Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States. Last week, for example, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald asked Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg about any loyalty oaths to Israel Goldberg took when he served in the IDF during the early 1990s. (On Tuesday, writer Max Blumenthal used a gross phrase to describe Goldberg: “former Israeli prison guard.”) The obvious implication is that Goldberg’s true loyalty is to Israel, not the United States. For months, M.J. Rosenberg of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group, has been throwing around the term “Israel Firster” to describe conservatives he disagrees with. One recent Tweet singled out my friend Eli Lake, a reporter for Newsweek: “Lake supports #Israel line 100% of the time, always Israel first over U.S.” That’s quite mild compared to some of the others.

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize.

Throughout my career, I’ve been associated with the Jewish left—I was to the left of the New Republic staff when I worked there, moved on to Talking Points Memo, hosted my blog at Firedoglake for years, and so on. I’ve criticized the American Jewish right’s myopic, destructive, tribal conception of what it means to love Israel. But it doesn’t deserve to have its Americanness and patriotism questioned. By all means, get into it with people who interpret every disagreement Washington has with Tel Aviv as hostility to the Jewish state. But if you can’t do it without sounding like Pat Buchanan, who has nothing but antipathy and contempt for Jews, then you’ve lost the debate.

This is tiresome to point out. Many of the writers who are fond of the Israel Firster smear are—appropriately—very good at hearing and analyzing dog-whistles when they’re used to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims. I can’t read anyone’s mind or judge anyone’s intention, but by the sound of it these writers are sending out comparable dog-whistles about Jews.

***

A bit of background for the uninitiated: Last month, Josh Block, a former AIPAC spokesman, pushed a series of talking points that targeted several liberal writers at the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank with ties to the Obama Administration. (Full disclosure: My personal blog was very briefly hosted by CAP in 2008; some of Block’s targets are my friends.) The effect was to suggest that CAP was hostile to Israel because it is to Block’s left. A plain reading of the think tank’s work refutes the accusation.

But buried in Block’s overbroad invective was a kernel of truth. Some at CAP, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, and beyond deployed the “Israel First” smear, calling the Americanness of their political opponents into question. Predictably, right-wing Jewish writers took their shots at CAP, Media Matters, and the rest—never wanting to miss an opportunity to indict the left. And the Washington Post revived the contretemps last month in an article that effectively asked if CAP was anti-Israel.

The response to this controversy, and related ones, was ugly. Many toyed with the idea that denigrating someone’s American identity wasn’t so bad after all. Left-wing polemicist Philip Weiss wrote that he considered the term “Israel firster [to be] a perfectly legitimate term in a wide-open American discourse.” Time columnist Joe Klein noted that he’s used the term himself before, weighing in on “Americans who are pushing for war with Iran”—as the question of attacking Iran lurks in the background of this entire debate—and who “place Israel’s national defense priorities above our own.”

Even more disappointingly, the term got a nod of approval from the head of a lobbying organization that represents the Jewish left. Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace organization that I’ve written favorably about, told the Washington Post he was cool with the throwing “Israel Firster” around. “If the charge is that you’re putting the interests of another country before the interests of the United States in the way you would advocate that,” he said, “it’s a legitimate question.” So, Ben-Ami’s response to years of getting baselessly attacked for not caring about Israel is to turn around and say his attackers don’t care about America? (Ben-Ami later clarified that, “The conspiracy theory that American Jews have dual loyalty is just that, a conspiracy theory and must be refuted in the strongest possible way.”)

If what Rosenberg and the others on the left want is a debate—by which I understand them to mean a debate about the wisdom of a war with Iran, and about the proper role of the U.S.-Israel relationship—great. The left, I think, will win that debate on the merits, because it recognizes that if Israel is to survive as a Jewish democracy living in peace beside a free Palestine, an assertive United States has to pressure a recalcitrant Israel to come to its senses, especially about the insanity of attacking Iran.

But that debate will be shut down and sidetracked by using a term that Charles Lindbergh or Pat Buchanan would be comfortable using. I can’t co-sign that. The attempt to kosherize “Israel Firster” is an ugly rationalization. It shouldn’t matter that the American Jewish right proliferates the term “anti-Israel.” The easiest way to lose a winnable argument is to get baited into using their tactics. I don’t fetishize false civility; bullies ought to get it twice as bad as they give. People disagree, so they should argue. Shouting is healthier than shutting up.

Call me a squish or a sellout or a concern troll. Whatever. But if you can’t be forceful without recalling some of the ugliest tropes in American Jewish history, you’re doing it wrong.

Which is not to say the two agree (or would agree) on everything. Wieseltier indicts President Obama’s view of the current upheavals, which, he says, is mired in the outdated, stereotypical view of the Arab street. And Ibish argues that despite the absence of anti-Western, -American, or even –Israeli sentiments among the main driving forces of the masses in Tunis, Cairo, and elsewhere, “There is no question that the Israeli occupation is still the prism of pain through which most Arabs view international relations—and that they are passionate about the cause of Palestinian freedom.”

But I still think reading the pieces together (choice excerpts below the jump) provides a fascinating, insightful window into the changes afoot half a world away and how they are realigning the ideological spectrum at home. What I mean to say is, it really struck me how the two of them use such different language to describe such a similar reality.

Wieseltier:

the democratic eruption of recent months marks the advent of a post-post-imperial moment, in which the future is finally allowed a greater claim upon the present than the past. Post-post-imperialism is another term for self-reliance, for an internal renovation, for what an early Zionist writer called “auto-emancipation.” There is no deeper emancipation. The blessing of the post-post-imperial moment is not that the terrible history has been forgotten, but that the lachrymosity it left in its wake, the lowered expectations that derived from the belief that there is only one story and only one enemy, the pessimistic effects of unceasing commemoration, have been dispelled. … Democracy, for these protesting peoples, is no longer defined, or tarnished, by its largely Western provenance. This is a milestone. Indeed, the post-imperialist analysis of the Arab uprisings is now the desperate and hallucinatory work of Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who would suspend all Muslims in eternal grief and eternal rage. They are the losers in the Arab apotheosis. Reality is shattering their conspiracy theories, in a grand historical rebuttal.

Ibish:

Any serious, honest appraisal of what is spreading throughout the Arab world refutes every aspect of this pernicious mythology. Certainly, the size, scope, and bravery of the demonstrations for democracy, good governance, and accountability mean that no one can continue flogging the Orientalist shibboleth that Arabs are inherently resistant to change—at least not with a straight face. Likewise, the idea that Arab political culture is inherently violent has been most eloquently debunked by the extraordinarily self-disciplined nonviolence of the protesters in Egypt and Tunisia—in spite of extreme provocation and abuses by the police and government-paid hooligans. …

Consider, by contrast, how events in Egypt might have unfolded had the Western stereotype of the Arab street possessed any real explanatory power: The demonstrations in Cairo would have been violent and chaotic—and driven by religious fanaticism. But Islamism and religious identity played almost no role in the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings; indeed, these supposed prime movers of Arab culture and politics haven’t been particularly evident in the region’s other mass protests, with the exception of Jordan. It wasn’t Islamism that brought millions of Arabs out into the streets to demand change. Rather, these protests were the product—and, just as important, the expression—of national consciousness, uniting Christians and Muslims, the devout and the skeptical, and a range of urban social classes, from the upper middle class to the working poor.

Post-Post-Imperialism [TNR]
Under Western Lies [Bookforum]

• Over the weekend, Hamas reconfirmed its commitment to a cease-fire in an effort to head off tensions in Gaza during the two-year anniversary of Cast Lead. [NYT]

• In another instance of WikiLeaks telling us for certain what we knew was almost certainly true, a newly released 2008 cable authored by then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice confirms that Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. [JTA]

• Columnist Avi Shafran points out that President Obama has done pretty much every basic thing that typical pro-Israel American Jews have asked of him. [Jewish Standard]

• Henry Kissinger puts his 1973 remark, “If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern,” “in context.” [WP]

• A must-read profile of longtime New Republic maven, owner, and editor-in-chief (soon to be editor at large) Marty Peretz reports that his controversial blog, The Spine, will soon be discontinued. [NYMag]

• Aid groups argue that the Gaza blockade is inhibiting them, not Hamas. [WP]

• Popular distress is building in Iran is building over higher prices, a result of slashed subsidies, in turn partly a result of Western sanctions. [WP]

• Hitch on Kissinger. I could read a new one every week. [Slate]

• Dov Halbertal polemicizes against Israel’s mixing of synagogue and state. [Haaretz]

• Recent revelations that even the ostensibly non-Nazi German civil service actively furthered the Holocaust and other crimes have shaken Germany of late. [NYT]

• After the Carmel fire, some are rethinking the whole everyone-should-plant-a-tree-in-Israel thing. [WP]

• The Mavi Marmara was returned to Turkey. [NYT]

• Dan Kurzman, a Washington Post foreign correspondent and historian of World War Two and the Israeli War of Independence, died at 88. [NYT]

• The argument that Cliff Lee is, in effect, a Philadelphian Jew strikes me as somewhat specious. Then again, anything to rub it in Yankee fans’ faces. [Jewish Exponent]

Donate to the United Jewish Appeal! Edward G. (as in Goldenberg) Robinson says so.

Seroy no doubt had in mind some of TNR’s more legendary hatchet jobs, including former lead critic James Wood’s influential takedown of “hysterical realism” in novels by Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Salman Rushdie, and the notorious Dale Peck drive-by that began, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” But the practitioner who has best and most responsibly defended the high principles behind TNR’s house style has been Ruth Franklin, a younger critic who is a senior editor at the magazine and, as it happens, the author of the Franzen review.

Although it made the tabloids, Franklin’s take on Freedom is dog-bites-man: It is entirely coherent with the broader values she has stood for in her decade-plus of reviewing contemporary fiction. To begin with, there is the trademark TNR stubbornness. “We damn not with faint praise, but with hyperbole,” Franklin once wrote. As an antidote, she errs on the side of negativity, in part so that when she says she likes something—the novels of David Mitchell, for example—we know she likes it. Too many critics, she worries, are like the teenager who is friends with everyone and thereby ensures that no one knows exactly where one stands with him. In this thinking, the most popular kid in class is Dave Eggers and his “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along approach to literary criticism,” as she put it, which he has enshrined in his journals, McSweeney’s and The Believer. These, according to Franklin, celebrate books rather than critique them, and thereby do writers and readers a disservice.

If Franklin was generally less likely to get caught up in Franzen-frenzy, Freedom specifically embodies literary priorities that she rates lower than most. It is, Franklin accurately observed, a “Way We Live Now novel, consummately of its moment,” intricately immersed in the details of current American life. For many critics, this was a selling point. For Franklin, the novel’s faithful rendering of superficial contemporary truths crowded out the deeper, more human truths that she most urgently seeks. Franzen’s realism is “just a transcription of reality,” she complained. “He substitutes the details for the big picture, a hyper-realistic portraiture for genuine psychological insight.” By contrast, she can love David Mitchell’s novels despite what may seem like their unharnessed gimmickry—his Cloud Atlas consists of six obliquely related stories that span from medieval times to the future—because, as she sees it, “on their most fundamental level all his books are concerned with the connections between human beings.”

Now, Franklin has published her first book, A Thousand Darknesses. It’s about Holocaust literature, which might at first seem odd; indeed, her extensive writings on Holocaust literature, out of which this book grew, might themselves have seemed odd over the past several years. For someone who picks fights with Franzen, Eggers, Nicole Krauss, Zadie Smith, Gary Shteyngart, and more of the most prominent contemporary literary novelists, publishing criticism and then a book about survivor memoirs and secondary works seems beside the point at best. But her Holocaust criticism has in fact been totally in sync with her other criticism, and A Thousand Darknesses is precisely Franklin’s attempt to advance her larger, hedgehog-like argument about what art and criticism should do. What seems on its cover almost a niche, scholarly work actually confirms Franklin’s status as one of our most important critics under 40.

