Lawrence Wright wrote The Looming Tower and is generally considered to be a reasonable journalistic voice. His piece in the current New Yorker should tarnish his reputation for seriousness.

It is a long and credulous recitation of stories he heard on a trip to Gaza. It is at turns deceptive, inaccurate, incomplete, and downright mendacious. He calls Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, “a Fatah loyalist.” Fayyad is a member of the Third Way party, not Fatah. But that’s a nitpick. Here is a good example of one of Wright’s many more serious distortions:

We drove past the site of a former Jewish settlement. Across the road were the remains of the greenhouses that the settlers had left behind, intact, with the understanding that Gaza farmers would take them over. The greenhouses were meant to become an important part of the agricultural economy. Gaza’s main exports were strawberries, cherry tomatoes, and carnations, destined mainly for Israel and Europe. But then the borders clamped shut and the fruit rotted. The carnations were fed to livestock. Now the greenhouses are nothing more than bare frames, their tattered plastic roofing fluttering in the sea breeze.

So, there were nice greenhouses, but then “the borders clamped shut” and “now the greenhouses are nothing more than bare frames” — just one more example of Israeli cruelty and collective punishment. But how, exactly, did the greenhouses become bare frames? How can border closings physically destroy buildings? Isn’t this a bizarre and confusing way to describe a series of events?

It is written this way because Wright is trying to deceive his readers. He wants to leave the impression that Israeli border closures starved the Gaza economy so completely that the Palestinians had to let perfectly good greenhouses fall into decrepitude.

But that’s not what happened — not even close. Here is an AP report dated September 13, 2005 — days after the disengagement:

Looters strip Gaza greenhouses

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip – Palestinians looted dozens of greenhouses on Tuesday, walking off with irrigation hoses, water pumps and plastic sheeting in a blow to fledgling efforts to reconstruct the Gaza Strip.

American Jewish donors had bought more than 3,000 greenhouses from Israeli settlers in Gaza for $14 million last month and transferred them to the Palestinian Authority. …

Palestinian police stood by helplessly Tuesday as looters carted off materials from greenhouses in several settlements, and commanders complained they did not have enough manpower to protect the prized assets. In some instances, there was no security and in others, police even joined the looters, witnesses said.

This is a well-known story — one of the best-known stories of the disengagement, in fact. It has been reported and discussed extensively. Why would Wright lament the greenhouses without pointing out that the Palestinians themselves destroyed them? When you read the piece, you’ll understand why.

Gold, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, is debating the author of the Goldstone report today at 5 p.m. at Brandeis. The matchup can be streamed live here. I have a feeling this event won’t go so well for Goldstone. Maybe after the pummeling is over, he can write a report condemning Dore Gold’s illegal and disproportionate debating tactics.

Israeli Navy commandos seized a cargo ship last night en route from Iran to Syria. It contained 10 times the arms that the Karine A attempted to deliver from Iran to the Palestinians in 2002, enough weapons, according to the head of the Israeli Navy, to keep Hezbollah supplied in a hot war for a month. Along with 3,000 rockets, the ship contained:

107-millimeter rockets, 60-millimeter mortars, 7.62-rifle Kalashnikov-ammunition, F-1 grenades and 122-millimeter Katyusha rockets. On the side of some of the cases inside the containers the words “parts of bulldozers” was written.

The Syrian foreign minister, Walid Moallem, soared to Baghdad Bob levels of hilarity by trying to deny the reality of what the Israelis discovered.

“Unfortunately there are official pirates disrupting the movement of goods between Iran and Syria,” he told reporters on a visit to Teheran. “I stress, the ship was not carrying Iranian arms bound for Syria, nor was it carrying material for manufacturing weapons in Syria. It was carrying [commercial] goods from Syria to Iran.”

Moallem says there were no arms on board. The IDF has released a video of the ship’s weapons being unloaded in the port of Ashdod. There are rows and rows of mortar shells, rockets, and crates filled with grenades:

What will Obama say about all this? Being that evidence of Iranian-Syrian hostile intent complicates the administration’s desire for “engagement,” whatever that means anymore, the answer is: probably nothing.

What will the human-rights hustlers say? Where is Judge Goldstone? Where is the flurry of outraged press releases from Human Rights Watch? These weapons are intended for one purpose only — to terrorize Israeli civilians and drag the region into war. Shouldn’t this be an easy call for peace-loving human-rights activists? HRW has condemned Israel for violating international law over the way it funds public schools. I would bet a large sum that HRW will say nothing about the 500 tons of arms Iran just tried to send to Hezbollah. Priorities, you see.

And where is the UN Security Council? The arms ship violates numerous UNSC resolutions banning Iran from exporting weapons and forbidding the arming of Hezbollah. Don’t expect any leadership from the Obama administration on this score, either; to make a big deal out of Iranian bad faith would be tantamount to admitting that the engagement policy is the stuff of fantasy.

