In a statement first reported by Ben Smith, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren said: “The Israeli government would welcome the decision to lift the congressional hold on U.S. funding for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.” He added, “We appreciate that the hold was placed to demonstrate to the Palestinians the consequences of their attempts to declare statehood unilaterally at the United Nations, without making lasting peace with Israel.”

When the hold was first placed, I spoke to Anthony H. Cordesman, a longtime regional expert, first at the Pentagon and now at the Center for Strategic International Studies. “There is no debate over the value about this type of aid, in serving not only Palestinian but Israeli interests,” he told me. Halting the aid “doesn’t do Israel any good. All it does is create more potential for some kind of Palestinian rioting or protest and convince more people in the Arab world that they can’t work with Israel, the United States, and the peace process.”

“The truth is,” Cordesman added, “there is a very unfortunate tendency as you head toward an election year to have certain American political figures try to be more Israeli than Israel, and to in the process show no regard for Israel’s really existing interests or even for the cautions that come out of Israeli experts.” Freezing aid, he maintained, “is an exercise in political opportunism, in which just appearing to be pro-Israeli, as opposed to the reality, is the goal.”

The Israeli government just backed him up. How will Congress respond?

Israel Backs Aid to Palestinian Authority [Ben Smith]
Earlier: Congress Cuts P.A. Aid; ‘Political Opportunism’

Ron Paul has gained ground after a debate in which his refusal to join the Iran warhawks was front and center. Indeed, in my travels around the country, I don’t meet many neoconservatives outside of Washington and New York. It’s one thing to just adore Israel, as the evangelical Christians do; it’s another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel’s national security.

I read this and thought it fairly remarkable. Was he saying Ron Paul was preferable to the rest of the Republican field? And that “yet again” was even more bizarre. I wanted to press Klein and ask him if he meant what he seemed to be saying: not only that an attack on Iran would be fought “for Israel’s national security” but that this would not be the first time—presumably, that Iraq was the same thing. The notion that Iraq was invaded for Israel’s sake, I personally believe, feeds into some of the weirdest and least accurate theories of Jewish neoconservatives pushing George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld into an ill-advised war.

Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeff Goldberg noticed the same thing and had also emailed Klein, and our emails prompted Klein to respond. As in an email to me, he said that we were misunderstanding his “yet again” (“Jeff had jumped to a silly conclusion,” he wrote; I think the notion that it’s a silly conclusion is itself silly). He then expanded on his beliefs, arguing that while there were Jewish neocons pushing for the Iraq war, they were not actually responsible for it (he fingers Cheney, as would I). All in all, I think Klein’s original post was sloppy at best and likely pretty intemperate; and while his follow-up is helpful, language like “Israel First/Likudnik bloviators,” specifically in reference to people who aren’t actually Israeli or actually members or primary supporters of Israel’s Likud Party, makes me uncomfortable, conjuring as it does charges of dual loyalty that Jews really shouldn’t have to hear anymore.

But I know why Klein feels, as it seems he does, like his back is against the wall, and why he would be frustrated by “the crazed intolerance of many right-wing Jewish commentators.” I brought up in my email with him the fact that no less than Michael Oren had responded to Thomas Friedman’s column last week, with its already-notorious “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” line. [UPDATE: Friedman clarified the line today.] “This allegation is profoundly disturbing,” Oren said. Whether or not he’s right, Oren is not an intellectual-without-portfolio (anymore). He is Israel’s official envoy to the United States. If criticism of Israeli policy—even when, as in Friedman’s case (or Douglas David J. Rothkopf’s, or Joe Klein’s), it is sloppy, or intemperate, or even worse—garners you an official condemnation from the Israeli government as well as the wrath of ostensibly nonpartisan PACs as well as accusations of anti-Semitism, then we are looking at a stifling of debate that isn’t in the interests of anyone except the Jewish right, which is attempting to turn Israel into a wedge issue in the American Jewish community.

I’m not sure Elliott Abrams warrants the label “sometimes, a feckless shmuck,” which is what Klein called him after this post. But I do wish Abrams had restricted himself to disagreeing with Klein and Friedman on the policies rather than bringing up the blood libel; and what I really wish is that he had urged his readers to, you know, disagree with Klein and agree with him rather than urged various Jewish institutions to rescind their awards and generally cut Friedman and Klein off.

We have a long election year ahead of us, and it could be a useful occasion of hashing out differences on the Mideast. Who knows, if it’s done right, a new consensus—more to the right or to the left of the current one—may actually emerge. But poorly chosen, sloppy, and just plain clownish accusations (and then defenses that are predicated on comma placement) as well as responses that head straight for anti-Semitism and call for communal shunning are not going to get it done.

(By the way, I tried to find a clip of Samuel L. Jackson telling everyone in Do The Right Thing to cool that shit out, but none are embeddable. But the line is “Y’all need to chill that shit out! And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.”)

15 Days Til Iowa: Travel Day [Time Swampland]
Clarification: Israel’s National Security [Time Swampland]
Israeli Officials Escalate War of Words With N.Y. Times [JTA]
Blaming the Jews—Again [Weekly Standard Blog]
Earlier: Ron Paul Moves Into Iowa Lead

Relatively speaking, the past month has been fairly quiet on the Syrian front. Earlier this week, the heroic U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford—in her new book, by the way, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice regrets pulling the Syrian ambassador in 2005—temporarily departed due to “credible threats” against him. Yesterday, a prominent opposition group requested international protection from an impending crackdown. Hezbollah recently insisted Assad has left the revolutionary “danger zone” behind. Compared to the past months, which have involved mass sieges of major cities and thousands of protesters killed in the streets, it seems pacific.

But a new poll finds that in Arab countries support for Assad versus the opposition groups ranges from 17 percent to 0 percent (ups to Jordan!), which is nothing short of incredible and inspiring. So, here’s another reason for Israel to root for Assad’s downfall: It will put it on the right side of the Arab Spring. And the dramatic death of Muammar Qaddafi is reportedly revivifying protests. “The focus of the world will now turn to Syria,” said the opposition Syrian National Council’s leader after the former Libyan dictator was executed. “It’s Syria’s turn to receive attention.”

Ouster of Syria’s Assad Would Be ‘Opportunity’ for Israel [CSM]
Poll: Arab Support for Assad at Historic Low [JPost]
Related: State of the Union [Tablet Magazine]

On its face, it’s hard to believe all this; however, it becomes easier. Frequent Tablet Magazine contributor Yossi Melman, whose Israeli intelligence sources are more or less unparalleled, began incredulous: “It’s hard to believe that Iran, who has significant intelligence capabilities and has carried out sophisticated terror attacks in the past, would assign such an important task to an Iranian-American whose favorite drink is whiskey,” he quips. Yet he concludes that the charges are more believable than not: Iran does actively hatch such plots; the Saudis genuinely buy this one, and know that their ambassador, who has made a point of cultivating the U.S. Jewish community, is particularly loathed by the mullahs; and the plan “conforms to the Iranian strategy of proving to its bitter enemies that there is no place where they are safe.” Ultimately, Melman argues, “It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. Attorney General, the head of the CIA and most of all U.S. president Barack Obama would risk their reputations by publishing such unequivocal dramatic announcements” if they weren’t sure. His guess is that the administration is privy to covert communications that the rest of us aren’t.

