Love that kosher sushi--that makes it worth the trip
Tomorrow, J Street will be celebrating its merger with Brit Tzedek and the launch of its local grassroots initiative with meetings all over the U.S. The main event will be held at Penn Hillel and will be videocast all over the country to the other gatherings. It will feature J Street director, Jeremy Ben Ami. For the loony Israel lobby right, it’s too much to bear. Not only is J Street going from strength to strength, a university Hillel is hosting the traitors.
That mobilized the forces of ZOA and Z Street (what dya think the “Z” stands for?) into a full bore stalking expedition. Not to be outdone, they’re scheduling not one, but TWO counter meetings at Penn Hillel which are deliberately timed to compete (that’s called stalking). It’s going to be something like biur chometz in which they’ll go through the building with a fine-tooth comb ridding it of any bit of J Street defilement. Maybe they’ll even host an exorcism if they feel the building has been mortally compromised.
Penn Hillel has been under such assault that it felt compelled to release a statement explaining its decision to offer a rental space to J Street.
You can see the graphic for the Z Street event displayed here, which will feature former Aipac hack, Mitchell Bard, author of the Jewish Virtual Pro-Israel Library. Bard also directs the ACE program which funds pro-Israel academic positions on willing campuses thanks to the help of the Schusterman Foundation, which also pays Mitch a cool 125G’s for his trouble.
The ZOA has brought one of its staff hit men to conduct a full bore witch hunt entitled, Is J Street Bad for Israel? The question mark seems superfluous. This event is co-sponsored by Hillel while the J Street event is not. But the mere idea of J Street inside a Jewish building seems to have the loony right in fits of apoplexy.
Many Jewish peace activists chuckle at the antics of lunatics like Mort Klein who has been shrying about left wing Jewish perfidy for decades. But the truth is that Klein and ZOA have the support of the cream of the Jewish fat-cat funding world. If you review this press release you’ll see that no less than Ronald Lauder, Mort Zuckerman and James Tisch will headline this year’s fundraising dinner. Itamar Marcus, former Israeli intelligence officer and current director of the Palestinian media smear outfit, Palestine Media Watch, will also be honored with an award actually named after Ben Hecht (!) for his hatchet work.
Mohamed Ali Samantar, accused Somali human rights violator befriended by Israel lobby
The Forward brings word that our friends in the Israel lobby have some strange new bedfellows in the form of a former Somali cabinet minister accused of atrocities and other human rights violations. The minister is being tried in U.S. courts for his alleged crimes. Jewish groups like ZOA, Agudath Israel, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, American Jewish Congress, and the ADL argue in friend of the court briefs that our judicial system should have no jurisdiction:
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments March 3 in the case of Yousuf v. Samantar, in which a group of Somalis is seeking financial damages from Mohamed Ali Samantar, Somalia’s former defense minister. He also served as prime minister from 1987 to 1990. Samantar was a top official in the regime of President Siad Barre, a socialist-leaning dictatorship that was denounced by international groups for its systematic use of torture and arbitrary arrests, and for the rape and murder of political rivals and dissidents.
Among the five Somalis suing Samantar are a student who was allegedly detained and raped 15 times by a military man, a former officer who alleges he survived a mass execution and a businessman who claims he was tortured for months by the regime Samantar helped lead. Two of the plaintiffs are now American citizens. The case was filed under the Torture Victim Protection Act.
…Pro-Israel activists, fearing a precedent that will allow others to pursue legal action against Israel for alleged war crimes — as has happened in Europe — have filed briefs opposing their suit.
What is passing strange about the lobby’s position is that it argues regarding Palestinian terror that U.S. courts SHOULD have jurisdiction. So somehow it will argue that the Somali represented a government which should have sovereign immunity while the Palestinians didn’t and don’t. But what should be difficult for the Supreme Court justices to swallow is conceding that raping and massacring citizens should be construed as a legitimate government policy. I think they’d really have to stretch the definition of what is acceptable behavior by a government or its officials. It would be something like arguing that no officials responsible for Abu Graibh should be prosecuted because the acts committed there were official U.S. policy.
The Forward reporter notes the oddness of the current Israel lobby legal position:
Fighting to maintain immunity for foreign officials seems to place Jewish activists far from positions they have taken in the past. Supporters of Israel actively backed legislation that paved the way for relatives of terror victims to sue terror organizations and their sponsors in American courts. Over the years, these lawsuits have yielded several rulings against Hamas, Fatah and Iran for compensation reaching hundreds of millions of dollars.
