damn you Meredith,

I just spilt coffee all over the keyboard....My side hurts.

Israeli American relations have always been immune from honest debate. This is long overdue. I resent the millions of dollars that have gone to Israel so they can have access to better health care than I have. There have been many holocausts against peoples of the world, but the Jews are the one people who have taken that guilt and milked it for all it's worth. It's time the Jews stop manipulating America and stand on their own feet. America needs to turn attention homeward and take care of it's own people. This country is a shell of it's former self. Our insides are gutted.

Call me anti-semitic if you want to. I say stop using guilt to prevent an honest look at the actions of Israel and it's partner in crime the United Stated of America. Evil hides in the dark. Shine the light of truth on everyone.

I'm not afraid. I welcome this debate. The whole world will benefit.

Patty Jr, While agreeing with you that Israel's and America's (and Australia's) interests are not identical, nor should be, given that the latter two, whatever else they are, are not apartheid states, your loose talk about "the Jews" fails to distinguish between Jews and Judaism on the one hand, and Zionists and political Zionism on the other. I know that it's easy to screw up here because the two arms of political Zionism, the state of Israel and its fifth columnist Zionist lobbyists in countries such as the US and Australia have done their level best to conflate Judaism and political Zionism and convince everyone that Jew=political Zionist. So, lets begin at the beginning: Judaism, like Christianity and Islam is a faith that belongs to the private realm of the individual. As such it pre-existed political Zionism and will continue on long after political Zionism has gone the way of other reactionary -isms. Political Zionism, on the other hand, is a political ideology that, like all ideologies, needs to be judged by the extent to which it is compatible with the universal values of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the standards of international law. Political Zionism, committed as it is to the establishment and consolidation in Palestine of a sovereign, Jewish state that attempts to guarantee in law and in practice a demographic majority of the Jewish tribes in the territories under its control, represents, therefore a form of apartheid based on the distinction in law between Jew and non-Jew. Not all Jews subscribe to this discriminatory ideology. Antony Loewenstein is an example. Many fundamentalist Christians such as Boaz-David do, which makes them political Zionists. A Jew (or a Christian, or even a Muslim) is only a political Zionist in so far as he subscribes to the program of political Zionism as outlined above. The distinction between Jews and Zionists is a fundamental one but it must constantly be made if we are ever to sort out the mess in Palestine.

Strewth, you speak on the subject in a more intelligent way than I ever could. My reaction is knee jerk at best. Certainly I have a simplistic view of the situation. I do believe though that an honest look at U.S. policy and aid to Israel in long overdue.

You're correct there, Patti.

Perhaps surprisingly, given that it tends to tilt slightly to the right, The Australian published a lengthy extract from Mearsheimer and Walt's article yesterday after a number of writers wrote previous columns rejecting it. The piece is available at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18882383-28737,00.html for the next week or so.

Many of Mearsheimer's and Walt's claims seem readily testable, such as:

QUOTE
Israel receives $US3billion ($4 billion) or so in direct assistance each year, about one-fifth of the US foreign aid budget, and worth about $US500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking given that Israel is a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank.
END QUOTE

If the facts are correct it is simply wrong to reject the article out of hand. Government foreign aid is a pretty ordinary percentage of US GDP. If 6 million Israelis consume a fifth of it, that doesn't leave a whole lot for those of the world's 6 billion population who are in need of serious help.

The authors touch on the role of the evangelical Christian lobby in supporting Israel - but (at least in The Australian's extract) don't spell out the reason for their support. To evangelicals, Israelis are totally dispensible but their land is not: it is where the second coming of Christ is expected, just before the Rapture - which will whisk Christian believers to Heaven and drop nonbelievers into the fiery furnaces of Hell. Thus, Israel cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of infidels. (No, I am not making a joke, http://www.leftbehind.com/ )

What if there was a second coming of Christ and he was born and brought up as a Muslim?

The original version of the paper is at http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf