Eye On Israel

[mike435]

LOL:

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[golgol85]

yea what you are saying is a universal human ideal but it is your people your country who you first owe and then others

and it is not a matter of being selfish its just a reality

example if a persian doctor studys in iran it is his moral duty to give back to the country remember for him to become a doctor alot of other people had to sacrifise too and it wast people in israel lebonan or anywere else
and this applies to every faset of irans people why should persian teen suffer in iran while the government gives monet to a terrorist group that starts a whole cycle of death and destruction i hate the islamic republic
do you know the islamic republic right now is making more money than shah from oil i think alot more.

obviously people should help others anytime they can but you should not forget your pioritys
example a group of jews in america were simoltaniously rasing money for recustruction in lebonan wich i think i acctualy a beutiful thing

but remeber also there are alot more people who are closer and more able to give to the lebonies and palestinians that persian and iran is.

yuo know a solution i think is rasing advocasy rather than contributing resources that need to first go to out own people.
just a thoght

This is sad, i cant believe you are saying this. Humans are humans, regardless of the fact that they are not of the same religious or cultural background. look, the islamic republic is bad, we all know that and that is something that all of us agree on. those in government in iran are selfish, they care about their own gains and having bank accounts in swiss instead of worrying about their people: the poor who have to sleep in the streets, the ones who are steal to support their families, the ones who cant afford to go to school. we cant be selfish like them, we have to care about fellow human beings who are being killed. helping is helping regardless of who it comes from.

[golgol85]

Khanoum-e aziz.. doust-e Khoub-e man.. Ma (Iraniha) ahdaf-e mohemtari darim keh bayad beheshun bepardazim ! har vaght keshvar-e shoma azad shod az yough va zolm-e akhoundha va daray-e democracy shod, shoma va digaran mitounan dam az komak va azadi baray-e keshvarhayeh digeh bezanan, nah inkeh khodemoun,az goshnegi va zolm va azab bemirim,un vaght bekhahim touyeh syasat-e keshvarhayeh digeh fozouli konim va bishtar moshkel saz bashim ta hal moshkel konim !

Siamak, man nemitoonam beshinam cheshmamo bebandam nabinam toye donya che khabareh. baram sakhte didane marge bachehaye bi gonah, vase hamin delam misoozeh. delam vasayeh hameyeh bachehaye bigonah to har jaye donya ke mahroom hastan az har lahaz misoozeh: vaseye bachehaye lebanon ke bigonah koshte mishan, vaseye bachehaye khaiabooniyeh iran, vaseye bachehaye hend, africa, etc. har ja ke bacheye bi gonahi mahroom mishe delam misoozeh (che az nazareh darsi, az nazareh haghe zendegi kardan, az nazareh moraghebathaye pezeshki). foozooli nist ke adam bekhad be hame komak koneh, its part of human nature to care.

[mike435]

Siamak, man nemitoonam beshinam cheshmamo bebandam nabinam toye donya che khabareh. baram sakhte didane marge bachehaye bi gonah, vase hamin delam misoozeh. delam vasayeh hameyeh bachehaye bigonah to har jaye donya ke mahroom hastan az har lahaz misoozeh: vaseye bachehaye lebanon ke bigonah koshte mishan, vaseye bachehaye khaiabooniyeh iran, vaseye bachehaye hend, africa, etc. har ja ke bacheye bi gonahi mahroom mishe delam misoozeh (che az nazareh darsi, az nazareh haghe zendegi kardan, az nazareh moraghebathaye pezeshki). foozooli nist ke adam bekhad be hame komak koneh, its part of human nature to care.

golgol ture humans are humans regardless of anything

but out of those there are humans who have affected you more and less who have stood by more than other who you can associate with more than others that is why you should first help your own

this does not mean that just because someone is out of that relm they are exempt you should help to

by for example razing advocasy or razing awareness
not by commiting you scares resources that is very limited and you needed for your own people.

in my opinion you should help people help theme selfs

[Rasputin]

The Arab-Israeli Axis

The Arab regimes can't hide their objective alliance with Israel anymore due to the recent development in Southern Lebanon, and to the mounting Iranian power. They are moving toward a subjective public extensive coordination with Israel. They have been objective allies because Israel and the Western powers, particularly the United States, have been preserving and guarding the continuity of their dictatorships.

