I know from personal experience that Mr. Silverstein likes to call people names rather than engage in respectful discussion. In my case, he’s damned me as (horrors) a “lib-Zionist.” I have no idea what kind of “Zionist” this makes Silverstein.

By the way, I attended the panel at that J Street conference that Silverstein mentions and was apparently damned by Goldberg. It struck me as peculiar that while being hosted and fed lunch courtesy of J Street, the only panelist who actually supported J Street was the Palestinian-American activist, comedian and radio personality, Ray Hanania.

I don’t always agree with Goldberg, but I know that he’s something of a centrist today with liberal-left leanings. On Israel and the Palestinians, he is clearly in favor of a two-state solution and opposes the expansion of West Bank settlements. But he also vociferously defends Israel and Zionism against what he regards as unfair criticism. My guess is that he’s criticized Silverstein for something or other and thereby earned the latter’s undying enmity.

With Israel, the question is [1] whether it can exist independent of its past crimes (as I think of its armed explosion into being, its 1945-48 usurpation of Palestine) and [2] whether it can shake its mental-set of the need and correctness of perpetual violence against its neighbors and thereby somehow exist without continuing to newer crimes (such as the post 1948 attacks on Egypt, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon, threatened attacks on Iran, the settlements, the siege of Gaza, the unfair taking of Palestine’s water). If the freely-chosen violence Israel’s birth has coalesced into a psychology that requires and accepts perpetual (criminal) violence, then my saying that I can accept Israel apart from its crimes is rather vacuous.

I wonder where Silverstein and Haber stand on these points.