Helena Cobban sits on the board of Human Rights Watch and was a member of the blogger panel at the J Street conference. She recently ruminated on the question of why so many Jews are disgusted with the Goldstone/HRW treatment of Israel (hat tip: Richard Landes). Her answer:

But the Michael Goldfarbs, the Norman Podhoretz’s, the Alan Dershowitz’s, and Robert Bernsteins of this world truly don’t get this. They truly think there is something so “special” about Jewish people and their experience in the world that somehow the [sic] (and especially the allegedly “Jewish” state, Israel) deserve to be given a free pass on the application of any neutral standards of behavior, such as would be applied to anyone else.

Ah, so the Jews think they’re superior to everyone else — where have we heard that one before? And what is the “allegedly” Jewish state? (Sorry, I’ve misquoted her. That’s the allegedly “Jewish” state.) Her writing is so sloppy that it’s impossible to discern what specific slander she has in mind.

Cobban concludes:

So now, frustrated by their inability to dream up a “Cast lead II,” Israel’s hardliners are taking out their frustrations by railing against Goldstone and “demanding deep changes in the laws of war.”

The pop psychology here is entertaining but of a thematic piece with the rest of her thinking. The criticism of Goldstone, she intones, is not serious or rational — it is in fact the redirected frustration of a predatory and sadistic people whose desire for more war on Palestinian civilians has been thwarted. Get it?

Just to remind people again: this petulant woman sits on the board of Human Rights Watch.

These remarks got Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, booed at the J Street conference. But that was predictable. What’s important is his critique.

This is not the time for a full discussion of the Goldstone report, which in my view was fatally flawed. There are many questions that one might legitimately ask about Israel’s conduct of the war: Why was it necessary for Israeli forces to use so much firepower? How do you carry out a war against a terrorist organization that attacks your citizens and hides amid a civilian population? What risks are Israeli soldiers obligated to take, beyond those inherent in combat, to prevent harm to civilians? The Israelis that I know are asking these questions; it is right for them to do so, and it is right for the government of Israel to deal with these issues.

But the Goldstone report chose not to focus on these questions. Its central assertion is that Israel targeted Palestinian civilians, intentionally causing their deaths. This is a stunning and outrageous charge. I reject it, the people of Israel reject it, and – most important – it is not supported by the facts. This is not a thoughtful judicial report attempting to make difficult moral judgments. It is a political report based largely on unverifiable Palestinian claims that is meant to be used as a sledgehammer to bludgeon Israel.

If you doubt this, read the report. Its reasoning is shaky in some places and more often absurd. The accusations against Palestinians are expressed in language that is understated and restrained, while the accusations against Israel are expressed in wording that is sweeping, bold, and absolute. And upon closer inspection, many of these charges include phrases such as “it seems that,” “it would appear,” and “we have no definite proof but…” In an interview in the Forward, Goldstone acknowledged that nothing in the report could be used as proof in a court of law and that it contained no actual “evidence” of wrongdoing by Israel. Among the public that heard about this report and the diplomatic community that seized upon it, I doubt if one person in a hundred is aware of what we are now told is the report’s limited scope. Didn’t Justice Goldstone have an obligation to make this clear from the beginning? And this too: you cannot be a moral agent if you serve an immoral master, and Richard Goldstone should be ashamed of himself for working under the auspices of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

It will be important for Israel to continue with the investigations that it has already begun. Still, I suspect and I fear that the damage has already been done. This report, no matter how compelling the refutations that follow, will become a staple of U.N. gatherings and international meetings. It will be used to incite against Israel and to portray every Israeli leader connected with the military as a war criminal. It will become an instrument to inflame Palestinian extremism. And it will be invoked every time that Israel defends itself against attacks on its civilian centers. In short, it has made the work of peace much harder than it already was.

Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard is at the event and has been filing some must-read reports. Apparently the conference, especially the blogger panel, is living up to expectations. Elie Wiesel has been mocked, Walt and Mearsheimer have been defended, Jeffrey Goldberg has been repudiated, and the “one-state solution” has been applauded. Sounds pro-Israel to me.

Click here to read more.

Robert Bernstein, the founder and for 20 years the chair of Human Rights Watch, has fired back in response to HRW’s misrepresentation of his New York Times op-ed.

Jane Olson, current chair of Human Rights Watch and Jonathan Fanton, past chair wrote that they “were saddened to see Robert L. Bernstein argue that Israel should be judged by a different human rights standard than the rest of the world.” This is not what I believe or what I wrote in my op-ed piece.