* * *

Tim O’Brien, himself a witness-author (he is a novelist who served in Vietnam), once wrote, “That’s a true war story that never happened.” Franklin has the same sort of higher “true” in mind when she considers Holocaust literature. Against Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” she lays out why creating imaginative art—the sort of art that shows you why it shares its root with “artifice”—is exactly the response Auschwitz demands. And against A. Alvarez’s assertion in Commentary that Night is “certainly beyond criticism,” she demonstrates that respectful but honest criticism is our duty to Night and other books like it. (It turns out that Commentary’s unquestioning appreciation of Shoah lit shares much with The Believer’s unquestioning appreciation of hip lit.)

Franklin begins by proving that most of what we think of as objective, plainspoken, and truthful documentation of the Holocaust was actually consciously and artistically crafted by talented, imaginative authors to depict transcendent human truths at the expense of literal ones. This even goes for the two giants of the genre, Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man.

Levi’s first tome (frequently translated as Survival in Auschwitz) is, Franklin argues, “a fundamentally literary book, with a highly stylized use of language;” the Italian chemist’s very real experience in Auschwitz underwent a “process of fictionalization” on its way from real-life to the page. And why not? “Why should he not exploit his creative freedom to do with his characters what he will,” she asks, “to alter them intentionally—not unconsciously—in ways that will make his narrative more effective?” Late in life, Levi confirmed that he was aware that, even as he was living his extreme life, he hoped to turn that life into something more: “The idea of having to survive in order to tell what I had seen,” she quotes him, “obsessed me night and day.”

In contrast to Levi, in his later years Wiesel has appointed himself the High Arbiter of truth in Holocaust memoirs, “guarding the Temple against those who would desecrate it.” Yet Franklin shows that Wiesel’s first and most influential work certainly wouldn’t pass his own authenticity test. There is its style: “Every sentence feels weighted and deliberate, every episode carefully chosen and delineated,” she writes. “It is also disarmingly brief: It can be carried in a pocket and read in an hour. One has the sense of merciless experience mercilessly distilled to its essence.” There is its careful, learned, artistic construction: Franklin cites the critic Lawrence Langer’s ingenious insight that Night functions as a reverse Bildungsroman, in which “the youthful protagonist becomes an initiate into death rather than in life.” And then there are the details: According to Franklin, “Night balances unsteadily between fidelity to the events it portrays and the making of literature. The book’s poetic austerity comes at a cost to the literal truth.” Franklin documents that the narrator’s mentor, Moishe the Beadle, is a fabricated composite character, and that the narrator’s central interior struggle—his loss of faith in God—is made-up (Wiesel has attested that he believed in God even after the war); in short, Franklin proves that the narrator of Night is not Wiesel. Wiesel might take this as an accusation. Franklin intends it as a compliment.

The heart of A Thousand Darknesses is the chapter on Wolfgang Koeppen’s 1992 book Jakob Littner’s Notes From a Hole in the Ground. Here’s the story: Jakob Littner, a Polish Jew, had been a stamp dealer in Munich until being expelled in 1938; continually kicked eastward, he eventually had to hide for nine months in the titular hole in the ground in eastern Poland, from which he was rescued by Soviet troops in 1944. After the war, he submitted a memoir of his experience to a German publisher, but it was deemed of insufficient literary quality, and the job of adapting it was given to an exceedingly minor German novelist named Wolfgang Koeppen. Koeppen rewrote the manuscript, keeping its first-person voice, and the publisher brought the result out in 1948 as Notes From a Hole in the Ground, by Jakob Littner—Koeppen’s name appeared nowhere. The work was assumed to be a nonfiction memoir, a piece of testimony authored by the person who underwent the experiences depicted (much as Night is received). However, nearly a half-century later, in 1992, the book was published in a new edition, this time as a novel called Jakob Littner’s Notes From a Hole in the Ground, by Wolfgang Koeppen. “The reading public was being asked to accept,” Franklin explains, “that the novelist Wolfgang Koeppen”—by this time, he was a novelist of some notoriety—“was the true author of a book that had been believed to be an authentic Holocaust memoir and was now reclassified as a novel.” Most readers came to believe Littner’s story was fictional! It wasn’t until 1995, when an American professor pointed to Littner’s original manuscript (which had been published in 1985), that people understood what was going on. Koeppen’s 1992 work, Franklin concludes, “appears to be the first time that a text believed to be fiction turned out to be based on fact.”

This remarkable story is an immaculate microcosm of Franklin’s point. First, you have the uproar over whether Koeppen’s text is a novel or a memoir—a fictional or factual account—when the reality reveals how useless that dichotomy is. And then you have the question of who had his priorities right: Littner’s champions, committed to getting every last fact about Littner’s experience correct, or Koeppen and his champions, committed to best conveying what “happened,” in a broader sense? “His purpose,” Franklin writes in defense of Koeppen, “was to write an artistically coherent text, not a news report.” And here is the crux: Koeppen’s work, nearly all agree, is artistically superior to Littner’s. Some would say that doesn’t matter—that Littner’s fealty to what literally happened to him counts the most. But Franklin is persuasive that Koeppen’s more moving and beautiful work—his true war story that didn’t quite happen that way—is more valuable.

In 2006, in Slate magazine, Franklin considered Daniel Mendelsohn’s best-selling The Lost. This journalistic memoir found the author, a premier American literary and theater critic, retracing the steps and discovering the stories of his great-uncle, great-aunt, and four cousins, all of whom perished. Mendelsohn, Franklin wrote, was obsessed with uncovering all the facts and fetishized those facts, as if knowing the stories meant understanding the lives. The Lost was therefore an exact antithesis of Franklin’s program: “Mendelsohn goes too far,” she opined, “in his insistence on the primacy of factual evidence over all other ways of conjuring the past—particularly art.” Of Mendelsohn’s relations, she asks, “What is more important: That we know what happened during the Holocaust (whether Shmiel and his family were shot or gassed, for instance), or that we try, in whatever hopelessly limited way, to understand what occurred?”

If Mendelsohn is Franklin’s foil, Paul Celan is her prototype. In a 2000 New Republic essay, Franklin examined the work of the Jewish poet—who spent time in labor camps and whose parents were murdered by the Nazis—and argued that his verse teaches us no more nor less about suffering than that of a poet he translated, Emily Dickinson. It seems a remarkable claim: Dickinson famously rarely left her house; Celan’s knowledge of suffering came from some of the worst suffering of all. Yet “the recluse in genteel Amherst could teach the survivor of l’univers concentrationnaire something about death,” Franklin says. She adds, in what would have been a good epigraph for A Thousand Darknesses, “Art really is that strong.”

