A reader writes:
I'm dismayed by your increasingly childish spat with Jeffrey Goldberg (he's been increasingly childish too, but, I have to say, you more so). It's because of you that I read Goldberg in the first place, and that you're making such a big deal of a minor disagreement with a man who agrees with you on almost all major points regarding Israel/Iran/settlements just doesn't make any sense. Now since Goldberg apparently doesn't have to time right now to immediately substantiate his claim that you've falsified his positions, let me do that for him. It's pretty simple:
1) Ever since his original Atlantic piece reporting the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran last year, you've been consistently confusing his reporting "Israel will probably do this" for an advocacy that "Israel should probably do this," even though he's always said that he thinks a preemptive strike on Iran would have few gains and many very bad consequences.
That is misrepresentation, and you've been doing that for a while, either suggesting that Goldberg has been "played" by the Israelis or is their willing accomplice, but without any evidence. On this point the charge that you don't understand how reporting works doesn't seem so farfetched.
2) More recently, you've said that Goldberg is changing his story, and you linked to a Roger Cohen column to the same effect: now, since there hasn't been a strike, Goldberg thinks that Netanyahu was bluffing all along in order to play Obama. But if you read Goldberg's actual column (not reporting, but exclusively opinion), you find him entertaining the idea that it's a bluff, but that he still thinks Bibi is in earnest – that he is not bluffing. So you've misrepresented him again. Or you have special insight into his serially lying heart. What evidence?
You and Goldberg agree that it's not a good idea to strike Iran. You agree on the desirability of a two-state solution. You agree that the settlements are an obstacle (and he got there before you on that one). You agree that Netanyahu hasn't really been helping the situation. All you disagree about is tactics and Peter Beinart. And while you've been hyperventilating that Goldberg is part of a conspiracy not even to consider Beinart's proposal, Jeffrey's been talking to a number of people who have considered (and rejected for various reasons) that proposal.
How about you stop fixating on Goldberg's supposed errors and explain why you think Beinart's proposal could work? That's a conversation that might go somewhere, but so far you haven't done anything of the kind, but only called his critics names. Drop the ad hominem arguments, stop picking idiotic fights with people who should be your allies, and present a real defense of his suggested policy.
My reader deserves his vent. But a couple of points. I did not misrepresent Goldberg's first column on bluffing. I accurately described his position – intrigued by the idea but not completely persuaded by it. What concerned me was his delight that the bluff might have worked, which would have made him an unwitting accessory to it, something that did not seem to concern him, but which concerns me and others at his own magazine. Secondly, the issue is not with Beinart's specific NYT op-ed proposal to boycott goods from settlements, rather than from Israel proper, but with Goldberg's dismissal of the entire book, and accusing it of errors he does not cite.
And on the core point, yes, there's agreement on the need for a two-state solution, and for not bombing Iran. But at every point when Israel has faced possible external pressure to stop the settlements, Jeffrey has opposed it. And his reporting of how some Israelis feel threatened by an existential threat was also a defense of it.
The Dish 