It's getting fun over at the Atlantic.

Andrew Sullivan has been getting better and better on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. After a decade or so of keeping quiet on the 42-year occupation (probably to avoid offending his Likud mentor, Martin Peretz), Sullivan is saying what he really thinks.

And Sullivan's current Atlantic colleague is taking it personally. Jeff Goldberg complains about Andrew breaking with him publicly on Israel. "This is the thanks I get," Goldberg writes, "for defending him [Sullivan] as a Zionist."

Of course, not everyone thinks being labeled a Zionist is a compliment. It seems to me that Sullivan is even-handed, as sympathetic to Palestinian aspirations for a state in West Bank/Gaza/East Jerusalem as he is to a Jewish state within the '67 borders.

He is also one of the most influential journalists in the world.

Goldberg, ever predictable, is discomfited by Sullivan who is anything but. The Gaza war has succeeded in opening another pair of very significant eyes.

Also, Phil Weiss on New York Times columnist Roger Cohen demolishing WSJ's Brett Stephen on Iran at a synagogue debate. Beautiful.

NOTE: MEDIA MATTERS will begin distributing my weekly column on the Mideast after Thanksgiving. If you want to received it by e-mail, write to me at mjrosenberg8@gmail.com. Write subscribe in the subject line.

The neocons (Bill Kristol. Jeff Goldberg, Frank Gaffney, John Bolton, Martin Peretz, Daniel Pipes, Charles Krauthammer, etc) are arguing among themselves about how much blame Islam deserves for the Fort Hood slaughter.

In response, Americans for Peace Now produced a little primer on Israeli or (using the neocon categories) Jewish religious violence.

And this primer, helpful as it is, barely scratches the surface. The entire settlement enterprise in the occupied territories was ignited by religious fanatics. And the settlement enterprise is violent by its very nature -- displacing Palestinians, starving Gaza, restricting Palestinian movement and, when convenient for religious settlers and/or soldiers, beating and killing those who get in the way. The religious crazies -- supposedly so deeply in love with the Land of Israel -- also rip out olive groves and literally poison the land with chemicals to destroy Palestinian agriculture.

So is Judaism violent? No, but Jewish extremists are, just like their Muslim counterparts. As for Christianity, one need hardly elaborate on the Christianity-blessed extermination of native peoples worldwide or the Holocaust's Christian roots.

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Just yesterday US mediator, George Mitchell, told the Israelis that the United States opposed expanding the Gilo settlement in East Jerusalem. According to Israeli press reports, Mitchell said that moving ahead with settlement expansion now could kill the peace process.

So what did the Israelis do today? They approved the Gilo expansion.

This then may be President Obama's last chance to get it right. In his Cairo speech in the spring he demanded that the Israelis freeze settlements. Prime Minister Netanyahu ignored him except to make clear that he had no intention of freezing anything. Then the Secretary of State made it worse by going to Israel and praising Netanyahu for his "unprecedented" moves for peace.

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Yossi Sarid, the longtime head of Israel's Meretz party and a staunch Zionist, writes in Ha'aretz that the Palestinians should unilaterally declare a state now (like the Jews did in 1948) in West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

It's a very interesting idea. And it has a lot to recommend it. He writes:

"Abbas owes it to his people, to himself, and to us. This week, there were reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finds this possibility very scary, and he expects the Americans to nip it in the bud. But his nightmare is our only chance for an end to the occupation in our time.

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I'm going to write about Charles Krauthammer today without telling about the time he freaked out royally in synagogue on Yom Kippur.

I'll get right to his column today which is a diatribe against the media for not attributing the actions of the Fort Hood killer to his religion. Actually, I have noticed no such reluctance. There is hardly a story about Nidal Hassan that does not mention his adherence to the most extreme and violent strains of Islam. And that is the way it should be. His views matter so do their source.

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I knew Marc Adin, author of this piece, during our childhood days in Kingston, New York. I remember him as pretty good at Nok Hockey which was the main fun thing at our local Jewish center.

Anyway, Marc's life spun off in a different direction from the rest of our crowd when he went to Vietnam.

This is his powerful story. And not just his.

On November 4, the House of Representatives voted 344-36 (22 voted present) in favor of a resolution condemning the Goldstone Report, which chronicled the war crimes committed during last year's Gaza war. Not only that, in a break with normal procedure, the House refused to agree to Rep. Keith Ellison's (D-MN) request to publish the Goldstone Report in the Congressional Record. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) objected to publication and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman (D-CA) agreed with her. Bottom line: the American people will not be able to access the Goldstone Report on a US government website (which was surely Ros-Lehtinen's intention). Note: the Congressional Record routinely publishes what it called "extraneous material. In this case the Goldstone report was the subject of the vote which made it especially important that it be published in the record of the House. Plus Rep. Brian Baird on the Gaza slaughter.

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Crisis.

President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu met for two hours last night. Here is the post meeting statement from the White House.
"The President and Prime Minister Netanyahu discussed a number of issues in the U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship. The President reaffirmed our strong commitment to Israel's security, and discussed security cooperation on a range of issues. The President and Prime Minister also discussed Iran and how to move forward on Middle East peace."

Cold. No photo. No reporters in the room. The President did not escort the Prime Minister to his car (or to the Metro) and the White House issued a statement that said nothing. It was written before the meeting as it made no reference to anything that occurred during the meeting.

