Jeffrey Goldberg

So I went to the Matisyahu concert at the 9:30 Club last night -- Matisyahu is, to my 11-year-old son, what Kurtis Blow was to me, and so I was the driver and escort -- and I was left with a number of conflicting observations. As those of you who follow the career of this Hasidic reggae superstar know (and as those of you who follow all those other Hasidic reggae superstars don't know), Matisyahu recently shaved off his beard, but he did appear last night wearing a kippah and tzitzit. My prediction: He loses the tzitzit. It seems as if he's reaching beyond an identity that may have trapped him commercially. It's hard to say if this is a marketing ploy, or some honest change in his spiritual make-up.

It would be too bad if he ditches the Orthodox persona. Somehow, he seemed more authentic as a reggae superstar when he dressed like the Lubavitcher rebbe. Maybe it's because of the huge overlap between the Torah and Rastafarian theology (the through-line of traditional reggae is the Exodus story), or maybe just because his beard and long coat lent him a kind of exoticness he now lacks. (There is also a cheese factor in operation here -- at last night's concert a huge disco dreidel hung above the stage, shades of Spinal Tap's Stonehenge.)

Last night, as I watched him, I couldn't help but think that I just paid good money to watch a Jewish kid from the suburbs make believe he's Burning Spear. Believe me, a lot of Jewish kids go through a Rastaman phase. I also couldn't help but think that Matisyahu might be Sacha Baron Cohen's greatest creation. On the other hand, he can actually sing.

The most interesting aspect of all this to me was the audience. I didn't expect Hasidim -- Washington isn't known for Hasidim -- but it was a wildly-mixed crowd, with comparatively few Jews (yes, my Jewdar is that good). Down in front was a merry band of drunk frat-boys, singing along, cheering a man with tzitzit. I've made this point before, but I'll make it again: From the perspective of Jewish history, America is a very unusual and blessed place.

There is an interesting, and depressing, development In the continuing  Pakistani"Memogate" controversy -- the one in which the now-former ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, is accused by Pakistan's ruling military elite of trying, with Pakistan's civilian-elected President, Asif Ali Zardari to foment democratic reform in his country. Haqqani, back in Pakistan and under continual investigation, is now being accused of helping the U.S. locate Osama Bin Laden. Yes, "accused."

There are two ways for the Pakistani military to grapple with the fact that Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan: They could apologize to the U.S. for, advertently or not, hiding the greatest mass murderer in American history, and they could conduct a serious internal investigation to discover how it came to pass that Bin Laden found refuge in their country. Or, alternatively, they could throw a fit about the "violation" of their border by American soldiers hunting the aforementioned greatest mass murderer in American history, and investigate not how Bin Laden got into Pakistan, but how CIA operative gained access to Pakistan.

The Pakistanis have obviously chosen the latter course, to their shame. The military is actively seeking to punish anyone who might have helped the U.S. find the world's most notorious terrorist. Pakistan is today a country with very perverse priorities. (You can read about the way the Pakistani military lies to the U.S. in our Atlantic cover story, The Ally From Hell).

Here is coverage, from Pakistan's Nation newspaper, of Haqqani's Bin Laden-related travails:

ISLAMABAD - Pakistan's former Ambassador to the US, Hussain Haqqani has stated that he neither had issued visas to the US citizens nor had provided any information to the US about the Osama bin Laden presence in Abbottabad.

'Let me state clearly for the record that these wild allegations are totally baseless and refuted completely by the official record. The Embassy of Pakistan in Washington DC never issued unauthorised visas in three years and 5 months that I served as Ambassador', he said in his written statement submitted to the Inquiry Commission on Abbottabad Operation on Monday.
Husain Haqqani, also appeared before the Commission here at the Cabinet division on Tuesday and faced a number of questions from the Commission members.

About the accusation that Haqqani aided America in locating Bin Laden, the report goes on to state:

...Haqqani said he was on his way to Islamabad via London and Dubai when the operation was conducted and he found out about it upon landing at Heathrow Airport in early morning of May 2.
'I was instructed to immediately turn around, which I did, and returned to Washington by around 5pm local time', he said.
He said he had fully defended the country's interests following the Abbottabad raid and played a role to ensure that the US government, Congress and media do not blame Pakistan government, Armed Forces or intelligence services for allowing Osama bin Laden's presence in the country, as that would have been a violation of UN Security Council resolution 1267 and 1373.
'I was also to protest the violation of Pakistan's sovereignty by US forces in conducting the action and to point out that how US had violated the norms of international conduct between two sovereign countries. I faithfully and diligently carried out my instructions. I met with the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Deputy National Security Adviser of the President of the US to register protest over violation of Pakistani sovereignty'.

The Times' Lede blog reports on an unusual statement by a retired general who is currently advising Egypt's military junta:

In comments published by the Egyptian newspaper Al Shorouk on Monday, the adviser, Gen. Abdel Moneim Kato, said that the protesters who came under attack by soldiers were delinquents "who deserve to be thrown into Hitler's ovens."

I've spent quite a bit of time in Cairo arguing with Holocaust deniers (arguing doesn't work, by the way), so I was pleasantly surprised to read of a senior Egyptian official who understands that Hitler's ovens were real, and that the Holocaust was a brutal affair. I was unpleasantly surprised, of course, to read of an Egyptian official who wants to punish his fellow Egyptians the way Hitler punished the Jews. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Mubarak's military successors are trying very hard to win the  let's-outdo-Hosni-in-cruelty-and-sheer-idiocy competition.

