Jeffrey Goldberg

In today's edition of "How Many Jews Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?," certified leftist Spencer Ackerman goes after Glenn Greenwald and others -- rather successfully, I think -- for using anti-Semitic rhetoric to smear (Glenn's favorite word) Jews with whom they disagree:

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.

Ackerman makes this important observation:

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.

By the way, I don't consider "former Israeli prison guard" a "gross phrase," just so Ackerman understands. It's an inaccurate phrase -- I wasn't a guard, I was a military policeman (the actual title of my position was "prisoner counselor," believe it or not, which meant that I saw after the culinary, hygiene and medical needs of the prisoners, but I also, on more than one occasion, actually did give advice to Palestinian prisoners on how to apply to college in America -- I stressed that the essay portion of any application would be an easy home run for any of these Intifada prisoners. A few of them did end up at universities here). 

One amusing note: When Max Blumenthal (who now writes a column for a pro-Hezbollah Beirut newspaper, by the way -- and no, I'm not making this up) calls me an Israeli prison guard, I invariably receive one or two e-mails like this one, just recently received:

"You can tried to hide your past but it's not working. We all know now that you worked in a concentration camp for Palestinians."

As loyal Goldblog readers know, I've done a very poor job of hiding my perfidious past: Writing a book about my service at this Israeli army prison camp was probably not the best way to keep this a secret.

But, onward. Here's Ackerman on why it is important for leftists to avoid smearing Jews they are ostensibly trying to convert to their position on the occupation and on bombing Iran:

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.

The handful of Jews who use anti-Semitic terminology to demonize other Jews (and it really is a handful -- I'm not sure they could fill a synagogue) do serve an important purpose, however: They open-up space for anti-Jewish invective in mainstream discourse. Here is Lee Smith, also in Tablet:

Why is it that no one bats an eyelash when a former United States national security adviser says, "The Israelis have a lot of influence with Congress, and in some cases they are able to buy influence"? Last week in an interview, Zbigniew Brzezinski accused the government of Israel of a crime. If he has evidence that Israeli officials have broken the law by bribing U.S. politicians, law enforcement authorities should compel him to produce it. But of course Brzezinski's not really talking about Israelis. What he means is that American Jews have subverted the interests of the United States on behalf of a foreign power.

You don't need to know much about history to recognize that Brzezinski here is trading in a classic anti-Semitic trope. Why didn't his Salon interviewer call him out on it? Why hasn't anyone else? Where are the American elites--the intellectuals, writers, policymakers, and political activists--when it comes to vigilance against anti-Semitism?

An attempt to answer that question must come in a separate post; I'm running off soon to an interview at the TSA (of all things). But I would note that Brzezinski is speaking at an event for his new book this Sunday at the Sixth and I Synagogue (!) in Washington. Maybe someone could go ask him what he thinks of the term "Israel-firster."

Barry Rubin is sure that the Israelis will not attack Iran's nuclear sites this year, and offers various reasons (pro-Israel reasons, by the way) why an attack shouldn't happen. It's a very interesting essay; read the whole thing:

Why should Israel attack Iran now? Because one day Iran will have nuclear weapons that might be used to attack Israel.

Does Iran have such deliverable weapons now? No.

If Israel attacks Iran now does that mean Iran would never get nuclear weapons? No, it would merely postpone that outcome for at most a year or two more than it would take otherwise. And then it would ensure an all-out endless bloody war thereafter.

If Israel attacks Iranian nuclear installations would that ensure future peace between the two countries? Would it make it less likely that the Tehran regime uses such weapons to strike at Israel in future? No. On the contrary, it would have the exact opposite effect. Again, it would ensure direct warfare between the two countries and make Iran's use of nuclear weapons against Israel 100 percent probable.

Man, I'm taking a lot of heat in the Goldblog mailroom over something I wrote earlier (and, by the way, now that we've opened-up comments on this blog, please feel free to post your responsibly-written invective down below, though of course you can still email me directly). Here's what I wrote::

And by the way, as an American Jew, I believe, as most American Jews believe (and most American non-Jews, as well) that Israel should exist and flourish as a Jewish country, that it is an important project of the Jewish people, that  and that it is a natural ally of the United States. An American Jew can feel this and still be a loyal, upstanding American. (Certainly, non-Jewish Americans are permitted to feel this way.)  I get the sense, from reading him every so often, that Glenn Greenwald is in the minority on this issue. Which is fine, of course. (Bold is mine).

Here is one letter from a Goldblog reader:

You say that Greenwald's vicious anti-Israel double standard is fine with you. My question is what's wrong with you? Greenwald is part of a small coterie of Jewish anti-Semites who never miss an opportunity, as the saying goes, to blast Israel or Jews for supporting Israel. It is morally, ethically and spiritually wrong what he does. How can this be fine with you? Are you trying to suck up?

To that last question, Umm, no. Here's another, similar letter, more succinct:

You yourself are defining yourself as a self-hating Jew by endorsing the right of Glenn Greenwald to hate Israel.

Self-hatred is a deeply-inexact description of the people this reader is trying to describe. In my experience, those Jews who consciously set themselves apart from the Jewish majority in the disgust they display for Israel, or for the principles of their faith, are often narcissists, and therefore seem to suffer from an excess of self-regard, rather than self-loathing. "Self-hater" is a euphemism, then, for "auto-anti-Semite," or some other such locution. I generally try to stay away from such descriptions (though there are some very obvious candidates for the label of auto-anti-Semite, including the John Mearsheimer-endorsed neo-Nazi Gilad Atzmon).

In the case of Greenwald, here is what I think, from afar, since we've never met. When I write that Greenwald's ostentatious anti-Israelism is "fine, of course," I'm not endorsing his views, I'm simply acknowledging that he has a right to say whatever he wants -- he has a right even to defend the use of the neo-Nazi-derived anti-Semitic slur "Israel-Firster" to describe Jews with whom he disagrees -- and I'm also acknowledging, in a way, that he is not sui generis: There have always been Jews who define themselves in opposition to Judaism, Marxists mainly, in the style of of Isaac Deutscher's so-called "non-Jewish Jew." (By the way, Deutscher was one of Christopher Hitchens' favorite Jews, and we used to argue at great length about him. And by the way again, I forgot who made this argument to me, but it is possible to assert that opposition to Judaism is in itself a form of Judaism, given Judaism's disputatious, questioning nature.)