Yet, true or not—and Iran denies it—the allegations are proving a political reality as the Obama administration and its allies step up an already fast-moving diplomatic offensive against the Islamic Republic. Saudi Arabia would like the matter to be taken up by the U.N. Security Council (and tomorrow, the U.N. will release an extremely damning report on the human rights situation inside Iran). Israeli ambassador Michael Oren said it was “definitely an escalation.” The administration spent the weekend calling on international nuclear inspectors to make public new evidence indicating Iran’s illicit weapons program. If nothing else, the whole event is bringing Saudi Arabia closer to the United States and Israel—this after last month, in which a prominent Saudi official said the U.S. alliance was jeopardized by American opposition to Palestinian U.N. membership. It is doing so if only by heating up the Iranian-Saudi and Iranian-American proxy wars.

An Iranian official, meanwhile, observed that making trumped-up charges is just the type of thing Hitler did. Gee, it’s like they’re trying to push our buttons.

Which, actually, is part of the point. Laura Secor, a top reporter on Iran, notes that, to an absurd degree, it is in everyone’s interests for tensions to be ratcheted up:

The Iranian regime wants its people to believe the Americans will attack, because it believes this will help it hang on to power. The U.S. government wants the Iranians to believe it just might attack, because otherwise the United States has very little leverage in nuclear negotiations. The Israelis want the Iranians to fear an American attack, because they believe this will deter Iranian moves against Israeli interests. The Saudis, too, would like to use a bellicose American ally as leverage against Iran, their regional rival. Then, there’s American domestic politics. The Republicans bluster against Iran to prove that they are tough and that the Democrats are appeasers; the Democrats bluster against Iran to prove that they are no such thing. The neoconservative right encourages the conclusion that the only solution is military; the anti-imperialist left forever argues that the neoconservatives are secretly steering America toward war.

As to the last, cue Bill Kristol calling for military action and Glenn Greenwald accusing the government of wagging the dog. Secor ultimately disbelieves the plot, but the real point, it seems to me, is that it hardly matters: everyone will act as though it were real.

Saudis Ask Alleged Iranian Plot Against Ambassador To Be Brought to U.N. Security Council [AP/WP]
The Mystery Behind the Alleged Iran Assassination Plot [Haaretz]
Michael Oren: Israel Taking Assassination Plot Seriously [Haaretz]
To Isolate Iran, U.S. Presses Inspectors on Nuclear Data [NYT]
Iran Calls U.S. Assassination Charges ‘Nazi Propaganda’ [DPA/Haaretz]
What’s Behind the ‘Iranian Plot’? [New Yorker News Desk]

In spite of the Obama Administration’s snubs and slights, in the wake of the U.N. meeting Oren believes that “relations between the two countries are closer than any time in the last two and a half years.” Differences between the Obama Administration and Netanyahu regarding the peace process have been “tactical,” he told me. “Both agreed on the principle of two states, but the question was how to get there.”

Oren says that the White House and Netanyahu’s office closely coordinated their efforts to dissuade Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas from making his unilateral bid for statehood, which the United States also sees as contrary to its national interests. Both sides of the aisle in the U.S. House of Representatives support President Barack Obama’s stance on the matter. Rep. Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, has already threatened to suspend aid to the Palestinian Authority. I asked Oren if he thinks that’s a good idea, given that the relative stability currently prevailing in the West Bank is generally attributed to American financial support. “We believe that if the Palestinians breach their commitments, avoid negotiations, and make an end-run around the peace process, there should be consequences,” the ambassador answered, suggesting that cutting off aid to the P.A. is hardly anathema to Israel.

Oren said his transition from life as an academic with opinions to being a statesman with official policy positions is a little like going from “writing slam poetry to composing rhymed haiku—it takes a lot of discipline.” He is certainly disciplined about his workout regiment: The 56-year-old New Jersey native looks about as trim as he did when he won a gold medal in rowing at the Maccabiah Games in 1977. Oren said he still rows every day, adding that the only way to keep up with a daily grind that includes a busy evening social schedule is to stay in shape.

Oren had to renounce his U.S. citizenship in 2009 when he accepted Netanyahu’s offer to take the job he’d dreamed of since childhood, but he said there was little in academia (including teaching posts at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown) or the think-tank world (the Shalem Center in Jerusalem) that prepared him for the challenges of his current job.

“Sure, I had a couple advantages,” Oren admitted. “I knew America very well. I not only grew up here; I also knew about American foreign policy from a historical perspective. For instance, I knew that this was the third time that America had been involved in Libya, and that back in 1801 Thomas Jefferson was talking about bringing democracy to the Libyans.”

Even though Oren understood that America’s relationship with Israel was the closest and most multifaceted relationship with a foreign country in post-World War II history, “It’s hard,” he said, “to understand the vast breadth and depth of the position until you’ve actually begun it.” He pointed to his desk and explained that the innocuous-looking piece of furniture is the “nexus among 535 members of Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, the U.S. intelligence community, the American Jewish community, and American churches” on one hand and, on the other, “the Israeli government, the IDF, the Knesset, 30 ministers, and Israeli society and culture.”

In the American context, at least, Israel is anything but isolated as far as the ambassador is concerned. He’s hosted first-time events for Americans not typically known as natural friends of Israel, like the gay community. Oren explained that Israel isn’t merely a regional leader in gay rights—not a particularly special distinction, given that many of its neighbors consider homosexuality a sin punishable by death—but also an international leader. “We never had anything like ‘don’t ask don’t tell’,” he noted.

Oren hosted the Israeli Embassy’s first iftar last month, with 65 Muslim leaders in attendance, and he recently reached out to the Muslim community at the University of California, Irvine. Last week, 10 Muslim students in the so-called Irvine 11 were found guilty of misdemeanor charges for disrupting Oren’s February talk at the school. “That was the community I was intending to address,” said Oren. “I issued another letter to the students at Irvine and said I was willing to go back, and discuss anything, everything, as long as they were civil. The offer still stands.”

The Israel of the popular international imagination is the one held responsible for alienating Turkey when Israeli commandos boarded a Gaza-bound boat in May 2010 and killed nine activists after being attacked. It is apparently lost on most of Israel’s critics that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deliberately turned his country’s foreign policy against the Jewish state in order to project power throughout the Muslim world. Still, Oren said, “It’s hurtful because Turkey was a long-standing ally.” Moreover, explained the ambassador, “There’s the friendship between Jews and Turks that goes back hundreds of years. It was Turkey that took in the Jews when we were banished from Spain.”

Losing Turkey has opened up other opportunities for Israel, like building strategic relationships with longtime Turkish adversaries Greece and Bulgaria. Still, Israel’s immediate region, Oren said, “is a particularly flammable Middle East, where all our assumptions as of a year ago are called into question.” Egypt is perhaps the biggest wild card, and Oren demurred when I asked what the consequences might have been if the staff of the Israeli embassy in Cairo hadn’t been rescued by Egyptian commandos. But he did challenge reports that the Egyptian military neglected to answer Netanyahu’s calls. “We eventually got through to the Egyptians,” he said, adding that Israeli officials are in close regular contact with Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which rules the country. “They are as committed to keeping the peace as we are,” he said.

Most daunting—for Egypt and Israel—is the prospect of a weak and disorganized democratic current in that country coming up against a well-funded and well-disciplined Islamist movement. That movement includes the Muslim Brotherhood and assorted Salafist organizations, which, said Oren, “want to see a universal sharia state in the Middle East, and one without Israel in it.”

Syria is one of the few places in the region where Oren and Israeli officials are guardedly optimistic. “The opportunity there,” he said, “is seeing a leader who is not Bashar, weakening the link with Iran and dealing a blow to Hezbollah.”

Israel’s key strategic concern remains Iran. “The Iranians have overcome their technical difficulties and are experimenting with missiles capable of reaching throughout the region and beyond,” Oren said. An Iranian bomb, he added, is “a game-changer. We have some time to stop them but not much time.”