There is no further word about Mel Gibson's plan to make a biopic about Judah Maccabee (come to think of it, there has been no further word about Goldblog's forthcoming biography of Judah Maccabee, either). For those of you who missed this the first time around, I spent some time with Mel Gibson (at the behest of Christopher Hitchens, actually -- you can read why here) talking about his fascination with Judah Maccabee:

His interest stemmed, he said, from the simple fact that the Book of Maccabees (I and II, he said) are "ripping good reads."

"I just read it when I was teenager, and it's amazing. It's almost like" -- here, he grabbed my digital recorder, held it to his mouth, and spoke in a portentous movie-announcer voice -- "They profaned his Temple. They killed his father. They... all kinds of stuff. In the face of great odds for something he believed in" -- here he switched out of movie-announcer voice -- "Oh, my God, the odds they faced. The armies they faced had elephants! How cinematic is this! Even Judah's dad -- what's his name? Mattathias? -- you kind of get this guy who more or less is trying to avoid the whole thing, but he just gets to a place where had enough, and he just snapped!"

This is one interpretation of Hannukah, of course. A little too frenetic and nutty for me, but serviceable. What Gibson didn't mention was the doughnuts. The doughnuts are very important. I'm off to find the doughnuts. I'll be skipping the Lubavitcher lighting of the world's crassest menorah outside the White House. Getting the doughnuts seems more important. See you tomorrow.

Image credit: Nishant Choksi

Leon Panetta, whom we recently saw dropping media cornstarch to temper Israel's alleged urge to attack Iran, clarified his position last night on the CBS Evening News. In the far-ranging interview with Scott Pelley, Panetta predicted that Iran may be able to develop a nuclear weapon in the next year or perhaps even earlier. This strikes me as news:

Pelley: So are you saying that Iran can have a nuclear weapon in 2012?

Panetta: It would probably be about a year before they can do it. Perhaps a little less. But one proviso, Scott, is if they have a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel.

Pelley: So that they can develop a weapon even more quickly...

Panetta: On a faster track....

Pelley: Than we believe....

Panetta: That's correct.

Panetta, from his perch on a military jet known as "The Doomsday Plane" no less, reaffirmed that Iran wielding a nuclear weapon would be "unacceptable" and repeated "that are no options off the table." 

While the Obama administration's position has repeatedly been to say a nuclear Iran is "unacceptable," this interview represents an abrupt shift for Panetta, who earlier this month suggested that an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities might hurt the world economy and fracture Israel's relationship with America. I suppose this is the point at which Joe Klein would call Panetta an "Israel-firster," if Panetta were Jewish.

It's also important to note that Iran has been uncharacteristically forthcoming  recently about the impact of the most recent round of sanctions. And in Italy today, the United States met with some key allies from around the world (possibly including a Gulf country) to discuss further sanctions.

Yesterday, my friend Joe Klein wrote something quite intemperate, and historically inaccurate:

"It's another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel's national security."

I sent Joe a private note, between friends, asking him, in essence, what he was talking about. I know of American troops fighting and dying on behalf of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq's Kurds and Shia (and so on), but not on behalf of Israel. No American soldier has ever died in the defense of Tel Aviv. Nor would Israelis want American soldiers to die on Israel's behalf -- self-sufficiency being a governing idea of Zionism (something, by the way, Ron Paul understands, and Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann et. al., don't).

In any case, Joe decided to make my private qualm public, writing:

A few hours ago, I received an anguished email from my friend Jeff Goldberg, who was incensed that I'd written this sentence:

"It's another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel's national security." [emphasis his]

Jeff had jumped to a silly conclusion. I was concerned about sending American kids off to war yet again. I separated the phrase with commas in order to emphasize the too-many-times we've sent our troops overseas in the past decade. It might have been more accurate if I'd written "to send American kids off to war yet again-this time, to fight for Israel's national security." Which I believe is what the warmongering against Iran is all about. But the thought that we'd gone to war in the past, especially in Iraq, to fight for Israel's national security was nowhere in my mind. Nowhere. I don't believe we've ever gone to war to fight for Israel's national security. Period.

I leave it to readers of English to decide whether I jumped to a "silly conclusion" based on my understanding of the sentence, "It's another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel's national security." I'm glad Joe corrected the record, and his follow-up post contains many interesting ideas, which I'll try to address later, when I'm not traveling, which is now.

UPDATE: I'll get to the whole of Joe's response when I can, but I couldn't let this line, about what he might call Jewish intolerance, go without comment: "I find that the tendency to dehumanize all Arabs, especially Palestinians, and all Persians to be un-Jewish in the extreme."

There is, of course, some amount of offensive Jewish discourse about Arabs, and even, I suppose, Persians, and all such discourse is condemned in this space. But is the story of the moment really the manner in which Jews de-humanize Persians? There is some evidence to suggest that the opposite that is true. It is not Israel that is calling for Iran's destruction. Last time, I checked, Israel's destruction was a policy demand of the Iranian leadership.

