MJ Rosenberg

It appears now that all the legitimate complaints that the pursuit of campaign contributions had utterly distorted U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is becoming a small part of a much larger catastrophe.

That is because as critical as the Middle East is, the whole issue is now being...

There is a fundamental absurdity hanging over negotiations with Iran, and I fear it could doom the whole enterprise.

It is the position of AIPAC as adopted by the Congress of the United States. This president is likely to only go as far as AIPAC (or the Israel...

It's no longer news that the one item exempt from cuts in every budget slashing proposal (including Rep. Paul Ryan's "gut Medicare" offering) is aid to Israel.

Actually it is hard to use the word aid about an annual multi-billion dollar gift that goes directly to the Israeli military....

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives is slated to vote on a resolution designed to tie the president's hands on Iran policy. The resolution, which is coming up under an expedited House procedure, was the centerpiece of AIPAC's recent conference. In fact, 13,000 AIPAC delegates

It's impossible to understand why anyone who literally wasn't born yesterday would get excited about the new Likud-Kadima coalition forged by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz.

Of course, the coalition is great news for the members of the new coalition (94 out...

According to a poll released by the American Jewish Committee last week, President Barack Obama is leading former Governor Mitt Romney 61 percent-28 percent among Jewish voters. Obama's support is 17 percent below the 78 percent he scored in 2008 while Romney's is 6 percent above John McCain's 22...

The media is full of reports from Israel about leading intelligence and military officials publicly assailing the Netanyahu government's line on Iran. One after another, Israel's most knowledgeable (and usually hawkish) members of the security establishment are coming around to the U.S. view that the Iranian government has...

As one who has been harping for years on the Israel lobby's unique ability to silence critics of Israeli policies whether they work in politics, the media, academe or anywhere else, I can't say that I am surprised by the brouhaha surrounding Sunday's 60 Minutes broadcast of a Bob Simon...

The occupation and the Iran nuclear issue have swallowed up Israel. Unless you live there, the only sense you get of that country is that it is obsessed with Iran, maintaining the occupation, and exploiting the Holocaust to keep critics of its policies on the defensive. No wonder a billionaire-financed...

What is President Obama going to do if he and the allies reach an agreement with Iran? It's easy to know what he will do if it turns out that the Islamic Republic has no interest in a deal. Obama will just announce that he will proceed with "crippling sanctions"...

The fine Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev has a piece today predicting that Mitt Romney might do better among Jews than previous Republican presidential candidates. Since FDR's time Jews have voted overwhelmingly Democratic, with Republicans only reaching 40 percent in 1956 when President Eisenhower was their nominee....

A day after leaving Media Matters For America, I feel a need for an explanation beyond what I posted at the MMFA site. It was provoked by all the right-wing "pro-Israel" types who don't believe I quit and insist I was fired because I attacked the dual holy...

It would be funny if it wasn't so creepy. An author or journalist can write anything he wants about the United States -- or, in fact, about any foreign country -- without causing legions of critics to question the propriety of his doing so. That is, unless the subject of...

Almost all the criticism (and controversy surrounding) Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism comes down to two major complaints.

The first is that he is a "liberal Zionist" which, by some definitions, means he is just as indifferent to Palestinian rights as a rightwing Zionist. He...

The schedule for the American Jewish Committee conference in Washington coming up in May highlights that Sohrab Ahmari, an Iranian-American, will be addressing the question: "Can Iran's nuclear program be stopped?" Ahmari has been popping up more and more these days, especially at neoconservative organizations like the AJC. 

The AJC,...

One critical element leads me to the conclusion that the United States will not go to war with Iran, nor allow Israel to do so. It is this: common sense.

It is true, of course, that common sense dictated against invading Iraq. But the very fact that we did invade...

A couple of years ago my wife and I made the first of three trips to Poland to visit her family's ancestral home. As far as anyone knows, the Gruenbaum/Ellenbogen family had been living in the Galicia area of Poland for centuries.

That long sojourn ended with the German invasion...

Writing in the Jewish Daily Forward, JJ Goldberg reminded me of words I wrote 43 years ago in the Village Voice:

I shall always choose the Jewish cause. Not blindly, not arbitrarily, but with full knowledge of who I am and where I must be.

My...

We have one person to thank for the fact that President Barack Obama successfully let Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu know 'who's the boss' both at the AIPAC conference and at a meeting between the two at the White House on Monday.

Thank you, Mitt Romney.

Imagine if things had worked...

The New York Times reports today that, "American officials who have assessed the likely Iranian responses to any attack by Israel on its nuclear program believe that Iran would retaliate by launching missiles on Israel and terrorist-style attacks on United States civilian and military personnel overseas."

Just what...