When I asked if the Arab Spring has pushed concerns over Iran out of the news cycle over the last six months, the ambassador looked at me incredulously. “We’ve been shouting about Iran as much as possible,” he said. “And in this country, too, there’s a firm awareness of the threat posed by Iran.”

I mentioned a recent poll, conducted by the American Jewish Committee, which found that among Jewish voters a plurality of 45 percent disapproved of how the White House has handled the Iranian nuclear issue. Oren said that those polled don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes. “The administration’s policy has unfolded,” he said. “First, it was the president believed an Iranian nuclear program was unacceptable, which morphed into Obama is determined to stop the nuclear program, which reflected substantive movement. Now the U.S. is ratcheting up sanctions. Our policy and the U.S.’s is that all options are on the table—and we remain committed to that policy.”

• Ten members of the so-called Irvine 11, who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California-Davis, were found guilty by a jury of two misdemeanors. [JTA]

• More (since we first linked Wednesday) on how John J. Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame, has blurbed a book by an honest-to-God, self-proclaimed self-hating Jew who has some particularly troubling things to say about the Holocaust. [Adam Holland]

• Meet Shelly Yachimovich, the new leader of Labor, who has her work cut out for her. [NYT]

• Prompted in part by the Emergency Committee for Israel’s campaign, several Jewish leaders have cautioned that Israel ought not to be turned into a partisan wedge issue. [Forward]

• Last year, at his press availability in New York, President Ahmadinejad served bagels and lox. [The New Yorker News Desk]

• President Clinton major-league disses Prime Minister Netanyahu. [FP The Cable]

• Peggy Noonan praises President Obama on Israel and chastises Gov. Perry. Wait, what? [WSJ]

• A new study found that younger Conservative rabbis may be more politically left than their elders, but are still staunchly pro-Israel. [Forward]

• Prominent Jewish journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber was honored by the government of Poland. [JTA]

• Israel has pledged $1 million to Auschwitz’s upkeep. Which, read the wrong way, comes off sounding pretty ironic. [AP/WP]

• The German fashion company Hugo Boss has formally apologized for its onetime ties to the Nazis. [Imprint]

• What are you doing next Wednesday? You’re watching Rush Hashanah on VH1, of course. [The Daily Swarm]

• Did Germany’s reunification in part lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence? [Jewish Chronicle]

Happy 62nd birthday to a man who is frequently mistaken for a Jew but is always accurately captured when deemed the Boss.

• Christians United for Israel was unusually effusive in its praise for Obama’s pledge to veto a Palestinian statehood resolution in the U.N. Security Council. [JTA]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government says it plans to respond to Turkish rhetoric with silence in an effort not to further exacerbate tensions. [Haaretz]

• Blogger Richard Silverstein: leftist ideologue, or one-man Mideast WikiLeaks? [Forward]

• Some Orthodox Jews were turned off by the official Democratic response to the Weprin loss, which was in part to, well, blame it on the Orthodox. [Ben Smith]

• The last interview Tony Judt ever gave makes me sad, because he is more unfair to Israel than I usually thought of him as being. Here, for the record, is an interview I did with him about a month prior. [The Atlantic]

Why did Israeli ambassador Michael Oren leave his speech at the University of California, Irvine, early last year? It wasn’t because of the pro-Palestinian protesters; it was because of tickets to the Los Angeles Lakers game. Doesn’t he know what happens when Jews go to Lakers games?

• Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, accused Israel of trying to steal Lebanon’s offshore natural resources and vowed to respond to any Israeli provocation. (For more, see Lee Smith’s column today.) [AP/WP]

• The race to replace Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose district was in Queens and Brooklyn and about a quarter Jewish, is becoming a referendum on President Obama’s Israel policies (even as the Democrat is a modern Orthodox staunch supporter of the Jewish state). [NYT]

• Israeli ambassador Michael Oren met with convicted (but controversially held) Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in his prison in North Carolina. [Ynet]

• Swimming for peace. [NYT]

• Israeli forces raided the Jenin Freedom Theatre, which had been lead by the late Juliano Mer-Khamis, and arrested two last night. [+972]

• U.N. nuclear inspectors got nowhere in talks with Syria over the facility, allegedly an illicit reactor, that Israel destroyed in 2007. [AP/WP]

• Adam Kredo has the most comprehensive breakdown of J Street’s new poll on American Jews’ attitudes toward Obama. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Archaeologists are making major strides in unearthing the ancient city of Shekhem in what is now the West Bank. [WP]

• Myra Kraft’s funeral was held. [Providence Journal]

• Speaking to the group, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren compared Christians United for Israel to Righteous Gentiles. [Arutz Sheva]

• A new, peer-reviewed, scholarly article finds that the media disproportionately focus coverage on Israel. [Contentions]

• Eli Valley’s latest has a helluva punch line. [Forward]

• How a pilfered painting by the Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani led to the capture of a Serbian war crimes suspect. [ArtInfo]

• Bartenura wine can be seen in Drake’s latest video. Um, gross! [Heeb]

• The former longtime American Jewish Committee representative in Washington, D.C., impeccably named Hyman Bookbinder, died at 95. [JTA]

An homage to black-Jewish couplings and offspring (and, more implicitly, a celebration of Los Angeles).

• From a week ago, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren insists in a letter to the editor that it is Israel’s position that “the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don’t.” So Israel advocates regime change? This should be bigger news. [WSJ]

• A new U.N. report for the Security Council lists 10 instances of Iran’s supplying weapons in recent years to terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and even the Taliban. [JTA]

• Russell Crowe enters the circumcision debate on the anti- side, and then, having made a mess, rolls back. Tryin’ here, folks. [JTA]

• Baruch Korff, an Orthodox rabbi who was one of President Nixon’s spiritual confidantes and defenders during Watergate, died at 81. [NYT]

• The blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” which many (including The Scroll) have heralded, is most likely a work of fiction. [JPost]

• “I absolutely support Israel,” Tony Kushner told Cindy Adams (!). “It should continue to exist. I work hard to be clear that I never supported a boycott.” [Page Six]

It’s hot.

• Ambassador Michael Oren argues that the U.S.-Israeli special relationship remains crucial to American interests. Several folks, including contributing editor Jeff Goldberg and controversial professor Stephen Walt, respond. [Foreign Policy]

• An inside look at how the IDF creates its ethical rules. [JPost]

• Will the U.S. Senate get its first Jewish Tea Partier? Yes, if Adam Hasner, of Florida, has his way. [JTA]

• A new issue of the Jewish Review of Books dropped, with much attention given to the Arab spring, including a lead essay by Natan Sharansky. [JRB]

• Stay classy, pro-gun lobby. [HuffPo]

If it’s spring, it’s time for Chabad’s Mitzvah Tanks!

Setting aside that St. Pats was two weeks ago, I am disappointed.

The menu was an uninteresting course of Israeli wines, or Guinness and “traditional Irish fare” like steak and potatoes. We can only pray that Ambassador Oren sprang for a keg, because I’m pretty sure serving canned Guinness to the Irish ambassador counts as a declaration of war.

The entertainment was mildly more interesting since Oren and Gov. O’Malley performed with a Celtic-influenced Israeli band Evergreen. Oren playing a Bodhrán, or Irish frame drum, and yes, there is a video, and yes, you can see it below.