I believe that Israel should be judged by the highest possible standard and I have never argued anything else. What is more important than what I believe, or what Human Rights Watch believes, is that Israelis themselves believe they should be held to the highest standard.

That is why they have 80 Human Rights organizations challenging their government daily. Does any other country in the Middle East have anything remotely near that? That is why they have a vibrant free press. Does any other country in the Middle East have anything remotely near that? That is why they have a democratically elected government. That is why they have a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political societies, etc etc etc.

I have argued that open societies , while far from perfect, have ways to correct themselves and that is particularly true in the case of Israel. Millions of Arabs, on the other hand, live in societies where there is little respect for or protection of human rights.

Bernstein’s op-ed was perfectly clear, and the misrepresentation of it perfectly intentional. HRW’s most serious problem is not with Israel — it is with honesty.

That is the oft-repeated formulation that describes the problem with the participation of Islamist and terrorist groups in elections. They pretend to be committed to democratic politics so long as democratic politics provide a vehicle for them to take power. But the moment elections no longer favor them, they no longer favor elections.

Many have been wondering where Hamas would come down on this question since the group’s rise to power was given democratic legitimacy in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. It appears that we have an answer. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA and the leader of Fatah, has announced that he will schedule presidential and legislative elections for January 24th, 2010. Hamas’s reaction?

Salah Bardawil, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, said Abbas’ “declaration will blow away in the wind.”

Hamas’s Syrian leadership added:

“Mahmoud Abbas cannot hold elections only in the West Bank,” said Moussa Abu Marzouk, Hamas’ Syrian-based deputy political leader. “Everything he says on this subject is to put pressure on Hamas.”

So Hamas will not participate in elections, and will in fact attempt to undermine and delegitimize them. This is unsurprising to most observers of Islamist politics. But then, there are legions of westerners who counsel Israel and the United States to “engage” Hamas. To take one of many examples, here is Daniel Levy, a leading spokesman for this view:

One can’t marginalize Gaza — it’s part of the two-state solution. And we’re most certainly going to have to bring Hamas inside the tent to make this work. I think that’s doable and the first imperative for the U.S. is to leave the Palestinians to do their own internal politics, and to reconstitute their own reformed national movement.

The obvious question is: If Hamas will neither participate in elections nor temper its ambitions, how do we bring it “inside the tent”? The engagers are being either lazy or dishonest when they take as their unspoken premise that Hamas itself desires to come into the tent. What if Hamas cares more about maintaining its ideological purity and guarding its Gaza fiefdom than it does about earning good PR from the West? Indeed, isn’t it perfectly rational that Hamas should seek to protect its hard-earned sovereignty in Gaza by rejecting participation in a process whose goal is ending that sovereignty?

It is precisely the fear of becoming entangled in a system that it cannot dominate — i.e., elections or a national-unity government — that provokes Hamas’s rejectionism. As David Makovsky notes,

Surveys conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, led by Khalil Shikaki, found that current Palestinian support for Hamas stands at 28 percent, compared to 44 percent for Fatah. In fact, Hamas has not polled better than Fatah since June 2006.

The lesson here is obvious, but alas too simple for sophisticates like Levy: Hamas will not participate in elections. It will not compromise on any of its positions in order to join a national-unity government with Fatah. It will not participate in a peace process or agree to any previous Palestinian agreements. Why would it do any of these things — why would it come into “the tent” — when doing so would require the group to surrender its one great accomplishment: its control over Gaza?

Steve Clemons broke the news yesterday that Kadima-party leader Tzipi Livni has written a letter expressing support for some of J Street’s views. But it was hoped that she would actually attend the J Street conference. Perhaps the reason she will not be appearing in person is that half the attendees of the conference want her tried as a war criminal in The Hague, and she’s afraid that the members of the blogger panel may try to stage a citizen’s arrest.

The past week for J Street has been an example of what happens to a political group unable to maintain some semblance of ideological discipline. The group’s pre-conference problems all derive from the exposure of the radicals in its midst: the crackpots who compare Gaza to Auschwitz; the anti-Zionists like Avram Burg and Bernard Avishai; the blogger panel composed of shrill fanatics and slanderers of the Jewish State. Instead of cultivating an image of seriousness and maturity, the conference has sharpened the public’s perception of a group dedicated to apologizing for and attempting to sanitize people who have made careers out of antagonizing Israel.

Meanwhile, the group reserves its real indignation for people like Sen. Joe Lieberman and Michael Goldfarb. All this does is create fodder for the charge that it’s a Trojan Horse for anti-Zionism. Given its record, I can’t really disagree that this is its purpose. Jeremy Ben-Ami told Politico that “we are at the center of debate and controversy after only 18 months, and this is a real impact and a success.” He doesn’t seem to understand the difference between being controversial and being influential, or the way the former characteristic can undermine the latter. The burden has shifted very publicly onto J Street to prove its detractors wrong, and that’s a bad position to be in.