I don't know anything about Greenwald's Jewishness. He could be a Marrano Chabadnik for all I know, though, based on the way he writes about Israel and American Jewish organizations, I often suspect that some really bad shit happened to him in Hebrew school. (I mean, worse than the usual soul-sucking anomie). But about what he writes: I do know that he evinces toward Israel a disdain that is quite breathtaking. He holds Israel to a standard he doesn't hold any other country, except the U.S. Now, of course, if you read certain things I write (like this, for instance) you could say that I'm also hostile to Israel, though I also exhibit affection for Israel, both the reality of  Israel (or at least many of its facets) and the idea that motivated the reality into existence.

Greenwald has written millions of words (well, written and block-quoted, anyway), and I haven't read them all, so he may have said something positive about Israel, but I don't know. I've never seen him write with any sort of affection about Israel, Zionism, Judaism, the Jewish people, and so on. Of course, he doesn't write with affection about very much at all. (This is not to say I don't admire some of his stands, including his forthright stance against torture -- of course, this is a very Jewish position to take, if you ask me.)

Though his opinions are his to have, I don't think he is being intellectually honest when he defends the use of the term "Israel-firster." David Bernstein has an interesting look at Greenwald's hypocritical double-standard:

Obviously, Greenwald's sensitivity to offensive language depends on whether he likes/agrees with the target. When his favored candidate, Barack Obama, was being attacked by John McCain, he was extremely quick to accuse McCain of using language designed to appeal to racist sentiment. When pro-Israel activists and politicians, a Greenwald-disfavored group, are being attacked by his anti-Israel compatriots, suddenly they are inherently immune from any hint of using anti-Semitic (a form, of course, of racism) language unless, perhaps, they are wearing swastikas and celebrating Hitler's birthday. And the fact that Greenwald can and has come up with examples of where some of Israel's supporters have used charges of anti-Semitism in inappropriate or exaggerated contexts is quite irrelevant to the point, just as it would be irrelevant to Greenwald's post about McCain if someone pointed out that charges of racism against Obama's opponents are at times inappropriate or exaggerated.

There is a great temptation on the part of some Jews, now that anti-Semitism is being mainstreamed by people like John Mearsheimer (read this indispensable Adam Kirsch piece on Mearsheimer's unholy mission, and read this important Ben Cohen piece as well, on the chutzpah of anti-Semites who believe it is their right to define what is and isn't anti-Semitism), and now that actual neo-Nazi terminology is being used in the press to describe certain Jews (and now, of course, that the Israeli government has mostly given up trying to make outsiders sympathetic to Israel's cause), to communicate somehow to the non-Jews around them that they have nothing to do with Israel, or with Israel's supporters. This is a self-defense mechanism of petrified people, and though it isn't particularly admirable, it isn't unnatural.

"Israel-firster," of course, connotes someone who puts Israeli interests above America's interests. It plays on an ancient stereotype of Jews, that they are only loyal to their own sectarian cause (Henry Ford's "The International Jew" is a classic of the genre). From where I sit, there are three good reasons not to use the term:

1) It's probably best, for civilization's sake, to avoid using language popularized by neo-Nazis to describe Jews, especially because the manner in which neo-Nazis use the term is similar to the way in which the term is used by non-neo-Nazis. It is a term designed to stoke anti-Jewish resentment and prejudice.
 
2) It is a term designed to end an argument, not open a discussion.

3) It is an inaccurate way to describe American Jews who support Israel and support a strong Israel-U.S. relationship. It precludes the possibility that the person who supports Israel is doing so precisely because he or she feels that it is in America's best interest to support Israel. There are many reasons for the U.S. to support Israel (for one view, from a former undersecretary of defense, and a former deputy national security adviser, both not Jewish, please read this), and there, of course, non-anti-Semitic arguments to be made against such support. But those who argue against a close relationship between the U.S. and Israel too often assume the very worst of their opponents.

You do, of course, have schmuckos like Andrew Adler, the now-ex-editor of the Atlanta Jewish paper, who fantasized in print about the Mossad rubbing-out President Obama. I don't think this makes him pro-Israel, by the way, or whatever the non-anti-Semitic equivalent of "Israel-Firster" is. I think this makes him an idiot and a sociopath. The real subject of all this "Israel-Firster" invective is the fifteen or twenty percent of (non-lunatic) American Jews who feel very strongly anti-Obama because of his alleged dislike for Israel. The assumption among some people is that these folks aren't even dual-loyalists, that they're loyal only to Netanyahu. But though I'm not one of them (I'm accused almost every day of being in the tank for Obama), I think it is perfectly plausible to believe -- and I've talked to right-wing American Jews who say exactly this -- that pro-Israel Americans, Jewish or otherwise, are motivated to support Israel because they are Americans, and see in Israel a cause worth America's effort.

Of course, Israel's self-destructive leadership, through inaction on the occupation, by proposing laws that curtail free speech, by kowtowing to religious extremists, are creating conditions in which it will no longer be easy for Americans -- especially American Jews -- to see in Israel a reflection of American values. But this a subject for a separate post.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald just tweeted this: "Last week, @Goldberg3000 depicted himself as a McCarthyism victim - now he's back to smearing people as Israel-haters http://is.gd/4a13jH"

Put aside for a moment Greenwald's over-reliance on the verb "smear" to describe any sort of criticism of him. I do think that a reasonable reading of Glenn Greenwald's work on Israel would suggest that he likes it not at all. There's no proof in his writings that he has any affection for Israel, or any sympathy for Israel. Which, as I've said, is his right.

This is probably a bad idea, but the Supreme Revolutionary Council of Goldblog, in consultation with the ISI, the CIA, MI6, and the AAA, has decided to open comments on all posts in this space. This might not be as bad an idea as having a blog in the first place, but we'll see.