But I’m still not pleased, because there is already a Jewish-Irish cultural holiday: Bloomsday. A holiday to celebrate Leopold Bloom of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the most famous Irish Jew of all time. Not to mention there is already an organization—a magazine, if you will, perhaps one of Jewish news, ideas, life and culture—which throws an annual Bloomsday party to remember that Jewish Irishman, walking the streets of Dublin, unknowingly acting out the epics of old.

Ambassador, honored guests, let me invite you to Tablet Magazine’s next Bloomsday, because relying on steak and potatoes and an Israeli band playing Celtic music for diplomacy is a mug’s game. Peace between nations requires country songs inspired by Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, selections of the novel performed in Yiddish, and a full ensemble 15 minute Ulysses shpiel, to get you up to speed. Say yes.

Earlier: Happy St. Patty’s Day!

• The six best Jewish cookbooks. [Saveur]

• Ruth Franklin weighs what it means to consider Anne Frank’s story a universal one, as opposed to a particularly Jewish one. [TNR]

• At a memorial for former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—the first Likud PM—Benjamin Netanyahu chastised West Bank settlers that harass Palestinians. [Haaretz]

• The latest This American Life, whose theme is gifts, has much of interest to Tablet Magazine readers, from the reading of an Etgar Keret short story to a tale of an Israeli marijuana sting. [TAL]

• Thirty Jewish Studies faculty members in the University of California system urged the Orange County prosecutor to drop charges against 11 Muslim students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at Irvine last year. [JTA]

It occurred to me that two of the three Jewish intellectuals contributing editor Ruth R. Wisse wrote about this week are also two of the three Jewish intellectuals in Zelig’s opening.

• There are elements of The Catcher in the Rye, “Franny,” and probably other works I can’t think of right now in this amazing recollection of a party (and an after-party) with J.D. Salinger in 1952. Must-read. [Paris Review]

• Remember that nice, funny, cute Super Bowl commercial with the Volkswagen and the little kid as like Darth Vader? Yeah, well, it was really about Nazis. [Badass Stuff]

• David Horowitz comes down against Bill Kristol’s non-hysteria over Egypt. [Right Wing Watch]

• The 11 students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine, a year ago were criminally charged by prosecutors. [JTA]

• Jan Gross is coming out with a new book about alleged Polish complicity in the Holocaust. [Haaretz]

Turns out that if you string together several McBain clips from different Simpsons episodes, they are all part of one coherent, larger feature. Trust me when I say that to some people this is really, really important news.

The conversation turns more serious when Ramos notes that several Latin American countries—Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela among them—have recognized an independent Palestinian state. “Is Israeli diplomacy failing in Latin America?” he asks.

According to Embassy Spokesman Jonathan Peled, “Ambassador Oren’s interview is part and parcel of Israel’s outreach to the Hispanic community.” How does he do? Watch the whole clip (it’s in English) after the jump.

• Also in Geneva, Israeli and Turkish diplomats are near to finalizing a deal that will fully restore diplomatic ties. [Haaretz]

• Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren points to the firefighting aid Israel received from both friends and adversaries as proof that cooperation is possible in the Mideast. [LAT]

• After being shown Israeli intelligence, the United States urged Arab countries not to go along with Iranian smuggling to Hezbollah and Hamas, a WikiLeaks cable reveals. [Haaretz]

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange turned himself over to British authorities over charges of sexual coercion. [NYT]

• Director Claude Lanzmann, 85, discusses the re-release of his masterpiece, Shoah. “I dislike deeply Schindler’s List, for many reasons,” he says. [NYT]

• Political dissension and varying scandals have led to a worrying decrease in the IDF’s prestige. [WP]

• A profile of San Francisco-raised Sally Oren, the wife of the Israeli ambassador. [Washington Diplomat]

• Some important inside-Jewish-charity baseball news, as the Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency decide to beat their swords into plowshares. [The Fundermentalist]

• Actress Rachel Weisz and director Darren Aronofsky are headed for Splitsville. This somehow feels important. [Jezebel]

• Michael Goldfarb (not the former McCain adviser), whose book Emancipation is excellent, is speaking at the Manhattan JCC this week and next. [Manhattan JCC]

In case you still haven’t seen this middle school trick play …

• U.S. diplomats are seizing on a PLO official’s willingness to recognize Israel this way at the pre-1967 borders as a welcome place to start negotiating. [JPost]

• The rift between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Lieberman is growing, and Bibi’s biggest fear is moving so far to the center that Lieberman and his nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu come to define the right. [NYT]

• After Israeli security razed illegal outposts in the northern West Bank, settlers and Palestinians clashed. [JTA]

• Ahmadinejad says: Nuclear power plants for everyone! [Haaretz]

• This article. More at 10. [NYT]

President Obama probably still favors a continued moratorium, and his diplomats may be trying to coax another two months of freeze, like a bargaining addict. But with the narrative having shifted and with most of the U.S. Senate on Israel’s side, nothing will come of it. “The onus is on the Palestinians not to walk away,” Hussein Ibish tells Ben Smith. “That’s not fair but it’s the way it is.” Israel’s American-born ambassador Michael Oren duly trotted out a football metaphor: “[The Palestinians are] like a football team that lets the clock run down to one second and then demands overtime. They thought they would win some big diplomatic victory by running down the clock.” (By the way, Richard Cohen makes a convincing case that this state of affairs is actually the Obama administration’s fault.)

So what’s next?

Influential Haaretz columnist Aluf Benn, who calls Netanyahu “the winner,” has some idea:

Abbas and Obama will swallow the end of the freeze and wait for Israel to stumble by approving a provocative building plan. Then they will try to trap Netanyahu again and threaten him with a diplomatic crisis or endanger his coalition. …

At the end of the freeze, Netanyahu finds himself exactly where he wants to be: at the political center, without having made decisions that would force him to choose a side. All the balls are in the air: The Labor Party and Kadima got the diplomatic process they wanted, and the right got renewed construction in the West Bank. The real decisions, if there will be any, have been left for next summer, just before the deadline on negotiations for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

And people say the Mideast peace process makes you cynical!

Meanwhile, new building has begun (and with it have arrived new jobs for Palestinians—no, seriously!). The weekend was very, very good to Bibi.

In Blame Game, Arrow Tilts Toward Abbas [Politico]
The Winner in the Settlement Row is Netanyahu [Haaretz]
Bibi Needed the Headlines [Ynet]
Preconditions, The Sequel? [Capital J]
Obama Demands More Than Israel Can Give [WP]
Earlier: Biden Bashes Settlement Announcement

• Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren takes to the op-ed page to note the recent attacks on Israel and insist that it will defend itself but is also ready to make peace. [WP]

• Ukrainian authorities arrested an Israeli for allegedly ringleading a $40 million organ-smuggling operation. [Haaretz]

• Newly leaked documents demonstrate that Iran is continuing its non-peaceful nuclear program. [AP and Reuters/Haaretz]

• An outfit that was founded by right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson filed a petition in New York court to overturn the Landmarks Preservation Commision’s Cordoba House decision. [JPost]

• The infamous Mavi Marmara is on its way back to Turkey. [NYT]

Also, in case you’d forgotten, the Supreme Court received the eighth Jew in its history.