Hezbollah won the war, a thing that is frightening for the Arab regimes and pressing for swift reaction. A victory means strength on the national level, an encouraging psychological impetus and high Arab public morale. This is dangerous for the regimes who have been nourished by the continuous defeats and humiliation. These regimes are puppets who care only for their own private interests.

The victory that Hezbollah achieved is indicative, to an extent, of the Syrian power and that of Iran. Israel, the US, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf states, some Lebanese and some Palestinians are interested in crushing both Syria and Iran. These parties can't hide their alliance anymore, and the Arab-Israeli axis is gradually unfolding. The Saudis are visiting Israel, the Egyptians are talking about nuclear technology of their own, the Jordanians are training Lebanese anti-Hezbollah elements, the Palestinians led by Abbass are joining the orchestrated Arab-European-American-Israeli pressure on Hamas.

The area will witness two axes: the Syrian-Iranian supported by Hezbollah, Hamas and the general Arab lazy public; and the Arab-Israeli supported by the US and Europe.

[behnazk]

down with zionism

[mike435]

zionism is not the problem

zionisom excisted in 1973

pre 1967 boarders

befor 1948 when there was no israel and they still hated the idea of a jewish country in the region

problem is the dislike and hate of the arab world towrdes the state of israel wether it be jewish or non jewish
they just cant see a jewish state in that region

the state in no way has harmed any of theme

wether economic wise, cultrul, enviormental,

the zionist up until very very recently have allways been at a disatvadntage in every field but they have grown prospered and succeded and have turnd there zionist country in to a hub of technology, advance medicin, and even persute of the arts. they have turnd there univercitys in to those that compete with the world heavyweights


all the while facing distiction over and over and over again

dont condem them but imititate the zionist.

evey arab country in the region including iran a non arab country that allines it self with the arabs has more human capital, more resources, more diversity, more wealth, more everything...

there should be no reason absolutly no reason for the arabs not to florish
if israel can florish why cant the arabs or iran.

the problem is from with in not from with out.
i would say democrocy would be the solution but than majority rule in the arab world wants to get rit of the zionist, i think only iran would be diffrnt case senario but then i am an iranian so maybe if was an arab it would say it possible in the arab world as well

i think first there needs to be some years of learning and enlightenment.

p.s. when i mean israel has not hurt the arabs i mean it in a way that offencivly they didnt hurt theme. they didnt go and start stuff agaisnt the arabs or take oppertunity away from theme or destroy the enviorment

now offcourse i know that every times the arab states or arab factions have foght with israel they have gotton hurt and humiliated in the process no doubt about that.

imitate the judeo-zionist idiology by replicating ther good and usful atributes such as
unity
respect for life and the continuity of life
self respect
idea of never giving up
persute of excelense
persute of education
idea of being an optimist
caring more about being alive and living than anything else
idea of living for the next generation rather thene being a myrter

the more i think about it the more i see how ironic the state of israel and zionist are

i almost want to say its a mirical that they are even around but to bad i dont belive in miricals.

it is only now that israel is militarly suppirior, economicly suppirior, technologicly supirior. for a while they were behined in all of those fields but throgh hard work and dedication they have been able to bring theme selfs up.

but there is hope greatest example is Dubi and former iran and up until this summer lebonan befor it got bobmed back to the stone ages.

never loose hope

i wish i could tell this to palastiians i wonder what they would say in reply.

[GoorGoor]

Zionism is the problem

[bardi]

good job

[Rasputin]

Israel: Syrian fears of attack unfounded

Government officials said Saturday that Israel had no intention of attacking Syria, despite Syrian President Bashar Assad's statements that his country was prepared for an Israeli offensive to start "at any moment."

Israel has no hostile intentions toward Syria," said one senior Jerusalem source. "We have no plans to initiate conflict."
He called Assad's comments "disturbing" and noted that the IDF units stationed in the North had remained at the same "high level of readiness" since the outbreak of the war in Lebanon although the fighting had halted.

In an interview with the Kuwaiti daily Al-Anba over the weekend, Assad said, "We are preparing for an Israeli attack at any moment" and said Israel had given up on the peace process even though most of the issues between the two countries had been resolved.

