling. Look at the soldiers hopping up and down.  I have no idea why they're hopping up and down: Longing for peace. Gratitude for time off. A need to hop.

My point is Israel is a country like any other. My God, I hope I cover it like any other country, with critical distance.

Journalists have a dirty little secret, a romantic notion of ourselves as Sam Spade dispatching Bridget O'Shaughnessy to prison, and promising to love her for the decades she's behind bars. Think of the best baseball writers, and the plays they've mythologized and the scandals they've exposed. The triple play and the steroids, cupped in the same typewriter basin. That's what we aim for. It's what our subjects deserve, it's what you deserve.

I love Israel, and for reasons as irrational as a day at the ballpark, but that's fine. No one loves anything for rational reasons. I've endured a thousand awful on-location romantic comedies because my wife loves New York, for irrational reasons. I slid strapped to a plank of wood, terrified, down steep inclines deep in British Columbia, to better understand the irrational love my sister and her family have for those vistas.

Belief, the absence of sense, it is true, at time closes your mind; at other times it opens it. There's nothing that calms me better than grilled offal's thick perfume pervading the dark wet nights of Aggripas Street in winter. And years ago, after a day of fraught coverage in Hebron, when a Palestinian colleague seeking the same refuge pulled me into a roasted chicken joint, I understood.

Israel deserves the same twin considerations of any other country, including Palestine: The notion that it is normal, and subject to the scrutiny and reproach that every other nation deserves, and the notion that there are reasons to love it, irrationally, just as every other nation is loved, irrationally.

What it does not need is to be objectified, eroticized into some pornographic fantasy of evil, or for that matter, of good. Leon Wieseltier, waxing a little rancorous, dismantles Andrew Sullivan's tendency to objectify, here, and, maybe slipping back a little into rancor, I'll finish by quoting him:

And then Sullivan returns to his condescension toward the Jews. Contemporary Israel is “a betrayal of many Jewish virtues.” I thought that human rights, if this is what Sullivan sees Israel abusing, is not a Jewish virtue, or a Christian virtue, or a Muslim virtue, but a human virtue. Israel is a secular state. The primary offense of Israeli brutality in Gaza was not against Maimonides. But Sullivan desperately wants the Jews to be good Jews, to be the best Jews they can be. He wants edifying Jews. Don’t they realize that if they fail to edify, they may lose his friendship? The fools! Jews ought to determine their beliefs and their actions apologetically, so as not to disappoint “goyim like me.” This is a common phenomenon in the experience of minorities. They may awaken to their autonomy, but they must not go too far.

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Stephen Walt’s profound dishonesty

By Ron Kampeas · February 8, 2010

Stephen Walt -- actually permitting himself to title his post "I told you so" -- thinks he's found something of a smoking gun in Tony Blair's testimony before a British inquiry into the Iraq War:

Probably the most controversial claim in my work with John Mearsheimer on the Israel lobby is our argument that it played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Even some readers who were generally sympathetic to our overall position found that claim hard to accept, and some left-wing critics accused us of letting Bush and Cheney off the hook or of ignoring the importance of other interests, especially oil. Of course, Israel's defenders in the lobby took issue even more strenuously, usually by mischaracterizing our arguments and ignoring most (if not all) of the evidence we presented. 

So I hope readers will forgive me if I indulge today in a bit of self-promotion, or more precisely, self-defense. This week, yet another piece of evidence surfaced that suggests we were right all along (HT to Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman and J. Glatzer at Mondoweiss). In his testimony to the Iraq war commission in the U.K., former Prime Minister Tony Blair offered the following account of his discussions with Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002. Blair reveals that concerns about Israel were part of the equation and that Israel officials were involved in those discussions.

Before we get to Blair's quote, let me indulge in a little bit of "I told myself so." I saw this flagged on Mondoweiss last week, and I said to myself, "Self, will this professor at an Ivy League institution, this best-selling author, be vain enough, eager enough, stupid enough not to check the source?"

Self, on the one hand, was hoping Walt would not, because self wanted to preserve what little respect he had left for the American academic meritocracy.

Self is a little schizo, though, and was also hoping for a Nelson Muntz moment.

Sigh. Nelson wins.

So here's Blair's quote:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

Yes! The smoking gun! Yes!

Except: What Blair is discussing here (Walt does not even link to the original PDF) ... is not Israel's role in Iraq, but Israel's actions in the West Bank at the time. If you're looking for a bigger picture context for Blair's reference to Israel -- and I'm not sure there is one -- it is that Blair and Bush may have been discussing Israel's role in the U.S.-British relationship.