• In East Jerusalem, protesters and police skirmished at the site of 22 Palestinian homes whose destruction municipal authorities just approved. [NYT]

• Gilad Shalit’s family is leading a march to Jerusalem demanding the Israeli government retrieve Shalit, whom Hamas kidnapped over four years ago. There is particular resentment that the Gaza blockade was eased without securing anything—like Shalit’s release—in return. [NYT]

• Thomas Friedman warns that the expiration of the settlement freeze, in September, could prompt major West Bank violence. [NYT]

• U.S. and E.U. officials worry that China will step into the energy-trading vacuum that new sanctions against Iran will create, rendering them fairly meaningless. [LAT]

• M.D. Ginsburg, the husband of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died at 78. [NYT]

But earlier this week, on Washington, D.C., radio news channel WTOP, Michael Oren, the American-born Israeli ambassador, denied official Israeli involvement in the Pollard case: “We’re talking about an event that was run by a rogue organization in the Israeli intelligence community,” he said. This statement contradicts official Israeli policy dating back to 1998, when the then-prime minister—who also happens to be the current prime minister—admitted that Israel officially sanctioned Pollard’s activity.

Among other people, the remark upset Pollard’s wife, Esther, who responded, “I don’t know from where to draw strength to tell my husband that the country he so loves and for which he worked with such self-sacrifice is once again knifing him in the back.”

Netanyahu stood by the party line, and ordered Oren to state that Pollard indeed was an official Israeli espionage agent. Yesterday afternoon, Oren did so.

Spying … it’s weird!

Netanyahu: Pollard Was An Israeli Spy, Oren Must Clarify Remarks [Haaretz]
Ambassador Oren Contradicts Official Israeli Policy on Pollard [Ynet]
Related: Spies Like Us [Tablet Magazine]

If Oren came to the post fully aware of some of the challenges and threats Israel was to face during his tenure, most notably the Iranian nuclear program, there was little to indicate that he would also watch up close the historic changes in the special relationship between his two countries. Last week, as the full effect of the Gaza flotilla story started to take hold, I sat with him in his Washington office and asked him how long Israel can keep up its naval blockade, especially now that the Obama Administration says it is unsustainable. “We, too, believe that the status quo needs to be changed,” said the ambassador. “And we are open to suggestions.”

It’s worth recalling that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is the result of U.S. policy, specifically the George W. Bush Administration’s freedom agenda. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice badgered the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas to make sure that P.A. elections were held on schedule in January 2006, after which the United States couldn’t contest the poll results that brought Hamas to power. After that, Israel and the United States, along with the rest of the members of the Middle East Quartet (comprised of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia) leveled economic sanctions in order to weaken Hamas. In turn, Hamas showed just how strong it was by crushing Fatah in the 2007 Palestinian civil war that left the former in charge of Gaza. With U.S. diplomacy incapable of unseating the Islamist outfit that had come to power through both the democratic elections that Washington championed and the violence it condemned, Israel imposed a blockade to limit the amount of rockets and missiles smuggled into Gaza and then fired at Israeli homes. To end the blockade without accounting for Israeli security, says Oren, would put an end to the peace process. “Hamas will create a situation with a vast missile arsenal and it will gain further popularity,” he said to me. “Who needs peace with Israel if you can make war?”

The attention given the flotilla incident left Oren almost relieved to answer questions about the Iranian nuclear program. How long, I asked him, can Israel afford to abide by a process managed by the United States before it gets off the bus and decides it has to act alone against Iran?

“It definitely is a managed process,” said Oren. “And we signed on to it. President Obama’s tactics follow a linear trajectory—first there was outreach, then compromise, and now we’re at the threshold of what we hope will be effective sanctions. We’ll see what the Russians and Chinese do.”

I noted that there are many people, not only in U.S. and Israeli policymaking circles but also among our Arab allies, who believe it is too late for sanctions. Oren has doubts: “Even a whiff of sanctions spurred the Iranians to sign on with the deal the Turks and Brazilians offered,” he said. Nonetheless, the ambassador admits that right now it’s hard to know the exact signs that will tell Israel sanctions aren’t sufficient and that Jerusalem will have to go it alone. “I believe that President Obama’s position on Iran is far more muscular than is widely perceived,” he said. “He has said he is determined to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon and I do believe he is.”

“A strong American disposition is an Israeli strategic interest,” said Oren. I asked him if Washington’s role in the region is changing, whether the United States has the same leverage that it did a decade ago. “It’s in the middle of a withdrawal from one conflict [Iraq], and a pledge to withdraw from another [Afghanistan],” Oren said, “and this is perceived in the Middle East with antennae well attuned to shifts in power.”

Even Washington’s customary habit in the Middle East of offering financial incentives is limited. “The U.S. is reeling from a severe economic recession as well as ecological challenges and a reorganization of domestic priorities,” said Oren. “This doesn’t mean that the U.S. is not still a major player. In terms of mediation, it’s the only show in town.”

Nonetheless, among Israeli officials like Mossad chief Meir Dagan there’s a growing belief that the White House is disburdening the United States of its involvement in conflicts, and I asked the ambassador if he believes that the process of unburdening includes Washington distancing itself from its conflict-prone Israeli ally. Even before the flotilla incident, Israel’s stock had seemed to be dropping inside the Beltway. Israel’s wars with Hezbollah in summer 2006 and Gaza in the winter of 2008 to 2009 alienated segments of the U.S. intelligentsia, including American Jews, who were flummoxed, they said, that the Jewish state did not abide by higher moral standards than other countries, including the United States. However, those same two wars left Washington worried that Israel can no longer get the job done. Once a strategic asset whose unrivaled power (coupled with unconditional U.S. support) kept peace in the eastern Mediterranean, Israel has become, according to Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and one of the pillars of the Beltway’s think-tank community, a strategic liability.

Oren disagrees. “We are aware that this is a certain body of thought in the Washington bureaucracies and the think-tank world, but it is not so with the American people or policymakers,” he said. “Israel is the only democratic American ally in the Middle East that can field a highly trained combat-proven army in 12 hours.”

Indeed, among other things, the Mavi Marmara incident revealed that the Turks are not the friends of Washington that they once were, leaving only Israel as capable, and willing, to stand by the United States as a reliable ally in the Middle East. “The U.S. can leave Vietnam confident that North Vietnamese tanks are not going to roll through U.S. cities,” said Oren. “But with the Middle East you’re not going anywhere because it will follow you—to Times Square, to the airspace over Detroit. Israel is described as the U.S.’s aircraft carrier in the Middle East. If the U.S. had an Israel in the Persian Gulf it might not have had to land troops in Iraq twice over the last two decades. Israel is the indispensable nation.”

Jerusalem may have a chance to remind Washington of the fact in the coming months. When I remarked that many Israelis are expecting war this summer, Oren made no efforts to dispel it as a rumor. “We are concerned about this,” he said, explaining that with sanctions coming up at the United Nations, the Iranians may once again try to spark a war in Lebanon, as they did when their nuclear program was referred to the U.N. Security Council in 2006. “We face a different situation than we did in 2006, and it is much worse,” Oren said. “Hezbollah has rearmed so that it now has 42,000 missiles that can hit Eilat,” Israel’s southernmost city. In 2006, the Israelis destroyed all of Hezbollah’s long- and medium-range missiles during the war’s opening salvo, but now, said Oren, “Hezbollah has hidden all of its medium- and long-range missiles under schools and hospitals. They internalized Goldstone.”

In other words, while it was widely reported during the course of the Gaza war that the Hamas leadership was hiding out in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital, Israel knew that an attack on a hospital would earn it the opprobrium of the international community. Even then Israel still wound up facing the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, commonly known as the Goldstone Report. For Israel, a third Hezbollah war is about cleaning up its backyard regardless of whether or not the Party of God’s sponsors in Tehran enrich enough uranium to build a bomb. The United States also has a vital interest in its ally disabling the asset of an Iranian adversary that challenges Washington’s half-century hegemony in the Persian Gulf—an interest that may or may not be more important to the Obama Administration than its efforts to seek rapprochement with the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims.

