Mr. Rosenberg, you stereotype "the lobby" the way Henry Ford stereotyped Jews. Please tell us who in the lobby is against negotiations?--has AIPAC asked anyone in the House and Senate to sign a letter to Bush or Rice, or sponsor a resolution, opposing the Annapolis talks? Has the American Jewish Committee? Has the Anti-defamation League? Has Hadassah? Has the American Jewish Congress? You know the answer is no.

Yes, there are groups like Zionist Organization of America and individuals within AIPAC who consider Abbas a fool or a willing front for Hamas. But just as you keep saying that the lobby does not spak for all Jews, the right-wing groups like ZOA do not speak for all groups who support the positions of the Government of Israel and who lobby Congress and the Administration to suppport them.

Your commentaries would be far more persuasive if you did not cast them in such black and white terms and avoided generalizing about hundreds of thousands of people.

Being pro-Israel means respecting Israeli people, being anti-Israel means disrespecting Israeli people. M.J. Rosenberg is anti-Israel not because his proposals are wrong, he is anti-Israel because he has no respect for Israeli people.

Boy, you have to admire those Peaceniks: they're fervently, almost religiously dedicated to their cause, to the point that when the choice stands between peace and truth, the latter is readily sacrificed.

Here's an example from Ben Ami's column in the Wash. Post. He writes:

Hamas won the most recent Palestinian national elections in a landslide.

Well, not really a landslide: Hamas got 44 percent of the popular vote, Fatah got 42 percent. Of course, no one fact-checks columnists, right?

Here's another pearl from the same column, a canard often repeated on TPM:

a recent poll in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz found that two-thirds of Israelis favor cease-fire negotiations between their government and Hamas

The question in the above poll was phrased in the context of negotiating the release of a young Israeli soldier kidnapped two years ago -- supposedly by a splinter Hamas group, and held captive ever since inside the Gaza Strip. Hamas demands the release of close to 1500 Pal. prisoners in exchange for that soldier, so the negotiations drag on -- indirectly, through third parties.

Taking this relatively tangential issue and extrapolating the above poll results to mean that there is a clamor among the Israeli population to sit down and talk peace with Hamas, isn't just misleading: it's a lie, and both Mr. Ben Ami and M.J. know it.

The rest of Ben Ami's stuff is boilerplate and could just as easily have been penned by any AIPAC apparatchik, maybe using language that's a bit more diplomatic towards the current Administration and the Christian Zionists.

To echo apacmember's comments from 2-3 weeks ago, except for their positions on Hamas, there aren't that many substantive differences between AIPAC and J Street.

As for the voices that call on future U.S. Administrations to apply pressure on Israel in order to achieve a quick deal with the Pals, I find them not simply wrong, but also highly immoral. After all, our interests in the region are predominantly economic, whereas Israel's interests are existential.

To repeat myself. Congratualtions on putting your message out. Maybe it is a measure of your success in driving the right wing Likudnics in a frensy of denuciation against your well measured article (as is so well shown in the above posts}.

Maybe it is a measure of your success in driving the right wing Likudnics in a frensy [sic] of denuciation against your well measured article (as is so well shown in the above posts}.

I am always intrigued by the custom of these Middle East discussions where it is routine and mundane to reflexively characterize one set of adversaries with the most extreme rhetoric ("racist," "neocon," "right wing Likudnik," etc.), while any examination of antisemitic implications in the broader context of the regional conflict is presumed as an insidious attempt to "stifle debate." When you make the rules, "heads we win/tails you lose" is the best there is.

IAF. I dont know how or why that piece came down. I you send me a cached copy, I'll put it back up. I know that a few of you guys live and die by my posts and I don't want you to suffer. Show me how, and it will go right back up. I liked that piece.

I was going to put this on M.J. Rosenberg's thread on the issue of Robert Malley being removed from the list of advisors to Obama, but while I was preparing it, it seems to have disappeared. I presume Mr. Rosenberg removed it himself since he has been known to do this with threads in the past, and therefore it will not reappear.