Blair is being asked about an April 2002 meeting at President Bush's home in Crawford, Texas. April, 2002, was not without incident: Israel was in the midst of Operation Defensive Shield. That mini-war in the West Bank generated an international crisis; the Bush administration had called on Israel to withdraw. The operation took place between March 29-May 3; Bush and Blair met on April 6 and 7, during the height of the Battle of Jenin.

Here is the longer extract, referring to Blair's testimony that at the time he hoped to "put together a coalition ...  to deal with Saddam Hussein."

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: Are you saying to me that that was the kind of agreed policy with which you went to Crawford? On the eve of Crawford, is that what you intended to achieve at Crawford?

RT HON TONY BLAIR: What we intended to achieve at Crawford, frankly, was to get a real sense from the Americans as to what they wanted to do, and this would be best done between myself and President Bush, and really to get a sense of how our own strategy was going to have to evolve in the light of that.

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: Can we then come to Crawford? Because you had one-to-one discussions with President Bush without any advisers present. Can you tell us what was decided at these discussions?

RT HON TONY BLAIR: There was nothing actually decided, but let me just make one thing clear about this: one thing that is really important, I think, when you are dealing  with other leaders, is you establish and this is particularly important, I think, for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the President of the United States you establish a close and strong relationship. You know, I had it with President Clinton and I had it again with President Bush, and that's important. So some of it you will do in a formal meeting, but it is also important to be able to discuss in a very frank way what the issues were.

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

But the principal part of my conversation was really to try and say, "Look, in the end we have got to deal with the various different dimensions of this whole issue". I mean, for me, what had happened after September 11 was that I was starting to look at this whole issue to do with this unrepresentative extremism within Islam in a different way, and I wanted to persuade President Bush, but also get a sense from him as to where he was on that broader issue.

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: So what you are suggesting is that you were having general discussions in terms of getting views across to each other, trying to understand and establish a rapport and a relationship?

RT HON TONY BLAIR: Yes, but also, frankly --

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: During the course of these discussions, do you think you gave many commitments?

RT HON TONY BLAIR: The only commitment I gave, and I gave  this very openly, at the meeting was a commitment to deal with Saddam.

So: The issues for Blair going into this meeting were "a close and strong relationship" with the United States, "what had happened after September 11" and "unrepresentative extremism within Islam," as well as Iraq.

Israel's role in all this? It was dominating headlines at the time, and would naturally have come up, whether Bush and Blair were discussing climate change, NATO, or the Jockey Club v. the Kentucky Derby -- never mind Iraq.

When Blair  says they spoke with Israelis -- he's not sure -- it was probably to assess how long the operation would last and what effect it would have on American and British interests.  We don't know if Iraq came up at all in the talks with the Israelis, if such talks took place. (I doubt that Israel's leaders would have wanted to discuss Iraq at that time, or that Blair and Bush would have wanted to bring it up.)

Further down in the testimony, Blair notes that in their joint press conference, Israel came up first as a discrete issue:

At the press conference that President Bush and I gave afterwards, we talked about -- I think Israel actually came up first, but then we went on to Iraq and President Bush says: "The Prime Minister and I, of course, talked about Iraq. We both recognised the danger of a man who is willing to kill his own people and harbouring and developing weapons of mass destruction."

At that press conference, Bush called on Israel to end the operation "without delay."

What this testimony suggests, if anything, is that the leaders saw Israel not as a partner in invading Iraq, not as a pretext for invading Iraq, not even as one of many pretexts for invading Iraq but as a possible complicating factor. I'm not even sure this is the case -- Blair never actually links Iraq and Israel in his mind; the very quote Walt pulls, in fact, distinguishes the topics: The conversation had "less to do" with Iraq or the Middle East because of Israel's actions in the West Bank.

Moreover, his interlocutor, Baroness Prashar, understands his testimony about the meeting as describing "general discussions in terms of getting views across to each other, trying to understand and establish a rapport and a relationship."

Walt does not, or refuses to. That distinction is unimportant: This kind of reach, which has become endemic to his work on Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, disqualifies him as serious on this matter.

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In which I find something good to say about Twitter

By Ron Kampeas · February 8, 2010

Twitter's 140 character limit hath bestowed upon me the sobriquet, "Angry Ron," per Ali Abunimah's tweet regarding my post below:

Angry Ron Kampeas of JTA attacks me over @Intifada's reveal of NYT/Ethan Bronner conflict of interest

Angry Ron likes!