The chief U.S. firm trolling for Jewish terror victims in order to pursue claims against Arab banks and other deep pockets has cogently articulated the reason for opposition to this suit:
“There will be a rash of lawsuits of this kind against Israel” if the court rules for the plaintiffs, warned Alyza Lewin, an attorney with the firm of Lewin & Lewin, which has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of Samantar and against making foreign officials vulnerable to civil lawsuits.
…“You’d have the entire Middle East conflict here in the U.S.” if Samantar won, agreed Marc Stern, co-executive director of the American Jewish Congress. Stern, who also filed a brief on this issue, claimed that allowing civil suits would “require Israelis to recount in an American court years after the event why every rocket was fired and why each attack took place.”
Of course, that’s a gross exaggeration. What Lewin and Stern fear is that Israeli impunity might end here in U.S. courts and that Israeli officials might have to face justice in the heart of the most powerful nation on earth. That’s enough to strike fear in the heart of the lobby and IDF officers who might be the first to sit in the dock of justice.
Oh, and speaking of strange bedfellows–Saudi Arabia has joined the lobby in filing an amicus brief. So Abe: how does it feel to be in bed with Saudi royalty and a Somali torturer? A bit uncomfortable perhaps? Or have you no shame and feel no pangs of conscience about this? Not to mention that the lobby finds itself on the opposite side of the fence from international human rights groups who welcome the Somali suit. But the lobby is so often on the side of the devils, rather than angels in human rights matters like these.
The pro-Israel ideological wars continue at Ben Gurion University (BGU), where knives were sharpened after faculty member, Neve Gordon published a groundbreaking op-ed in the L.A. Times advocating the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) movement as a means of opposing Israel’s Occupation. Now, there is news that a right-wing BGU trustee, Michael Gross, after seeing Prof. David Newman interviewed on the BBC documentary (starting about 19:25 in the video above), Dispatches, wrote him an e mail wishing him dead:
Mr Gross [the trustee] sent two emails to Prof Newman after the political geography professor, also British-born, appeared on last month’s Channel 4 Dispatches strand, which examined Britain’s pro-Israel lobby.
Prof Newman, who has been at BGU for 21 years, did not directly criticise Israeli policy in the programme…
Mr Gross, who…sits on BGU’s international board of governors, emailed Prof Newman after the programme’s transmission…“I saw your disgusting contribution to the Dispatches programme. I will use whatever influence I have at BGU to have you thrown out…I hope you perish.”
He later sent another message: “The sooner you are removed from BGU and the face of the earth, the better.”
I have spent many years in academia as an undergraduate and graduate student and university fundraiser. Frankly, I’ve never heard of a university trustee doing such a thing. It’s beyond astonishing. I can certainly understand that a right-wing pro-Israel trustee like Gross would be angry with Newman for appearing on a TV show that he viewed as harming Israel’s interests. But wishing him dead? And not once, but twice? This is simply beyond the pale and should not be countenanced by a legitimate institution of higher education.
Of course, there is the issue of academic freedom, which Gross’ grossly threatening language violated. But beyond that, Gross wished a distinguished member of the BGU faculty DEAD. Can this be acceptable in civil discourse in a university community? Especially when the individual levelling the threat is a university trustee?
128 BGU faculty signed a letter of protest (gathered over a mere 48 hours) addressed to the chairman of the school’s board of governors, former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, Roy Zuckerberg. They wrote in part:
We find it quite incredible that a person [Gross] capable of writing such letters should have a place on any Board of Governors, in particular that of a University. The letters signal an attitude of total disdain for the principles of academic discourse based on open debate, and for free inquiry of any kind, and we believe that there is no place in the BGU community for people who are capable of writing such letters. The fact that Mr. Gross wishes to use his financial assets as leverage, and seeks to control who should, and should not, be employed by the university, renders his behaviour even more egregious. We accordingly ask that you use your position as Chairman of the Board of Governors to ensure that Mr. Gross issue a formal and public apology to Prof. Newman, or alternatively ask for his resignation from his position as a member of the Board of Governors.
