These are strange times for those of us who follow the debate about a possible war with Iran. It is clear that the Israeli government and its neoconservative camp followers here in the United States are increasing pressure on President Obama to either attack Iran or let Israel do it...

In his pre-Super Bowl interview on Sunday night, President Obama went farther than ever before in stating his view that U.S. and Israeli interests are identical. Obama even topped Vice President Joe Biden who has repeatedly said that there must be "no daylight, no daylight" between U.S. and Israeli policies....

I certainly set off a firestorm with my use of the term "Israel Firster." Other people use it too but I was the guy who popularized it recently and who used it hundreds of times. The others who utilize the term did so occasionally, often citing me.  So...

News on the Iran front gets more and more complicated. I am not referring to the situation on the ground, but in Washington where Congress, deep into election year fundraising with the March AIPAC conference looming, is about to pass another sanctions bill. There is no reason to go into...

Talk about déjà vu all over again.

In September 2010 The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, in a much ballyhooed article, that "there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike [against Iran] by next July," meaning the summer of 2011.

This coming Sunday,...

An article in Tuesday's New York Times suggests that there is a method to the madness of the Republican presidential candidates' hawkish rhetoric on Iran. I had thought that the reason all the Republican candidates (with the exception of Ron Paul) are such noisy warmongers is because that is...

A man wrote me the other day to complain about something I had written about my belief that Israel has every right to exist in peace and security. He responded that Israel should not exist at all. He asserted that Israel is simply a western colony implanted in the Middle...

I rarely learn anything meaningful from reading the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. In my opinion, his tight relationship with the Israeli government and its lobby here greatly influence his take on both foreign and domestic events. Although he occasionally deviates from the Israeli line, he not only appears very uncomfortable doing...

The top three vote-getters in the Iowa caucuses — Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) — responded to success in very different ways.

Santorum, best known for his antediluvian views on gay rights and choice, emphasized the economy and job creation. Paul, keeping with the themes...

This is my last column of 2011, so I will make a few predictions for 2012, some which I hope come true and some which I hope don't.

U.S. Election: President Barack Obama will be re-elected. Each of his potential rivals is, in my opinion, fatally flawed. The most likely...

The silliest aspect of former House speaker Newt Gingrich's claim that Palestinians are an "invented nation" is that anyone who accepts Israel's legitimacy would endorse it.

The singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state and a people -- Israel and Israelis -- from...

It has been over a week since the lobby that deems itself "pro-Israel" began its recent effort to suppress the views of those of us it considers Israel haters, self-hating Jews or -- in a most ridiculous twist given that most of us are Jews -- "anti-Semites."

The effort...

I wonder what happened to Israel, by which I mean the actual country and its seven million people.

It still exists, thank God, but one would hardly know it from the way its supposed supporters discuss it in the United States.

Take the brouhaha last week that started with

Any doubt we might have that the Israeli right has lost its mind should be eliminated by the latest column from one of its most prominent media figures, Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post.

Glick, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, has flipped out over some remarks...

Suddenly the struggle to stop Iran is not about saving Israel from nuclear annihilation. After a decade of scare-mongering about the second coming of Nazi Germany, the Iran hawks are admitting that they have other reasons for wanting to take out Iran, and saving Israeli lives may not be one...

The drums of war with Iran will be beating loudly in the three months leading up to AIPAC's policy conference early next March. The Republican candidates for president (with the exception of Rep. Ron Paul) will try to outdo each other in professing devotion to Israel coupled with...

The classic definition of a campaign gaffe is when a politician inadvertently speaks a truth that will hurt him politically. The first George Bush gaffed when he said that the idea that cutting taxes would increase government revenue was "voodoo economics." Similarly it was a gaffe when Barak Obama said...

The Republican candidates for president are not the only politicians who use Iran, and its nuclear program, as a magnet to pull in campaign dollars. The same dynamic can be seen in Los Angeles where two Democratic House members, Howard Berman and Brad Sherman, are trying to out hawk each...

Veterans Day weekend is the perfect time to think about unnecessary wars that went terribly wrong. Veterans Day was a response to World War 1, a war that should have been avoided and which left as its legacy not only 35 million dead but also, within 20 years, the inevitable...

As someone who blogs about Israel and Palestine almost daily, I elicit many reactions -- from left-wing supporters and hostile right-wing detractors.

Naturally the two groups don't agree on much of anything but sometimes supporters and detractors make the same mistake: they assume (or charge) that I am anti-Israel....