Two rivals on the weakness of Netanyahu

Back in March, when Benjamin Netanyahu's Interior Minister Eli Yishai ruptured Israeli-U.S. relations by announcing plans to build 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem while U.S. Veep Joseph Biden was meeting with Netanyahu, Netanyahu's election rival (and possible prospective coalition partner) cast the tiff as a sign not of of the Prime Minister's arrogance but of his weakness:

Opposition leader and Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni on Sunday cast her own criticism of Netanyahu regarding the recent row, saying his weakness to his coalition partners was costing the government its stability.

"The coalition agreement is not a substitute for a set path and a vision," Livni said, adding that "we have a prime minister who does not know what he wants and this weakness is leading to a political landslide."

"Israel is paying the price for the fact that her government is not making decisions and it will continue to pay for it," Livni added.

That might be dismissed as a rival's sniping. But now, Netanyahu's Foreign Minister, the thuggish Avigdor Lieberman, is making the same charge. Lieberman is reportedly furious and prepared to take "calculated revenge" on his own Prime Minister because Netanyahu sent Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer to a secret meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, instead of Lieberman, and didn't tell Lieberman. In the wake of the meeting,  the Turkish paper Hurriyet reported (as relayed in the Jerusalem Post) that "Israel is prepared to apologize to Turkey for the flotilla incident and to compensate the families of the injured parties,"  which Ben-Eliezer's office denied.

Peter Beinert's shock therapy for American Jewry

Sometimes an article on a fraught subject, rather than stepping on a proverbial third rail, leaps onto that rail with both feet and so avoids the fatal shock.

Such may be the case with Peter Beinert's The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, which documents the growing divide between liberalism and Zionism among (and within) American Jews, and the failure of  American Jewish leadership to grapple with with that divide.

That leadership is known, Beinert asserts, to "patrol public discourse, scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which all leaders cherish democracy and yearn for peace." Presumably he will be fiercely "scolded."  Yet I suspect that this is one piece of criticism that, rather than simply provoking furious denunciation, will lead to some real soul-searching, and perhaps to less poisonous dialogue between Israel's unconditional defenders and its critics within American Jewry.