* * *

For Franklin, there is no frigate like a book, so long, like in Dickinson, as it “Bears a Human soul.” And like Dickinson’s stylized, unnatural verse, the hardiest frigates are artistic, because art, more than history or journalism or science or any other means of conveying information, invites what Franklin has called “imaginative empathy”—the ability to feel the human situations depicted rather than just know their basic information. So, Franklin thinks Piotr Rawicz’s unlikely, almost Roth-ian novel Blood from the Sky is valuable because of its insistence that its content is the opposite of unique: “The events that he describes,” Rawicz says of his narrator, who is only implicitly a survivor, “could crop up in any place, at any time, in the mind of any man, planet, mineral.” That insistence, according to Franklin, allows the reader “to empathize imaginatively, to engage with and accept the story on a deeper psychic level than is experienced by the reader of history.” On the other hand from Rawicz is the “totalitarian” (her word) insistence of Wiesel and others on total fealty to the facts and on the Holocaust’s uniqueness and universal centrality; on the other hand also is Mendelsohn’s factual overload; and on the other hand also is Franzen, who chronicles the facts of who we are without adding to our knowledge of who we are, and is therefore, in Franklin’s formulation, “all mirror and no lamp.”

You could argue that Franklin’s self-conscious focus on the Holocaust canon actually undercuts her central argument, which is that these books are like any other books, if perhaps more so. As she wrote of Celan, “The Holocaust did not make great artists out of ordinary Jews; it provided the impetus for those who were already great souls to express themselves in art” (one thinks here of Anne Frank). Franklin’s meditations on how “every act of memory is also an act of narrative,” and that “the very act of telling the story must falsify it because to tell it implies that it has some kind of internal logic” feel irrelevant, even trite. But Franklin’s focus on the Holocaust is nonetheless useful. She has traveled there to trumpet her argument about art for the same reason that Dante traveled to Hell and Heaven to trumpet his argument about human nature: It is the loudest, most extreme, and therefore most obvious stage.

Which is why it is good to know that Franklin will fight for the same values on more mundane stages, too. Earlier this year, she wondered why disagreements between critics over works of art are treated by everyone—the critics included—as polite and unimportant differences, rather than as seismic, bloody quarrels that result from a clash of vital first principles. “Few of us,” she pointed out, “when encountering an opinion of a work of art diametrically opposed to our own, are magnanimous enough to declare the merits of both positions and call it a draw. No: We believe that our position is right.” In the age of The Believer’s celebratory criticism and the Internet’s dominant “new niceness,” it felt quenching to read, “A taste judgment, after all, is a kind of value judgment, even if we can’t always articulate those values exactly.” Franklin was not discussing Holocaust literature, or even Jonathan Franzen. The “work of art” under examination was Come Fly Away, the new Frank Sinatra jukebox musical.

News, however, that Harvard’s Social Studies Department dropped him as a speaker at its upcoming 50th anniversary celebration forces the issue.

And the issue is this: Despite Peretz’s legalistic retraction (albeit of a different sentence, regarding not extending First Amendment protections to Muslims) and sincere atonement—his Kol Nidre and his Yom Kippur, if you will—this is not the first time he has written something racist, and it isn’t the fifteenth time, either. While I am not sure if this was the best choice of medium, someone has made a Twitter feed documenting the dozens of questionable—no, make that unquestionably out-of-bounds—things Peretz has said over the years. We all publish things we would take back. But the tonnage of these quotations and the consistency of their content demonstrate that Peretz’s insensitivity and bigotry toward Muslims and Arabs (er, and black people) yank him out of the realm of people you should be reading on the subject.

So whom should you be reading? Today Todd Gitlin eloquently argued that Peretz’s latest comment came at exactly the wrong time. “When the margins crawl with insanity,” he wrote, “it is all the more important for the vital center of calm, reasonable, evidence-based thought to hold.” Where is that vital center? You could start with where Gitlin’s essay was published: The New Republic. You could continue with the best thing you will read concerning the Islamic center, which was published in … The New Republic. See my point? It will be a tremendous shame if a reader were to stop taking Peretz’s magazine seriously just because he has (correctly) stopped taking Peretz’s own writing seriously. But even though such a reader would be the one to blame for that decision, I hope Peretz would find it regrettable, and I hope he will do his part to prevent it from happening. In a word: Stop.

Peretz Dropped As Harvard Event Speaker [JTA]
Related: This Manichean Moment [TNR]
@martyperetz [Twitter]

But this is also a Jewish story: Because of (for all I know, and assume) the two founders, Barbara Meade and Carla Cohen; because prominent among those hoping to buy the place are Jewish journalists Franklin Foer, the New Republic editor, and Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic national reporter and Tablet Magazine contributing editor; and because of, as Goldberg put it, “our Jewish customers, of which I’ve noticed a couple.” Substitute “Zabar’s,” and you will catch Goldberg’s understatement. (This is only a small part of it, but the store is in—or incredibly near, I’m not sure—the neighborhood of Forest Hills, which gained the moniker “Hanukkah Heights” when many Jews settled there after being kept out of what were then more affluent neighborhoods.)

The bookstore is a delightful, sun-filled space. It has its own separate room for fiction and poetry; the most comprehensive reading series of any bookstore, New York ones included; a generous children’s section; a fantastic café, where you can always count on running into someone you know (and which ingeniously puts its Splenda in a pourable container, as one would normal sugar); and just the most delightful, easygoing aura you could ever hope to come across.

For these reasons and more, it made an indelible mark on its customers through the years. “When I was in high school and couldn’t get a date on Friday night, which was just about every Friday night,” says Foer, “I would spend my time in the aisles of the store.”

Forgive the indulgence—and without delving too deeply into my no doubt equally pathetic high school track record—but may I co-sign Foer’s sentiment? You see, I am from Bethesda, Maryland; my house was a seven-minute car ride—or, as I frequently preferred, a 20-minute bike ride—from the place.