Zuckerberg, rather astonishingly replied to the letter by addressing both Gross and Newman as two naughty schoolboys who’d just had a fist fight in the schoolyard:
…Both of you by your own admission have made errors of judgment. I am not going to assign grades or degrees of blame, nor do I plan to take any of the actions suggested by you and some of your colleagues.
I must insist, however, that both of you drop the issue, enough damage has already been incurred to the good name of the University, and any further prolongation of the dispute will only exacerbate the situation.
…I call on both of you to return to applying your talents and resources in constructive channels.
I anticipate we can now end this matter.
A fellow trustee of his university has wished a faculty member dead and the chairman of the board wishes to wash his hands of the matter with a statement best summarized as “boys will be boys.” Zuckerberg is the chairman of an institution of higher learning, not Goldman Sachs. This incident has huge repurcussions in terms of violation of academic freedom and just plain abusive conduct. Yet Zuckerberg writes as if he’s admonishing two rogue traders who had a fist fight on the trading floor. This will not do.
Another unintentionally comic aspect of this donnybrook is this statement by British pro-Israel academic and columnist, Geoffrey Alderman:
The now very public slanging match involving Michael Gross and David Newman, reported in the JC last month, represents, for me, a multiple sadness.
…The language used by Mr Gross [in his attack on Newman] is not the language I would have used. At the same time, Professor Newman’s decision to appear on Peter Oborne’s pseudo-documentary — apparently without any editorial control — is not the decision I would have made.
Academic freedom is a precious commodity. But it doesn’t give an academic the licence to say what he or she pleases. There is, for example, such a thing as bringing one’s university into disrepute, and during an academic career now in its 48th year it has been my sad duty to have had to deal with a number of such cases, involving academics (some very senior) who felt they could, with impunity, bite the hand that fed them.
I’m sorry to use the word “astonishing” so often in this piece, but here we have another piece written by an academic, of all things, which completely misconstrues the meaning of the term academic freedom. In fact, this concept DOES give a member of the academy to ‘say what he or she pleases’ as long as it is truthful and accurate. And nothing Newman said in this documentary was untruthful or inaccurate or even incendiary. Academic freedom does, in fact, allow a faculty member to ‘bite the hand that fed them’ if doing so is in the interest of the pursuit of knowledge, the essential mission of academia. Not that Newman was doing anything of the sort through his participation.
Further, I find it again, well, astonishing that a fellow academic, when faced with something close to a death threat (or at least “death wish”) would refuse to rally in the latter’s defense. Alderman, who seems eminently lacking in empathic spirit, should himself face such a threat and then we’d see how he would react and what he would have a right to expect from his own colleagues in support.
But here’s the real clincher:
At this point, I must declare an interest. It is a matter of public knowledge that I am privileged to hold, at the University of Buckingham, a professorial appointment endowed by Mr Gross. It is from this endowment that part of my salary is paid. But I must add at once that Mr Gross has never sought to influence either my academic work or my extra-mural media activities. On a great number of issues affecting world Jewry, he and I happen to agree. On some others we do not. But we respect each other’s views, and independence.
Of course, Alderman “respects” Gross’ “views” on Newman and has little or no problem with them. As for independence…did that man say ‘independence?’ How independent is he when Gross virtually signs his paycheck. In fact, it is a journalistic travesty that the Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s main Jewish periodical, published this column. Alderman has a huge conflict of interest and anything he says on this subject is colored by his professional association with Gross. And having Alderman declare himself independent and therefore able to be objective in this matter is deplorable. It’s like a white 1960s southerner telling you he’s no racist. Of course, Alderman thinks he’s fair and balanced. But it’s not up to an interested party to make such a judgment. That should be in the hands of a sober editor, something the Chronicle apparently doesn’t possess.
Gross must go. To have him continue as a director of Ben Gurion risks making the institution look like the donors run the show and are able to call for the demise of any faculty member they dislike. Besides, Israel lately has been the victim of numerous incidents of violence and terror by Jews against fellow Jews (not to mention Palestinians as well). In fact, settler terrorist, Jack Teitel has admitted to Israeli police that he planted a bomb intended to kill Hebrew University professor Zeev Sternhell. In light of this how can BGU countenance retaining Gross on its board? I would like to ask Roy Zuckerberg what it would take for him to actually force Gross off the board? Newman’s death? Or merely a bomb placed outside his front door as happened to Prof. Sternhell?
