Tidbits, throwback edition

*Because it worked so well for the British Mandate: Andrew Sullivan wants NATO troops dividing Israelis and Palestinians:

My own view is moving toward supporting a direct American military imposition of a two-state solution, with NATO troops on the borders of the new states of Palestine and Israel. I’m sick of having a great power like the US being dictated to in the conduct of its own foreign policy by an ally that provides almost no real benefit to the US, and more and more costs.

* Sullivan was reacting to the story that Rahm Emanuel is telling folks that the Obama White House is sick of the Israelis and the Palestinians and is ready to bail out of the process. Both sides — the White House and Israeli officials — vehemently deny such a warning.

Still, it seems that Emanuel was indeed speaking freely when he spoke with the Israeli consul in Los Angeles, Jacob Dayan — I’ve heard he expressed his "frustration" with the process in the conversation. Such candidness is not inconsistent with someone who wants to break free. I’ve noted before how Emanuel’s raising his profile, wondering if that meant he was vying for the open Illinois Senate seat; The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn hears he’s shooting for Chicago mayor.

* In the Jerusalem Post, Jeremy Ben Ami says he likes being Jeremy Ben Ami, and is glad he’s not Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to Washington. As Jeremy, Jeremy explains, Jeremy can say what he likes: Oren is caught between Prime Minister Benjam Netanyahu’s newly expansive approach to peacemaking and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s could-care-less approach:

OURS IS the easier job. We know what we believe and can say clearly what we stand for – an Israel that is Jewish and democratic; an end to the occupation of the Palestinian people; two states living side by side in peace and security; a comprehensive regional peace that brings full recognition ofIsrael’s right to exist and of its borders, and full acceptance into the community of nations.

I imagine it’s far harder to be an ambassador when it isn’t clear whether your marching orders are engagement or confrontation, or whether your government is serious about ending the conflict or is simply feigning interest as a delaying tactic to preserve an increasingly unsustainable status quo.

* Yesterday I flagged Jennifer Rubin’s ruminations at Commentary over why Jews hate Sarah Palin. I noted that I don’t believe Jews hate her — they just don’t want to elect her.

I linked to the article’s precis, and then, what the heck, I coughed up the $5 and read the whole thing.

David Frum, who after all is a card-carrying conservative, dismantles it much better than I can, over here:

If American Jews have a problem with Palin, Rubin is right that problem 1 is that they – we – doubt her intellectual capacity for the job. But that’s only the start of the list of problems.

Ignorance is bad. But we all start ignorant. Jews – again like other people, only more so – expect their leaders to start early and to work hard to remedy their ignorance, by learning things. People who don’t, won’t or can’t learn – whose followers disparage the value or need to learn – are going to forfeit Jewish support, and not only Jewish support.

But even this is not the worst of it. Just guessing, but I think the real and most fundamental problem Jews have with Palin is not her gleeful ignorance, but her willful divisiveness. More than any politician in memory, Palin seems to divide her fellow-Americans into first class and second class citizens, real Americans and not-so-real Americans. To do her justice, she has never said anything to suggest that Jews as Jews fall into the second, less-real, class. But Jews do tend to have an intuition that when this sort of line-drawing is done, we are likely to find ourselves on the wrong side.

That said, let me add: Rubin suggests Jewish women like frumpy better than sexy. What’s the term for this? A double whammy? An insult to the many elegant, eloquent Jewish women I have known all my life? Or an insult to collective Jewish intelligence? ("I’d vote for her, but her skirts are too tight?" Please.)

Here’s the thing: A few years ago I covered a number of events around town where Jewish women, tears in their eyes, packed rooms to cheer the election of an devoutly Christian mother of five who refused to launch her career until her children were grown and who is always elegantly turned out: Nancy Pelosi.

And one other thing: Jews don’t take pride in their kids’ sports successes? Jennifer, come around Arlington one muddy, soggy weekend morning, and we’ll do a tour of the soccer fields, count the Hebrew primers tucked into bags for breaks, and match them to the red-faced, screaming parents.

And, okay, I can’t shut up, but Jews underserve in the military? They do not, actually. As long as the Defense Department counted — up until the Korean War, I’ve heard — they served disproportionately; one in 16 soldiers in World War I was Jewish. Vets say their reckonings suggest the same is true today, although it’s impossible to know. But I don’t know of an American Jew who is not proud of a community that has given the forces its current commander of the Air Force and its assistant commander of the Marines. Visit this museum, Jennifer, and apologize to the WWII dogtags scratched with Magen Davids — troops  who defiantly wore their Jewishness, against orders not to. Walk through Brooklyn and count the Jewish names on the slabs in Prospect Park, at the foot of the trees along the avenues. Lack a family military tradition? Tell that to the Jews I know who have proudly walked their grandfathers through the World War II memorial on the National Mall.

Commentary does me a service, though, allowing me to indulge in screaming at the stereotypes floating across my screen without having to hand Mondoweiss a site view.

$5 well spent.

[UPDATE: One more note. I have no idea whether Frum is right that Palin is  guilty of "willful divisiveness." My point was that some people certainly believe she is, and such views have much more to do with the Jewish angst — liberal and conservative — over Palin than her appearance does.]

*Speaking of screaming at the screen,  Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic does yeoman’s work in tracking C-Span’s bizarre rave-o-matic this weekend: No one intervened when Michael Scheuer, former CIA analyst, took calls from his anti-Semitic fellow travelers and let the conspiracy-infused spittle fly. Goldblog has yet to get an explanation.