POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DOMINQUE MOIST IN THE GUARDIAN
You have some good points here, although you don't offer much basis for your assumption of a coming change of era.
But there are many signs it is coming, and certainly not just the emerging multi-polar world.
Americans are finally starting to show some independence in thinking on the matter of Israel. There are many signs, with important, thoughtful people questioning aspects of the relationship in public, and I don't just mean Carter whom many Israelis have excoriated just for a few honest sentences.
I do think the many abuses America has suffered in the name of supporting Israel play a role here: the idiotic invasion of Iraq (Israel's position was the main reason, no matter what some blubber about oil); the many spy scandals, including one of the most compromising in American history, that of Jonathon Pollard; the endless ignoring of Security Council resolutions and other matters requiring the U.S. to often cast the only, unhappy vote supporting Israel's excesses; the many surreptitious and open acts against American policy, as the expansion of settlements; and horrible black-ops events like Israel's vicious attack on the USS Liberty.
It also gets a little tiresome handing over a $3 billion subsidy every year.
The sense of things in the Middle East having moved grossly out of balance, particularly under the pathetic Bush who appears to apply Religious Right Theology to foreign policy, comes into play also. The Arab world is important. Not only are there many tens of millions of people, but there is movement towards modernity. Iraq had almost reached the stage when it would have naturally become a democratic state of some prosperity. The Arab world's interests must be better recognized and more fairly treated. The idiocy of Iraq has actually set this all back, and the U.S. will have to work hard to regain some trust and honor among Arabs.
Israel needs to be to stand on its own. It really cannot be called a nation otherwise. Its status today is a kind of quasi-dependency of the United States. Of course, standing on its own means making genuine peace with the people who have been abused and scorned for so long. The current garrison-state situation just cannot continue indefinitely.
As to your reference to Israel’s "nimble" economy, I just wonder where you got that idea. The history of Israel's economy is anything but "nimble." Despite immense subsidies, its economy has often been stagnant and inflationary, burdened as it is with many policies that only apply to a kind of theocracy and burdened with a military almost nightmarishly out of proportion to its size.