Politics & Prose is where my father took me every Sunday after Hebrew School, which was slightly farther south on Connecticut Avenue: We would listen to BBC’s “My Word” in the car, stop at the bookstore, pick up bread from the neighboring Marvelous Market, and head home. (My father may have the stronger claim to the place, if only because he grew up less than half a mile from where it now stands.) I learned to peruse bookstore shelves in its shelves. Before the days of Amazon, or at least its prevalence, it was always the place that, somehow, against-the-odds, had the book you were looking for. I read my favorite chapter of Ulysses (“Hades,” if you must know) in one of its impossibly comfortable chairs. Writers of books frequently claim to hate readings, but I cannot imagine a more blissful experience than doing a reading there.

I do not consider it a trip home unless I have spent a morning caffeinating and working at the downstairs café among the American University law students; graduates of my high school, and, sure, other high schools; the mayor (he dropped by a couple years ago when I was there, don’t remember why); people like my parents; and, sometimes, my parents. If you are an even slightly faithful reader of The Scroll, you have read posts that were written there.

What am I trying to say? No matter if Goldberg describes the city as a “wasteland” (dude, didn’t you grow up on Long Island?), D.C. has a wealth of culture, Jewish and otherwise. But there is no sense even defining the word—and no sense thinking it Jewish—if Politics & Prose is not thought of as a center of culture, and of Jewish culture: A means to culture, and a cultural end unto itself.

In other words, next time you are in the area, I encourage a visit. If you are in town the weekend of the Fourth, look for me there.

Bookstore in Capital Seeks Its Next Chapter [NYT]

What prompted the essay? Why now, when you previously have not written much about Israel?
Having kids definitely played a role. I think it made me think about not just my Zionist identity, but what kind of Zionism was available to them. And the more I thought about that, the more I began to worry. I also think that we all operate at intellectual levels and emotional levels, and for me I just decided … There was this story in the New York Times about the Gaza War, about the house in Gaza where they found the children whose parents were dead. What you may find, if you do have kids one day, you are affected at an emotional level more strongly by certain things, in a way you may not be entirely prepared for. I think that’s a good thing, it’s primordial. I know people develop all kinds of shrewd and sophisticated and clever ways of explaining anything that happens, but when I read the story I just thought I was not in the mood to try in some clever way to explain it away. And the fact that I felt I was supposed to just sickened me a little bit.

That’s not to say there are never gonna be civilian casualties in war. But knowing the people who are running Israel now. … The amazing thing about Netanyahu’s book, which is a pretty long book, is there is not a single word of human empathy for the suffering of the Palestinians or Arabs. It was for me such a chilling book in its willingness to essentially. … there was something so inhuman about it, I felt. I just felt like that wasn’t something that I wanted to apologize for.

Why did you publish the essay in the New York Review of Books, which has a reputation of being distinctly left-wing, particularly on the question of Israel?
In all honesty, it was originally supposed to be New York Times Magazine. I don’t have any ill will, but there was a stylistic disagreement, not an ideological one.

There are not very many places anymore where one can write long, serious essays. Secondly, although my piece is a piece about liberal Zionism—I don’t believe in a binational state—Jeff Goldberg is my friend, but I disagree with him when he says NYRB is an anti-Israel. It publishes some of the most important people on the Israeli left. … We should draw inspiration from those people who share our values in Israel. If you’re going to tell me the New York Review of Books is an anti-Israel publication, that just makes no sense. I don’t think I’m anti-Israel. I think people throw around these terms way too promiscuously.

But doesn’t this make it easier for those who disagree with you to simply dismiss the piece given where it appeared?
I did think about that. You’re right: People will say that. And I think it’s a little bit silly. I wrote 5000 words. If you disagree with what I said—and there are reasonable disagreements—if you just say, ‘Oh well, it’s in the New York Review,’ that’s a sign that you’re looking for an opportunity not to engage with it. Tell me where I’m wrong! I can think of counterarguments.

Have your politics shifted over time? In 2004, under your leadership, The New Republic endorsed Joe Lieberman for president. I don’t think he would agree with your essay.
Yeah, I think I have shifted, not only on this issue. Anyone who reads my new book will clearly see a shift. But I also didn’t really write about this issue very much at The New Republic. I do think I’ve shifted, and it’s partly personal things, and also I didn’t envision that you were going to have a government of Shas, Avigdor Lieberman, and Benjamin Netnayhu.

I think maybe the most provocative sentence in your essay is, “Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well.” Could you clarify how exactly it does this?
I think by very, very harshly attacking organizations that are willing to be critical of Israel. It clearly does that. We have free speech, but I think the agenda is clearly to basically try to get human rights organizations to carve out an exemption for Israel in which only the tamest of criticism is permitted. I think that we should expect international human rights organizations to be able to be as critical as Israeli human rights organizations. If they’re not self-hating, their international analogue isn’t anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, unless there’s real evidence that there’s real animus. Call me naive, but I don’t see it.

Why is there no mention of J Street? It seems like you would have much sympathy for it, and in fact its response was very positive.
I’ve actually never been to a J Street event and don’t know that much about the organization. I’m broadly sympathetic. The piece is not on behalf of any organization. I wish J Street well. My fear is that liberal American Jews won’t care enough. But I do believe that for a lot of secular American Jews the choice is between J Street Zionism and no Zionism. I guess I didn’t know what to say about the organization.

Your piece spends most of its time diagnosing the problem. What’s the solution?
Partly I was appealing in a way to the people who make up the communal Jewish leadership of the United States, that I think what they should do—this may be naive—is be conduits to hear from those people in Israel who genuinely cherish liberal and democratic values. Those people who need our solidarity, and who could be genuinely inspiring figures, in the same way that many American Jews were inspired by Abraham Joshua Heschel when he went South during the civil rights movement.

I really believe that if Israel becomes more and more callous toward the right and dignity of non-Jews, it is naive to believe it will not become more callous to the rights and dignity of certain Jews. I think the two cannot be separated. Whether it’s the rights of gays and lesbians, or the rights of women who want to pray at the Kotel, or soldiers who want to speak out.

When we protect the right of Arab Israelis, we’re also protecting the rights of Jews against the government, and a Haredi population that I think at times is willing to use violence.