The so-called "Hilltop Youth," which is a kind of romantic-sounding name for settlers in Judea and Samaria who are actually a bunch of thugs, are escalating their campaign to make Israel pay each time its government orders the closing of an unauthorized settlement. They crossed a red line last week when they threw stones at an Israeli army commander. As I've written, these overboard attacks are probably in a perverse way a good thing, because they will remind the average Israeli that these people seek the destruction of their country in the name of Zionist maximalism. But the obvious downside is that they could, through their actions against mosques, in particular, trigger a conflagration. In my Bloomberg View column earlier this week, I wrote about one course of action the Netanyahu government could take: Threatening any and all West Bank hooligans with detention at the prison camp, Ketziot, I wrote about in this book:

The Netanyahu government has said it will take a few new legal measures in response to these incidents, including holding settlers under administrative detention laws and trying them in military courts. But so far it seems only modestly outraged. It doesn't seem to grasp that it is only a matter of time before the price-tag campaign escalates.

These fanatics represent a perverse branch of Zionism. There is a war in Israel between Jews who believe that Zionism is a movement seeking Jewish national equality, and those who believe that Zionism is about the redemption of the lands of the Bible -- all the lands of the Bible, ideally -- in the name of God. This maximalist view, which would be alien to Zionism's founders, is a catastrophe for Israel, Jews and Judaism.

If the Netanyahu government were to announce that it was repurposing Ketziot to accept violent settlers, and that settlers who attack a soldier -- or uproot an olive tree, or burn down a mosque -- would be buying themselves a long-term stay in an unforgiving prison, it would send a clear message. And it would show the world that the Israeli government, and not a collection of racist and extremist rabbis, makes Israeli policy.

There is one other advantage to this plan. The Negev desert is a depopulated place. And Ketziot is near the spot where Moses and the Children of Israel camped during the exodus from Egypt. It is holy soil, and it could use a good Jewish settlement or two.

I don't think he would mind my saying that I thank God for the privilege of having known him.

Sorry I'm a bit late to this, but I've been running in circles the past couple of days (it's the season, I think). Anyway, Tom Friedman stirred things up a bit by asserting that Congress is "bought and paid for by the Israel lobby." He wrote this in the context of bemoaning Israel's current direction, and bemoaning its American "friends," including the distinctly destructive Newt Gingrich.

I agree with the thrust of his column, that Israel's more right-wing friends in America are doing it no favors by encouraging its worst tendencies. But I do disagree with his analysis of Israel's role in American politics. Tom takes a kind of modified Walt/Mearsheimer approach to the issue -- he's not blaming Jews for creating anti-Semitism, or excoriating Israel as some terrible evil, as Walt and Mearsheimer do -- but he's suggesting that AIPAC and other, mainly-Jewish PACs, dictate the parameters of the Israel-U.S. relationship:

I sure hope that Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.

This just doesn't seem accurate to me. Netanyahu received a standing ovation in Congress because he's popular in Congress. Why is he popular in Congress? Because the country he leads is popular with Americans. Members of Congress receive PAC support from all sorts of causes, but it's hard to imagine them giving a standing ovation to a representative of the insurance industry. Polls have consistently, over many decades, shown that Israel is well-thought-of by the majority of Americans (the Palestinians poll miserably, by contrast). What explains Israel's popularity? The Bible, for one thing, along with a shared belief in democracy, shared victimization by Arab terrorism, and so on. (I'm not necessarily endorsing as morally sound these observations, just making them.)

Does AIPAC play a role in encouraging a positive American attitude toward Israel? Of course. But it doesn't explain the standing ovation for Bibi. Tom also wrote:

 "...Newt Gingrich took the Republican competition to grovel for Jewish votes -- by outloving Israel -- to a new low by suggesting that the Palestinians are an "invented" people and not a real nation entitled to a state.

As I've said, Gingrich's position is unhelpful (as they say in the State Department), but he is certainly not groveling for Jewish votes. He knows he's not going to get many Jewish votes in Florida and New York, and he certainly knows he's not going to get a great many Jewish votes in those world centers of Jewish life, Iowa and New Hampshire. He said this a) because he believes it; and b) because it plays on Islamophobic feelings among more conservative voters and c) because it is simply good politics, in a Republican primary, to take Israel's side in a dispute. Tom is absolutely right that Gingrich hit a new low, but he didn't hit it in order to please Jews.

From Reuters:

Iran could soon launch sensitive atomic activities in an underground facility deep inside a mountain, diplomatic sources said on Wednesday, a development likely to add to tension between Tehran and the West.
 

Iranian experts have carried out the necessary preparations at Fordow near the holy city of Qom, paving the way for the Islamic state to begin higher-grade uranium enrichment at the site on a former military base.

The machines, equipment and nuclear material needed have been transferred and installed at Fordow, the sources added, suggesting the work itself -- until now conducted above ground at another location -- could start when Iran takes the decision.

This move seems inevitable. An Iranian leadership interested in protecting its centrifuges -- or in provoking an attack on its centrifuges for any one of a number of reasons (including providing itself with justification for a fast-tracked nuclear program and a withdrawal from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) -- would move its centrifuges inside a mountain. The question is, if the machinery is already in place in Fordow, is it too late for the Israelis to attack? I'm looking for more information on this subject.

UPDATE: This Iranian move might be related to the recent series of mysterious explosions at Iranian industrial facilities:

On Sunday, at least seven people were killed in an explosion at a steel mill in the Iranian city of Yazd. Foreign nationals, possibly North Korean nuclear arms experts, are believed to be among the dead.

The explosion follows two blasts that occurred in Iran in recent weeks at sites linked to Tehran's nuclear program.

Late last month, The Times of London reported that a mysterious blast that rocked Isfahan in western Iran days before damaged a key nuclear facility in the city.