There is an excerpt related to the topic in
THE LONG RUN; Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side
By Jo Becker and Christopher Drew
from the May 11, 2008 New York Times.
This relatively short section of the long article deals with his approach to Israel/Palestine in preparation for his Senate run. I do highly recommend reading the entire article at the link:

Straddling Two Worlds

As Mr. Obama moved closer to running, he paid a visit to James S. Crown and his father, Lester, billionaire investors who presided over a sprawling Chicago business dynasty and prominent leaders in the Jewish community.

As the meeting ended, the younger Mr. Crown said, his father — who is “fairly hawkish” about Israel’s security — was noncommittal about Mr. Obama. But, James Crown said, “I pulled him down to my office, and I said, ‘Hey, look, I think you should run, and I want you to win.’ ”

In courting families like the Crowns, Mr. Obama was gaining entree into the upper echelon of the city’s corporate boardrooms, a ripe source of campaign money. But he was also seeking to broaden his appeal to Jewish voters, and he was wading more deeply into one of the touchiest issues in American politics: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For years, the Obamas had been regular dinner guests at the Hyde Park home of Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago and an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1990s peace talks. Mr. Khalidi said the talk would often turn to the Middle East, and he talked with Mr. Obama about issues like living conditions in the occupied territories. In 2000, the Khalidis held a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama during his Congressional campaign. Both Mr. Khalidi and Mr. Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada, said Mr. Obama had spoken at the fund-raiser and had called for the United States to adopt a more “evenhanded approach” to the Palestinian-Israel conflict.

Still, Mr. Khalidi said ascertaining Mr. Obama’s precise position was often difficult. “You may come away thinking, ‘Wow, he agrees with me,’ ” he said. “But later, when you get home and think about it, you are not sure.”

A.J. Wolf, a Hyde Park rabbi who is a friend of Mr. Obama’s and has often invited Mr. Khalidi to speak at his synagogue, said Mr. Obama had disappointed him by not being more assertive about the need for both Israel and the Palestinians to move toward peace. “He’s played all those notes right for the Israel lobby,” said Mr. Wolf, who is sometimes critical of Israel.

During the Senate campaign, Mr. Obama joined in a “Walk for Israel” rally along Lake Michigan on Israel Solidarity Day. The Crowns and other Jewish leaders raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for him. Several days before the primary in 2004, some of his Jewish supporters took offense that Mr. Obama had not taken the opportunity on a campaign questionnaire to denounce Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or to strongly support Israel’s building of a security fence.

But in a sign of how far Mr. Obama had come in his coalition-building, friends from the American Israel Political Action Committee, the national pro-Israel lobbying group, helped him rush out a response to smooth over the flap.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Obama blamed a staff member for the oversight, and expressed the hope that “none of this has raised any questions on your part regarding my fundamental commitment to Israel’s security.” Mr. Abunimah has written of running into the candidate around that time and has said that Mr. Obama told him: “I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping that when things calm down I can be more upfront.”

The Obama camp has denied Mr. Abunimah’s account. Mr. Khalidi, who is now the director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, said, “I’m unhappy about the positions he’s taken, but I can’t say I’m terribly disappointed.” He added: “People think he’s a saint. He’s not. He’s a politician.”

Mr. Crown, for his part, could not be more pleased. Since Mr. Obama was elected to the Senate Mr. Crown said that even his father had been won over, helping to arrange meetings for Mr. Obama in a visit to Israel. James Crown said he had “never had even the slightest glimmer of concern that Barack wasn’t terrific” on Israel — a view that Mr. Obama jokingly reinforced at a meeting last year in Mr. Crown’s office.

As Mr. Mikva recounted it, after discussing a lukewarm response by more conservative Jews to some of Mr. Obama’s comments, “I turned to Barack and said, ‘Your name could be Chaim Weizmann, the founder of the Jewish state, and some of these Jewish Republicans wouldn’t vote for you.’ ” And, Mr. Mikva said, “He joked, ‘Well, you know my name is “Baruch” Obama.’ ”

But for all of Mr. Obama’s attentiveness to Jewish concerns about Israel, Republican Party officials have made it clear that they think this is an area of vulnerability. Though Mr. Obama has condemned Hamas, a militant Palestinian group, as a terrorist organization, just last week Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, suggested that the group wanted to see Mr. Obama in the White House. Mr. Obama denounced that suggestion as a “smear.”