Of course, Angry Ron also awaits Abunimah's more substantive reply about how he has made reporting a little more dangerous, not just for Jews with Israeli relatives, but for Palestinians with relatives in Fatah and Hamas, Iranians with brothers in the Basij, Russians with sons serving in Chechnya, etc. etc. etc.

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On Bronner: Goldblog puts it…

By Ron Kampeas · February 8, 2010

Much pithier than I would.

The whole issue of whether Ethan Bronner's son's service in the IDF compromises the New York Times reporting is so outrageous (Uri summarizes it here), that I've been holding back because it's liable to push me off the deep end into a lengthy screed.

Thank heavens (and The Atlantic) for Jeff Goldberg who gets it just right, in considerably less than 2,000 words, especially here:

This is a somewhat obvious point except to propagandists, reporters are capable of actually separating out their personal interests from their coverage. I've worked with Palestinian reporters in Gaza and the West Bank, many of whom have had family ties to Fatah and, in one case, even to Hamas, but without fail they've functioned as professional news-gatherers interested only in getting the story before the competition. I don't think the Times should stop using Palestinian reporters in the West Bank and Gaza, because if it did so, its coverage would suffer. And its coverage of Israel would suffer immeasurably if the Times bent to the pressure of anti-Israel propagandists and removed Ethan Bronner from his post.

I used to think Ali Abunimah, who started all this, had a few good ideas, but now I wonder if he bothers thinking at all. This initiative is a big fat welcome mat for folks who want to marginalize and even criminalize Palestinian reporting, a phenomenon I addressed here.

Listen up: This is a standard that would essentially kill the concept of the "local hire," rob us (the global "us") essential insights into conflicts around the globe, and reduce media credibility just when it needs as much reinforcement as it can get.

As I've written elsewhere, an organic involvement in one society or the other on either side of a conflict -- and having a son enlist is as organic as it gets in Israel -- does not detract from reporting; it enhances it.

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Barnea: U.S. Jewish leaders press Bibi to block NIF probe

By Ami Eden · February 7, 2010

* Yediot's Nahum Barnea, by many accounts Israel's most respected political columnist, reports that U.S. Jewish communal figures weighed in with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin against a Knesset investiagtion of the New Israel Fund:

The attack on the fund greatly troubled the American Jewish establishment. An investigation in Israel could harm other Jewish organizations. Questions will be raised about political involvement in a foreign country, dual loyalty and tax offenses. Anti-Defamation League Director Abe Foxman, who is not associated with the NIF, said to The Jewish Week that the accusations of the right wing NGO were impudent. “It’s almost undemocratic,” Foxman said to me over the phone yesterday.

In the afternoon, Rivlin received a phone call from a leader of one of the Jewish organizations. “Have you gone mad?” the man lashed out at Rivlin. “You’re going to investigate us for funds we send to you? You’re out of your minds.”

Barak “I can’t stop it,” Rivlin said to him. “It’s not within my authority.” He called Netanyahu and reported to him about the call from New York. Netanyahu turned to Schneller and convinced him to remove the proposal from the agenda. Schneller says that he promised him to recruit the entire coalition to support the proposal, if the discussion of it would be postponed to next week.

Barnea also reports on the strange political alignments in this fight, with strong anti-NIF comments coming from Kedima and Labor Knesset members, while several prominent Likud memebers spoke out against the idea of setting up a parliamentary commission of inquiry.

Yeshiva World News reported that Nachman Shai (Kadima) and Daniel Ben-Simon (Labor) organized a letter signed by 14 Knesset membersdefending NIF.  And Ynet quotes another Laborite, Welfare Minister Yitzhak Herzog, as slamming the attacks against NIF as "McCarthyism."

The Jerusalem Post quotes Haim Oron or Meretz threatening a probe into the funding of right-wing organizations in response to any Knesset investigation of NIF.

Meanwhile, the Post's Caroline Glick argues that the anger over NIF is a good sign:

The media coverage provoked calls in the Knesset this week to investigate the NIF and its operational arms in Israel, both through regular committee hearings and perhaps through a parliamentary investigative panel.

These calls are extraordinary because they represent the first time in a decade that the legitimacy of these NGOs has been seriously scrutinized.

Since the Palestinians began their terror war against Israel in September 2000, NIF-sponsored groups have worked steadily to intimidate political leaders, law enforcement officials and military commanders to toe their anti-Zionist line.