If these blasts are indeed Israel's doing, then what is the strategy here? To drive the Iranians underground, in order to then attack the buried facilities? Everyone is playing a very dangerous game. Much better to place punitive sanctions of Iran's central bank, and try to force the issue that way, no?

Mark Judge at The Daily Caller senses a conversion in the making: "Could Christopher Hitchens become a Christian? It's a possibility that doesn't seem laughable anymore." Judge's paper-thin argument: Hitchens's just-published disavowal of the Nietzschean aphorism, "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." Judge writes: "Rejecting one of the more sophomoric of Nietzsche's aphorisms may seem small, but out of such moments are great conversions made. He goes on:

In his piece, Hitchens admits that the brutality of his treatment has made him reassess the bravado he showed about death in "Hitch-22," where he claimed he wanted to be fully awake and conscious at the moment death came, in order to enjoy the ride fully. Now that death has, if not arrived, at least driven by the house, Hitch is not so sure.

I wouldn't tell Christopher Hitchens that now is the time to get right with the Lord, or to pray or read the Bible. I wouldn't try and convince him of the resurrection. I would only ask him to entertain the notion that love -- the love he has for his life, his wife and his children, the love his readers have for him and the love that the doctors and nurses are showing him -- is a real thing whose origins are worth exploring without glibness...."

Very early in his cancer, Hitchens told me that there would come a time when someone, a charlatan, maybe, or perhaps even some presumptuous person of misdirected goodwill, would try to convince the world that he was undergoing a deathbed conversion. I didn't believe that such a thing would happen. "Watch," he said.

Hitchens also said that if information emerged that he had, at some late stage, made a statement of faith, or a religious confession, including but not limited to, "I accept Jesus as my lord and savior," or, "Muhammad, peace be unto him, is the messenger of God," or, "the Lubavitcher rebbe is the true messiah and currently living in Brooklyn," that his friends were to make it known that it was not the true Hitchens doing the confessing. This is what he told me once, during a video conversation we posted on this website: "The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain," he said. "I can't guarantee that such an entity wouldn't make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark."

So, just to be clear: Christopher Hitchens has not found God, and is not finding God. It is mischievous to suggest otherwise.

Last week, just before the White House's (early bird) Hannukah party, the deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonough, met with a group of Jewish leaders and told them, "I'm really pissed off that there are people out there who doubt our resolve to stop Iran."

McDonough may be upset about the doubters, but there is a reason these doubters exist. I am not referring to the usual suspects, who believe that Obama, against all evidence, is incapable of deploying force against any of America's Muslim adversaries. I'm referring to people who look at the message on Iran delivered from the White House -- "all options are on the table" --  and compare it to the message delivered by the secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, a couple of weeks ago at the Saban Forum, and wonder who is speaking for the Administration on this issue.

At the forum, Panetta delivered a standard pro-Israel speech, but went out of his way to state publicly the many reasons he feels an attack on Iran would be disastrous. Here is part of Panetta's answer to the question, posed by the Saban Center's Kenneth Pollack, about how effective he thought an attack would be in thwarting Iran's nuclear ambitions:

Part of the problem here is the concern that at best, I think - talking to my friends - the indication is that at best it might postpone it maybe one, possibly two years. It depends on the ability to truly get the targets that they're after. Frankly, some of those targets are very difficult to get at. That kind of, that kind of shot would only, I think, ultimately not destroy their ability to produce an atomic weapon, but simply delay it - number one.  Of greater concern to me are the unintended consequences, which would be that ultimately it would have a backlash and the regime that is weak now, a regime that is isolated would suddenly be able to reestablish itself, suddenly be able to get support in the region, and suddenly instead of being isolated would get the greater support in a region that right now views it as a pariah. 

Thirdly, the United States would obviously be blamed and we could possibly be the target of retaliation from Iran, striking our ships, striking our military bases.  Fourthly - there are economic consequences to that attack - severe economic consequences that could impact a very fragile economy in Europe and a fragile economy here in the United States. 

And lastly I think that the consequence could be that we would have an escalation that would take place that would not only involve many lives, but I think could consume the Middle East in a confrontation and a conflict that we would regret.

My own criticism of Panetta's comments has less to do with the comments themselves -- there are, indeed, many excellent reasons an attack could be a catastrophe --  than with their very public delivery.  This is a message that should be delivered privately, not publicly. If Panetta fears that the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, are about to bring disaster down on their own heads, and on America as well, then he should threaten them in any way he sees fit. But privately. To say the things he says in public is to signal to the Iranians that they have no reason to fear a military attack aimed at postponing their nuclear program. Panetta's public statements in this regard were inexplicable. Why tell your enemy what you're not going to do? It made no sense. And one upshot of Panetta's commentary is that he has created doubt in the minds of people predisposed to believing Obama on this matter

As Goldblog readers know, I believe for various reasons that President Obama would seriously contemplate the use of force to stop progress on Iran's nuclear program, or to keep Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. Many of his critics (and many critical readers of this blog) argue otherwise. But I generally agree with the view -- expressed to me yesterday by  NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor -- that "a fair reading of everything the President has said and done is that he does what he says." I still believe this to be true. Though I now have my doubts.

One more thing: The by-now traditional Goldblog explanatory note --  I, too, am opposed to either an Israeli or an American strike against Iran, especially at this moment. But I'm all for creating the impression in Iran that Israel or America is preparing to strike. 