I didn’t want to devote any more time to this matter, but Matt Yglesias is very upset over what I wrote yesterday. He says:

But a liberal democracy can’t just say “we’re a liberal democracy!” and thereby evade questions about actual human rights practices. Part of being a liberal democracy is to, in practice, attempt to avoid human rights violations and attempt to investigate allegations that they’ve taken place.

The link in his post is to the Israeli human-rights group B’tselem, which, like the UN Human Rights Council that Yglesias refuses to question, has a long record of hostility to the IDF. And B’tselem, like Goldstone, has been called out repeatedly and credibly on its own biases and errors.

But never mind that for now. The link to B’tselem is meant as a rebuttal to those of us who criticize the Goldstone Report and its sponsor, the UN Human Rights Council. But because Yglesias doesn’t know much about these matters, he doesn’t realize that B’tselem joined the ranks of the Goldstone and UN critics:

“There’s no question that the HRC, which mandated the Goldstone [fact-finding mission into the Gaza fighting], has an inappropriate, disproportionate fixation with Israel,” [Jessica Montell, executive director of B'tselem] said, adding that the Council was “a political body made up of diplomats, not human rights experts, which means that the powerful states are never going to come under scrutiny the way the powerless will. So China, Russia and the US will never have commission of inquiry, regardless of how their crimes rank relative to Israeli crimes.”

Furthermore, the Goldstone Report itself, which was presented in its final version to the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, is “disagreeable” and mistaken in some of its gravest accusations against Israel, she believes. These include the claim that Israel intentionally targeted the civilian population rather than Hamas, and the “weak, hesitant way that the report mentions Hamas’s strategy of using civilians [in combat].”

The executive director of B’tselem made the very same criticisms of Goldstone that we evil apologists for Israeli militarism have been making, yet Yglesias points to B’tselem as Exhibit A in his defense of Goldstone. Whoops.

Andrew Sullivan, now a leading spokesman for the UN Human Rights Council approach to Israel, lists as his quote of the day the following inanity from the Bobby Bigwheel of the Juicebox Mafia, Matt Yglesias:

“If people want to say that the whole quest to articulate objective human rights standards and international humanitarian law is inherently futile or misguided, then fine. But an awful lot of people who claim not to believe that seem to want to turn around and reject the underlying premises of the endeavor when it turns out that Israel—like its adversaries—sometimes violates those standards,” – Matt Yglesias.

It turns out that Hamas and Hezbollah sometimes violate human rights standards? The self-declared purpose of these groups is to destroy Israel and murder Jews everywhere through the use of terrorism. They sometimes violate human rights standards? Every moment of their existence is a violation of human rights standards.

This is where the Juiceboxers and their new playground chaperone repudiate one of the most important tenets of international legal and humanitarian traditions: the concept of jus ad bellum, which asks the question of whether instigating hostilities is legitimate. To put it simply, this is the moral distinction between killing an intruder who seeks to murder your family and being the intruder himself. In the former case, you have a right to open fire. In the latter case, you have no right to expect not to be on the receiving end of open fire.

Yet Yglesias and Sullivan do not acknowledge any such distinction. To them, there appears to be little or no moral difference between the al-Qassam Brigades and the Israeli army, because the intentions of these two fighting forces count for nothing. On one side, there is the desire to terrorize, murder, and hopefully commit genocide against the Jews (or, as Yglesias puts it, Hamas and Hezbollah are “mean”); and on the other, there is the desire to prevent the perpetration of those things and defend a liberal, democratic way of life. Sullivan is quite clear about his indifference to all this, writing: “The only salient question is: did Israel commit war crimes in Gaza?”

I think the only salient questions are: Who keeps starting wars with Israel? Why do they start them, and what are they trying to accomplish? And who bears responsibility for the ensuing destruction? And no, for the record, Israel did not commit war crimes in Gaza. Watch Richard Kemp’s remarkable UN testimony if you disagree. You won’t see his presentation debated on Sullivan’s blog because it does not provide an opportunity for obnoxious and empty moral posturing.

In case you missed it, yesterday something very important happened: Bob Bernstein, the founder and for 20 years the chair of Human Rights Watch, published an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the organization for its obsessive attacks on Israel. He wrote that HRW is “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

HRW was quick to offer a response — and it is a pathetically weak and deceptive one. A quick fisking:

Human Rights Watch does not believe that the human rights records of “closed” societies are the only ones deserving scrutiny.