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The power of example—the NIF, the attacks, and Goldstone

By Ron Kampeas · February 4, 2010

One way to figure the increasingly fraught to and fro between the New Israel Fund and its Israeli critics (including the Israeli government) is as a family fight: Not exactly articulate, at first.For the past few days, ever since it's become evident that the army is using some of the same NIF-funded evidence to examine itself as the Goldstone commission, I've been wondering why exactly -- at the same time -- NIF's critics have intensified their attacks. The criticism, aired over the summer, that the evidence is tendentious now, itself, appears to be tendentious.

What's emerging -- and may yet be articulated (or maybe has been articulated, I have yet to see it clearly) -- is not that the evidence is bad, or manufactured, but that it was wrong to share it with Goldstone. Period.

That posture may be grossly simplistic -- nativist, even -- but I think the psychology that underpins it stems from legitimate Israeli concerns about legitimating Goldstone -- and it's here that NIF falls short in shaping the argument.

Otniel Schneller, a Kadima lawmaker in the Knesset and one of several Knesset members seeking the criminalization of some of the activity of the human rights groups at the center of this, seems to hint at this psychology Thursday in The Jerusalem Post:

Schneller added that he felt at least one of the groups connected to the NIF, which had given testimony to Goldstone’s commission of inquiry, had overstepped the bounds of legitimacy in that it had already tried to bring the same issue -- regarding IDF actions in Gaza -- to the Israeli Supreme Court, which rejected the case.

“They attempted to bring a case alleging that the IDF had destroyed entire villages in Gaza,” Schneller said. “The Supreme Court threw it out and dismissed it as false, but the group nonetheless presented the issue to Goldstone. That’s a prime example of an illegitimate activity, because it’s not only faulting the IDF based on false testimony, but it’s saying that decisions made by the courts of the State of Israel are not binding.”

Let me be crystal clear: I'm not endorsing Schneller's view, or even saying it makes sense. He doesn't bother to identify the group or the case, rendering his claim a centimeter or two short of nonsense; recourse to an international body is, a priori, out of bounds, according to his outlook, although he doesn't explain why Israel is happy, for instance, to use the World Trade Organization's good offices to bludgeon Arab states into allowing trade.

Where this argument may be going, where it may finally grasp legitimacy, is in his "nonetheless": "Goldstone" has become a byword, in Israel, for "travesty," and not without reason. The report includes some substantive charges, but makes its overall case -- that Israel's policy was to intentionally target civilians -- on flimsy grounds, including meaningless bluster from Israeli officials who were not involved in the war's planning, and the bizarre claim that because of Israel's development of precision weaponry, human error cannot be a factor. This, as I've written, is like blaming Canon for Uncle Marv's tendency to point the PowerShot at Aunt Edna's ear instead of her face. The camera may be state of the art, but Uncle Marv, unfortunately, is still an idiot.

And this report underpins a process that Israelis have every reason to suspect is corrupt. Had the U.N. Human Rights Council, make no mistake, received from Richard Goldstone a paper plate illiustrated with his absent doodling, it would have used it to launch a bid to refer Israeli officials to the International Criminal Court. That such a referral now has the patina of legitimacy because of Goldstone's authentic background as a jurist, a human rights icon and a Zionist makes it worse, for Israelis.

And the fact that he has marshaled facts, and from Israeli sources, makes it even worse, which is where this becomes vexing. This fury, at the subliminal level where it now brews, needs little justification; B'tselem's facts seem as outrageous to Israelis like Schneller, as Goldstone's distortions of the same facts.

It is the responsbility, of course, of the Israelis acting on this fury to responsibly tease apart the malicious from the meticulous, and so far, they've done a really horrible job of it: Legislation that would shut down NGOs would probably cause as many problems as it would solve, if for no other reason than it would provide a pretext to shut down NGOs watching out for the welfare of Jews in the Ukraine and other states of the former Soviet Union and would lend credibility to the smearing of human rights groups providing valuable information in the immediate neighborhood. Do we need an "even Israel does it" moment?

But this need for clarity is also the responsibility of the human rights groups exploited by Goldstone -- and their sponsors, like the NIF. Not because of some McCarthyist notion by which every critic must first swear fealty to a politically correct notion of what it means to be Israeli. Not because the NIF and the groups it sponsors have been named by the likes of Im Tirtzu, but because they have been named by Goldstone.

Let me get a little Dickensian here, and risk casting Israel as Oliver Twist: You catch the kid picking your pocket, you turn him over to the constabulary. When you discover that he faces the gallows, is it your responsibility to do your damndest to get him out?