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment [NYRB]
Earlier: In U-Turn, Beinart Slams Israeli, AIPAC

Here is the essay’s crux: “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

Beinart is one-time editor of the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic. He prominently supported the Iraq invasion and specifically chastised fellow Democrats who didn’t. He has since repudiated that support, but even so, it is not a little surprising to see a one-time genuine hawk calling Israeli “new historian” Tom Segev “fearless.” (Under his leadership TNR endorsed Joe Lieberman in the 2004 Democratic primaries. Joe Lieberman!)

And even that is not as jarring as Beinart’s choice of venue. The New York Review of Books is the premier outlet for essays that are critical of Zionism; it famously published Tony Judt’s repudiation of Zionism in 2003. Tellingly, this is Beinart’s first contribution to the journal. Among other things, Beinart’s decision is designed to reassure you that, no, you’re not misreading it, and, yes, his piece really does represent a genuine shift for him. It also means Beinart chose to trade a certain amount of credibility with those who disagree with his conclusions in exchange for solidarity with those who do. Not to be overly cynical, but Beinart’s new book is out in two weeks.

Beinart’s essay may not garner quite the controversy that Judt’s did, but older American Jewish liberals won’t enjoy being told that their strong support for Israel is illiberal. They will make some immediate counterpunches, and will also take issue with Beinart’s handling of the relevant research, which may not suggest a permanent generation gap on the question of Israel (more on this in a bit).

The left will applaud Beinart, although he remains a Zionist—there are no better prizes for them than once-hawkish Jewish apostates. Meanwhile, J Street may be a little afraid to embrace him, even though his critical, liberal Zionism seems like a good match. (Beinart conspicuously does not mention the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group.)

The Orthodox? Well, they won’t be too happy, and few will blame them. (Beinart attends an Orthodox synagogue. Awkward!)

Quick prediction: The sentence that will attract the most ire is, “Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well.” It will be very easy for critics to mention Walt and Mearsheimer as an inspiration.

After the jump: A couple key paragraphs and the anticipated counter-arguments. I’ll round-up the responses in the afternoon, assuming any writers or bloggers decide to respond to Beinart’s essay. (That was a joke.)

Here are what we in the journalism business call the nut grafs:

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.

So what will the rebuttals say?

• At the center of the essay is the contention that young American Jews feel less of an affinity to Israel than their elders, which is based on a couple cited reports. The essay’s critics will accuse Beinart of ignoring subsequent research that called those reports into question, and of abusing the reports’ conclusions. They will point to reports from past decades that suggest that young American Jews always feel less of an affinity for Israel—they grow into it.

• Beinart attacks those who undermine human rights organizations’ work uncovering alleged Israeli abuses. His caveat: “Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible.” Many will find that quite the understatement.

• Beinart’s allegation of Israeli illiberalism ignores the historical and geopolitical contexts in which Israel operates, his critics will say. The liberalism of the bien pensant American Jewish intellectual is a little easier to come by than the liberalism of the embattled Israeli prime minister. Of course, this is part of why the victimhood narrative is important.

• This technically has no bearing on the substance of the piece, but … Beinart has a new book coming out. It’s his first since 2006’s The Good Fight, which argued for muscular liberalism. I have not read his new book, but something called The Icarus Syndrome could only offer fuller regret for his one-time hawkishness. An essay such as this is just the sort of thing to both get attention generally and endear him to the left specifically.

• The choice of venue makes it all too easy for the right to pounce. So easy, in fact, that one must conclude that Beinart isn’t addressing this to the right: It is aimed primarily to energize the left and, in addition, to put the notion in the heads of those who espouse a critical Zionism that they may be running out of time.

• Many, many other things that I’m missing right now, but which I don’t doubt I’ll be reminded of as the day goes on.

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment [NYRB]
Related: King Without a Crown [Tablet Magazine]

The emerging U.S.-is-the-better-bomber meme is given wider airing in an excellent New Republic article. Unlike Abrams and Rosen, author Michael Crowley is agnostic-to-skeptical on the wisdom of bombing Iran (“Let’s pause here to reiterate the obvious fact that a U.S. attack on Iran might well be an epic disaster”). However, he is emphatic that “if someone is going to bomb Iran, it shouldn’t be Israel. It should be America.” The main reason? Detailed analyses and extensive war games suggest that an American air attack would have a far higher likelihood of actually doing real damage to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Plus, Crowley adds, even an Israeli strike would probably draw America deeply into the subsequent conflict with Iran—in other words, there would be little additional fallout if it was actually us doing the bombing (which is kind of perverse, but whaddya gonna do?). So, the thinking goes, if it’s something our government decides it supports, it might as well sign its name to it. For now, of course, that remains a hefty if.

Abrams: U.S. Must Address Iran’s Threat to Israel [JTA]
The Bomb Squad [TNR]
Related: The Shadow Viceroy [Tablet Magazine]

In a response to the responses, Wieseltier states, “I did not propose that he is an anti-Semite. I did propose that the scorn and the fury that characterizes his discussion of Israel and some of its Jewish supporters is wholly unwarranted.” As it happens, two years ago, over a similar contretemps, Wieseltier explicitly asserted that Sullivan is not an anti-Semite. (I’m inclined to give Wieseltier the benefit of the doubt: as I said last time, if Wieseltier wanted to write, ‘Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite,’ he could have, and since everyone took it that way anyway, it is not clear what Wieseltier stood to gain from refraining; therefore, it stands to reason that he does not think he is one.)

In Sullivan’s response, he adopts a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, bemoaning the loss of what was once a strong friendship (both parties admit that there are personal grounds for this conflict in addition to substantive ones) before denying Wieseltier’s (implied) charge of anti-Semitism. He writes:

I’m sorry if Leon immediately saw my distinction between some neocons and many non-neocons as some kind of reference to ancient persecution. But what am I to do if I am trying to describe my support for J-Street over AIPAC on these matters, or for the younger generation of American-Jewish writers as opposed to their elders? Is this analysis something no non-Jew is allowed to even discuss, for fear of offending?

And while noting some caveats, Sullivan does roughly align himself with Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose basic thesis is that a powerful Israel Lobby works, mostly successfully, to steer U.S. policies vis-à-vis Israel in (right-wing) directions inimical to the U.S. interest.