A classic red-herring argument. Nowhere did Bernstein argue that open societies should not be subject to scrutiny. What he said is that the amount of attention HRW pays to Israel is wildly out of proportion to Israel’s violations, especially when Israel is compared with the Middle East’s dozens of dictatorships. Misrepresenting the plain meaning of Bernstein’s argument allows HRW to rebut an accusation that he never made. The press release continues:

Human Rights Watch does not devote more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region, or in the world. We’ve produced more than 1,700 reports, letters, news releases, and other commentaries on the Middle East and North Africa since January 2000, and the vast majority of these were about countries other than Israel.

Another red herring — this one with some clever weasel phrasing. Bernstein never said that HRW “devotes more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region.” He wrote that “Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.” The obvious difference is that Bernstein was comparing the number of reports on Israel to the number of reports on any other individual country in the Middle East. HRW presents Bernstein as claiming that HRW writes more reports on Israel than on all the countries in the Middle East combined. Obviously, HRW cannot contest the accuracy of Bernstein’s statement, so it dishonestly responds to a charge he never made.

It is not the case that Human Rights Watch had “no access to the battlefield” after the Israeli operation in Gaza in January 2009. Although the Israeli government denied us access, our researchers entered Gaza via the border with Egypt and conducted extensive interviews.

Human Rights Watch is apparently incapable of dealing with criticism on its own terms. Bernstein did not argue that HRW had no access to the battlefield after the war was over, as HRW claims he said. What Bernstein in fact said was that HRW was not present on the battlefield during the war, therefore limiting its ability to know what happened and to make war-crimes judgments.

The dishonesty and manipulativeness of HRW’s response to Bernstein is but a small manifestation of the organization’s larger problems: its inability to engage honestly with the arguments of its detractors, and the related problem of the unreliability of the group’s reporting on the Middle East.

Yesterday, a suicide bomber in Iran detonated himself, killing seven — seven! — commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the personal terrorist army of the Iranian regime. The IRGC was created by Ayatollah Khomeini in the opening moments of his rule following the Iranian revolution in 1979. It first served as Khomeini’s personal goon squad for crushing internal rivals and protecting that rule. It soon graduated into international terrorism, serving as a training and advising cadre for Hezbollah and other groups. The IRGC has been all over Iraq in recent years and has a great deal of American blood on its hands.

It is curious that the State Department would leap into action upon hearing the news to say the following:

“We condemn this act of terrorism and mourn the loss of innocent lives,” State Department Spokesman Ian Kelly said in a statement in Washington.

“Reports of alleged US involvement are completely false,” he added.

Why does the Obama administration work so hard to always reassure the Iranian regime that the U.S. has only its best interests at heart? And why did it take our government only moments to respond to the utterly non-tragic and thoroughly deserved killings of some hardened terrorists and murderers — but it took days to offer even the meekest criticism of the murders and beatings of anti-regime protesters in June? Under the Obama Doctrine, the worse you act, the better you’re treated.

Conferences at Washington think tanks are interesting and sometimes fun, but they are rarely places where the sparks fly. Maybe Daniel Levy and Robert Lieber should be put on panels together more often. They appeared at a recent Hudson gathering to discuss U.S.-Israel relations. Levy performed his usual routine, which is part neocon conspiracy theory and part pleading for the United States to teach Israel a lesson once and for all because Israel is a retrograde, dysfunctional society.

Lieber followed Levy and began his remarks with a devastating rejoinder:

If I can throw in a gratuitous remark, it is that our previous speaker is also a close associate of Yossi Beilin, and let me suggest that his talk suggests why Yossi Beilin is irrelevant to the wider dialogue in Israel today, let alone the United States.

Too true. Which is why the most important thing to understand about Levy, Beilin, and J Street is that the blood-soaked failure of their diplomatic project — Olso — earned their complete rejection by Israeli voters. Today, Yossi Beilin’s Meretz Party holds three seats in the Knesset, and the ideas on which Meretz was founded hold the imaginations of a marginal coterie of Jewish leftists represented by the likes of Daniel Levy, an immigrant to Israel who prefers to spend his time in America telling audiences what a bunch of fools and failures his countrymen are.

Israel’s rejection of Beilinism has caused Levy to reject Israel in kind, which is why he has grown more and more open about his loathing of Israeli democracy itself.

You can listen to the entire Hudson event here.

The Forward has a piece on the Goldstone report that uses as its headline a rather remarkable quote from Judge Goldstone himself: “If This Was a Court Of Law, There Would Have Been Nothing Proven.” That’s quite an important thought to throw into the mix, willy-nilly. Perhaps it would have been more usefully expressed, say, as the subtitle to his report?

The Judge adds:

“Ours wasn’t an investigation, it was a fact-finding mission,” he said, sitting in his Midtown Manhattan office at Fordham University Law School, where he is currently visiting faculty. “We made that clear.” . . .