Assad has alternated between bellicose declarations and calls for peace in the weeks following the Lebanon war.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak also warned in a weekend interview of the possibility of regional war.

"The Middle East is on the verge of exploding," Mubarak told an Egyptian army journal in a story marking 33 years since the Yom Kippur War.

He urged Palestinians to put aside their differences and enter peace talks for their own good, suggesting that the fighting between Hamas and Fatah could spark a larger conflict.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev declined to comment on Assad's remarks and said he was unfamiliar with the Mubarak interview.

[Rasputin]

'Israel has cause for concern over N. Korea's nuclear test'

Israel should be very concerned by North Korea's nuclear test," Uzi Eilam, former head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

According to Eilam, "The cause for concern is three-fold. First, as a world democracy, it should be concerned by the threat a North Korean nuclear capability poses to the entire world. Second, It is certainly possible that Pyongyang would share its nuclear know-how with Iran, in return for a sizeable financial reward. North Korea's nuclear program is far more advanced than Iran's. While Iran has only started to produce fissile material, North Korea has done so at least five years ago."

"Third, Syria, which is also under heavy international pressure, could look at the North Korean example and decide to actively push for its own nuclear capability, taking into account that it would be a great deterrent to alleviate the pressure and get the international community off its back," Eilam said.

"Today's experiment means that the North Koreans have successfully produced a device whose core is the heart of a nuclear bomb. In order to reach that level, it must be integrated in a weapons system, whether a bomb or a missile warhead. Since it is known that they have been working on missile technology for many years, it is not unforeseeable that North Korea could achieve nuclear weapons capability in 1-2 years."

"The international community's response to the North Korean test," Eilam asserts, "is of the utmost importance. The Security Council must impose much harsher sanctions on Pyongyang."

Labor MK Ephraim Sneh said on Monday that the morning's weapons test had showed that the West had failed in its efforts to prevent North Korea from developing and experimenting with nuclear weapons.

"It could be a good thing," Sneh told Israel Radio, explaining that Israeli policymakers and advocates should use the developments in North Korea to convince the international community to "do something [about Iran] before it's too late."

The risk posed by North Korea obtaining nuclear capability, Sneh said, is less relevant to Israel than the threat posed by Iran, which is committed to the destruction of Israel.

Sneh believes that international economic sanctions would be a viable deterrent. While Iran produces crude oil, he said, it lacks a supply of refined petroleum products. In fact, he added, Iran imports some 40% of its gasoline.

"A serious international embargo would be effective," Sneh asserted.

Unlike Sneh, Dr. Soli Shahar, a Haifa University expert on Iran, is convinced that economic sanctions would not be an effective deterrent against Iran's nuclear ambitions. "The only option I see is a serious effort [to affect] a regime change," he told Israel Radio.

The fact that North Korea reached such an advanced stage in nuclear experimentation - and Monday morning's experiment was still not tantamount to nuclear weapons capability - could be a strong hint to the Iranians that they are on the right track with their nuclear program, Shahvar said.

"The Iranians are very certain of their direction," Shahvar continued, and said that he "wouldn't rule out" the possibility that Iranian representatives had been present at North Korea's experiment.

North Korea, Shahvar said, is much worse off economically than Iran, which has plentiful energy resources and profits by them. Those same energy resources, he continued, provide the West with a much stronger incentive for cooperation with Iran that with North Korea.

"North Korea's nuclear experiment must alert the entire world that the next nuclear weapons test could be conducted by Iran," Shahvar warned.

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

Israel worried about possible NKorea-Iran nuclear cooperation

JERUSALEM (AFP) - A top Israeli official said that the Jewish state was worried about possible nuclear cooperation between arch-enemy Iran and North Korea following Pyongyang's announcement that it had conducted an underground nuclear test.

"Now that North Korea has proven its nuclear capabilities, it risks collaborating with Iran and accelerating its nuclear program," Danny Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to the United States, said in an interview with the Haaretz daily.

"In this context, sanctions (on Iran) become more and more critical," Ayalon said in a separate interview with army radio.

Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres urged the international community to impose economic sanctions on Iran over its atomic program.