What a freakish country:

A Saudi woman in her 60s was beheaded today for being a witch, according to reports out of the desert kingdom.

Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser was executed in the northwest province of Jawf. She was convicted of "practicing witchcraft and sorcery," the Interior Ministry said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency, AFP says. The country's high court upheld the death penalty.

The most important issue facing our economy and our future as a nation is obviously, do Palestinians exist? Newt Gingrich, for one, thinks this is a very important question. So do I. Therefore, I would like to give my answer to the question in this very public venue: Yes, Palestinians exist. I've seen them with my own two eyes. I've seen them in their cities, I've seen them in their villages. I've seen them on the beaches, I've seen them eating peaches.  I've seen them in cars, I've even seen them in bars. Gay bars in Tel Aviv, to be exact. Ah, you might ask, what was Goldblog, a known heterosexual, doing in a gay bar in Tel Aviv? Well, how was Goldblog supposed to know it was a gay bar? Okay, the Palestinian dude grinding his shwarma against the Israeli dude was a clue. But I often miss such clues. I visited Andrew Sullivan in Provincetown once and thought that everyone was really muscular and shirtless by accident.

I apologize for the digression.

And now, for the follow-up question: Do Palestinians have a right to exist?

Why, yes, they do! Any other questions?

Yes, you, in the corner, in the Center for American Progress t-shirt, please ask your question.

Do Israelis exist?

Why, they do indeed. And do they have the right to exist? You bet they do!

Now that we've established that Palestinians and Israelis exist, and have a right to exist, can we move on to something else? Such as an equitable two-state solution to their shared problem?

Spencer Ackerman writes, in a (semi-)rebuttal to this post:

"(T)he vast majority of American Jews won't support an Apartheid Israel. But the Israelis have a different American ally who might: Christian Zionists. Christian Zionists, in the United States, are fully democratic actors, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise domestically. When it comes to Israel, though, their favored approach is for Israel to keep the entire West Bank, for eschatological reasons. They are much, much less concerned about the political character of Israel, and even less concerned with the fate of (non-Christian) Palestinians."

My argument is that Israel will not survive for very long without the active support of American Jewry. Ackerman is arguing that millions of evangelical Christians -- who are concerned about Israel for theological, rather than ethnic, familial, or ideological reasons -- would be able to maintain American support for Israel in Washington even without broad Jewish support. I'm not disputing the notion that this movement (post-Jewish Zionism, in Matthew Yglesias's phrase) worries less about Israel's democratic character than it does about Israel's Jewish character, and about the Christian messianic promise embedded in the return of Jews to their historic homeland, but I take issue with the idea that it has as much power as Ackerman ascribes to it here:

"...(C)onspiratorial talk about the Israel Lobby seriously misses the point. The U.S. relationship with Israel is not determined by a narrow band of colluding Washington, New York and Hollywood Jews. It's not even determined by Jews, full stop. It thrives because one of the most powerful constituencies in American politics, conservative Christians, identifies with Israel -- and not with politicians who question it. You can see that, barometrically, in the GOP presidential debates, in which the candidates line up to outdo each other in vowing support for Israel and bashing Obama for his insufficient affection for Israel.

It's not that Post-Jewish Zionists like apartheid. They just like Israel fulfilling what they understand to be a divine mandate; they additionally identify with Israeli rhetoric about being tough to survive in a hostile region; and they consider politicians who are comfortable with pressure on Israel to be opponents of their broader conservative agenda. (Probably a correct calculation.) As long as American politicians make the -- frankly correct -- democratic political calculation that there are more votes in Post-Jewish Zionism than there are in liberal Zionism, Israel won't face American pressure. And as Goldberg and everyone else correctly observes, there is very little time left on Israel's demographic clock before Zionism faces a full-blown crisis.

I don't disagree with Ackerman about the priorities of conservative Christian "Zionists" (I'm not sure I would label what they believe "Zionism,' because their beliefs don't have much to do with the reasons actual political Zionism came into existence, but you should pardon the digression). What I don't fully accept is the notion that evangelical Christians are a) truly devoted in a permanent way to the cause of Israel, and b) that their current commitment is deep and abiding, and c) they possess the political infrastructure to protect, over time, Israel in the American foreign policy debate.

Though I don't always subscribe to the view that philo-Semites are simply anti-Semites who like Jews, I do think philo-Semitism, which is rooted in the idea that Jews are somehow different than everyone else, can curdle and become its opposite rather quickly. In this particular case, that of evangelical Christians, I think that this could happen. Remember that evangelical Christians don't often know Jews; what they do know of Jews in America -- that they are mainly liberal -- is not something they like; remember that evangelical leaders have sometimes expressed themselves in crudely anti-Semitic ways (the late Rev. Falwell comes to mind) and remember that before Christian evangelicals decided to like Jews (rather recently) they didn't like Jews at all. (And I think Ackerman is correct when he notes that a future, compromise-oriented Israeli government might very well alienate its evangelical supporters, but that's another subject.) Many evangelical supporters of Israel do not like Israel for what it is, and they do not like Jews for who they are. They like Israel as a steppingstone to the Second Coming, and they like Jews in the abstract because their savior was Jewish.