When this blog first came to life, I followed the (smart) advice of Andrew Sullivan and chose not to have comments, because comments sections, particularly on blogs that cover subjects I cover, tend to become pretty sewerish. On the other hand, there are many thoughtful Goldblog readers who e-mail me regularly with smart observations, and I only share a tiny portion of those thoughts with readers, so it seemed to me that this was a way of bringing this crew of people into the conversation. But we'll see -- if the blog gets clogged by the rantings of angry Semites and angry anti-Semites, we'll revisit this decision. But in the meantime -- and this means you, loyal Goldblog readers -- please register, if you aren't already commenting elsewhere on TheAtlantic.com, and please comment away.

A smart piece from Colin Kahl:

When Mubarak fell, Iran's leaders moved out with swagger. They saw one pivotal U.S. ally gone, and perceived an opportunity to exploit unrest to undermine other pro-Western regimes, especially Saudi Arabia. They sought to develop contacts with Islamists in Egypt and Libya, expand ties to opposition movements in Yemen, and capitalize on the indigenous Shiite protests in Bahrain. And Iran's leaders seemed confident that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, Tehran's state ally in the Middle East, was immune from the populist wave because of its militant stance toward Israel and the United States.

One year later, however, it is hard to find evidence that Iran has benefited from the Arab uprisings. In fact, Iran's regional position has taken a big hit. With the partial exception of Yemen, Tehran has struggled to build new networks of influence with emerging Islamist actors. Meanwhile, Assad's regime has been thoroughly delegitimized, expelled from the Arab League, and is wobbling in the face of nationwide protests. This, in turn, has created considerable anxiety for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that constitutes Iran's chief non-state ally.

The perception of Iranian meddling has also decimated Tehran's "soft power" appeal across the Arab world. Surveys conducted in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates by Zogby International show Iran's reputation in free fall since the Arab Spring began. Just a few years ago, Iran enjoyed a strong majority of support among the populations of all these countries; as of July 2011, Iran had a net unfavorable rating in every country but Lebanon.

From David Samuels's mind-blowing Tablet interview with the documentary filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, who has devoted his life to telling the stories of people who were not afraid to act when action was needed:

David Samuels: What are the biggest lies we tell ourselves about the Holocaust?

Pierre Sauvage: The biggest lie is that we didn't know. It's possible, I suppose, for some rancher in Montana who wasn't reading the press or listening to the radio maybe not to know. But it was massively present. God, this question goes in so many directions. When you think of movies that come out, like Woody Allen's Radio Days. What is Woody Allen's Radio Days about? A happy childhood in Brooklyn, in a Jewish family, during the years of the Holocaust. Lost in Yonkers, which is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Neil Simon about nothing to do with the Holocaust. Wonderful play, by the way. It's like Hitler is totally removed from their frame of reference. This is nonsense. This is absolute nonsense. Woody Allen's parents--Woody may not realize it--but Woody Allen's parents were in their bedroom scared to death what was happening to their relatives in Europe. So, that is the biggest lie.

The second biggest lie is that we couldn't have done anything. That was the conventional wisdom after the war. The people who were propounding that point of view were, for the most part, the people who had done nothing.

But I'm not so interested in judging the generations then. I think those were very difficult times, very challenging times. Yeah, I believe they made mistakes. But I don't believe that we wouldn't have acted any better. That is facile and glib and smug.

What shocks me is that we today are not willing to let in that past, we're not trying to understand it. I'll give you one example: At one point in the Bergson film, I mentioned Einstein, we were talking about Rabbi Wise, and I have some footage of Einstein, who actually is in his office sitting down. Well, Einstein was the most powerful Jew, virtually in the world and certainly in America. In 1938 at Princeton, there was a vote among Princeton freshmen, and he was judged the second greatest living person in the world. The first greatest person in the world--according to the Princeton freshman class of 1938--was Hitler.

This is rich. Elliott Abrams reminds us in National Review that Newt Gingrich, who is casting himself as Reagan's true heir, sometimes accused the conservative icon of weakness in the face of Soviet aggression:

The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This was right in the middle of the fight over funding for the Nicaraguan contras; the money had been cut off by Congress in 1985, though Reagan got $100 million for this cause in 1986. Here is Gingrich: "Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire's challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail... President Reagan is clearly failing." Why? This was due partly to "his administration's weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail"; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which "have no strategies to defeat the empire." But of course "the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan." Our efforts against the Communists in the Third World were "pathetically incompetent," so those anti-Communist members of Congress who questioned the $100 million Reagan sought for the Nicaraguan "contra" rebels "are fundamentally right." Such was Gingrich's faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan's meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev "the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich."

Do I even have to note that it was Reagan, more than any other president, who brought about the demise of the Soviet empire?

Eric Trager, one of the most acute observers of the Egyptian revolution, which began a year ago today, doesn't like very much what he's seeing:

It is tempting to believe that things might have turned out differently had Washington worked harder to bolster the young revolutionaries who seemingly exemplified America's own liberal values when they took to the streets last January. These brave activists, after all, had won America's hearts to the tune of an 82-percent approval rating at the height of the revolt, and their photogenic faces carried the promise of a more democratic, friendly Egypt.

But the activists were never who we hoped they were. Far from being liberal, their ranks were largely comprised of Nasserists, revolutionary socialists, and Muslim Brotherhood youths--an alliance of convenience for opposing Mubarak and, later, for denouncing the U.S.

Thus, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Egypt in March 2011, a group of leading activists refused to meet with her. They also turned out to be intolerant conspiracy theorists: When classically Cairoesque rumors that a "Jewish Masonic" ceremony was to be held at the pyramids on November 11, the April 6th Youth Movement's Democratic Front declared that this non-existent event should be prohibited. "We are committed to the achievements of the revolution, which emphasized freedom," they said in a statement. "But freedom is not absolute freedom, and ... it is constrained by the regulations and beliefs of the Egyptian people, who do not accept that these celebrations be protected in the wake of the revolution."