"You have to hit economically. It's the hesitation to inflict economic sanctions that opens the way for military actions," Peres told army radio, adding that Iran's nuclear program was a concern for the entire international community.

Iran has been at loggerheads with the international community for months over its own nuclear program, which it insists is for peaceful energy needs and the West fears could be a cover for developing atomic weapons.

The five UN Security Council permanent members, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany, are expected to begin discussing this week a resolution imposing sanctions on Tehran if it does not halt its atomic program.

Israel views the Islamic republic as its chief enemy, alarmed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map and his dismissal of the Nazi Holocaust as a myth.

Israel is widely believed to be the only country in the Middle East to have a nuclear arsenal, estimated at 200 warheads, although it has never formally confirmed or denied it holds such weapons.

Israel slammed North Korea's announcement on Monday that it had conducted its first ever nuclear test as "provocative" and warned it sounded an "alarm bell" for the world.

Seismologists recorded a big blast from a remote northeastern area of the isolated communist country and US and South Korean authorities have since been trying to verify whether it was a nuclear test and, if so, whether or not it was a success.

[Rasputin]

The country that wouldn't grow up

By Tony Judt

By the age of 58 a country - like a man - should have achieved a certain maturity. After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and for bad, who we are, what we have done and how we appear to others, warts and all. We acknowledge, however reluctantly and privately, our mistakes and our shortcomings. And though we still harbor the occasional illusion about ourselves and our prospects, we are wise enough to recognize that these are indeed for the most part just that: illusions. In short, we are adults.

But the State of Israel remains curiously (and among Western-style democracies, uniquely) immature. The social transformations of the country - and its many economic achievements - have not brought the political wisdom that usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one "understands" it and everyone is "against" it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced - and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting - that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal. Appropriately enough, this country that has somehow failed to grow up was until very recently still in the hands of a generation of men who were prominent in its public affairs 40 years ago: an Israeli Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in, say, 1967 would be surprised indeed to awake in 2006 and find Shimon Peres and General Ariel Sharon still hovering over the affairs of the country - the latter albeit only in spirit.

But that, Israeli readers will tell me, is the prejudiced view of the outsider. What looks from abroad like a self-indulgent, wayward country - delinquent in its international obligations and resentfully indifferent to world opinion - is simply an independent little state doing what it has always done: looking after its own interests in an inhospitable part of the globe. Why should embattled Israel even acknowledge such foreign criticism, much less act upon it? They - gentiles, Muslims, leftists - have reasons of their own for disliking Israel. They - Europeans, Arabs, fascists - have always singled out Israel for special criticism. Their motives are timeless. They haven't changed. Why should Israel change?


But they have changed. And it is this change, which has passed largely unrecognized within Israel, to which I want to draw attention here. Before 1967 the State of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated: certainly not in the West. Official Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the non-communist left. The romantic image of the kibbutz and the kibbutznik had a broad foreign appeal in the first two decades of Israel's existence. Most admirers of Israel (Jews and non-Jews) knew little about the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. They preferred to see in the Jewish state the last surviving incarnation of the 19th century idyll of agrarian socialism - or else a paragon of modernizing energy "making the desert bloom."

I remember well, in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War - and how little attention anyone paid either to the condition of the Palestinians or to Israel's earlier collusion with France and Britain in the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. In politics and in policy-making circles only old-fashioned conservative Arabists expressed any criticism of the Jewish state; even neo-Fascists rather favored Zionism, on traditional anti-Semitic grounds.

For a while after the 1967 war these sentiments continued unaltered. The pro-Palestinian enthusiasms of post-1960s radical groups and nationalist movements, reflected in joint training camps and shared projects for terrorist attacks, were offset by the growing international acknowledgment of the Holocaust in education and the media: What Israel lost by its continuing occupation of Arab lands it gained through its close identification with the recovered memory of Europe's dead Jews. Even the inauguration of the illegal settlements and the disastrous invasion of Lebanon, while they strengthened the arguments of Israel's critics, did not yet shift the international balance of opinion. As recently as the early 1990s, most people in the world were only vaguely aware of the "West Bank" and what was happening there. Even those who pressed the Palestinians' case in international forums conceded that almost no one was listening. Israel could still do as it wished.