“If I was advising Israel, I would say have open investigations,” he told the Forward. “In that way, you can put an end to this. It’s in the interest of all the people of Israel that if any of our allegations are established and if they’re criminal, there should be prosecutions. And if they’re false, that should be established. And I wouldn’t consider it in any way embarrassing if many of the allegations turn out to be disproved.” [emphasis added]

So let’s get this straight: Judge Goldstone led a “fact-finding mission” to Gaza and then produced a 575-page report that contains “nothing” that could be “proven in a court of law.” It may not contain facts, in other words. Despite his lack of confidence in his own claims, he insists that “the burden is now on Israel to counter these findings through its own probe” — “these findings” being his charge that the IDF intentionally killed civilians and committed sundry war crimes.

It is good to see that Judge Goldstone is living up to the highest standards of the UN Human Rights Council, which appointed him. We have now emerged on the other side of the rabbit hole.

I am humbled to have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize this morning for “giving the world hope for a better future.” It is gratifying that the international community has finally acknowledged what previously only my mother understood. I hope that I can continue giving the world hope, because what could be more hopeful than that?

But seriously. Here is the test of whether Barack Obama and his senior advisers are in touch with the real world or whether they indeed have floated off into Neverland on an opium cloud of narcissism and self-regard. If Obama is capable of the slightest political sobriety, he will quickly reject the Prize, for all the obvious and sensible reasons — and for the political benefit of helping dispel the growing perception that he is out of touch with basic bourgeois modesty and is completely in love with himself. If he accepts it, the notion that Obama is arrogant and does not understand the fundamental difference between words and action, leadership and celebrity, competence and theater, will be given a tremendous boost.

In Israel, a woman has won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In Gaza, women have been banned from riding on motorcycles.

As we wend our way through the first year of the Obama administration, it is hard not to notice a stark contrast in style between the American president and another democratic leader who has been in power for almost the same amount of time: Binyamin Netanyahu. The political trajectories of the two men have been almost perfectly opposite. Obama started off his presidency blessed by great popularity only to see his fortunes plummet, while Netanyahu began under a cloud of public uncertainty and suspicion yet today enjoys healthy public-approval numbers. More than anything else, the leadership styles of the two men explain their divergent fortunes.

The most obvious difference between the two is in the level of public exposure that each has pursued. Obama seeks to place himself in the headlines of newspapers and to lead the television news broadcasts on a daily basis, achieving an omnipresence unprecedented in American politics. He has given scores of speeches, each heralded to be of great consequence to the nation and the world. He has staked much of his presidential power on the sheer force of his personality, giving little consideration to the sustainability of such a strategy or whether so much narcissistic pageantry is becoming to a national leader. His public pronouncements are astonishingly self-absorbed: to take one example, in their speeches to the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen, the First Couple used the first-person pronoun 70 times in 89 sentences.

Obama’s permanent publicity blitz has rendered his pronouncements banal and is helping to create an impression that he is all talk, no results. Who can recall with any precision what the president says from one day to the next? Why bother trying when another speech is moments away? CBS News’ White House correspondent noted on July 13 that Obama had already delivered his 200th speech — on his 177th day in office.

Click here to read the rest of this COMMENTARY Web Exclusive.

A Norwegian university has decided to assemble a cast of Israel haters to teach a seminar on Israel. Ilan Pappe, of Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine notoriety, is involved. Pappe, a Marxist Israeli who left his native land for the UK—which is far more welcoming of people like him who support economic and academic boycotts and the destruction of Israel—will be joined by a group of similarly obscure quasi-academics whose major qualification is their hatred of Israel. As Haaretz reports,

Other speakers invited by NTNU Dean Torbjorn Digernes include Moshe Zuckermann, who in a January interview for Deutschlandradio—a widely-heard German program—said that operation Cast Lead cost hundreds of thousands of Gazan lives.

The members of the seminar’s organizing committee—Morten Levin, Ann Rudinow Saetnan and Rune Skarstein—have all signed a call for an academic boycott of Israel.

Who would feel comfortable sharing the stage with such people? Well, Stephen Walt, of course, who has joined the seminar as a lecturer. For someone who was once lauded as one of America’s greatest foreign-policy thinkers, it must be a little embarrassing to be forced to take your act to an obscure university set in a small city of a country whose major export is pacifistic moralizing. Or maybe Walt’s desire to participate in some high-octane Israel-bashing is so intense that he can only get his fix abroad, what with all the intimidation from the Israel lobby in the U.S. Who knows.

During the Chas Freeman controversy, one of Walt’s ways of defending Freeman was to compile lists of American Jews who opposed his nomination and accuse them of dual loyalties and then express puzzlement at how anyone could suspect him of animosity to Israel. After all, as he insisted, he and his co-author, John Mearsheimer,

have consistently declared our support for a Jewish state, said we “admired its many achievements,” and wrote that the United States “should come to Israel’s aid if its survival is ever in jeopardy.”