Sohrab Ahmari dismantles a new apologia from Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian American Council, who has consistently extended the benefit of the doubt to the regime in Tehran and has never extended the same courtesy to the Obama Administration. Oh, and Parsi has consistently blamed the usual suspects for everything that's gone wrong in the U.S.-Iran relationship. Ahmari:

In "A Single Roll of the Dice," Trita Parsi tries to account for this failure. But rather than re-examine U.S. policy and its underlying assumptions, Mr. Parsi spends much of the book casting blame on a wide range of actors for Mr. Obama's inability to disarm the clerical regime through diplomatic means. Such blame-shifting is not surprising. The author has spent years, as president of the National Iranian American Council, advocating for engagement with Iran; he is now determined to explain away the policy's inherent flaws.

The fault lies with the country Iran has repeatedly threatened to exterminate, of course:

Predictably, Israel and American Jews with an interest in U.S. policy are subjected to the harshest criticism. Israel's perception of the Iranian threat, Mr. Parsi says, has long "resembled prophesy more than reality," impelling the Jewish state to frame its conflict with Iran's clerical regime "as one between the sole democracy in the Middle East and a theocracy that hated everything the West stood for." Mr. Parsi rejects that perception. Beneath the Iranians' viciously anti-Semitic and anti-American sloganeering, he contends, lies a legitimate demand that their "security interests and regional aspirations" be recognized. Meet the demand, he thinks, and Iran will no longer be a threat.

Israel and its allies in the U.S. were determined to prevent such an exchange of strategic respect, according to Mr. Parsi. Thus was closed a rare diplomatic opening represented by the election of an American president with a persona well suited to peacemaking and without "the baggage of previous administrations."

Ahmari forthrightly states what honest observers (including honest observers inside the Obama White House) believe to be the root of the Administration's failure to reach a breakthrough with Iran::

Mr. Obama's engagement policy failed not because of Israeli connivance or because the administration did not try hard enough. The policy failed because the Iranian regime, when confronted by its own people or by outsiders, has only one way of responding: with a truncheon.

Ronen Bergman writes in The New York Times Magazine:

Netanyahu and Barak have both repeatedly stressed that a decision has not yet been made and that a deadline for making one has not been set. As we spoke, however, Barak laid out three categories of questions, which he characterized as "Israel's ability to act," "international legitimacy" and "necessity," all of which require affirmative responses before a decision is made to attack:

1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran's nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?

2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?

3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran's nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel's most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes. (Bold is mine.)

This last statement is partially untrue. Several key Israeli leaders believed these conditions obtained in 2010. Some Israeli leaders believed these conditions actually obtained in the latter part of the George W. Bush Administration. Bergman's first point has absolutely been true for quite some time. Number two is not necessarily true, even today. And the reason number two is not necessarily true is that American officials disagree with Israeli officials on point number three. Even some Israelis in the inner cabinet believe that this is the final moment for an attack to be successfully launched.

I write this, of course, as someone who thought, based on interviewing many of the same people Bergman interviewed, that there was a very good chance that Israel would have struck Iran by last summer. The success of the Stuxnet virus, which operated against Iranian centrifuges, altered the calculus in that case. And so I wouldn't be at all surprised if Bergman's analysis is premature. I certainly hope it is premature -- I think an attack on Iran would be disastrous for Israel, in part because condition number two (above) does not yet obtain.

How would a nuclear exchange in the Middle East come to pass?

There is always a chance, of course, that the mullahs in Tehran would decide, while sitting around one day cursing the Jews, that since they now have a nuclear weapon, why not just drop it on Israel and be done with it? I've always believed that, all things being equal, it would be better to see atheists in charge of nuclear weapons, rather than religious fundamentalists. Men who profess belief in the glories of the afterlife might not mind their own nuclear obliteration quite as much as I would like. And it is also true that the Iranian regime is rhetorically genocidal, describing Israel, and Jews, in Hitlerian terms: as cancer and tumors in need of eradication.

But the mullahs are also men interested in keeping hold of temporal power, and it seems unlikely that they would immediately deploy their weapons against the Jewish state. But, as I point out in my Bloomberg View column this week, it might not matter. Put aside all the other good reasons the current Iranian leadership shouldn't be considered appropriate stewards of nuclear weapons. The main threat posed by a nuclear Iran is that, based on its past behavior -- and assuming it will be even more adventurous and provocative once it has gone nuclear -- it will almost inevitably trigger a crisis that will escalate into a nuclear confrontation with Israel:

The experts who study this depressing issue seem to agree that a Middle East in which Iran has four or five nuclear weapons would be dangerously unstable and prone to warp-speed escalation.

Here's one possible scenario for the not-so-distant future: Hezbollah, Iran's Lebanese proxy, launches a cross-border attack into Israel, or kills a sizable number of Israeli civilians with conventional rockets. Israel responds by invading southern Lebanon, and promises, as it has in the past, to destroy Hezbollah. Iran, coming to the defense of its proxy, warns Israel to cease hostilities, and leaves open the question of what it will do if Israel refuses to heed its demand.

Dennis Ross, who until recently served as President Barack Obama's Iran point man on the National Security Council, notes Hezbollah's political importance to Tehran. "The only place to which the Iranian government successfully exported the revolution is to Hezbollah in Lebanon," Ross told me. "If it looks as if the Israelis are going to destroy Hezbollah, you can see Iran threatening Israel, and they begin to change the readiness of their forces. This could set in motion a chain of events that would be like 'Guns of August' on steroids."
Imagine that Israel detects a mobilization of Iran's rocket force or the sudden movement of mobile missile launchers. Does Israel assume the Iranians are bluffing, or that they are not? And would Israel have time to figure this out? Or imagine the opposite: Might Iran, which will have no second-strike capability for many years -- that is, no reserve of nuclear weapons to respond with in an exchange -- feel compelled to attack Israel first, knowing that it has no second chance?

