My Kissinger story. Every 6 months, the DC @ap would send reporters to the National Archives in College Park to search through a roomful of newly declassified docs to see if anything 30 years old was newsworthy. I made one such trek in 2002. You literally had to randomly search through boxes and hope something would pop put. I found transcripts of meetings Nixon and Kissinger had with foreign leaders -- notes that Kissinger or others in the meetings would take. What struck me was how much, up close, they were bullies

.@dpletka, a Jewish conservative who has been one of the fiercest proponents of the US-Israel relationship, says "The reality is that America’s money is no longer essential to Israel’s defense". A really interesting rattle out of the GOP box. thehill.com/opinion/intern… The GOP (since before Trump, but he accelerated the process) has drifted away from internationalism, from maintaining an overwhelming US posture in the world. How does that square with the GOP's claim it is more committed to Israel than others? There have been strategies:

.@GovChristie unsparing with Trump and candidates,. " We lost in Wisconsin and Michigan, because we pick the wrong candidates, no wait, Donald Trump picked the candidates" some applause #RJCinVegas "I don't want to be part of a Republican party who stands for just one man and not all of those principles" @GovChristie "it is time to stop whispering, it is time to stop doing the knowing nods, we can't talk...let's go out and do it together"' standing applause at #rjcvegas

"We all had visions of sugar plums dancing in our head this cycle," @normcoleman starts second day of @RJC saying, using an Xmas metaphor to describe GOP disappointment #RJCinVegas "The Biden legislative agenda is no more" @normcoleman says @RJC #RJCinVegas

"We're up to almost 35%, 33% of the Jewish population voting Republican," cheers at annual @RJC confab as @normcoleman opens "Retiring Nancy Pelosi is a gamechanger for America, @normcoleman says at @RJC assuaging grim feelings after less than steller GOP performance in midterms

"Learn what we are doing in the Holy Land, we are trying to create miracles," @mnsorabbas tells @WashInstitute - which is how an Israeli pol would normally pitch a talk to a US Jewish org He notes his origins in a Galilee village near Tiberias that is pluralistic by definition -- majority Druze, with Muslim and Christian minorities

I am at @deborahlipstadt's confirmation hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lipstadt is seated next to @RosenforNevada. @SenatorCardin comes over to greet her: "It's good to see you here, we've been trying to get you here for a while." Senate Republicans had delayed: Lipstadt's confirmation but were spurred to remove their block after the Colleyville hostage taking crisis.
Rosen introduces, notes recent rise in antisemitism.

A note on what people believe vs. what is real. Before AP would send reporters into Bosnia to report they had the very wise practice of making us desk the story in Vienna, so we could learn about it. So this is what I did for a month or so, right after Dayton. One grisly story... ...kept popping up: Bosnian Serbs, evacuating to Republika Srpska (despite the pleadings of UN officials who hoped hopelessly to return Bosnia to prewar staus) kept disinterring their dead and putting them in the back of pickups and taking them with them. I mean...

Turnout at this @TKE_Fraternity Torah procession marking the destruction of a Torah replica by unknown vandals is big, several hundred

I’m watching the right wing pro-Israel “oh sure, it was all about Netanyahu, gonna wait 5 minutes until you stab Israel in the back” performance. Here are some thoughts: There are haters, like the UNHRC, they’re not going away, so please don’t cite them as proof you were right- Instead watch for these tells. Democrats stopped trusting Netanyahu would resolve differences in private. That trust may be restored now, and the phenomena we saw last month, of Democrats publicly taking Israel to task during the war, may recede as the Biden admin...

My gut feeling 2 cents predictions of how this war’s aftermath plays out:
-Israel: changes on the margins if that. Maybe a reining in of extremists on the right. Hard conversations about intercommunal Jewish-Arab relations. But folks don’t realize the extent to which Israel... ... is structured to pivot to “Albania” (the isolated country under Hoxha), to be totally self reliant and to suffer some privations.
-Palestinians. I don’t see how Abbas’s leadership survives this. I don’t know who replaces him. Hamas will be under pressure too.

The Holocaust's sudden echoes: My parents were Turkish Jews. My mother made me aware of the Holocaust when I was 5. I think what prompted it was my question about Hitler, who an older boy had mentioned. But its horror seized her and shaped her. But: She made it clear... ...it didn't "happen" to us. My parents were in Turkey. Turkey was with the allies. My father and uncle were in the Turkish army. My father recalled learning as a soldier of Winston Churchill's secret visit to Turkey. It didn't "happen" to us. I grew up with the sense...

short thread on @Rob_Malley: Over a decade ago, after he was sidelined from Obama campaign for talking to Hamas, I went to hear him describe to a small group what the Hamas trip told him (a trip he made as a think-tanker, not a campaigner)... ...he a) made clear he thought Hamas was bad b) said talking to the group was inevitable because it controlled Gaza c) concluded it was not worth engaging right then because Hamas was a mess and rejectionists had a determinative voice. At the end of the day...

A slight rant on the opprobrium Dianne Lob, the ex-@HIASrefugees has garnered for being the next @Conf_of_Pres chairwoman, in part because of how I cast a story. She just issued a long semi-apologia about how yes, she is pro-Israel, as if this should ever be in question... let's examine the thinking behind this. I've seen @HIASrefugees described on this idiot website as "anti-Zionist" with zero evidence. How is it anti-Zionist? what posture does it embrace that opposes Zionism? Its Israel office *is* part of a network of Israeli groups that oppose-

My take on Jewish Bernie: his Vermont community is Jewish. He does Jewish like most Jewish Americans, on holidays (but not always). He knows the prayers. Like many Jewish Americans, he filters his politics through his antecedents Jewish experience, of suffering... ...and through his own, which includes his time in Israel (don’t underestimate that period in how it shaped him.) Like many Jews of his generation talking about his Judaism seemed somehow risky. I’m among the reporters who were frustrated by his holding back...