However, if Israel’s adversaries believe that they can put Israel on the defensive by shaming it in the court of public opinion through the use of human shields, Oren says, they may have miscalculated. For if the Jewish state is condemned when it plays by the normal rules of warfare that apply to the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, then maybe Israel will stop trying to figure out how to satisfy the capricious dictates of the international community and act to defend itself and defeat its enemies.

“Our critics don’t get it,” Oren said. “In Jenin, we went house-to-house and sent 23 soldiers to their death. But if we’re going to be called war criminals no matter what we do, then maybe that changes our thinking.”

• In Britain, the Conservative Party gained a plurality but not a majority of seats—opening the door to a coalition government with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats (and a Lib Dem-run, maybe less Israel-friendly Foreign Ministry). [NYT]

• Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren is insisting to everyone that the lack of cameras or ceremony when Prime Minister Netanyahu visited the White House in March was, in fact, not a snub. [JTA]

• Because of increased building, particularly in Jerusalem, conditions on the ground have never been more challenging for establishing an eventual peace, according to a report. [WP]

• In Jerusalem, “there was not one party on Thursday but two”: The Palestine Writers Festival and the International Writers Festival of Israel both took place. [NYT]

• Max Palevsky, who amassed a fortune funding the start-up that became Intel and later was one of America’s biggest political fundraisers, died at 85. [NYT]

The anti-Oren petition is (somewhat) careful to couch its opposition in terms of Oren serving as a distraction from graduating students rather than of specific opposition to the policies he represents: “commencement has been hijacked to serve as part of a debate about Middle Eastern politics,” it argues. It wears its politics a bit more on its sleeve when it calls Oren “a divisive choice.”

While not technically officially totally Jewish, Brandeis, located outside Boston, has highly Jewish student and faculty bodies and was named, at its founding in 1948, after the first Jewish U.S. Supreme Court justice (who was also, as Jeffrey Goldberg puts it, “the leading Zionist in American history”).

Oren will also receive an honorary degree, as will American Mideast adviser Dennis Ross; novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina (whom some of us are big fans of); and Paul Simon. Personally, I am outraged—outraged!—that the perpetually underrated Garfunkel is not to be similarly honored. So if you’ll excuse me, I have a petition to write.

A Kerfuffle at Brandeis [Jeffrey Goldberg]
Earlier: ADL, J Street Condemn UC-Irvine Incident

• Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren makes a similar description and the same denial in this op-ed. But he also stands by Israeli building in East Jerusalem. [NYT]

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas now says he won’t engage in proximity talks without a settlement freeze in East Jerusalem. [LAT]

• A Thai farm worker in Israel was killed by a Gaza rocket, the first such death since the January 2009 Gaza conflict. [LAT]

• Forty-nine percent of Americans believe Israel must stop building settlements; 22 percent think they should be allowed to continue. [Laura Rozen]

• The situation has U.S. officials mulling the prospect of their proposing the specific contours of direct peace negotiations, likely after several months of proximity talks. [NYT]

The whole matter is important enough—proximity talks! peace in the Middle East! the U.S.-Israeli relationship! Hillary Clinton reprimanding Netanyahu for 45 frickin’ minutes!—that the whole thing deserves its own Monday morning mega-round-up. So:

• AIPAC called on the Obama administration to “defuse” tensions with Israel: “The administration should make a conscious effort to move away from public demands and unilateral deadlines.” [Press Release/Ben Smith]

• Not one of Netanyahu’s 30 ministers—including members of the center-left Labor Party—supported a total settlement freeze, including in East Jerusalem. [JPost]

• Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told other Israeli diplomats that the U.S.-Israeli relationship has reached its lowest level in 35 years. [Haaretz]

• On Meet the Press, top Obama political adviser David Axelrod described the announcement as an “affront” and an “insult.” [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak said it was “not intentional, but was nonetheless unnecessary and damaging.” [Ynet]

• The U.S. State Department formally summoned and reprimanded Oren. [Ynet]

• U.S. envoy George Mitchell is headed to the region this week, and Netanyahu is headed to Washington, D.C., at the beginning of next for the AIPAC summit. President Barack Obama actually will be around while Bibi is there. [Laura Rozen]

• Influential columnist Thomas L. Friedman laments that Biden didn’t leave Israel immediately after the announcement, though not before relaying the following message to Israel:

Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality. Call us when you’re serious. We need to focus on building our country. [NYT]

• Columnist Anne Applebaum considers what the consequences for America would be if Israel bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. [Slate]

• The Palestinian Authority took credit for thwarting an Islamic Jihad-sponsored suicide attack on Israel last month. [Haaretz]

• Erwin Chemerinsky, the University of California-Irvine law school’s founding dean and a First Amendment scholar, holds that those students who disrupted Ambassador Michael Oren’s lecture at the university are not protected by free-speech guarantees. [Jewlicious]

• Charlie White, a Jewish-American skater, took the ice-dancing silver medal last night in Vancouver. [JTA]

• A columnist posits that international recognition of Palestinian statehood should be considered, not as the culmination of independence, but rather as an early, “constructive” step on the road there. [IHT]

But in fact, the ADL has gone out of its way to oppose a boycott. Partly, one suspects, out of a sense of fair play, as well as of prudence: the group has far more weight when lobbying the university to cultivate a “safe, respectful atmosphere,” if it is on-record opposing a boycott.

There’s another reason the ADL is against a boycott of UC-Irvine, though. Said—who else?—ADL head Abraham Foxman:

We are surprised that those who call for a boycott fail to recognize that it is a double-edged sword that legitimizes a tactic so often used against Jews and Israel, particularly in academic settings. We believe academic boycotts are inappropriate, harmful and counterproductive, and will not work to resolve the situation on campus.

Meanwhile, the ADL’s release praised the chancellor for his “swift, clear, and appropriate” response while insisting that more needed to be done. It acknowledged that the heckling led to 11 arrests, while taking no position on them; the Muslim Public Affairs Council has called for an investigation into them, while the Council on American Islamic Relations has asserted that they violated the First Amendment. (Whether they did or didn’t is a question of line-drawing: suffice to say that not all speech is protected like all other speech, and heckling a lecturer falls pretty wide on the less-protected side of the spectrum.)

ADL: U.S. Jews Mustn’t Boycott University for Heckling of Israeli Envoy [Haaretz]

Earlier: ADL, J Street Condemn UC-Irvine Incident

• The Israeli IRS wants supermodel Bar Refaeli, who is incorporated in Singapore and keeps most of her wealth in offshore banks, to pay alleged back taxes. [NY Post]

• British actor Colin Firth has signed on to play Avraham Stern, the leader of the Zionist Stern Gang of Mandatory Palestine, in a Michael Winterbottom film. [Haaretz]

• Even as Ambassador Michael Oren has played nicer with J Street after prior rancor, Israel’s combative Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon went after the dovish American group: “They should not call themselves pro-Israeli,” he said. [Ben Smithl]

• An interesting interview with the head of a new Fatah-affiliated private equity fund that plans to invest in Palestinian businesses. [LAT]

• Prime Ministers Netanyahu and Putin traded pledges: a Holocaust memorial in Moscow, a monument to the Red Army’s World War II exploits in Israel. [JPost]

The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman condemned the incident (in an email), as well as the strikingly similar incident, also on Monday, in which Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was shouted down with like-minded epithets at Oxford University: “Anti-Israel activists on our campuses are increasingly resorting to undemocratic, bullying, confrontational tactics in order to silence Israeli officials and the expression of pro-Israel views.”