He concludes:

At his most generous, Wieseltier accuses me of moronic insensitivity. Well, I do not think Leon thinks I am a moron. Am I insensitive? At times, I’m sure I am. I’m a writer who doesn’t much care for political correctness, of policing discourse for every single possible trope or code that someone somewhere will pounce on as evidence of bigotry. I’ve gone out of my way as an editor and writer to stir things up—on race and gender and culture and sex—and I have never been one to worry excessively about the sensitivity of others. I think I have offended and enraged far far more gay men and evangelicals than I ever have Jewish-Americans, for example. I’m a South Park devotee, for Pete’s sake.

Beyond Sullivan’s rejoinder, and Wieseltier’s rejoinder to the rejoinder (oh, look: Sullivan has now responded even to that!), a ton of other pundits and bloggers weighed in. The Atlantic Wire has an excellent links gallery in case you want to read everything. Several that are especially worth your time follow:

• Jonathan Chait notes that Sullivan once was rabidly, uncomplicatedly pro-Israel, and argues: “On the Middle East, Andrew falls prey to a habitual tendency to see the world divided between children of darkness and children of light. … I don’t think that Andrew’s transformation from overwrought hawk to overwrought dove is driven by, or has brought about, a different view of Jews. It seems instead to be the shattering of a brittle worldview and its replacement by a new worldview, equally brittle.”

• Matthew Yglesias sees the piece as symptomatic of larger problems at the magazine that published it: “Like most of TNR’s very worst work, it suffers deeply from schizophrenia about the idea of flinging around baseless charges of anti-Semitism. On the one hand, the charges are baseless so the writer hesitates to fling them around. On the other hand, flinging baseless charges of anti-Semitism is the essence of the magazine’s commentary on Israel.”

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg, while denying that his (Atlantic colleague) Sullivan is anti-Semitic, agrees with the sentiment of Wieseltier’s article, and points out, “What is relevant is that [Sullivan] sometimes uses his blog to disseminate calumnies that can cause hatred of Jews, and of Israel.” He also argues:

Sullivan doesn’t know that much about the Middle East. … The politics, contradictions, and motivations of Netanyahu’s approach to Obama do not interest Andrew. Netanyahu’s apparently self-evident evilness is what interests Andrew. Extremists on both sides of the issue want the Middle East to be simple, but it’s not. The Middle East is a tragedy precisely because the Israelis have an excellent case, and the Arabs also have an excellent case. This essential fact has often escaped Andrew’s attention.

• Blake Hounshell, of Foreign Policy, finds both Sullivan and Wieseltier’s writings “weird and sloppy,” and makes this valuable point: “Sullivan’s criticism of Israel ought to worry defenders of the Jewish state, then, because he is a bellwether for a broader shift in American media and society that has happened over the last few years.”

That last comment seems impossible to refute. The question of whether Andrew Sullivan is anti-Semitic, or even wrong, is far less relevant than the question of how many in America are apt to agree with his analysis of the Mideast situation, which is decidedly uncharitable to the Israeli side. Debaters’ points may win these little kerfuffles, but will they be enough to stem that “shift”?

Something Much Sadder [Andrew Sullivan]
The Trouble with South Park [TNR]

Earlier: Wieseltier vs. Sullivan

In Tablet Magazine, Zackary Sholem Berger celebrated Sutzkever’s ability to continue evolving:

While other writers perseverated on the world that was lost—which for many led to artistic stasis—Sutzkever built new worlds in lyric self-expression. Yes, he wrote about ghetto existence, and about life in hiding while the Nazis raged, but those were his Holocaust-era works, not signposts to an unchanging style. Historical moments were for him the raw material for his own poetic vision, not excuses for occasional verse.

At Jewish Ideas Daily, Ruth R. Wisse—author of Nextbook Press’s Jews and Power—testifies that Sutzkever inspired her to become a professor of Yiddish literature: “Sutzkever is a master of precisely the kind of wordplay that defies translation, and of a wit that exploits the singularity of a language whose elements are ingeniously fused.”

And in The New Republic’s excellent new online supplement, The Book, Tablet Magazine contributor Jeremy Dauber finds Sutzkever a premier poet of catastrophe:

Sutzkever’s simple descriptions of enormous horrors—perhaps most famously the couplet “Did you ever see in fields of snow/Frozen Jews, in row upon row?”—split the difference, reducing the traces of mass human homicide to a childlike, wondering response at what seems to have become the new natural landscape.

Golden Link [Tablet Magazine]
Abraham Sutzkever: In Memoriam [Jewish Ideas Daily]
The Elegist [The Book]
Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and Partisan, Dies [NYT]

Related: Jews and Power [Nextbook Press]

In particular, those (like myself) who have spent lots of time in Morningside Heights may smile, and feel not a little awe, at how much insight and beauty Wetzsteon was able to wring out of her sleepy, university-town upper Manhattan neighborhood. In “Short Ode to Morningside Heights,” Wetzsteon juxtaposes the grad-school chatter at the Hungarian Pastry Shop with the towering Cathedral of St. John the Divine across Amsterdam Avenue:

The pastry shop’s abuzz
with crazy George and filthy graffiti,
but the peacocks are strutting across the way
and the sumptuous cathedral gives
the open-air banter a reason to deepen:
build structures inside the mind, it tells
the languorous talkers, to rival the ones outside!

Rachel Wetzsteon, Poet of Keen Insight and Wit, Dies at 42 [NYT]
In Memory, and Admiration, of Rachel Wetzsteon [TNR]

Understanding Joe Lieberman [The Plank]

Related: Why Are Jews Liberals? A Symposium [Tablet]
Joe Lieberman Says No to Medicare Buy-In [Politico]

These worthless Machines now stand directly in the way of the sale of good ones. Their existence causes great pecuniary loss to us…. We, therefore, have an extensive and direct interest in having all bad Sewing Machines finally withdrawn from the market, and our new improved ones substituted in their place.

As a result of the gambit, Singer sales grew that year by 50 percent, and the fortune that those sales helped amass brings us back into the world of 21st-century politics and ideas. The New Republic magazine owes its current existence, at least in part, to the fortune inherited by Singer heiress Anne Peretz, wife of TNR editor-in-chief and part owner Martin Peretz. Ironically enough, recent posts on The Vine, TNR’s environment and energy blog, have been lukewarm on “Cash for Clunkers,” arguing that the program’s potential environmental benefits will, in the end, be quite modest.