I’m not claiming that Gross would do such a thing. But he came perilously close to suggesting as much in his atrocious e-mail remarks. Or at least suggesting that someone else who killed Newman would receive Gross’ approbation. This is garbage pure and simple and should not be winked at or treated with a slap on the wrist as Zuckerberg has done.
If someone asked you what Aipac’s mission was you might say: lobbying for Israel; bringing politicians and journalists to Israel; promoting Israel’s interests in American society; strengthening Zionism among college students. But would you ever in your wildest dreams answer that one of Aipac’s missions was to side with Indian Hindu extremists in their holy war against Islam? I thought I knew about a lot about Aipac. But even I was bowled over when I read this from M.J. Rosenberg (he should know since he worked for the group for 10 years or more):
This takes the chief Israel-lobby organization far afield from its supposed mandate to promote Israel’s interests in the U.S. How can you possibly argue that taking the side of Hindu nationalists in their fight against India’s Muslims and Pakistan is part of a pro-Israel agenda? Unless of course, the cause of Israel must now be yoked to any cause that slimes Muslims. Is that what Aipac’s neocon agenda has come down to? Jewish Jihad against Islam?
This 2002 Forward article fleshes out a lot of M.J.’s claim about the closeness of the Israel lobby to Hindus nationalists.
The right-wing hasbarasphere is reporting that J Street has invited Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren to speak at the upcoming national conference in Washington, DC. and that Israel’s chief representative in this country has refused. Not only will he not appear, but the foreign ministry has released a finger-wagging statement aimed at taking the group down a notch or two.
Oren’s rejection is extraordinary. Usually Israeli ambassadors practically troll for speaking invitations before Jewish groups. An appearance by the Israeli prime minister and ambassador is de rigueur at the annual Aipac national conference. Oren’s is the ultimate diss-kiss-off.
You remember way back when Bibi appointed Oren, the pro-Israel right trumpeted it as a brilliant move to appoint a Zionist “moderate” with impeccable academic credentials who could talk to Obama and to Jews across the political spectrum. I didn’t buy it then. And it looks like Oren’s bosses in Tel Aviv have dispensed with this fiction. Now, fangs are bared. J Street is an ally of the Obama administration and as such is the “enemy.” The only problem with this scenario is that it presumes that American Jews will buy the notion that a Jewish group allied with a sitting president is an enemy of Israel BECAUSE it supports his policies. This is a bit extreme even for those American Jews with almost a Pavlovian response to the notion of supporting Israel come what may.
[J Street] has been reaching out to the embassy and invited Ambassador Michael Oren to speak at its first annual conference in late October. Despite early indications the embassy was looking to engage the group, Oren has yet to meet with executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami or agree to participate in the conference.
Instead, the embassy has “communicated to J Street its views on the peace process and on the best way to ensure Israel’s security,” according to embassy spokesman Yoni Peled.
The message, Peled said, is that “while recognizing the need for a free and open debate on these issues, it is important to stress concern over certain policies that could impair Israel’s interests.”
This will certainly not hurt J Street. If anything, it will point to the extremism of the current government, which refuses to recognize an American Jewish group with whom 100,000 Jews have affiliated. Israel likes to make a pretence of representing all of world Jewry. By turning down J Street, it stands exposed before the world as the ultimate partisan. And there are at least 100,000 Jews who will not fall into lockstep with the Netanyahu government’s dictum that the group is anti-Israel.
There is an unintentionally astonishing passage in the Post article which notes that J Street actually has the temerity to agree with U.S. policies when they contradict those of the Israeli government. Imagine, J Street actually has the guts to stand up to the settler government and follow a line endorsed by U.S. Jews. If you draw this out to its logical conclusion, it means that the Israel lobby groups who oppose J Street’s views on issues like Iran sanctions and the settlement freeze actually oppose U.S. policy. They have chosen Israel’s interests over America’s as defined by the sitting president. This in turn gives the lie to the lobby’s claim that Israel’s and the U.S.’ interests are one and the same. Clearly, they are not. But someone has told neither Malcolm Hoenlein nor Tchaikovsky the news :
J Street has taken several positions at odds with the Israeli government in recent months, including arguing against the immediate imposition of additional sanctions on Iran even as Israel pushes for greater action, and backing US President Barack Obama’s call for a complete settlement freeze in the face of Israeli opposition.
