“Bibi” Netanyahu was disgusted. “My initial reaction is that Iran has gotten a freebie. It has got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation.” The Israeli prime minister was referring to Saturday’s meeting in Istanbul of the P5-plus-1—the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany—with representatives from Iran. Subject: Iran’s...
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Infamies
Exactly 60 years before the terrorist attacks of 2001, September 11 became a day of infamy for many Americans because of what Col. Charles A. Lindbergh said to an audience in Des Moines, Iowa, that day. Speaking as a member of the America First Committee, Lindbergh warned his listeners, in words that immediately became world-famous,...
Israel’s House Divided
In the aftermath of Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral victory last March, the “two-state solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict is off the table for the foreseeable future. Netanyahu’s public disavowal of the two-state formula (despite his subsequent denials) was not a last-minute campaign ploy. It reflected his deeply held belief that Israel can survive and prosper by...
Lift the Siege of Gaza
In June 1948, our wartime ally imposed a blockade on Berlin, cutting off and condemning to death or Stalinist domination 2 million Germans, most of whom, not long before, had cheered Adolf Hitler. Harry Truman responded with the Berlin airlift, in perhaps the most magnanimous act of the Cold War. For nine months, U.S. pilots...
Bibi’s Hollow Victory
“The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.” With this defiant declaration, to a thunderous ovation at AIPAC, Benjamin Netanyahu informed the United States that East Jerusalem, taken from Jordan in the Six Day War, is not...
Israel in a Post-American Era
In 1918, the United States proved militarily decisive in the defeat of the Kaiser’s Germany and emerged as first power on earth. World War II, ending in 1945, produced two truly victorious nations, the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin and the America of Harry Truman. Out of the Cold War that lasted from Truman to...
Bush, Obama and the Gaza Blitz
Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month ceasefire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza. Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes...
Between Auschwitz and Armageddon
“Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever?” —Zechariah Most nations know all too clearly what they believe about Jews. Americans are less sure. This beneficial uncertainty inheres in the two major traditions that shape American souls: Christianity and modern political philosophy. Peter Grose writes that the Puritans “identified with...
The Martyrdom of Chas Freeman
It was a cold, blustery day in Washington, D.C., when the spies met their mark. The place: Union Station. The mark: one Lawrence Franklin, then a 56-year-old Iran specialist who worked as a top official at the Pentagon. Franklin was convinced that Israel was being shortchanged by the United States, and that Iran posed a...
Easter in Palestine
“Welcome to the world’s largest open-air prison.” That was how Tom Getman, the Israel country director for World Vision, introduced us to life in the Gaza Strip. Our pilgrimage tour bus motored away from the Erez security checkpoint, with its coils of barbed wire and walls of sandbags, and onto the highway to Gaza City....
Under Western Lies
One hot evening at the end of August I was walking up South Michigan Avenue with an Irish-American linguist on the way to eat in a German-American restaurant. The news was filled with reports on the NATO bombing raids against the Bosnian Serbs, but no one on the street seemed to care that an American...
Israel’s Counterelites
Conventional wisdom has it that the recent parliamentary election in Israel has swayed Israeli politics further to the political right. After all, the balance of power in the 120-member Knesset has shifted quite dramatically. The political bloc that included the centrist Kadima Party and Labor, which dominated the outgoing government in Jerusalem, was reduced from...
Jewish Antisemistism
“The only thing missing is the sign Arbeit Macht Frei,” said an English friend as we watched a British-made documentary on the children of Gaza. My wife, a German, winced. I did not. Watching a Palestinian father break down and cry while an Israeli official refuses him an exit permit so his seven-year-old son can...
A Road Map to Nowhere?
In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, its most determined advocates predictably claimed that the United States should proceed with her alleged mission of bringing democracy to the Middle East. The advocates of this approach seek to push the Israeli-Palestinian issue into the background, to subordinate it to whatever their agenda may be in...
Peace in the Land of Sojourn
When Ariel Sharon, facing strong international pressure, proposed a withdrawal of settlements from Gaza, the settlers’ response was predictably hostile. For some, the motive is predominantly economic—the settlements represent affordable housing; for others, nationalist politics is the driving force: Israel, they say, is Israel, and no part should be subtracted. These arguments can be countered...
Neocons in the Dock
The nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense has sparked a firestorm of opposition from Israel’s fifth column in the United States. It is a useful example of just how the Jewish state’s parasitic relationship with America works. Israel cannot stand alone: She is a European colony in the midst of an Arab sea...
The Impossibility of a Lasting Arab-Israeli Peace
President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City has been criticized on many grounds, most of them ostensibly sensible, in America and abroad. In the Western media, over the past two days, we have encountered six chief objections:...
The Impact of Islam on the Arab-Israeli Dispute
The role of Islam in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a contentious subject with two main schools of thought. One, broadly sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view, treats the conflict in geopolitical and social, rather than ideological or religious, terms. The other, emanating mostly (although not exclusively) from pro-Israeli sources, maintains that the Palestinian cause—even...
Arguing With Jesus
Professor Neusner, one of the world’s most accomplished scholars in the field of religious studies, begins by proclaiming that as a practicing and believing Jew he says a polite “No” to another practicing and believing Jew—but one who made extraordinary claims for himself —Jesus of Nazareth. Both the “No” and the politeness come out clearly...
New From Israel
The dispute over settlements has “transformed the American-Israeli connection and forced Israel to face new international realities.” Israel and the United States are facing “the worst split” in decades, a former Israeli foreign minister asserted, and the tremors may turn very soon into an earthshaking shift, “unless the Israeli government moderates its position on settlements.” ...
A Glimmer of Hope in the Holy Land
Mahmoud Abbas’s convincing victory in the Palestinian presidential election on January 9 provided a piece of good news in an otherwise somber Middle Eastern landscape. Often described as an old Fatah apparatchik with little charisma and popularity, Abbas managed to win 62 percent of the 775,000 votes cast in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and...
Hamas is Israel’s Golem
Hamas is a golem, a monstrous creature from Jewish folklore created from mud and made animate, which escaped his master and turned against him.
Iran vs. Israel: De-Escalation Likely, for Now
In the fullness of time Israel will probably retaliate in some limited form, but under American pressure it will calibrate its response so that it does not prompt an uncontrollable spiral of escalation.
On Liberty
In his piece on the tragedy of the U.S.S. Liberty (Cultural Revolutions, January), Matthew Rarey engaged in the type of blatant distortion and misrepresentation that is only too common in the mainstream media. I am sad to see it appear in Chronicles. Mr. Rarey suggests the possibility that Israel intentionally attacked the Liberty during the...
Tell Israel: Cool the Jets!
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who is wired into the cabinet of “Bibi” Netanyahu, warns that if Iran’s nuclear program is not aborted by December, Israel will strike to obliterate it. Defense Secretary Gates’ mission to Israel this week, says Bolton, to relay Obama’s red light, was listened to attentively, but will not be decisive....
Pire qu’un Crime . . .
“Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honour, all things fade. Save Treason and the dagger of her trade . . . “ —Oscar Wilde, “Libertatis Sacra Fames” The Pollard treason case is so unusual that I want to start my review of this book with a review of the reviews. I do this because the first-hand story by...
Jews Without Judaism
Certainly no confusion of the ethnic with the religious presents more anomalies than the mixture of ethnic Jewishness and religious Judaism that American Jews have concocted for themselves. But the brew is fresh, not vintaged. For nearly the entire history of the Jews, to be a Jew meant to practice the religion set forth in...
Goodbye, Greater Israel; Hello . . . What?
My name and title (“global-political and economic-affairs analyst”) appears on a few rolodexes on the desks of the young ladies, a.k.a. “schedulers,” who are in search of pundits—that is, pompous think tankers and retired foreign-policy types who are willing “to do Iraq” or “to do Iran” (in Washington lingo) or some other international crisis. So...
Is Peace at Hand in the Middle East?
Having presided over the recognition of Israel by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, President Donald Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize amid talk of peace breaking out across the region. Assuredly, this is a major diplomatic breakthrough, and Nancy’s Pelosi’s sour-grapes dismissal of the deal as a “distraction” testifies to that...
Post-Lebanon II: Constructing Narratives
A friend who has just returned from Lebanon told me that one of the jokes he heard before leaving Beirut was that the Bush administration decided to hire Hezbollah as one of the faith-based organizations that would help in the rebuilding of post-Katrina Louisiana. After all, the Lebanese Shiite group has been assiduously reconstructing the...
Peace in the Promised Land
Almost three years have passed since the unseasonably warm day in June 2002 when a number of the authors who have contributed to this issue of Chronicles met near O’Hare Airport to sketch out one of the most ambitious projects that we at The Rockford Institute have ever undertaken. We approached the project with a...
“Bibi” Votes Republican
Not since Nikita Khrushchev berated Dwight Eisenhower over Gary Powers’ U-2 spy flight over Russia only weeks earlier has an American president been subjected to a dressing down like the one Barack Obama received from Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday. With this crucial difference. Khrushchev ranted behind closed doors, and when Ike refused to apologize,...
With Friends Like These
The elegantly titled Iron Wall is a perfect example of how a necessary book on an important topic can be rendered inadequate by the author’s all-consuming bias. In the Preface to this immense volume, Avi Shlaim, a retired professor at Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy, describes his well-connected family as Iraqi “Arab”...
Israel’s American Chattel
I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation,...
Our Dearest Frienemy
It is the rise of people-power all over the Muslim world, and I’ve got news for you. The people—or the street, as it’s called in places like Cairo, Manama, Sana, and Amman—are united by two things only: A loathing for the autocratic crooks who have been keeping them poor and lording it over them since...
Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century,’ Part Two: The Disagreeable Agreement
[Read part one of this essay, “The Plan,” posted on Wednesday, Feb. 12.] Part Two: The Disagreeable Agreement. Establishing the Palestinians’ significant culpability for the lack of progress nevertheless does not mean that the Israelis should be encouraged to create territorial faits accomplis which cannot be tenable in the long run. Let us look once...
The Knack of the Non-Deal
An Arab-Israeli peace agreement is like a moderate Syrian rebel or rational leftist: It is possible to visualize, but producing one is daunting. Every attempt has failed. President Donald Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan will be no exception. Hardly the “deal of the century,” it proposes the establishment of a disconnected, truncated Palestinian state with...
Nothing’s Easy About Israel
Such was my pro-Israel ardor back in 1967, I actually put my name down as a volunteer soldier in the Six-Day War. I was living in Paris, and I was asked by the recruiter if I were Jewish. When I answered in the negative, he jumped up and shook my hand. As everyone knows, my...
The Cabal Strikes Back
Ever since the exposure in the mainstream media last year of the neoconservatives as a fifth column that engineered the present boondoggle in Iraq, dragged the United States into a foreign war for the transparent benefit of Israel, and concocted what are now known to have been lies about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” and...
No More Blank Checks for War
After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a “blank cheque” to punish Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in...
Will Bibi Break Obama?
The prime minister of Israel is angry with Barack Obama and is coming here to force a hardening of U.S. policy toward Iran. “Bibi” Netanyahu had his anger on display at a meeting in Israel with Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. McCain emerged saying he had never seen an Israeli prime minister “that...
Chicken Soup Starring: The Marx Bros.
“How can tyrants safely govern home I Unless abroad they purchase great alliance?”—William Shakespeare There is something compelling in reading about spies and something compelling as well about spying, or we would not have so many spies to read about, fictional or not. Our century has been a century of spies:...
I.O.U.: $10,000
The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz New York: John Wiley & Sons; 264 pp., $19.95 Alan Dershowitz’s brief on behalf of Israel has at least some truth on its side. Had the Arabs accepted the territorial partition arranged by the United Nations in 1947, far fewer of them would today be living in exile; and...
America’s Dismal Future
It did not take the Israel lobby long to make mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s “no new settlements” position. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is bragging about Israel’s latest victory over the U.S. government as Israel continues to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. In May, President Obama read the Israelis the riot act,...
The Neoconservatives’ Latest Purge
The recent neoconservative attack on Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson shows what happens when conservatives dare question U.S. support of Israel.
On “Easter in Palestine”
I wondered, reading the “Letter From Gaza and the West Bank” (Correspondence, October), what the author would recommend as a suitable basis for peace negotiations, now so far advanced, other than dismantling the state of Israel. He takes a position that the Palestine Authority has not adopted. As a Zionist for life, I was saddened...
Nuclear Iran
The question of war with Iran over her nuclear program has been around for a decade. In October 2005 Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at the World Without Zionism conference in Asia, in which he allegedly said, “Israel must be wiped off the map.” The propaganda war, with mutual demonization, was initiated. ...
Conned Again
If the change that President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America’s wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama’s choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama’s selection of Rahm Israel Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that...
Openings and Closings
Raphael Israeli examines one of the most difficult political problems of our time: The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He approaches the subject by presenting and analyzing research on the conflict by earlier Israeli historians (the so-called Old Historians), by more recent Israeli historians (the so-called New Historians who coined the label Old...
A Speech of No Consequence
All too many speeches by major political figures are heralded as historic in advance of delivery yet prove to be irrelevant in the grand-strategic scheme of things. Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” address in the wake of Dunkirk, for example, and his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton six years later were rich in...