JJ Goldberg has written the best thing I’ve seen yet about Andrew Adler, the Atlanta Jewish Times columnist who suggested that Israel may want to assassinate the president of the United States. Goldberg’s take is politically and historically astute and I wish everyone would read it:
And Obama? He pressed for a settlement freeze to get Netanyahu and Palestinian chief Mahmoud Abbas to the negotiating table. No aid suspensions, no angry, lectern-pounding press conferences. And he talked about using the pre-1967 lines as a basis for border negotiations, which has been turned into a falsehood that he wants Israel to return to those actual lines. Nearly every senior member of the Israeli defense and intelligence establishment publicly favors negotiations based on the pre-1967 lines. The notion of an indefensible border is not in Israels military vocabularyits used purely for political grandstanding and foreign consumption. If the pre-1967 border was indefensible, how did Israel win the 1967 war in six days? For that matter, why is that the last war Israel managed to win quickly and decisively?
Not to be a mushball centrist, I’m not sure who I have more contempt for- those on the left who are obsessed, knee-jerk Israel-bashers, or those on the right seeking to demogogue everyone to the right of Bibi as anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, self-hating Jews, etc. It’s at the point where when I read something from either side my eyes glaze over and I almost forget which side I’m reading.
Stephen Silver, Writer 