Ok, Cast Lead was no pocket-picking expedition, but the UNHRC -- and to a degree, the international court -- is about as corrupt as the interest-vested England of Dickens' day.

And the thing is, once the responsible organization makes it clear that it has repudiated Goldstone, a weight, at least, is partly lifted. B'Tselem, for instance, made it clear in October that it found Goldstone's report profoundly* flawed; is it a coincidence that Israel's government cited B'Tselem as a source in explaining its efforts to track down wrongdoing last week? Not that B'Tselem is satisfied -- but it has scored an irrevocable victory. The army has validated its research.

The same is true this side of the pond. Yuli Edelstein, the Israeli Diaspora affairs minister, who's here meeting with Jewish leaders this week as I noted earlier, lists the usual litany of wounded broadsides against the New Israel Fund:

This matter has come to a head through a body called the New Israel Fund, and this body, as I have said and we all know, has a number of projects that are very beautiful, very welcome in the social sector, and I as a former minister of absorption can testify ran very desirable activities in various areas. But alongside these ran activities I would say are very problematic, some of the funding is not private, … funded by all sorts of foreign agents, foreign governments, but certainly, and I haven't checked 100 percent the reliability of the research, but as far as I know, and the study is in my room, but as far as I know, most of the material submitted to Goldstone report was submitted by groups funded by NIF.

Nowhere in this rambling, barely grammatical (in its original Hebrew) declamation does Edelstein address whether the materials submitted to Goldstone are truthful, which you'd think would be the point.

NIF's director, Daniel Sokatch, understandably slid into the "kill the messenger" cliche when I read back Edelstein's remarks. "We've made an enormous difference to the texture and character of civil society over last 30 years," he said. "Human rights groups are reporting what they see in the field and absolutely have a duty to validate the reports -- to take it out on the organizations, and  and particularly the New Israel Fund seems to me an attempt to kill the messenger."

He would not, however, pronounce an opinion on the Goldstone report: "We don't take positions on political issues," he said. But that's exactly what NIF does, and with good reason. (Nothing in Israel is more political than the hegemony of the Orthodox, for instance.)

Contrast this with Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Reform movement's Religious Action Center, who was even more robust in his condemnation of the anti-NIF campaign -- and who even reached out to me to vent spleen.

"It's ironic that people who condemned the Goldstone report as sweeping generalities, taking facts out of context, are getting on the bandwagon of a report that does the same thing here," he said, referring to Im Tirtzu's "study" of the NIF.

Saperstein has the credibility to point out that irony because his organization was among those that "condemned the Goldstone report as sweeping generalities."

Saperstein made it clear that he believed whether NIF or the groups it sponsors have condemned Goldstone or not, was beside the point. "I don't see how they can be blamed for the Goldstone report because they provided information they knew to be factual -- their assertions ought to be evaluated on their own merits," Saperstein said. And he and Sokatch made the valid point that had the groups not cooperated with Goldstone, their material is, by definition, open source, and would have been available to Goldstone for quotation (or misquotation).

All true -- but it was Saperstein, whose movement has made its rejection of the Goldstone report clear, who scored the one-on-one meeting with Edelstein, who now says he will return to Israel to report to the Cabinet an impending crisis in relations with the Diaspora. Not Sokatch, nor his boss, Naomi Chazan.

Saperstein would not share with me his discussion with Edelstein, but I know David, and he is nothing if not blunt spoken.

UPDATE: Jerry Haber (below) does not agree that B'Tselem's characterization of the Goldstone report is "profoundly flawed," as I do. I think the flaws that B'Tselem describes are profound -- particularly, this sentence: "The mission’s conclusions regarding Israel’s overall objectives in carrying out the operation were not sufficiently supported by facts arising from the mission’s research."

But it is also true that B'Tselem does not necessarily see things my way; as Jerry points out, B'Tselem also finds that the "faults do not nullify the report’s main recommendation, that Israel must investigate the suspicions that its army acted in Gaza unlawfully and immorally." So I have crossed out "profoundly." B'Tselem found the report flawed, and one of the flaws B'Tselem finds is that Goldstone leaped to conclusions about intent unsupported by the evidence -- the very flaw I believe points to a profound corruption at the Goldstone commission's core. That's how I should have put it.