J Street had this to say (also in an email):

While appropriate and respectful protests are a legitimate and important part of the conversation on campus, anti-Semitic, racist, disruptive, and inflammatory actions and language are simply unacceptable.

In particular, we were profoundly offended by the anti-Semitic rhetoric used by a student to attack Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon during a recent talk at Oxford University. We were also deeply disappointed to hear about attempts to interrupt Ambassador Michael Oren’s remarks at the University of California, Irvine, with heckling aimed at drowning out the Ambassador’s speech.

UC-Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake, who was present at the speech, said afterwards that he was embarassed by the welcome Oren got.

Meanwhile, roughly a dozen students were arrested after Oren’s speech, prompting the Muslim Public Affairs Council to request an investigation—they argue that it is unclear what if any laws the students broke.

Muslim Students Shout ‘Killer’ During Oren’s L.A. Speech [Haaretz]
Muslim Group Wants Investigation Into Arrests During Oren Lecture [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

Earlier: Israeli Minister, Historian Welcomed in Britain

Today, the department did the same with Rosenthal. “Special Envoy Rosenthal has the complete support of the department,” it asserted. “As a matter of longstanding policy the United States has supported a peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To that end the U.S. government encourages broad dialogue among responsible partners for peace.” Looks like Uncle Sam is getting its wish.

State Department Backs Its Anti-Semitism Envoy [JTA]

Earlier: Administration Rebukes Its Anti-Semitism Envoy
U.S. Anti-Semitism Envoy Attacks Ambassador Oren

Tablet Magazine reached Rosenthal earlier today at home in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is busy packing up her furniture for the move to Washington, D.C., later this week. She declined to comment on the furor her comments provoked, except to say that she believes the original Haaretz headline—which said she “blasted” Oren—exaggerated what she actually said, which was that she thought it “most unfortunate” that Oren apparently thinks J Street’s dovish policy positions could put the lives of Israeli Jews at risk.

“The interview focused on what is and what isn’t anti-Semitism,” Rosenthal said. “I don’t think a reporter asking me about J Street is out of bounds, and I don’t think my answer was out of bounds.”

American Envoy Sparks Furor with Criticism of Oren [Haaretz]
U.S. Official Slammed for Criticizing Ambassador Oren [JPost]

Earlier: U.S. Anti-Semitism Envoy Attacks Ambassador Oren

Related: The Anti-Anti-Semite [Tablet Magazine]

Tablet Magazine’s Allison Hoffman interviewed Rosenthal upon her accession to her current position last month. She had this to say about J Street:

Criticizing a certain policy in Israel or a certain policy in the United States regarding Israel does not make someone an anti-Semite. … I think J Street needs to be at the table, and I think other organizations representing many strategies all need to be at the table, because the status quo in the Middle East is totally unacceptable.

U.S. Official Blasts Israel Envoy’s ‘Unfortunate’ J Street Remarks [Haaretz]

Related: The Anti-Anti-Semite [Tablet Magazine]

Earlier: Israeli Ambassador Scolds and Praises J Street

Now, according to JTA’s Eric Fingerhut, Oren appears willing to concede that his government and J Street share at least some common ground—namely, Iran. Oren, Fingerhut reported, said in a short telephone interview that he appreciated that J Street had “made a statement and supported these efforts” to push sanctions measures in Congress. Which is reassuring, because it shows that peace, at least between these two parties, is still possible.

Oren: U.S. and Israel Tight on Iran, Appreciates J Street Support of Sanctions [JTA]
In Shift, Oren Calls J Street ‘A Unique Problem’ [Forward]

At the very back of the ballroom, where the press was penned at long banquet tables, Benjamin Sack, a public-affairs officer for the Israeli embassy, watched the proceedings with his arms crossed over his chest. Sack, whose nametag did not include his affiliation, showed up as the token observer, in place of Israel’s ambassador, Michael Oren, who very publicly declined last week to take his turn in front of the crowd. What did he make of it? “I’ll tell you what I’m telling everyone—it’s exactly what I expected,” he said, raising an eyebrow. Would there be any surprise guests from the embassy? “No.” Did he think Oren, or other embassy staff, would make use of J Street’s live-streaming to tune in? “We’ve got other things going on today, you know.”

Rabbi Yoffie’s Remarks to J Street Convention [URJ.org]

Tzipi Livni Shows Prime Ministerial Stuff on J Street Conference [HuffPost]
Earlier: Oren Still Undecided on J Street Conference

It’s also worth remembering that context matters, so it’s probably not entirely irrelevant that the Israeli embassy softened its position right after Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni—whose Kadima party actually came first in last February’s Knesset elections, though it couldn’t muster a working parliamentary coalition—lashed out at Netanyahu’s government for isolating Israel on the international stage. “You have managed to beat the president of the United States, Israel’s greatest friend, or at least this is the impression you and your people tried to convey after the meeting,” Livni railed during Monday’s opening of the Knesset. “You have managed to humiliate the only partner for a peace settlement Israel has. In short: We have beaten America, humiliated the Palestinians, isolated ourselves. Raise your head from the small politics and see what has happened, see that Israel is excommunicated.”

On Eve of Conference, J Street Struggles To Prove Pro-Israel Cred [Forward]
Livni Accuses Netanyahu of ‘Humiliating Palestinians’[Ynet]
Related: Generation Z [Tablet]

Oren and Gold were rivals in that case, but the small world of Israeli politics has a long history of old friends competing with one another. Indeed, the two are friends and colleagues who—as went unmentioned in press coverage of their May competition—found their commitment to Zionism and Israel at the same and time place, as undergraduates and then grad students at Columbia University in the 1970s. They were part of a group of activist Jewish students who thrived in an atmosphere of urgency and fervor alien to college campuses today, and their story provides a glimpse into a generation of American Jews who decided to make aliyah and an idealistic Jewish world—centered around a Jewish commune at just off Columbia’s campus called Beit Ephraim—long past.

Last month, Oren was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly; he told the international press that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks there were “classic anti-Semitism.” Thirty-five years ago, at the 1974 General Assembly, Yassir Arafat made his first speech to the United Nations. The Palestinian leader was received like a celebrity, to raucous applause. And, by all accounts, it was his speech that moved Oren and his circle to action.

Eric Sokoloff, then a Columbia undergrad and prominent campus Zionist, started organizing opposition to Arafat even before the speech, founding a group called Student Mobilization for Israel to unite like-minded college students across the city. SMI was dedicated to pro-Israel political activism and education, staging rallies and demonstrations to present what Sokoloff described to me as “a more accurate portrayal of the issues” than Arafat would.

Sokoloff would later make aliyah, change his first name to Yitzchak, work for the Isreali Ministry of Defense, and teach political science at Hebrew University. But back in 1974, he and SMI began publishing the Middle East Observer, a leaflet featuring news and opinion by Columbia students. As the paper exploded in popularity, it helping SMI establish a national network of student activists. “Soon after we started the paper, we were printing 50,000 copies a week and shipping them across the United States,” Sokoloff recalled.

He worked with SMI, and on the Middle East Observer, with Jeffrey Fine, another Columbia undergrad who is today a lawyer and leader of the modern Orthodox community in Dallas, canvassed Manhattan preaching to their often-offended fellow Jews that service in the Israeli army was a moral obligation for all Jews (though Fine himelf never ended up moving to Israel).

SMI held court at Beit Ephraim, which Fine described to me as a “countercultural hub” for the Columbia Jewish community. Also known as “the Bayit,” it had been founded in 1972 with the financial assistance of the author Herman Wouk, a Columbia alumnus. “The establishment Jewish institutions were not particularly attractive to us,” Gold told me. “So a number of us got together and formed the Bayit as an alternative.”

