What are we to make of America’s insistence — now softened at the edges, if not the core — on an end to Israel’s building of settlements in the West Bank and Israel’s determined refusal to comply?Read More
It has lately become fashionable to speak of Barack Obama with — well, with regret. Such great hopes and expectations; so little so far.Read More
Litmus tests are dangerous conveniences. We all have them, we all use them, perhaps thinking of them as our own personal “red lines”: Cross them, and you’re in the enemy camp. Be cruel to a child, oppose progressive taxation, make excuses for torture or for terrorism, deny the Holocaust or view Israel with contempt and you have crossed mine, you are on the other side. These single factors are for me decisive, and that’s the standard definition of a litmus test.Read More
Where exactly — or even approximately — is “the center”? Is the center necessarily “the mainstream?” What if, instead of the conventional normal distribution — two dwindling slopes trailing off from a large hump between them — the distribution looks more like a “U,” with most people at either end and the middle nearly empty? Or an “L,” with most people off to one side?Read More
Like sharks entering a cove teeming with frenzied fish, loathers of Zion have opened their jaws wide and then, with delight, gripped their prey. For them, the Goldstone report is delectable, albeit it merely whets but does not satisfy their appetite. It confirms what they have known all along, that Israel is a criminal state, that its probationary period is long since over, that the time for its total isolation has come and the time for its collapse draws near.Read More