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Scewby Jew

By Ron Kampeas · February 4, 2010

Last night, Jon Stewart and "Mr. Bagelman" took on Hamas' anti-Semitic cartoons, and signed off with the ultimate "Those meddling kids!" unmasking:

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Tidbits: Kirk, Hersh, Dersh, and Bahrain in between

By Ron Kampeas · February 4, 2010

* Talking Points Memo's Justin Elliott has an excellent rundown here about how U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) has become the favored candidate of the establishment pro-Israel community to win Barack Obama's old Senate seat:

With $108,000 in pro-Israel PAC donations in the current cycle, Kirk is second overall (to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid), and easily the biggest recipient in the House. He was the second biggest recipient of pro-Israel dollars in 2006. And his career total is $1,025,000, seventh overall of any member of Congress, and behind only prominent senators like Joe Lieberman.

One quibble: Elliott notes that Kirk took a lead role in campaigning against the nomination of Chas Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, and says that Freeman's "nomination was killed after a campaign by the pro-Israel community."

This is accurate, but not quite true: It's true that pro-Israel voices launched the campaign against Freeman, it's true he pulled out. But: I have it on fairly senior authority that Freeman's nomination was killed in the House Intelligence Committee because of his China views. (Not that House committees have a vote, but the Intel committee's say is influential enough that it made the difference.) These views, it is true, might not have emerged had the pro-Israel community not launched its campaign -- although his pro-Beijing posture was so pronounced, I think it would have come out. But it was these views that buried him -- not his pro-Saudi critiques of Israel.

* What intrigues me most about this Seymour Hersh interview with Bashar Assad is that Hersh even brought up J Street. It's a little in the weeds for The New Yorker, and for the Syrian president, if you ask me -- what next, parsing Iran policy differences between Aguda and the OU? That's our job, bub.

Assad doesn't say much else that's new related to Israel (his apparently censored threat to kill intelligence sharing unless the United States improves ties would be my lede), and he seems to misunderstand what J Street is about:

Criticisms of some Israeli policies at the J-Street founding conference:
Ahh … that is new!… But we should educate them that if they are worried about Israel, then the only thing that can protect Israel is peace, nothing else. No amount of airplanes or weapons could protect Israel, so they have to forget about that.

Bashar, Bashar, Bashar. I think J Street gets the peace thing. I'm not sure they'd want to be associated with a call to disarm, though.

* Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, the Bahraini foreign minister, dined with Jewish community leaders Tuesday night. It was supposed to be hush-hush, but, nu, it was tweeted. I'd heard that Khalifa also tweeted it, but unless he's pulled the tweets from his feed, it doesn't look like it. (I like his amazement at the spread of "Five Guys" burgers.)

Anyway, if evidence was needed that Iran's Arab neighbors fear a nuclear Iran as much -- or even more -- than Israel, read this transcript of his press conference yesterday with Hillary Rodham Clinton real close (I've italicized the interesting part):

The Kingdom of Bahrain has always called for a region free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. To that end, we believe that the current situation surrounding the Iranian nuclear file should be resolved in a peaceful manner, in accordance with the Security Council resolutions and in complete adherence to the rules and regulation of the IAEA in a fully transparent manner. Furthermore, we discussed how the Gulf region could benefit from the use of nuclear power for peaceful civilian purposes in a safe, secure, and efficient manner.

I.E. Iran's not the only country in the region capable of contemplating the uses of nuclear power -- there's one across the Gulf that incidentally hosts the U.S. Sixth Fleet.

* We've covered the perception that U.S. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), whose D.C. suburban constituency has a substantial Jewish population, is not responsive to their requests for a hearing. The Baltimore Jewish Times reports this week that she's ready to talk. It's not online, but here's the story:

Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) has called on Jewish groups concerned with her votes on congressional resolutions dealing with Israel to meet her in a “dialogue that is far more honest and far more open for the people of the United States and to engage the Arab states that have not always been so helpful, and to engage the Palestinians.”

Her remarks, at Chizuk Amuno Congregation in Baltimore on Monday, Feb. 1, came at a luncheon coordinated by the Baltimore Jewish Council.
Last year some Jewish groups criticized the congresswoman for failing to meet with them.

She explained her Jan. 10, 2009 “present” vote on a resolution widely seen as favoring Israel’s actions toward the end of the Israel-Hamas War by saying, “It has been quite misinterpreted. I was described by one article as anti-Semitic and that was very hurtful to me. … To express a difference on a policy issue doesn’t mean a disregard for Israelis or for Jews and the same is for the Palestinians.”