The nuclear experts I respect most, including Bruce Blair, of Global Zero, and David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, both call a Middle East in which Iran possesses a small number of nuclear weapons a dangerously unstable place. Here is what Albright told me Monday about Iran's particular challenges in an escalating confrontation -- the no second-strike conundrum: "In a crisis, you don't want to go first, but you don't want to go second, either. It ends up in an unstable situation. Miscalculations can result in nuclear weapons being used. Iran may feel it doesn't have second-strike capability and so would, in an escalating crisis, feel it has to use what it has first." Iran, he explained, will be hampered, for many years after it crosses the nuclear threshold (assuming it is allowed to cross), by a small arsenal of comparatively modest bombs.

"Our estimate of their warhead design, based on internal documentation from  the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is that they would be building low-yield fission weapons of a few kilotons each" -- "Fat Man," dropped on Nagasaki, was roughly a 20-kiloton bomb -- "because they're forced to miniaturize to make it smaller for delivery," Albright said.

The Israelis, on the other hand, have a much larger arsenal than the Iranians could hope for for many years, and much more varied and sophisticated delivery systems. It is, from any angle, a hellish problem. Albright believes that the Middle East with a nuclearized Iran (and a nuclearized Israel, and, presumably, Iran's regional adversaries, including Saudi Arabia, seeking their own nuclear weapons) would be much more unstable than South Asia. "The governments of Pakistan and India don't necessarily see each other as mortal enemies. The relationship between Israel and Iran would be worse."

So, what to do? Not attack. There's plenty of time for war. Right now, the focus should be on convincing Iran, through sanctions, and a promise, if it gives up its nuclear ambitions, to rejoin the international community. Will this work? Probably not, but it has to be pursued. Here's Bruce Blair on the efficacy of a preemptive attack: "The liabilities of preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear program vastly outweigh the benefits. But certainly Iran's program must be stopped before it reaches fruition with a nuclear weapons delivery capability." I would argue that it needs to be stopped before delivery systems are in place. The chance is small, but not vanishingly so, that an Iranian nuclear weapon could be delivered by sea or land, not by air.

Interesting thoughts, and a bit of relevant history, from Carl Cannon at RealClearPolitics:

[C]urious minds want to know whether the Gingrich campaign will continue to reap the largesse of Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who seems an unlikely Gingrichian. To explain it, some critics have taken to calling Adelson an "Israel-firster." That ugly term has been applied, not just to Adelson, but to other supporters of current U.S. policies regarding Israel, as Atlantic Monthly writer Jeffrey Goldberg describes.

Bashing Jews for their supposed disloyalty to their nation is a crude maneuver that has been employed long before Israel existed. It has been a tactic of both the far-left and far-right, almost as though haters from both extremes come together on the dark side of the moon.

Demonizing people in this way is always a nasty form of argumentation, but in our country it is particularly disquieting when this kind of discourse seeps into the mainstream of our major political parties. Lately, that seems to have happened within certain Democratic circles, as Ben Smith reported in Politico. In Charles Lindberg's time, the intolerance on display by the "America-First" crowd was mostly (but not exclusively) Republican.

On Jan. 23, 1941, with Britain under siege from the Third Reich, Lindbergh went so far as to testify on Capitol Hill in opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's Lend-Lease program. It was the culmination of a tragic personal journey. In the mid-1930s, Lindbergh and his wife had gone to Europe seeking solace after the kidnapping and murder of their baby. For some reason, the flier was impressed instead of appalled by what he found in Nazi Germany. In 1938, he allowed himself to be decorated by Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe. And upon his return to the United States, he called for neutrality with Germany, and denounced "the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration" as being the instigators of war.

In that infamous speech, delivered in Des Moines on Sept. 11, 1941 - 60 years to the day before 9/11 - Lindbergh went way beyond opposing Lend-Lease. "Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences," he said. "Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government."

Lindbergh's anti-Semitism caused even his fellow isolationists to turn away from him. Earlier, President Roosevelt had criticized him by name, leading to Lindbergh's resignation from the Army Air Corps Reserve. After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh begged to return to the service, but FDR wouldn't hear of it.

Eventually, Lindbergh made his way to the Pacific, by signing on as a civilian consultant to United Aircraft. Out there, he found his way into the cockpit, flying some 50 combat missions and teaching U.S. pilots how to conserve fuel. This heroism helped restore Charles Lindbergh's reputation. But bigotry is not a stained easily erased.

I received an e-mail a little while ago from Salon's Glenn Greenwald that contained what I would call a leading question. Here is the e-mail (I'm preemptively -- now there's a word! -- posting this e-mail on my blog because Greenwald tends to post publicly e-mails he receives, at least from me):

Hi Jeffrey - I'm working on (yet another) piece about the CAP-anti-Semitism controversy. Could you confirm whether, when you joined the IDF, you took this standard oath:

"I swear and commit to pledge allegiance to the State of Israel its laws, and authorities, to accept upon myself unconditionally the authority of the Israel Defense Force, obey all the orders and instructions given by authorized commanders, devote all my energies, and even sacrifice my life for the protection of the homeland and liberty of Israel."

Much appreciated -

I love that "much appreciated"!

For those of you blessedly unaware of this latest controversy, CAP, the Center for American Progress, a liberal, Democratic-Party-oriented think tank in Washington, has been accused of anti-Semitism, or borderline anti-Semitism, or something having to do with Semitism, by various parties for sponsoring a blogger who used the term "Israel-Firster" to describe Americans of the Mosaic persuasion with whom he disagreed on America's Middle East policy.

The larger issue, the discussion of which was ignited by this Ben Smith piece, is whether or not CAP, and other like-minded Democratic Party institutions, are becoming anti-Israel, or at least pushing Democrats to lessen their support for a close Israel-U.S. relationship, but I'm not going to go into that right now.

I don't think CAP is anti-Semitic (it's pretty hostile to Israel, but it's not as if it has called for the Jewish state's destruction), but the term "Israel-Firster" is originally a neo-Nazi term (Willis Carto's fascist Liberty Lobby was a big proponent of its use, as is David Duke), and it is  meant to raise questions about a Jewish person's willingness to be loyal to America (this is merely the local variant of an ancient anti-Semitic trope). CAP, to its credit, acknowledged the anti-Semitic nature of the term, and apologized. (I wrote about the controversy here.)

Obviously, use of the term "Israel-Firster" to describe someone with whom you disagree is not meant to open a discussion, or advance an argument, but to demonize your opponent. When Jews use it, as Joe Klein does, it is particularly unfortunate, because it is a term specifically designed to marginalize Jews in the American political discourse, and people like Joe Klein will eventually reap the whirlwind, in one form or another. The mainstreaming of hostility toward any group of Jews leads inevitably to the mainstreaming of hostility to Jews generally. And of course it's probably a sound idea for Jews to avoid using neo-Nazi-derived slurs to describe other Jews.

Anyway, I get the sense that Glenn Greenwald is trying to see whether I pass his version of a loyalty test. The question he raises is actually an interesting one in my case, though I'm sure he knows this, having obviously done his research by reading my book on the subject of my Israeli army service during the first Palestinian Uprising. For those of you haven't read the book (you can conveniently buy it right here!), the hyper-short version of the loyalty issue is this: As a teenager, I felt a bit like David Ben-Gurion (or Ari Ben-Canaan, more to the point)  set adrift on Long Island. I thought, for various reasons I describe in the book, that Israel might have been meant to be my true home, so I moved there in my early 20s, only to learn that in Israel, I felt like George Washington. I realized, by the time I arrived at the central army intake base as a not-so-happy draftee, that I was irreducibly American, and this feeling was reinforced by my service at an Intifada prison, which I disliked very much, mainly because I thought the occupation (or more specifically, the settlement) of the West Bank and Gaza was counterproductive, brutal and generally un-Jewish.

So, the answer to Greenwald's question -- and usually I don't feel that participating in McCarthyite projects like his is a useful thing, but I'm open about all of this -- is, to the best of my ability to recollect, no, I didn't take that oath. I don't like swearing any oaths (there's a perpetual debate in some circles in Israel about whether a Jew should be asked to swear allegiance to any entity but God; this is another story, of course, though not entirely irrelevant, because I'm under the impression that this is one way Israeli soldiers can get out of taking an oath) and I thought -- I'll admit that the thought was more inchoate a quarter-century ago, when I had it, then the manner in which I'm characterizing it now -- that I shouldn't, as an American, swear to anything like this.

This doesn't mean that I didn't, as a soldier, refuse orders, except those orders I found to be illegal and/or immoral (there's a wider berth for this in the Israeli army -- or at least there was when I was there -- then you might think. An upside of the Israeli army is that it is basically improvisational; the downside is that it is basically improvisational). And what I remember is that I ducked the oath and no seemed to care (there was no pomp or circumstance associated with this, which is why I don't even remember at what point in the induction process this oath-taking was to have occurred. The only thing I remember clearly about those early days was that the army took very extensive pictures of your dental work, in case they had to identify your remains).

I don't know how other American Jews deal with this in the Israeli army (I'll ask my fellow Atlantic national correspondent Robert Kaplan, who also served in the IDF, if he remembers how it worked with him), but my memory of my time in the army is that I wanted to avoid this issue, and I did. I'm looking at the relevant parts of "Prisoners" to see if I mentioned this at all, but so far I can't find anything.

And by the way, as an American Jew, I believe, as most American Jews believe (and most American non-Jews, as well) that Israel should exist and flourish as a Jewish country, that it is an important project of the Jewish people, that  and that it is a natural ally of the United States. An American Jew can feel this and still be a loyal, upstanding American. (Certainly, non-Jewish Americans are permitted to feel this way.)  I get the sense, from reading him every so often, that Glenn Greenwald is in the minority on this issue. Which is fine, of course.

UPDATE: An alert Goldblog reader points me to a Greenwald tweet that he must have issued minutes after his e-mail to me:

Maybe Jeffrey Goldberg, who enlisted in the IDF (oath: is.gd/bMiaBf), isn't the best one to make this argument is.gd/7T9F

Sort of typically ad hominem.

UPDATE 2: Arik Elman posted on my Facebook page, which I barely know exists:

OK, first, at the induction base, you sign the 500 form. This is a personal oath, and you can't NOT sign it - failure to do so is tantamount to desertion. Usually it's done in a bunch of other forms, so not anyone notices, even the religious soldiers who are forbidden to swear an oath. This is because at the end of the basic training in your unit you swear a COLLECTIVE oath - which is the same, but proclaimed verbally by the whole command, in celebratory circumstances and before the flag. Here, the religious soldiers proclaim "I declare" instead of "I swear". Still, I fail to see your Israel-hating counterparts' point. The military oath is just that - a commitment given for the period of the said service. It expires when the person is discharged, and while the average Israeli is bound by the reserve duty, you're clearly not.

This is interesting information. I remember none of this, but I'm sure I signed a bunch of forms -- but what I certainly don't remember is any celebratory ceremony at the end of Basic, or whenever this is said to have happened. I remember some pro forma event at induction, which I remember I somehow got of.

Another Goldblog reader made an interesting point, that this was a quarter-century ago, so what does it matter what I did when I was in my early 20s? The reader wrote, "Glenn Greenwald's standard is that we are all frozen in amber at our most vulnerable moments, and should be judged forever based on this frozen moment." It's a good point. It's why Greenwald doesn't seem to be able, on some occasions, to process contradictory information.

UPDATE 3: This, from Goldblog reader Itai Mesch:

Thanks to your latest post, I suddenly want to read your book (Ed. note -- God bless you).  I finish my own army service next week and even though I'm a jobnik's jobnik (jobnik -- non-combat soldier), everything you said in the article about your experience rings true for me.  No, the IDF hasn't changed much in twenty years.

Incidentally, and keeping in mind that my Hebrew was ridiculously lacking when I did tironut (basic training), I don't remember taking any oath similar to what Greenwald described.  But then again, my tironut was fairly mismanaged.

Glad I made aliyah (immigrated to Israel), glad I served my country, and even more glad said service is almost over.

UPDATE 4: Damon Linker writes in with an interesting thought:

Isn't the best response to (Greenwald) simply: I don't remember if I took that oath, but let's assume I did. So what? I was joining and pledging to fight and potentially die for the IDF. It's perfectly appropriate to uphold an "Israel first" oath in such circumstances. (Joining the army was itself an implicit act of affirming such an oath.) But the oath is not intended to bind the soldier beyond his or her duties in the military any more than the American presidential oath of office is binding on George W. Bush now that he's no longer the president of the United States. So your game of "gotcha" got nothing.

Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is not shrinking in the face of Iranian denials. Once again, he has asserted his suspicions that Iran's goal is a nuclear-weapons capability:

"What we know suggests the development of nuclear weapons," he was quoted as saying in comments published in German on Thursday, adding Iran had so far failed to clarify allegations of possible military links to its nuclear program.

"We want to check over everything that could have a military dimension."

An IAEA delegation, to be headed by Deputy Director General Herman Nackaerts, is expected to seek explanations for intelligence information that indicates Iran has engaged in research and development relevant for nuclear weapons.

Of course, before any military action takes place against Iran (and I hope it never happens), those who launch such an attack better be certain of Iran's intentions. Amano's IAEA, though, is continuing to push on this issue, which is a useful and clarifying thing. By the way, I was talking to a friend yesterday, another reporter who covers this issue, and he took note of something important: There isn't anyone in the Obama White House who believes that Iran's intentions are peaceful. Why is this important? Because this isn't a neoconservative-dominated Administration; this is an Administration that ran against a neoconservative approach to the world. Still, it's worth knowing more about what Iran is doing before irreversible and dramatic decisions are made.

In other news, French President Sarkozy states something obvious, warning "against any military intervention against Iran over its nuclear program, saying a strike on Iran would 'trigger war and chaos in the Middle East.'" Well, obviously. The next conclusion he reached isn't so obvious or logical: "At his annual New Year's address to diplomats in Paris, Sarkozy warned 'a military intervention would not solve the problem (of Iran's nuclear program) but would trigger war and chaos in the Middle East and maybe the world.'" I actually think a military strike could solve the problem -- at least for three to ten years -- posed by Iran's nuclear program. But it would also definitely trigger war and chaos. The formula remains the same, for the moment at least: An attack on Iran to prevent a theoretical nightmare -- a possibly-uncontainable nuclear Iran -- could cause an actual nightmare, an all-out conventional war raging across the Middle East.

This is too good not to post again (the dancing starts at the five-minute mark:

There's been a controversy raging over the past month or so that I've avoided writing about mainly because it has a Groundhog Day quality to it. It began with this very interesting Ben Smith piece, but lately it has become tiresome. Apparently, it is not tiresome to other pepole, because it just keeps going. The seemingly most urgent question to emerge from this controversy is whether or not the term "Israel-firster" is anti-Semitic. The term is used by Media Matters, the left-wing advocacy group, to describe American Jews with whom it disagrees on American Middle East policy, and it was also used by staffers of the Center for American Progress, the important liberal think tank, to describe same. CAP has disavowed the language, and apologized on behalf of the staffer who used the term; Media Matters doesn't seem to care.

So, is "Israel-firster" anti-Semitic? Its origins are certainly anti-Semitic, and the idea that Jews are incapable of being loyal to the country of their citizenship and are only loyal to world Jewry, or the Jewish state, is an age-old anti-Semitic trope. This doesn't mean that those who use it are anti-Semitic. They just might be ignorant, like J Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami, who to my surprise buys into the trope. Obviously, "Israel-firster" is a term deployed by opponents of Israel, and opponents of a close relationship between the U.S. and Israel, to stoke resentment of Jews they find objectionable (though the two most important scapegoating stokers, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, have been too sophisticated to use the actual term in their public pronouncements -- though Mearsheimer has clearly gone off the deep end in other ways).

Here is David Bernstein on the origins of the term:

The "Israel-firster" slur was not used in "mainstream" discourse until the last few years.

Before that, you can find it occasionally in the early 1980s and 1990s in sources such as Wilmot Robertson's anti-Semitic Instauration journal, a 1988 anti-Semitic book called "The F.O.J. [Fear of Jews] Syndrome, and a 1998 anti-Semitic book "Rise of AntiChrist." I also found a couple of references to "Israel-firsters" in the extremist anti-Israel publication, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and from writers associated with this journal.

By the early 2000s, one can find "Israel-firster" being used by a variety of anti-Semitic "right-wing" sources like DavidDuke.com and the Vanguard News Network. As the decade wore on, the phrase occasionally pops up in far left anti-Israel sites that have ties to the anti-Semitic far-right or are known for playing footsie with anti-Semitism, like Antiwar.com, Norman Finkelstein's website, and Indymedia.

Here is The Washington Post on the controversy over the term:

CAP officials and the think tank's critics agree that the term is over the line. University of Maryland historian Jeffrey Herf, who has published books on anti-Semitism, said the phrase represented a "classic theme of modern anti-Semitism." He said the suggestion of Jewish "dual loyalty," along with the accusation that AIPAC was pushing for war with Iran, hearkened back to the early days of World War II, when certain people accused the U.S. government of entering the war as a response to powerful Jewish interests.

"This kind of nonsense is all over the place on the Internet," Herf said. "The fact that some of this is showing up on the Center for American Progress Web site makes it important."

But some on the left see the phrase as a legitimate critique, and argue that charges of anti-Semitism serve only to shut down needed policy debates about Israel and the Middle East.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a left-leaning voice on Israel issues, said he had no problem with "Israel-firster."

"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, it's a legitimate question," Ben-Ami said.

Ben-Ami added that Jewish groups "should tread lightly" when they make accusations of anti-Semitism. "Because when they do need to use that word, people won't take you seriously," he said.

The most important article that touches on this controversy is by Adam Kirsch in Tablet, which you should read, and about which I will blog later. Kirsch argues, very convincingly, that Walt and Mearsheimer, while failing to actually change American policy toward Israel, have opened up the discourse about Israel, and about Jewish participation in the American political process, to all sorts of cranks and anti-Semites, and they have given cover for others to introduce pernicious stereotypes into the conversation. (Kirsch's piece is partly about Robert Kaplan's paean to Mearsheimer published in this month's Atlantic, about which more later, as well.)