Steven M. Cohen, one of the Columbia students who helped found the Bayit and now a prominent sociologist, told me that the Bayit, which in its early days actively recruited campus Jewish leaders, sought to “cull Jewish activists from various walks of life, people sometimes ideologically opposed to each other, and see if they could live together.” Amid what Cohen described as a “swirl of self-motivated Jewish activity” at Columbia—from left- and right-wing Zionist organizations to advocates for Soviet Jews to various religious groups—the Bayit selected students like Sokoloff and Fine to create and maintain a dynamic atmosphere of young Jews who fiercely celebrated their Jewish identities.

Oren—who changed his name from Bornstein when he made aliyah, though he retained it as his middle name, in deference to his father—and Gold met for the first time at the Bayit, at a guest lecture by an Israeli author. They soon connected with Sokoloff, Fine, Cohen and others at the Bayit’s weekly Shabbat dinners and educational seminars. Eventually, they both moved in. They were joined by a remarkable cast of future Jewish luminaries who frequented the Bayit in the mid-1970s. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic lived there there, as did Rabbi Joseph Teluskhin, the Jewish author. J.J. Goldberg, a former editor-in-chief of the Forward, lived at a different Jewish collective, but he spent time at the Bayit. So did the nationally syndicated conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager.

Oren and Gold were particularly committed to their Zionism, the other former students said. One Friday night, Fine recalled, Gold discoursed on the potential difficulties of reaching a two-state solution with Palestinians. “We would sit there thinking, what is this guy talking about?” Fine said. “Back then, the PLO was seen as the root of all evil, and here’s Dore postulating all sorts of scenarios, 20 years in advance.” On another occasion, Fine remembered, he was studying Arab nationalism and commented to Oren that he’d encountered a great deal of scholarship in German. “If you want to become an expert in Middle East studies, you probably have to learn German,” Fine recalled saying. Oren pondered him for a moment, then agreed. “Six weeks later,” Fine said, “Oren came back, fluent in German. He was a wunderkind.”

Members of the Bayit and the activist Jewish community shared a sense of kol yisrael arevim zeh la zeh, all of the Nation of Israel are responsible for one another, reveling in each other’s diverse yet strong expressions of Jewish identity. In some cases, Fine recalled, this exuberant Jewish pride bordered on the ridiculous: “Some guys would wear kippot and then march into a trayf Chinese place and chomp on their pork,” he said. “They identified by external symbols.”

These students channeled the prevailing culture of youth protest and ideological zeal into Jewish causes. SMI’s cadre of activists, Sokoloff said, “never took no for an answer” and weren’t afraid “to be angry when necessary” in fighting for Jewish causes. But even among that crowd, Oren, Gold, Sokoloff, and Fine sensed a particular calling above all: Zionism. Columbia’s Middle East and Jewish studies departments allowed the four friends to couple their devoted activism on behalf of Israel with equally dedicated scholarship.

At the time, Israel’s most prominent global representative, the Cambridge-educated diplomat Abba Eban, recently replaced as Israel’s foreign minister, was teaching a weekly seminar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. (Gold took the class; Fine audited it.) The four friends also studied under J.C. Hurewitz, then director of SIPA’s Middle East Institute, who was among the pioneers of Middle East studies in the 1930s. They learned Zionism from Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, author of The Zionist Idea, a crucial compendium of Zionism’s intellectual history. Zbigniew Brzezinski instructed several of them in international affairs, while David Sidorsky interrupted his moral philosophy classes to expound upon the Hebrew meaning of the word “men.”

Yet they also refused to sequester themselves in a Jewish cocoon, the students said, seeking out classes on Arab nationalism and learning the Arabic language. They thrived on a campus that hosted Edward Said, already a prominent Palestinian activist, as well as Charles Issawi, a former member of Egypt’s finance ministry who specialized in Arab economics. The Middle East studies classrooms at Columbia were not the dens of controversy and ideological warfare they’ve become more recently. Gold recalled Arab professors such as Issawi encouraging him more than any other faculty members to pursue Middle East studies. Fine remembered taking a course on Arab nationalism in which the professor instructed his Arab-dominated classroom to engage with Fine rather than spout polemics. “Here you have an opportunity to talk to a Zionist, and he wants to learn about your faith and your nationality,” Fine recalled the professor saying. “Take advantage of it.”

Though professors encouraged dialogue, meaningful engagement between Arab and Muslim students and their Jewish peers hardly seemed a foregone conclusion. Though the many Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Iraqis in his classes had their own divisions, Fine said, “they certainly united to hate Israel.” Twenty years prior to the start of Oslo peace process, said Sokoloff, “PLO supporters didn’t mince their words: they believed in the destruction of Israel, as did the rest of the hard left on campus.”

But Sokoloff and Cohen both described debates with those students as arguments with “worthy adversaries.” In an academic environment “largely untainted by polemics,” said Sokoloff, “Dore and I sat shiva for our Arabic friends.” Arabs and Jews “understood each other’s passions and respected them,” he said. As a leading Zionist activist on campus, Cohen sat on panels with Edward Said and hosted Middle East negotiations between Arab and Jewish scholars in Columbia dormitories.

After Columbia, Gold, Oren, and Sokoloff each fulfilled their pledge to make aliyah. They all served in elite army units and fully integrated into Israeli society. Sokoloff founded and runs Keshet, a educational touring agency, and works with the Israeli Ministry of Tourism to bring thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish visitors to Israel each year. Gold has spent twenty years in the Israeli diplomatic corps, facilitating secret meetings between Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan’s King Hussein in the early 1990s and engaging in high-level diplomacy with the Clinton Administration as one of Netanyahu’s chief policy advisers.

Jerusalem Post columnist Shmuel Rosner noted that Gold and Oren’s success in Israeli government is incidental, not a sign of American immigrants establishing a larger role in the country but only of the two men’s relationship with Netanyahu. “You see the exception now rather than the rule,” Rosner told me, with a prime minister who uniquely relies upon “Anglo-Saxon advisers” in his inner circle. American immigrants, Rosner said, “remain too small in number, too diverse, and unmotivated” to form an interest bloc achieve true political visibility among Israelis—unlike, say, the politically powerful Russian émigré community.

“My generation of American immigrants came of age with the Second Intifada, when a group of us spontaneously, as individuals, realized we have something essential to contribute to Israel: the opportunity to explain Israel to an American audience in ‘American,’” said the writer Yossi Klein Halevi, a Shalem Center fellow and Oren’s close friend. Oren’s appointment represents “the coming of age of American immigrants” not as a communal political force, he argued, but as a loose movement of public diplomats acting as “counterweights against the demonization of Israel.”

Gold told me in an interview that he and his fellow Columbia Zionists had decided back in Morningside Heights not to “develop careers just for income and needs, but to do something socially and politically meaningful.” That’s what they’re doing. Columbia in the 1970s, Sokoloff said, encouraged altruistic careers. “Israel,” he said, “was our altruism.”

Jordan Hirsch, an intern at Tablet Magazine, is a senior at Columbia University.

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.

‘J Street Could Hurt Israel’s Interests’

Given Oren’s state employment, his essay might be written off as the work of a stooge—were it not for the fact that his civilian scholarship and analysis has appeared in TNR for years and been taken quite seriously. Bibi may be ideological, but he’s not stupid, and Oren’s appointment looks now to be almost enough to make up for the disaster of Avigdor Lieberman’s.

Deep Denial [TNR]