Noting the progress in economics and governance amongst West Bank Palestinians as opposed to those in the Gaza Strip, she said, “Surely it should be in all of our interests -- the U.S., the Palestinians and the Israelis -- to create a border that’s not dangerous. As a mother, I get that. We also have to be concerned about the children running through the streets of Gaza who are under 18 and have an entire lifetime defined by this moment. If America is not transformational at this point, we’ll have at least another generation of frustration.”

Mrs. Edwards, who represents parts of Prince George’s and Montgomery County, visited Israel and the Palestinian areas this past June.

* Alan Dershowitz now tells the Forward that he doesn't believe Richard Goldstone is a "moser," i.e., a Jewish traitor deserving of death, but he may (or may not?) be a monster - i.e., a tall guy with a flat head deserving of pursuit by a torch-bearing mob. Dershowitz had told Israel Army Radio's Razi Barkai that Goldstone was "evil" and "evil" (he said it twice) and an "absolute traitor" and when Barkai got specific -- is he a moser? -- Dershowitz replied "Absolutely!"

Now he says there was a miscommunication:

Dershowitz claims that the audio clip is based on a miscommunication.“I thought he said ‘monster.’ And I didn’t say yes, because I wouldn’t ever characterize anybody as a monster.” Dershowitz says that Barkai asked him the question multiple times, and only after Barkai added the explanatory phrase “someone who betrays his own people” did Dershowitz answer in the affirmative.

So he didn't hear moser, he heard monster, but he didn't mean monster, he meant moser, at least when it was explained to him by Barkai.

If one were generous, one might allow that Barkai did not explain the term fully, and that Dershowitz was embracing the term "traitor" but not in the sense of "traitor" as someone who should be put to death. That's quite a parse: Liberal societies have historically preserved treason as one of the few -- if not the only -- capital crimes. Israel has formally executed only two men: One was mistakenly identified, in the chaos of the Independence War, as a traitor; the other was Adolf Eichmann.

Dershowitz seems a little over the map here -- he wrote the radio station to retract the term "traitor", but in noting this to the Forward, reaffirms it:

“I wrote to the broadcaster, retracting my word ‘traitor,’” Dershowitz told the Forward. “But if you’re asking me deep in my heart and soul do I believe that the word fairly characterizes him, in light of the way he’s used his Jewishness, both as a shield and a sword? You know, if the shoe fits.”

In a comment below the article, Dershowitz claims the term would be understood differently in Israel than in the United States:

That is why I retracted the term “traitor,” which carries a somewhat different connotation in Israel than in the United States, even though I think its meaning suits him perfectly.

The difference, as far as I can tell, is that in the United States, treason is a capital offense, period, whereas in Israel, it is a capital offense only in "actual warfare."

Yosef Blau, a Yeshiva University spiritual counselor who went to Jewish day school with Dershowitz, isn't buying his schoolmate's claim that he had never heard the term:

"Moser was a term that was certainly used. He must have heard it as a child,” said Blau, who grew up with Dershowitz and attended religious elementary and high schools with him. “I don’t recall it coming up in the schools we went to, but it certainly was out there.”

Neither is Debra Delee, Americans for Peace Now's chairwoman:

Dershowitz now claims that he was not familiar with the word "moser," and that instead he thought he was agreeing with the characterization of Goldstone as a "monster." Similarly, his retraction of the word "traitor" left something to be desired.

I love that "similarly." Delee continues:

Dershowitz could have - and should have - aired substantive disagreements about the report that Judge Goldstone authored following the Gaza War. Instead he chose to demean, to insult, and to incite.

For his part, Dershowitz says in his comment in the Forward:

Rabbi Yosef Blau suggests that I might have learned the word moser in the Yeshiva we both attended, but he didn’t tell your reporter what a terrible Yeshiva student I was!

UPDATE: Dershowitz also sent a letter to JTA with his explanation, which has been posted to our new letters blog.

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Yuli Edelstein on J Street, NIF, the crisis with the Diaspora

By Ron Kampeas · February 4, 2010

Yuli Edelstein, Israel's minister for Diaspora affairs, is here; he's attending the National Prayer Breakfast today, along with President Obama. (The NPB, by the way, is one of the weirdest, most insular and most media-unfriendly Washington events to attract People With Actual Power -- barring, perhaps, Christmas/Chanukah cocktails at the NSA -- and is virtually uncoverable, except for the transcript of the president's speech. An exception was a few years back when Bono -- I swear this is true -- attended and insisted that the confessional press, including yours truly, be in attendance. He laughed at my joke about brisket.)

