But perhaps Rubin’s most egregious language, which would seem to fall well outside of the accepted tone of The Washington Post, has been saved for those individuals and groups that she deems to be enemies of Israel for daring to suggest that Israel should cease settlement construction in the Occupied Territories.

The Washington Note’s Steve Clemons has issued a public call to the Post’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, and Post Chairman Donald Graham, to address Rubin’s recent post in which she wrote:

The usual crowd of Israel bashers has sent the president a letter urging him to go along with a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for its settlements.

Clemons, along with a host of prominent foreign policy analysts, issued a letter urging the the Obama administration to support a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in the Occupied Territory.

He responded to her smear:

I believe that she and I have a serious disagreement about what Israel’s interests are — and I believe that the Netanyahu wing of the Israeli political establishment regularly places short term interests over long to mid-term interests. But I don’t call those who support Netanyahu Israel-bashers even though I believe that as patriotic as they may be as Israelis or as pro-Israel as they may be as Americans they are harming Israel’s interests. That could be a constructive debate — something where both sides could learn something, perhaps.

Calling someone as Israel-basher is akin to calling them an anti-Semite or a bigot, and that can’t go without response. I’m a strong believer in Israel and want a healthy and constructive relationship between Israel and the United States. I have traveled to Israel, have met people from nearly every political party in the Knesset, and love the place and people.

But Rubin, it would appear, took Clemons’ post as a personal challenge and used the exact same term in a post this morning in which she characterized a group of congressmen who endorsed General David Petraeus’s concept of “linkage” as “Israel-bashing.”

Rubin, who repeatedly tries to challenge conventional wisdom that the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict damages U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East, wrote:

…[A] group of the worst of the Israel-bashing congressmen sent a letter last May to Obama parroting back the general’s gaffe.

Back in May, these congressmen wrote to Obama, urging him to “continue [his] strong efforts to bring U.S. leadership to bear in moving the parties toward a negotiated two-state solution.”

They began their letter:

As steadfast advocates of the unbreakable U.S. commitment to the security of Israel, we write in support of your strong commitment to a Middle East peace process that results in Israel and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security.

Hardly the language of “Israel-bashing” except, perhaps, in the peculiar world of Jennifer Rubin’s Right Turn blog at The Washington Post.

Rubin’s proclivity towards smearing her opponents as Israel-bashing belies the fundamental weakness of the hawkish, Israeli right-wing — a position she consistently advocates from her perch at The Washington Post. While she can’t be blamed for continuing the abrasive tone that she perfected on Commentary’s Contentions blog, Clemons is right in pointing out that Rubin’s character attacks are beneath The Washington Post and should be called to the attention of the Post’s editors and chairman.

• The Atlantic: Jeffrey Goldberg, in his long awaited cover story, claims that an Israeli unilateral attack on alleged Iranian nuclear facilities is inevitable if the United States and its allies fail to strike first. “I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program; and Obama knows—as his aides, and others in the State and Defense departments made clear to me—that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to the interests of the United States, which include his dream of a world without nuclear weapons,” writes Goldberg.  (I responded to Goldberg’s article yesterday.)

• The Washington Note: Steve Clemons offers his thoughts on Jeffrey Goldberg’s prediction that, “the likelihood of Israel unilaterally bombing Iran to curtail a potential nuclear weapon breakout capacity is north of 50-50.”  Clemons writes that, “…doubts about the sanity and rationality of Iran’s leadership may be driving Israel’s leaders to abandon pragmatic rationality and serious scrutiny of costs and benefits as well. Is this all real? Or are both sides puffing up, acting like ‘crazy Ivans’, as part of a military strategy that could be bluff, or could be devastatingly severe?”

• Foreign Policy: Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett argue that Goldberg’s case for a U.S. attack on Iran is,  “even flimsier than the case Goldberg helped make for invading Iraq in 2002.”  Normalizing U.S.-Iran and Israel-Iran relations would profoundly benefit Israel and the United States, say the Leveretts.

• The Los Angeles Times: Paul Richter and Alexandra Sandels report that Iran told Lebanese officials that it will make up for the potential cutoff of U.S. aid to the Lebanese military.  Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) and Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-NY) decided to freeze military aid over concerns that such aid might be used against Israel.

• The Washington Note: Steve Clemons says that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a conflict that matters, “…far beyond the Israeli and Palestinian populations and is a screaming, right now challenge.” As the United States remains committed to remaking Afghanistan and Iraq the urgency of resolving one of the region’s biggest historical grievances has never been higher. Clemons suggest that President Barack Obama, “sees the vital and obvious linkage between resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine and any sensible strategy rolling back and/or containing Iran’s nuclear and regional hegemonic pretensions.”

• The Wall Street Journal: The WSJ editorial board says that the sanctions against Iran are beginning to work but additional sanctions are needed and the United States and Europe should offer more assistance to Iran’s democracy movement. The op-ed also suggests that Obama should invite dissident Iranian exiles to the Oval Office. Now, argues the authors, is not the time to drop sanctions in exchange for negotiations with Tehran. “The risk now is that the modest success of the sanctions will lure the Administration into dropping some of them in exchange for another round of temporizing and inevitably useless negotiations with Tehran,” they argue.

• The Weekly Standard: Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn call attention to documents in the Wikileaks dump which claim that Iran is supporting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The authors say that reports of Iranian activity in Afghanistan show Obama’s August 2^nd statement the United States and Iran have a “mutual interest” in fighting the Taliban to be a dangerous fantasy. Hayes and Joscelyn seem to willfully ignore previous passed-up opportunities for rapprochement with Iran.

• The New York Times: David Sanger reports that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have made comments indicating that sanctions against Iran have had a greater economic impact than anticipated by Iran’s government.  The administration’s statements appeared aimed at bringing Tehran back to the negotiating table but, Sanger points out, “Neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton defined with any precision what steps Iran’s leaders would need to take to build confidence that they were willing to negotiate.”

• The Huffington Post: David Bromwich makes the case that the post 9/11 United States has developed a dangerous trend of always being at war.  Obama, says Bromwich, is both withdrawing from Afghanistan more slowly than many would like and moving towards a military strike on Iran more slowly than many would prefer. “Will Iran become our third war of the moment? Sanctions which, Benjamin Netanyahu has said, should soon become ‘crippling sanctions,’ already have us in lockstep on that path,” says Bromwich. He warns that after the November midterm elections, “The Likud, in both Israel and America, may prove itself ready for action sooner than President Obama would like, just as the Tea Party picked up energy faster and harder than he looked for in the spring of 2009.” (Ali blogged on Bromwich’s article earlier today.)