Update: Jeremy Ben-Ami sent over this "clarification" of his comments to The Washington Post:

"I agree that the use of the term "Israel Firster" is a bad choice of words. The conspiracy theory that American Jews have dual loyalty is just that, a conspiracy theory and must be refuted in the strongest possible way.

However, this incident is a perfect example of a more pressing problem with the way the debate plays out over Israel in the American Jewish community and in American politics. Rather than engage directly over whether or not American and/or Israeli policies are actually advancing American and Israeli interests, an ill-chosen word or phrase is used to delegitimize a critic or in this case an entire institution. 

The real question we should be debating is not the use of the term "Israel Firster" but the underlying questions being raised by CAP and others over the direction of American foreign policy - how best to achieve a two-state solution and how to prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon without going to war.

Disagreements over substantive issues should be engaged with substantive arguments and shouldn't be sidestepped with debates over word choice.

One final and important point: American Jews and communal leaders should not overreach with charges of anti-Semitism in incidents like this. When real anti-Semitism actually rears its ugly head, people will be far less likely to listen."

Ruh-roh.

From John Tabin in The American Spectator:

When I arrived late at the town hall event in Meredith, he was prefacing an answer to a question about Israel by expressing admiration for Zionist principles of independence and self-reliance, going on to say, of course, that Israel shouldn't get any US aid. (Paul, or someone on his staff, has clearly read this Jeffrey Goldberg post.) He went on to make a somewhat odd suggestion, which Felicia Sonmez of the Washington Post zeroed in on, that Israel should "become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, or something like that. You know, have a really affluent society." It's the "become" part that makes this strange; Israel is already more affluent and democratic than her neighbors.
On the way out, I overheard a late-middle-aged Ron Paul supporter, identifiable by button and sticker, talking to one of the Neturei Karta guys, saying that "The Zionist are godless atheists ... they only believe in themselves." Ron Paul may not hate Israel, but people who hate Israel sure seem to like Ron Paul.

The televangelizing Salafist Hazem Shuman, who in addition to calling for the extermination of the Jews also opposes music, argues that the Jews need to be utterly vanquished and destroyed in part because 90 percent of the "world's famous actors are Jews." Just because this person is a delusional sociopath doesn't mean he's not dangerous. You can watch his performance here.

Here is a bit more of what he says:

Oh nation of Muhammad, Allah says to you: If you fear war with the Jews, brace yourselves for war with Allah. It is either a war with the Jews or a war with Allah. Allah says that the entire nation could be replaced if it is not prepared to sacrifice its blood for the sake of Palestine. My message to all the Jews is that the battle is bound to come and you will be vanquished. Allah has promised that you will be vanquished and that we will prevail. I tell you that our Prophet Muhammad, whose every word we believe and whose light we follow - the moment he signed the Hudaybiyya Treaty with Mecca, the first thing he did after the battle with the Quraysh tribe, only 20 days after signing the Hudaybiyya Treaty, he took his army and attacked Khaybar.

Why, oh Messenger of Allah? Because these Jews are a cancer. These Jews are a catastrophe. There is not a catastrophe in the world that is not the handiwork of the Jews. These Jews are a cancer in the body of planet Earth, and if permitted, it will spread and infect the entire body. Getting rid of these Jews is a must.

The Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren (who has made occasional appearances on this blog), issued this statement in response to questions about why the joint U.S.-Israeli anti-missile exercise, "Austere Challenge 12," has been postponed (I wrote about this in the previous post):

The exercise between the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces, scheduled to be held this spring, has been postponed to the latter half of the year. The decision, taken jointly by the European Command (EUCOM) and by the IDF, stemmed solely from technical issues. Such postponements are routine and do not reflect political or strategic concerns. The United States and Israel remain committed to holding the exercise -- code-named Austere Challenge 12 -- the largest and most robust in their historic alliance.

The important question, one we can't answer yet, is this: How is Tehran interpreting this postponement? I can't imagine that Iranian leaders see this as a sign of American and Israeli fortitude.

Here's an interesting development in a story I wrote about earlier today: Despite claims made in the Israeli press that the Obama Administration, worried about provoking Iran, initiated a postponement of a massive joint Israeli-U.S. missile defense exercise scheduled to begin later this month, Pentagon officials say it was the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, who asked his counterpart, Leon Panetta, for the postponement. The claim that the exercise, dubbed "Austere Challenge 12," was scrubbed from the calendar because the Obama Administration feared provoking the Iranian regime is "baseless," one senior Pentagon official told me just a few minutes ago, in a telephone call initiated by a group of senior defense officials.

One of the senior defense officials told me this: "Minister Barak called Secretary Panetta and asked if we could take the exercise off the calendar. The Israelis were concerned that they did not have the resources in place to carry it out effectively." The exercise, which was to begin with a live-fire drill, would have involved several thousand Israelis as well as several thousand American military personnel, and Barak told Panetta, according to these officials, that Israel could not pull together the resources necessary to stage the exercise successfully. "Our military is much bigger than theirs and this exercise was going to consume a much larger portion of their resources," the official said.

Panetta, according to these Pentagon sources, was concerned that the Iranians would interpret the scrubbing of the exercise, well, the way it's currently being interpreted, as a sign of American wavering in the face of Iranian threats. He told Barak that he would not agree to a cancellation, as Barak was suggesting, but only a postponement. "Panetta's initial reaction was, 'I don't want to take this off the calendar.' He said it would send the wrong signal." After multiple conversations, Panetta and Barak agreed to postpone Austere Challenge 12 until fall.

This is the Pentagon's message. I'm awaiting Israeli comment on this recounting of events, which I will post when I get it.

UPDATE: As of 5:15 p.m., Eastern, still waiting on that Israeli comment. There seems to be much confusion and awkwardness about the delayed exercise. Laura Rozen broke the original story, and she has a useful summary of the miscommunications and misfirings here.