Stephen Walt is just a concerned friend, you see. Is it really possible that he is traveling all the way to Norway to appear next to Ilan Pappe so he can declare to the assembled his admiration for Israel’s many achievements and his support for the Jewish state?

Let’s keep in mind that President Obama’s trip to Copenhagen to lobby for the Chicago Olympics is not the first time he’s flown off somewhere having done little preparation, only to find rejection. On June 3rd, the day before his Cairo speech, he dropped in almost unannounced on King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia to ask for Arab normalization gestures as part of the peace process.

And as happened in Copenhagen, Obama hadn’t laid he groundwork to assure a win, and Abdullah turned him down cold:

“The more time goes by, the more the Saudi meeting was a watershed event,” said the former U.S. official who recently traveled to Riyadh. “It was the first time that President Obama as a senator, candidate, or president was not able to get almost anything or any movement using his personal power of persuasion.” …

“Senior sources in the Saudi national security team,” he said, “think the president’s trip was poorly prepared.” From their perspective, “he was coming and asking them for big favors with no preparation,” but “the Saudis never give big” in that situation.

That was four months ago. You’d think he’d have learned something from it.

Daniel Levy has a long, rambling piece over at Foreign Policy that claims that there is a sophisticated strategy lurking behind the facade of disorder and incompetence that outwardly characterizes the Obama peace process.

I won’t bore you with Levy’s argument, because there isn’t much of one. But he does say something very important about where his faction—call it the barely Zionist Left—stands on the question of Israeli democracy:

America will have to recognize that it is dealing on the Israeli and Palestinian sides, for all their differences, with two deeply dysfunctional polities. The parties simply cannot do this of their own volition, and this is too important for them and for America for it to be left to the mercy of the vicissitudes of their respective domestic politics. America will have to create the incentives and also the disincentives.

It is not a question of wanting this more or less than the parties themselves. It is about who is best placed to carry this effort over the finishing line — and only determined American leadership with international support can achieve that. [Emphasis mine]

It has been interesting over the past couple of years to observe an important shift in the hard-Left, soi-disant Zionist stance toward Israel. The Beilinists have seen every one of their strategies discredited, from Oslo to the peace process to unilateral disengagement. Beilenism is a politically bankrupt force that retains a small constituency in the United States—primarily consisting of people who have never had to experience the consequences of its failures—and a minuscule one in Israel (the Meretz party holds three out of 120 seats in the Knesset). And because of the hemorrhaging of its political support, the remaining stalwarts have followed the logic chain to its natural conclusion: they have become anti-democratic.

As Levy writes, Israel’s democracy, with its high voter turnout, its Knesset, its vibrant political culture, its think tanks and NGOs, and its rollickingly free press, is as “deeply dysfunctional” as the corrupt, violent, autocratic Palestinian Authority. Why? Because the voters don’t think much of Daniel Levy’s prescription for their country.

So let them eat hummus. Daniel Levy wants Obama to simply impose policies on them. The issues are “too important,” he says, to be left to “domestic politics.” His colleague, Jeremy Ben-Ami, articulated the same idea when he told Newsweek last year that “it’s time [for the U.S.] to act like the big brother or the parent and to say ‘enough is enough and we’re going to take the car keys if you don’t stop driving drunk.’”

Levy and his cohort of committed leftists want an Imperial America to dominate other countries, dictate terms, and impose “solutions.” Didn’t Levy spend most of the Bush administration condemning exactly such an American approach to the world? And what does it say about the sclerotic and increasingly deranged politics of the barely Zionists that the central tenet of their movement is the demand that the United States overrule the democratic choices of the Israeli electorate?

Jonathan, President Obama’s statement about his meetings with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders today can be easily mistaken as meaningless, given its recitation of hoary peace-process platitudes. But there is an important nugget buried in the clichés. He said:

Palestinians have strengthened their efforts on security, but they need to do more to stop incitement and to move forward with negotiations. Israelis have facilitated greater freedom of movement for the Palestinians and have discussed important steps to restrain settlement activity, but they need to translate these discussions into real action on this and other issues. And it remains important for the Arab states to take concrete steps to promote peace. [Emphasis mine]

And so the climbdown begins. The words in these types of statements are chosen carefully. Compare today’s statement with any one of the Obama administration’s previous demands for a complete settlement freeze, such as when Secretary of State Clinton said in May that the administration “wants to see a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”

Eli Lake reports exclusively today that Israel is offering a six-to-nine-month accommodation that would stop settlement activity, except in Jerusalem and the 2,500 housing units already slated for construction. If true, this strikes me as a shrewd Israeli move. It will shift the pressures created by anticipation of the peace process onto Obama and the Arabs, who now must respond by either betraying their initial demands or by digging in and exposing themselves to blame for being unwilling to compromise.