Vested Interests [The Atlantic]

Now Messud’s attentions have returned to the Middle East, this time with a column in the Boston Globe recounting her recent very unpleasant time in Israel and the West Bank. Messud and a handful of other writers from around the world had traveled to Jerusalem to attend Palestine Festival of Literature, originally scheduled to take place at the Palestine National Theater—that is, until event was relocated, along with its attendees, all bedecked in their evening wear and spilling their cocktails over the rocky terrain, by “machine-gun toting Israeli soldiers in flak jackets.”

Messud offers no reason why IDF soldiers would ask a group of scribblers to take their business elsewhere, except that, as she coyly puts it, “our literary festival had the word ‘Palestine’ in its title.” According to the Palestinians she encountered, many other such cultural events have been shut down or hampered by the Israeli military in a city she notes UNESCO declared the Capital of Arab Culture for 2009. A little investigation might have gone a long way; instead, the rest of her piece is a monument to cant and banality—members of her entourage, she writes, compared the circumstances of a colonial population living under military supervision to “Orwell’s 1984; to Kafka.” It was no doubt Orwellian of Messud to refer to her stifled confab by its popular acronym, “Palfest.” And her background coloration scans like some Fodor’s Guide to Orientalist Cliché:

We scrambled up rocks among terraced olive groves to a stone shepherd’s hut, from which we could see the green and gold hills interlaced to the horizon. We picked our way along a dry riverbed, surprising a patterned tortoise, and on to a small village, where a mangy donkey gazed balefully from its tether and ruddy-faced children demonstrated their tree-climbing prowess.

You know how long it takes for a patterned tortoise to even know you’re there? All that’s missing from this strophe is the call of the muezzin drowned out by machine gun fire, and sand-scorched Western palates thrilling to the wondrous flavors of hummus. But, hey, before you know it, Messud is actually referring to one swarthy denizen of the region as “nut-brown.” And this happens to be Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who blew the whistle on his country’s nuclear program 25 years ago and served time for almost as long. He is now a nut-brown man without a sky-blue Israeli passport.

Messud’s piece was more than enough to set Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, off on a thousand-word blog tear:

Messud’s ignorance and incuriousness—her piece is an instant classic in the literature of the writer as political tourist—shows in her portraits of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. Her Palestinians are innocent victims who wish merely to read and write freely. Nowhere in her plangent prose in there a suggestion that they owe a good deal of their present misery to their own refusal of various offers of statehood. Nowhere is there a hint of actual literary and cultural life under Hamas and under Fatah. Messud seems to think that but for the Israelis and their occupation Palestine is an oasis of freedom and cultivation.

The real question, though, is how Peretz’s former star book critic James Wood, who graduated from TNR to The New Yorker a few years back and is—not incidentally—Messud’s husband, is handling all of this. A high priest at the Temple of Saul Bellow, Wood would no doubt be fielding angry calls from his now-dead hero and the author of To Jerusalem and Back for his wife’s freshman foray into leftist travelogue writing.

Walking Miles in Palestinian Feet [Boston Globe]
Her Truths [TNR]

Haaretz has the full text of the speech here. Tablet contributing editor Gershom Gorenberg parses the “contradictory” language of the speech here, and Benjamin Balint offers an analysis of what Netanyahu actually said here.

The Israeli press has been the most critical of both the substance and the style of the speech. Haaretz correspondent Yossi Verter argues that the entire speech was written and delivered for the benefit of one man—Barack Obama. “If it were up to [Netanyahu],” Verter wrote, “he would be glad to bear the Likud’s criticism and let the right blow its steam over the next day, accusing him of going too far. That way, he would enjoy both worlds: He would receive credit from Obama, but not have to pay the cost in terms of his coalition.” Verter’s colleague Akiva Eldar is more damning, claiming that the entire address was an act of colonialist condescension and Jewish chauvinism and that “[i]t’s hard to believe that a single Palestinian leader will be found who will buy the defective merchandise Netanyahu presented last night.”

Yair Lapid at Yediot was more sanguine about Netanyahu’s qualified reversal of position: ” He did not try to circumvent, but rather, raised all the points bothering every sane Israeli who does not put his hand in the sand, one by one: Palestinian rejectionism, the incitement, Hamas’ rise in Gaza, and the right of return.”

The Jerusalem Post runs a story citing Palestinian and Arab reaction to Bibi’s address. Unsurprisingly, it’s been uniformly hostile. The article quotes one aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: “Netanyahu’s speech is a blow to Obama before it’s a blow to the Palestinians and Arabs. It’s obvious, in the aftermath of this speech, that we are headed toward another round of violence and bloodshed.”

Meanwhile, stateside conservatives think Bibi provided a necessary and urgent corrective on Obama’s Cairo rhetoric. Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin, for instance, finds the Israeli P.M. was long on facts and cogency: “Netanyahu’s most complete argument was reserved for the nature of the Palestinian crisis and the key to unlocking peace. Unlike Obama, who is fixated on settlements and the status of the West Bank (and who therefore omitted 60 years of history), Netanyahu’s vision is based on the simple truth of Palestinian intransigence.”

At The Weekly Standard, Elliot Abrams, George W. Bush’s deputy national security director, argues that the Obama administration seems intent on repeating all the same mistakes of the Bush administration in focusing on the matter of Israeli settlements in the West Bank over Palestinian economic development there: “So determined is our government to produce nirvana for Palestinians, it seems willing to ignore chances to bring them better lives now—something Netanyahu pledged to work with the U.S. on immediately. If the administration chooses to keep fighting almost entirely on the settlement ‘freeze’ issue, it will be showing that a confrontation with Netanyahu is not a problem it seeks to avoid but a tactic it seeks to embrace.”

And Shmuel Rosner, in a rapid-response essay for The New Republic, at first compares the eloquence of Obama to that Netanyahu and suggests that now that the Israeli has made the (possibly empty) verbal gesture of acknowledging Palestinian statehood, isn’t it time for a Palestinian leader to reciprocate by acknowledging Israel as an unequivocally Jewish state?