Clearly, Mahmoud Abbas outsmarted everybody by threatening to resign. He forced the United States to look into the abyss -- and then push Bibi right to its edge. This was the least friendly meeting between an American president and an Israeli prime minister in memory. The message: don't play with us, Bibi.

Will the administration stick to its guns? Who knows? Its tendency is to follow pressure on Israel with apologetics (like going along with Israel's teeth gnashing over Goldstone and forcing the Palestinians to go along with it too). If it backs down again, its effectiveness in the Israeli-Palestinian arena is done. They need to stick.. For America's sake, and for Israel's and the Palestinians.'

Get ready for a big AIPAC/Congressional push back. Obama should let them sweat too. He has the power (on foreign policy, Congress is near irrelevant unless a President is intimidated by it).

Yesterday Joltin Joe Lieberman tried to put the Fort Hood slaughter in a religious context, specifically in an Islamic context.

Of course, as a self-proclaimed "man of faith", he won't say that the problem is not Islam but fanatics of all faiths. I mean, just because the history of the world has been scarred by one religious massacre or assassination after another by people of all faiths is no reason not to single out Muslims. Well, not for Joe, anyway. Or the supremely nutty Eric Cantor who believes that all Jews everywhere, including here, are under attack by Muslim "men with guns."

These characters may not recall that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Orthodox Jew, a killing that was justified theologically by ultra-Orthodox rabbis both before and since the killing. Or that physician Baruch Goldstein, a crazed religious nut, opened fire at a mosque in Hebron and killed 27 worshipers while they prayed. Today his grave is a shrine in Hebron for lunatic settlers.

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It has become increasingly clear that President Obama's term is going to be a very difficult slog. We live at a time when Congress no longer believes -- and that includes much of the President's own party -- that a landslide election victory by a Presidential candidate means that the new President has a mandate to enact the program he ran on.

I think Obama will be able to get the key elements of his program enacted, not all of it, but enough of it to make him a successful President. Of course, nobody knows.

In any case, either in 2010 (God forbid) or 2012 (more likely), the Republicans will be back. And, when they return, they will be worse than ever -- especially now with the Christianist bigots running the party.

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I will answer that question right off. As far as I know (and that is all that I can legitmiately comment on) he is.

The only reason I ask the question is because Goldberg, the Atlantic blogger, has joined with the usual neocons suspects to assert with ugly vehemence that the Iranian-American scholar, Trita Parsi, is not a loyal American but an operative of the loathsome Iranian regime.

Read this by Daniel Luban. And this by Spencer Ackerman (there are now a dozen similar pieces on the web) describing precisely who Trita is, what he stands for and what the neocons (now hell bent on an attack on Iran by the end of the year) are saying about him. Why Trita? Because he is the most effective advocate for diplomacy with Iran rather than listening to the Israeli hawks and their boys here.

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Here is today's Haaretz It looks like the administration has backed down on its criticism of settlements and that America is, yet again, putting all the onus on the Palestinians. Bibi is one happy guy today.

Meanwhile, the House is planning to vote Tuesday to support the Israeli position that the Gaza war was a praiseworthy exercise in Israeli restraint and sensitivity to civilians.

The good news is that J Street is opposed to it.

The bad news is that the 800 pound gorilla, AIPAC, and its satellite organizations are pushing it hard.

The House resolution which will pass on Tuesday basically endorses everything Israel did in the horrific Gaza war while bashing Judge Richard Goldstone for documenting war crimes committed in that war (320 dead Palestinian kids!).

After the vote I'll post the roll call and you will see that some of your favorite "courageous" liberals are none too courageous when it comes to this issue. Some of the very House members who denounce the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war and God knows how many other US military actions (often rightly) go mute when it comes to Israel. In fact, most of them do. In other words, they are courageous when there is no cost for it. (I'm curious about my current hero, Alan Grayson. Does he buckle on this issue?)

Passing this resolution will damage US security by stating to the world that when Bibi asks us to jump, we jump even higher. (Note to Congress: Did you ever consider just saying you don't agree with Goldstone's findings or did AIPAC reject that approach?)

Here is the Post story. Here is the resolution. Here is a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report by its fine reporter, Ron Kampeas, showing just how bad this resolution is.

Next week: the names of the Democrats who vote for it, just so you know why John F. Kennedy would not be writing "Profiles in Courage" about Congress in the 21st century.
I douby they will pass it by voice vote because then they can't get "credit" from AIPAC.

It is hard to imagine that the United States Congress can outdo its own record of rousing support for any and all Israeli actions and policies. But now, according to a report by Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent, it is preparing to do just that.

Next week the Democratic House is slated to vote on a resolution - introduced by Howard Berman (chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), Gary Ackerman (chairman of the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East) and two Republicans, Ranking Members Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Dan Burton.

The legislators pushing the resolution say the Goldstone report is unfair and biased against Israel. Although the report condemns both Israel and Hamas for "war crimes," the representatives take strong issue with Goldstone's finding that Israel took little care to protect civilians during its massive onslaught.

Of course, the numbers themselves support Goldstone. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, "Israeli security forces killed 1,382 Palestinians during the 22-day military operation. Of those, 774 did not take part in the hostilities, including 320 minors and 109 women over the age of 18."

Number of Israelis killed: 9 (3 by friendly fire).

The resolution ignores those numbers, offering not even a word of sympathy to those who were killed. 320 kids!

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