The strategic foolishness of Obama’s opening settlement-freeze gambit should now be fully in view: the Palestinians, of course, responded by seconding the demand and insisting that negotiations would not proceed until Israel complied. Obama seems to have believed he could strong-arm Netanyahu into obedience, at which point the negotiations would start, from Obama’s perspective, on the right track—with a big Israeli concession. Everything depended on a total Obama victory in this opening round.

But now, bowing to political reality, it seems that Obama has given up his opening demand for a complete freeze and seeks only that Israel “restrain” settlement activity, which the Israelis appear willing to do. If this happens, the process will turn back on Fatah. Mahmoud Abbas will be forced to choose between rejecting the entire peace process on the absurd grounds that 100 percent of his demands weren’t met, or abandoning his maximalist position and being humiliated in front of Hamas. Either way, the peace process is becoming far more damaging to Abbas than it is to Bibi. What’s truly staggering, as Elliott Abrams predicted would happen all the way back in July, is that it is President Obama who forced the Palestinians into this corner.

A friend who occupied a senior American foreign-policy position e-mails with a very insightful comment:

The decision to drop [missile defense] for Poland and Czechoslovakia is a thinly disguised step toward the fulfillment of [Hillary Clinton's] statement a couple months ago that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, the U.S. will “protect” the Gulf States and (silently) Israel by deterring and containing Iran. So this is a message that the U.S. will now accommodate both Russian and Iranian “sphere of influence” ambitions, including accepting Iran as a nuclear power.

If this is indeed the subtext of Obama’s missile-defense decision, it is problematic on its own terms. A U.S. containment and deterrence regime against Iran would depend for its effectiveness—that is, for its ability to deter both Iran and America’s allies from producing their own nuclear stockpiles or asserting policies outside the American umbrella—on the conviction among our allies that the United States will never go wobbly in protecting them. It would depend on the word and reputation of President Obama.

Yet the Poles and Czechs understand that they have now been thrown under the bus. Having witnessed the lesson of Eastern European missile defense, why should the Arabs or the Israelis choose to rely on a promise from Obama that the U.S. will “contain” Iran? They shouldn’t, and they won’t.

The latest episode in the Obama administration’s foreign policy tells us much more than the way the president views missile defense or the commitments the United States has made to its allies. It tells us that Obama’s strategic vision is one in which American foreign policy can be pursued discretely, with policies tailored narrowly to countries or crises with little regard for how the components assemble into a whole, or how a policy in one area might affect America’s interests in other areas. There is a great deal of evidence to support this claim.

Obama pursues rapprochement with Syria at the same time the Syrians are orchestrating violence in Iraq, undermining Lebanese democracy, and fueling Palestinian extremism. The foreseeable cost of this one-sided courtship is the degradation of America’s ability to hold Syria accountable for its regional meddling—and that, of course, is exactly what has happened, with U.S. silence greeting Damascus’s recently amplified terrorism campaign in Iraq. Obama’s opening gambit in the peace process has consisted almost entirely of pressuring Israel, which again has had the foreseeable effect of convincing Jerusalem that Obama is not serious about Israel’s immediate security needs and thereby curtailing Washington’s ability to restrain Israeli action on Iran. Today, it is hard not to notice that the many statements on Iran emanating from Israel share a sober realization that Israel might have to act unilaterally. This represents a failure of Obama’s policies, both on the peace process and the Iranian nuclear program.

And now he has done a large favor for Vladimir Putin a year after Putin showed the seriousness of his intention to establish Russian “spheres of influence” over its former captive territories, and amid Russia’s campaign to short-circuit Western diplomatic pressure on Iran. The administration’s reasoning on missile defense appears to be part of the “reset button” strategy with Russia—but the result will be a demonstration to Iran, as Max pointed out, of American naiveté and weakness, or at least of a foolish desire to elevate the superficial appearance of good relations above substantive American interests. In hanging Poland and the Czech Republic out to dry, Obama damages our ability to show our allies that American friendship is meaningful and unwavering. “This is catastrophic for Poland,” said a spokeswoman at the Polish Ministry of Defense. It is catastrophic for Poland, and Obama has apparently made his peace with that fact. But it is also broadly damaging to American credibility, which is the wellspring of American power.

There are many problems with individual Obama initiatives. But taken as a whole, the biggest problem is the administration’s apparent inability to look at the world as a system that responds with great sensitivity to American leadership, or the lack thereof. Obama looks at a map of the world as if through a straw, believing that his decisions in one area will have little effect on his choices in other areas. It is a grand strategy of rejecting the concept of grand strategy.