On the second point, keep this in mind: Though evangelical supporters of Israel outnumber Jewish supporters in America, the quality of their support is very different, and not only in  financial terms. There are quite literally thousands of Jews in America who work full-time -- I mean, in paid positions, underwritten by donations from other Jews -- to buttress Israeli academic, cultural, medical, and charitable institutions, and to buttress the Israel-America political and defense relationship. Tens of thousands of other American Jews stand behind these professionals as lay leaders, sometimes devoting 20, 30 or 40 hours each week to their slice of the cause. And outside this ring are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of other Jews who donate time and money on a regular basis to this relationship. The vast majority of the thousands of rabbis who lead synagogues in every city in America organize much of their professional lives around supporting and explaining Israel as well, from encouraging congregants to buy Israel Bonds to leading communal trips each year to Israel. I simply do not see this level of deep and broad engagement among evangelicals.

There are, of course, organizations and ministers thoroughly devoted to their version of this cause, but Israel, for most evangelicals, is part of package of causes, and their financial and time commitments are not the same as you find among Jews (and many American Jews also have relatives in Israel, which deepens and personalizes the relationship; this cannot be said for evangelicals).

This has been a windbaggy way of saying that this is not merely a numbers game: If the bottom falls out of American Jewish support for Israel, I don't think evangelical Christians would fill the gap. And let's put aside the tragic aspects of this -- the possibility of a divorce between a large sector of American Jewry and the Jewish state, and the devolution of Israel into a country that institutionalizes discrimination, for another time.

NPR's Steve Inskeep has written a fascinating and analytically acute book about the Pakistani mega-city of Karachi. "Instant City" (the title is a reference to Karachi's quick and steroidal growth) takes its readers deep inside an ordinarily-impenetrable city. Inskeep is a brave reporter for working in such a combustible place. His story is not merely about the manifold woes of a single city, or a single country, but about the terrific challenges facing the developing world from rapid population growth, urbanization, sectarianism and corruption. All of this is embedded in a fast-moving narrative (a catastrophic bombing of a Shi'a religious commemoration sets the book in motion). Readers of Goldblog know that its proprietor considers Pakistan to be America's second-biggest foreign policy challenge (after the country just to its west), and Inskeep does a very good job of making the place understandable. What follows is an edited transcript of my interview with him:

Jeffrey Goldberg: I'm sometimes amazed that you turn on a faucet and water comes out in a developing world mega-city. Karachi comes to mind, Cairo comes to mind. We only hear about Karachi when it's dysfunctional. But what keeps it working to the extent it works?

Steve Inskeep: The answer, is it's a massive improvisation. You mentioned water: There's not a lot of running water in neighborhoods that probably house millions of people. You have water delivered by water trucks, you have people steal water, liberate water, the same way they steal electricity. It's a city that has totally outgrown the infrastructure in way that Cairo has, maybe even to a greater degree, because Karachi was a smaller city to begin with.

JG: Why is the government unable to provide basic resources in a reliable way?

SI: You have a country that is focused on external threats. The elites are focused on external threats. They don't necessarily have the resources to deal with internal problems, and with a government that keeps turning over between civilian and military leadership, they don't have the head space or the planning space or the money or the attention span to deal with basic problems. What people do is they improvise their way through the day, improvise their way through their lives. They will dig their own sewers if they don't have them. They will hook up to the nearest power line. Maybe they would pay the utility, but it's not going to get to them anytime soon. This is the sort of thing that gets people through the day, and it makes them feel as if the city isn't going to completely implode.
 
JG: The Shi'a-Sunni split in its most violent manifestation is the launching-point for your book. Could Karachi ever devolve into a Sarajevo?

SI: You have the religious division, the ethnic division, which to some degree have become geographic divisions. People will tell you there were more ethnically-mixed neighborhoods then than there are now. That does raise the possibility of some kind of warfare of the kind you are describing. And you have all of these tensions that grow out of the way the country was formed in the beginning, unresolved questions about how the country is supposed to be organized, how it's supposed to be run, and in an intense city like Karachi these things are exacerbated by all the things you have reported on. You have elites who are focused on external threats, and they don't have time for internal threats. When you have elites who are devoting their resources to nuclear weapons, they don't have the resources to deal with infrastructure.

JG: Imagine if the nuclear program was devoted to building nuclear-powered desalinization plants.

SI: Right, if they had nuclear power plants generating electricity that would be a huge change for the country. And on top of that - and this gets to the divides in society - when you have a government using extremism as an instrument of foreign policy, that is friendly to any number of Islamist groups, you end up having massive side effects of the sort that are visible on the streets of Karachi. Pakistan is a country, long-time residents say, and history will bear this out, that has always had a strand of religious intolerance, but it was a more tolerant place, a more cosmopolitan place, than it was 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. It's more intolerant now.
 
JG: One of the most interesting aspects of your book is your exploration of the societal tensions caused by real estate competition and acquisition of land. It's a common perception that all tension is religious or ethnic in origin.

SI: People are fighting more about power, money and land than necessarily fighting over religious ideology.
 
JG: But religious differences will be employed to advance these arguments?

SI: It may ostensibly be about that, but it's really about power. In a growing city like this one, the most obvious expression of power is land. And in fact those other issues can get tied up with your neighborhood, your own home. We attach some of our identity to the property we may own or the neighborhood in which we live, and in who is moving in and who is moving out. And you have this city where there are these same kind of anxieties and issues but they play out in an atmosphere in which there is very little law and order, and many parts of the city have no law and order at all. And so the conflicts that would bedevil any city to a degree become massive and destabilizing.

JG: What percentage of residents of Karachi pay their taxes?