The Israeli nakba

But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations," the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish - which means that Israel's behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel. Until very recently the carefully burnished image of an ultra-modern society - built by survivors and pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats - still held sway over international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.

Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless. This unsought distinction does little to advance the Palestinian case any more than it ever helped Jews, but it has redefined Israel forever. It has become commonplace to compare Israel at best to an occupying colonizer, at worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans. In this capacity Israel elicits scant sympathy even when its own citizens suffer: Dead Israelis - like the occasional assassinated white South African in the apartheid era, or British colonists hacked to death by native insurgents - are typically perceived abroad not as the victims of terrorism but as the collateral damage of their own government's mistaken policies.

Such comparisons are lethal to Israel's moral credibility. They strike at what was once its strongest suit: the claim of being a vulnerable island of democracy and decency in a sea of authoritarianism and cruelty; an oasis of rights and freedoms surrounded by a desert of repression. But democrats don't fence into Bantustans helpless people whose land they have conquered, and free men don't ignore international law and steal other men's homes. The contradictions of Israeli self-presentation - "we are very strong/we are very vulnerable"; "we are in control of our fate/we are the victims"; "we are a normal state/we demand special treatment" - are not new: they have been part of the country's peculiar identity almost from the outset. And Israel's insistent emphasis upon its isolation and uniqueness, its claim to be both victim and hero, were once part of its David versus Goliath appeal.

[Rasputin]

Collective cognitive dysfunction

But today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania - "everyone's out to get us" - no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt's famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles," describe Israel as "Serbia with nukes."

Israel has stayed the same, but the world - as I noted above - has changed. Whatever purchase Israel's self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.

In short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.

The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.

In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary - if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel's defense - no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.
Israel's undoing

If Israel's leaders have been able to ignore such developments it is in large measure because they have hitherto counted upon the unquestioning support of the United States - the one country in the world where the claim that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism is still echoed not only in the opinions of many Jews but also in the public pronouncements of mainstream politicians and the mass media. But this lazy, ingrained confidence in unconditional American approval - and the moral, military and financial support that accompanies it - may prove to be Israel's undoing.

Something is changing in the United States. To be sure, it was only a few short years ago that prime minister Sharon's advisers could gleefully celebrate their success in dictating to U.S. President George W. Bush the terms of a public statement approving Israel's illegal settlements. No U.S. Congressman has yet proposed reducing or rescinding the $3 billion in aid Israel receives annually - 20 percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget - which has helped sustain the Israeli defense budget and the cost of settlement construction in the West Bank. And Israel and the United States appear increasingly bound together in a symbiotic embrace whereby the actions of each party exacerbate their common unpopularity abroad - and thus their ever-closer association in the eyes of critics.

But whereas Israel has no choice but to look to America - it has no other friends, at best only the conditional affection of the enemies of its enemies, such as India - the United States is a great power; and great powers have interests that sooner or later transcend the local obsessions of even the closest of their client states and satellites. It seems to me of no small significance that the recent essay on "The Israel Lobby" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has aroused so much public interest and debate. Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent senior academics of impeccable conservative credentials. It is true that - by their own account - they could still not have published their damning indictment of the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy in a major U.S.-based journal (it appeared in the London Review of Books), but the point is that 10 years ago they would not - and probably could not - have published it at all. And while the debate that has ensued may generate more heat than light, it is of great significance: As Dr. Johnson said of female preachers, it is not well done but one is amazed to see it done at all.

The fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to engineer a sea-change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S. It is becoming clear to prominent thinkers across the political spectrum - from erstwhile neo-conservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama to hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer - that in recent years the United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international political influence and an unprecedented degradation of its moral image. The country's foreign undertakings have been self-defeating and even irrational. There is going to be a long job of repair ahead, above all in Washington's dealings with economically and strategically vital communities and regions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And this reconstruction of the country's foreign image and influence cannot hope to succeed while U.S. foreign policy is tied by an umbilical cord to the needs and interests (if that is what they are) of one small Middle Eastern country of very little relevance to America's long-term concerns - a country that is, in the words of the Mearsheimer/Walt essay, a strategic burden: "A liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states."