In any case, Edelstein had what to say about what he says is a crisis over pluralism emerging between Israel and the Diaspora, when and how to deal with J Street, and the recent controversy over New Israel Fund backing for groups that reported on Israeli actions during last winter's Gaza war. Edelstein spoke to reporters on Tuesday after meeting with Jewish leaders in New York, Philadelphia and Washington. Here are the excerpts; I'll update later with reaction to the NIF comments and other commentary.

Pluralism:

One of the topics that arose in New York, Philadelphia and Washington was the topic of the recent events in Israel, Jewish pluralism, if you will, including Women at the Wall and the buses [the segregated buses for the fervently Orthodox) and other topics.

I promised that on my return that I would raise these issues with the prime minister and the Cabinet secretary and we would think about the establishment of a team that would be in touch, officially in contact, with the leadership of the different movements and the federations to attempt to assess what can be solved, what can't -- but at least to create a dialogue. Because in my opinion, we are speaking two different languages. If I come to the Cabinet meeting on Sunday, as I will, and say "there's a grave crisis here," no one will know what I'm talking about.

I think it's worth  making my Cabinet colleagues and Knesset members understand that there's a sense of a problem in the dialogue. And if they believe like I do that the communities' representatives, the activists in the communities are our cherished partners in everything connected to Hasbara and Israel's image, we must not ignore what they say in our direction.

There was a sense of frustration (on the part of the Jewish leaders he met with), of many requests not answered, of a lack of an address, and of saying, "Finally we can speak to someone official from Israel," they turn to the embassy, to the people in Washington… Now they could speak with an official from Israel and spill these complaints.

I said honestly, that if they wrote another thousand requests or even if I raised it with the Cabinet on Sunday, that there would not be a solution pleasing everyone by next week. The issue is very complicated, but the fact that there is no immediate easy answer does not acquit us of seeking answers, and see what we can do and how.

The expression was, "We love and support Israel but it's impossible to expect that we always be at your call without relating to these issues."

The New Israel Fund controversy:

This is a completely different topic, there are absolutely legitimate topics that Jewish officials raise, and there is a completely different topic that is very problematic, in my view, and one that we have been concerned with for a time, of a number of groups, under the guise of NGOs that are funded by foreign agents. I didn't say hostile, or subversive or terrorist, but foreign agents, including foreign governments.

This matter has come to a head through a body called the New Israel Fund, and this body, as I have said and we all know, has a number of projects that are very beautiful, very welcome in the social sector, and I as a former minister of absorption can testify ran very desirable activities in various areas. But alongside these ran activities I would say are very problematic, some of the funding is not private, … funded by all sorts of foreign agents, foreign governments, but certainly, and I haven't checked 100 percent the reliability of the research, but as far as I know, and the study is in my room, but as far as I know, most of the material submitted to Goldstone report was submitted by groups funded by NIF.

Now I'm not saying that in the wake of this to immediately, I don't know, close the fund or put anyone on trial. But this requires a thorough investigation, I don't think we'll find many examples in democracies where these things exist like they do in Israel.

J Street:

I didn't meet with J Street people, I was asked a number of times about how to relate -- if I would recommend -- for example there was a story, yesterday, I spoke at the University of Pennsylvania, there was a big story about J Street, they want to do activism on campus, and they asked my opinion.

I would say that as a minister of Diaspora affairs, and as an official elected by the Israeli public and as a Jew and Israeli, someone in touch with all sorts of agents in the Diaspora, those I agree with and those I don't. And when I speak to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, in front of me is sitting Americans for Peace Now and American Friends of the Likud, and I very much hope they don't agree with one another, because otherwise, I don't understand why would they exist.

With this, there is a very simple rule, if you want to call yourself a lobby for the state of Israel you have to first of all to remember that that Israel is a democracy.

In 14 years in politics, I was in government, and then as deep in the opposition as you can get and then in government and then as deep in the opposition as you can get, everyone who wants to be a lobby for the state of Israel must check itself, are you capable of working with Shamir, Rabin, Netanyahu? In fact, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, you can go on.

And don't misunderstand me, we are not a state of squares that scream at Jewish communities, "You have to support Israel right or wrong!" We don't need to support wrong, we need to support right.

There's a very simple rule, and I leave it with a question mark: If J Street says it is able to represent every government in Israel maybe they can be a lobby. If they can't be a lobby, call themselves Young Liberal Jews for whatever, for Better Jewish Communal Life in the United States, and then we'll speak with them.

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