SI: hardly anybody in Pakistan is paying taxes. There is a long tradition in Pakistan of not paying your taxes.
 
JG: It is amazing that you have a country that has a huge domestic spying apparatus, but that the government is basically non-existent in the area of tax collection.

SI: The military, like the rest of the establishment in Pakistan, has been organized to serve the elites. The elites are the ones with money and they don't necessarily want to pay their taxes. We assume that the military and the ISI have this immense apparatus that can track down people in any number of ways, but somehow the government can't track down people, rich people, who have never paid a dime in taxes.
 
JG: In 1947, independence comes to the subcontinent. Two countries are formed - one is today the world's largest democracy, a fast-growing economy, an open society. The other is Pakistan. They are both born out of the same crisis and they are linguistically and ethnically similar, even religiously similar in one way - there are 200 million Muslims in India. Why is one part of this split dysfunctional?

SI:  One thought is obvious and noted by many people. Pakistan has not managed to have a functioning democracy during all those 60-plus years. They've had a series of military coups. And when you look at their history, it's a history of constantly starting over.  Every military ruler comes in and writes a new constitution or messes with the old one. Then every time a military ruler is pushed out they have to fix the constitution or write another one. So in any of these periods, the country is only four or five years old. India has its own severe problems of governance and even states of emergency, but it has not had a military coup, so there's been the opportunity for some evolution.

JG: Why is Pakistan more prone to coups?

SI: There are a number of reasons for that. First, Pakistan has never had an administrative structure as the Indians did. We can talk about simple mechanical things like the fact that the Indians inherited a capital that already had a bureaucracy. The Pakistanis inherited some people but they didn't have a capital or a bureaucracy. They just had to make it up. The Indians had a leader who took firm control and maintained control until his death 17 years later. In Pakistan, you had a leader who was dying at the moment of independence, and barely lived a year. There are other factors. India is a more diverse society, there are more centers of power, this made it harder for any one person or organization to dominate the country. Pakistan is more diverse than it seems but there is still a relatively small elite and a relative dearth of strong institutions and power centers. It's been easier for one institution to dominate, an institution that has been supported by the United States in a massive way since the 1950s.

There's a scene in the book, in 1957, the U.S. is aiding Pakistan to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in 1950s dollars, and you had Eisenhower in a meeting complaining that we're supporting the military to the exclusion of everything else, and it's the worst possible policy they could have, and he can't think of anything better to do.
 
JG: In this partnership, the Pakistanis aren't the only ones to make the same mistakes over and over again. Here's another image from the book that stayed with me: Nighttime golf at the military's golf course, acres of watered grass. Talk about the symbolism.

SI: This is one of the things that as a journalist, not as a citizen but as a journalist, you love about this story, because you have these abstract notions of power made very concrete. When you look at the real estate, it becomes abundantly clear to you that one institution in the country has first call on the best resources and it is obvious what this means for everybody else. This is not to say that Pakistan shouldn't have an army or doesn't need an army or that they don't live in a dangerous neighborhood, but you have this institution that will steer things in its own direction and do real estate development in a certain way to benefit certain classes of people. And you realize it's not just the military. There are is a lot of money being made there, even as the people on the bottom are straining.

JG: What was your daily life like in Karachi? This is the city in which Danny Pearl was murdered, after all.

SI: I think I behaved in the way reporters behave in dangerous areas. You try to sleep someplace secure. You get up in the morning, you try to make sure you know where you're going, you try to go see the people you're going to see, and you don't linger too long if it's a bad neighborhood, and you keep a low profile. You rely on this, plus the fact that anywhere you go most people are fine, most people are welcoming and in fact eager to tell their story to an American. There are some more extreme elements in Karachi, and because I know what happened to Danny Pearl, you think a little bit more about whether someone knows where you are, are you sure of your contacts, and you take extra care. But even in this situation, I was a little surprised at the more extreme groups. They would want to lecture me about the United States, but once you got there it didn't feel like a terribly hazardous encounter.

JG: Do you think the level of anti-Americanism has gone up over time, or has it stayed constant?

SI: I think in the last couple of years something is shifting, just because the country has been in this constant and increasing state of crisis. I think there was a feeling three or four years ago that the situation was going to improve, or that the military was on its way out. No one saw the financial crisis on the horizon or any of the other things that happened, or even the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. As the war has intensified, frustration in Pakistan has risen as well, because the media will put out a story that for one reason or another, the United States is arranging bombings inside Pakistan, or that the United States is manipulating the Taliban in some way.  There is a vast conspiracy theory that the U.S. is trying to destabilize the country in order to have an excuse to get its hands on the nuclear weapons, as you know. This is a constant factor in people's thinking, especially in the military. When I interviewed people about the bombing that is at the center of my book, I ran across people who said that the Americans were responsible for it.  These are victims who would seemingly have a motivation to try to understand who was really responsible, so that's awful.

I would say at the same time, on an individual level, and I bet you've had the same experience, people are quite welcoming, there's this great culture of hospitality, and you lean on this culture of hospitality. They were especially eager to tell their stories to Americans, in part because there are an incredible number of connections between Pakistan and the United States, because there are so many expatriates here.
 
JG: One of the odd things about Pakistan is that when the electricity goes out, people often just shrug and self self-deprecatingly, 'Pakistan.' There's a kind of inferiority complex at work, it seems.