The case of the disappearing tweet: Solomonia's announcement of the launch of 'J Street Jive/J Street Monitor'
The smears against J Street are rising to a fever pitch. The latest entry is an anonymous blog, J Street Jive, written by the pseudonymous Parrhesia. With the help of some readers and online research, it appears that Mr. P. hasn’t done a good job of covering his tracks. J Street Jive began life as J Street Monitor. There is only one reference to J Street Monitor online and it is a tweet by Martin Solomon, author of the hasbara blog, Solomonia, announcing the new site’s launch. Either Solomon was announcing the launch of his own site or of a site run by a close ally. [UPDATE: I've asked Solomon and Stavis twice to confirm or deny their involvement. They chose not to reply directly. But they did reply indirectly and guiltily. You'll never believe what's happened! Martin Solomon has disappeared one of his own tweets. Sorry, Martin but we've anticipated those shenanigans and saved a screenshot of it so that you couldn't rewrite the history of your own surreptitious involvement in this site. And by taking down the tweet Solomon only reinforces the impression of his having a hand in this despicable blog venture. So it appears that this week the Republican National Committee has been embarrassed into deep sixing a tweet which praised a parody of a Hitler biopic in which der Fuhrer praises Nancy Pelosi. That puts Solomon in good company.]
Unfortunately for Parrhesia, in J Street Jive he attacks a particular person as an enemy of Israel. In my own exchange with the victim (let’s call him/her ‘V.’), the very specific details cited by Parrhesia in his post allowed V. to identify the post author as former Boston bookstore owner gone-bust, Hillel Stavis. Stavis happens to be a co-author of guess which blog? You guessed it, Solomonia. So we’ve very probably narrowed Parrhesia down to either Solomon, Stavis or some combination.
I put my money on Stavis, who’s led a rather checkered career as an enforcer for Boston’s David Project. I’m featuring here a video of Stavis stalking a Jewish Voice for Peace protest. At the end of the video, Stavis threatens:
If you get too close to me I’ll put my fist through your fuckin’ mouth.
Ooh, Hillel, not nice. Apparently, our Hillel has forgotten the dictum of his Talmudic namesake, “that which you hate, don’t do to others.”
I also tracked down this rather bizarre story in which Stavis hoaxed a Boston reporter by claiming to be a “Phil Davis” complaining about the International Solidarity Movement. After the story aired on radio, listeners called in to report the informant was none other than Stavis. Needless to say, the reporter wasn’t terribly happy.
And as any good attorney will tell you, my next question is: “If you lied then, Hillel, how do we know when you’re telling the truth? And what are you concealing through your anonymity at this site?”
The above paragraph answers the question: why someone would go to the trouble of creating an anonymous smear site. The guy is clearly an obsessive with simmering hostility brewing just beneath the surface of a borderline personality. In my experience, only the sleaziest, most paranoid Jewish far-right extremists like the author of Masada2000 go to such trouble to protect their identity. Anonymity serves as a cloak allowing the author to speak in the most aberrant, anti-social terms. This is true more of M2K than J Street Jive. But lies thrive in anonymity. Truth suffers in darkness. And the putative Solomon-Stavis site thrives in such a cesspool.
Another of the Jewish neocons writing for what Dan Siedarski so aptly calls Tabloid, er Tablet, Michael Weiss, comes up with yet another rightist spin on the MFA’s attack on J Street:
There’s little love lost between the Netanyahu government and J Street, but by refusing to even engage with the organization, Israel is more or less delegitimizing it as a foreign ally of the Jewish state—an embarrassment that’s going to be hard to combat in J Street’s U.S. public-relations work. Imagine a pro-American group in, say, Egypt being told that the State Department won’t meet with its representatives because it puts American interests at risk.
It never crossed Michael’s mind that the group might not want to be an agent of Israeli influence (cf. “foreign ally of the Jewish state”). Not to mention he doesn’t understand that the current government of Israel isn’t ISRAEL. It is the government of Israel and there are many legitimate perspectives on what Israel’s interests should be and what U.S. interests are, that diverge from those of Israel’s far-right ruling coalition. Since, hasbaroids, representing American Jewish interests is not the same as representing Israel’s, J Street, thank God, is in no imminent danger–least of all from the far Jewish right.
So with enemies like Stavis and Solomon, J Street, as I wrote in a post yesterday, is golden.
David Brumer is an executive committee member of StandWithUs/Northwest and the Seattle chapter of the American Jewish Committee. He is one of Seattle’s leading enforcers for the pro-Israel right, making sure that anyone dissenting from the party line gets a good whack in the shins. While I was always under the impression that social workers were practitioners of the healing arts, he also serves in that capacity at the Jewish federation funded Kline Galland Home which, aside from his employment there, actually has a good repuation for geriatric care.
Brumer has made it his business to smear me with epithets like “deranged,” and suggested I may be “fascinated” with gay porn, and that I should be spanked for my supposed hostility to Israel. But now Brumer’s acolytes have gotten into the act. Someone posting here as Brum Speaks has published scores of smutty comments here which I think the world should see. Given the IP address, this probably isn’t Brumer himself (he may be a bully but he isn’t that stupid). But this genius clearly is a devout follower of Brumer and his blog since he gives the impression that he speaks in Brumer’s name and offers a link to that font of Jewish blogging wisdom.
Unfortunately, no one in either the federation or Kline Galland Home leadership seems concerned enough about this to rein Brumer in. Which says a great deal about the quality of local leadership and its willingness to turn a blind eye to such bizarre behavior.
Human rights campaigner, Mary Robinson, wins Presidential Medal of Freedom (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
I’m delighted to report that Pres. Obama has honored international human rights campaigner Mary Robinson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. There was a campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby to derail her nomination calling her anti-Israel and other scurrilous, unfounded epithets. But the president stayed true to his convictions and honored her along with 15 other deserving recipients including Sidney Poitier, Desmond Tutu, Steven Hawking, Sandra Day O’Connor, Harvey Milk (posthumously) and Ted Kennedy.
US PRESIDENT Barack Obama has hailed former president Mary Robinson as “an advocate for the hungry and the hunted, the forgotten and the ignored” who is showing the way to a better future for the world.
Presenting Mrs Robinson with the Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honour, Mr Obama suggested that her family background may have helped to prepare her for life as a civil rights campaigner.
“The only girl in a family of four brothers, Mary Robinson learned early on what it takes to make sure all voices are heard. As a crusader for women and those without a voice in Ireland, Mary Robinson was the first woman elected President of Ireland, before being appointed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,” he said.
“When she travelled abroad as president, she would place a light in her window that would draw people of Irish descent to pass by below. Today, as an advocate for the hungry and the hunted, the forgotten and the ignored, Mary Robinson has not only shone a light on human suffering, but illuminated a better future for our world.”
Her award citation read:
“For Mary Robinson, the fight to end discrimination and suffering is an urgent moral imperative. She has been a trail-blazing crusader for women’s rights in Ireland and a forceful advocate for equality and human rights around the world,” the citation said.
“Whether courageously visiting conflict-stricken regions, or working to inject concern for human rights into business and economic development, Mary Robinson continues this important work today, urging citizens and nations to make common cause for justice.”
Among the reprobates who have hectored and fulminated about her award are such moral luminaries as John Bolton, Gerald Steinberg, Abe Foxman, Mort Klein, the Republican Jewish Coalition, Elliot Engel and 45 Republican members of Congress. A veritable rogues’ gallery of the Jewish right. With naysayers like this, you know you’re right. When any one of them has done 1/100th of what Robinson has done on behalf of the world’s poor and displaced then they can begin to talk. Till then, they oughta give it a rest.
Correction: Rupa Shah notes that I erroneously credited Robinson with oversight of UNWRA as part of her responsibilities as UNHCR high commissioner. But the two are entirely separate agencies.
JTA has been publishing press releases from the Israel lobby for so long it simply has no clue how to cover the Obama administration’s new approach to Israel. When you read the following passage from Eric Fingerhut, note that despite the fact that Israel’s settlement policy violates international law and U.S. policy, not to mention the views of most American Jews, it is Obama’s policy that is “hardline:”
Even as it publicly stakes out a hard-line position against Israeli settlement expansion, the Obama administration is avoiding serious criticism from most U.S. Jewish groups and pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers.
The rest of his article is actually quite interesting, as it notes that many of the typical Israel lobby groups are like a deer caught in the headlights when it comes to responding to the bulldozer that is the Obama administration when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These are some tough, mean sonsobitches and if they’re at a loss (momentarily no doubt) it’s a damn good thing for the good guys.
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