SI: Absolutely. I don't want to psychoanalyze where it comes from, but people are a little embarrassed by the state of their country. They'll describe their own government as shameful, which doesn't mean they wouldn't support their government in some kind of conflict, but they think they know the score. They're aware of the scale of corruption in the country. Most of all, a lot of people are old enough to remember a time when things didn't seem so chaotic.  I'm not offering my own theory here, but there is a feeling among some people that the culture goes out of its way to make things more difficult than they should be.
 
JG: But if Karachi still works at all, does it mean that perhaps Pakistan can work? Is there anything you saw in the culture that made you think, this place could ultimately work?

SI: There are a lot of reasons I keep thinking that things can't get much worse in this country, and then they get worse. But Karachiites in particular see themselves as survivors, getting through to the next day. I think about the cover of my book, of burning buses, and people on motorcycles riding by. It's a great picture. I didn't take it or pick it. But I looked at it and I thought, wow, what a great photo. I was concerned that people in the city itself would be deeply offended, here I am representing their city with a burning bus. And maybe somebody is offended, but Pakistanis I've talked to about the cover photo have loved it, and say it represents their country and their city. There are constant catastrophes going on, but the guys on the motorbike are going on with their business. And so there is some reason to hope, simply because people have worked out ways to keep it going.
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Ben Smith:

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich dismissed the Palestinian bid for statehood as as the effort of an "invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community."

Gingrich also said the Palestinian Authority, which has typically represented the moderate wing of Palestinian leadership and formally accepts Israel's right to exist, is motivated by "an enormous desire to destroy Israel."

Gingrich's comments, in an interview with The Jewish Channel, edge him and his part further away from the two-state solution embraced over the last decade by presidents of both parties, and are the latest in a series of comments from Republican leaders that will set a sharply confrontational tone toward the Arab world if a Republican is elected next year.

There's no denying that the Palestinians are a people of recent vintage. But so are the Americans.

A number of Goldblog readers have forwarded me this video of Peter Beinart speaking at the recent General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America. These readers are critical of Peter's assertion that Israel is, in essence, forcing a one-state solution on itself by continuing the occupation and settlement of the West Bank. I watched the video, and, alas, I don't find much to dispute with what Peter says. This isn't the easiest thing for me to acknowledge; I disagree with much of Peter's Middle East political analysis, and I disagree with many of his peacemaking suggestions. But he's not wrong about the most crucial thing: Israel will soon enough be forced to face a choice: Grant citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank, or cease to call itself a Jewish democracy. Here is a bit of what Peter said:

The Palestinians of the West Bank have been under Israeli sovereignty since 1967. So to my mind that makes them, whether we like it or not, till we have a Palestinian state, Israelis. There is only one state that has sovereignty and dominion over their lives.. That's the State of Israel...They're not Israeli citizens, but Israel is the state that controls much of their lives.

He goes on to say:

 I want Israel to remain a Jewish state for my children and grandchildren as much as anyone in this room. Where I disagree with some people is at the core of Israel's legitimacy is the fact that it was founded as a democratic and Jewish state.. and delegitimization of Israel will rise in direct proportion to the degree that people believe that Israel is no longer living up to its own founding principles and If Israel can become again a country that offers citizenship to everybody in its borders, irrespective of race, religion, sex and ethnicity, it will not need P.R. firms, because although there will still be hardcore anti-Semites and lunatics out there..,pro-Israel people will be able to go into any room and debate anyone and win. Because democracy is the language of our time, democracy is the lingua franca of our time. you can see even in the Arab world... if Israel becomes in some fundamental way a non-democratic state, you can get 100 P.R. firms and you will gradually lose that debate and more and more empower those people who believe that the creation of a Jewish state was a mistake to begin with.

I think we're only a few years away, at most, from a total South-Africanization of this issue. And if Israelis believe that the vast majority of American Jews -- their most important supporters in the entire world -- are going to sit idly by and watch Israel permanently disenfranchise a permanently-occupied minority population, they're deluding themselves. A non-democratic Israel will not survive in this world. It's an impossibility. So Israel has a choice -- find a way to reverse the settlement process and bring about the conditions necessary to see the birth of a Palestinian state (I'm for unilateral closure of settlements but the military occupation's end will have to be negotiated with the Palestinians) or simply grant the Palestinians on the West Bank the right to vote in Israeli elections. Gaza is an entirely separate problem, but one not solvable so long as Hamas is in charge, but even without Gaza's Arabs, Israel would cease to be a Jewish state if West Bank Arabs became citizens.

It will be extremely difficult for any number of reasons for Israel to leave the West Bank, but it will be impossible for Israel to survive over the long-term if it remains an occupier of a group of people who don't want to be occupied. I understand the security consequences of an Israeli departure from most of the West Bank, but I also understand that there is ultimately no choice. I don't believe a one-state solution is any sort of solution at all; Israel/Palestine will devolve quickly into civil war. The only solution is a two-state solution.

Timothy Stanley writes on Theatlantic.com about Mitt Romney's Mormon-derived Jewy vibe (Goldblog is an expert on that Mormon-Jewy vibe):

The former Massachusetts governor has even picked up some lingo from members of the tribe, as Jews sometimes refer to themselves. In a speech at Yeshiva University in April 2007, Romney said will to succeed at Bain despite his outsider status was pure "chutzpah."

Actually MoTs just say MoT. And I'm not sure using the word "chutzpah" is proof enough of a candidate's Jewiness. Although pronouncing it correctly gets you points, as Michele Bachmann learned, the hard way: