That's it? That's all you got?

Boehner's Epic Burn

Josh Marshall.

Israel is a junior member in a security alliance in which the needs of each partner are deeply imbalanced. 

There's nothing wrong with that. 

The two countries do share a range of common values and are bound together by a deep mutual affinity. 

That is as good a reason as any for an alliance. 

Uh, no.

A more ridiculous anti-realist view of foreign policy, military alliances, and war would be very hard to imagine.

Not that common values and deep mutual affinity count for nothing.

The existence of common values and a deep mutual affinity is a perfectly good reason for us to sympathize with Israel, to wish that country well, and perhaps to offer support and encouragement at no significant cost.

But it is a perfectly stupid reason for any country to incur serious costs or take serious risks, both of which we have done to the tune of literally trillions, over the decades, for this tiny country wholly insignificant for our own security or interests.

Josh Marshall urges this change in US policy in light of Bibi's efforts to sabotage both the Iran deal and the two-state solution.

US policy should change. 

Not on security, which should remain just as robust, but on the policy of blocking all external diplomatic pressure [for the two-state solution, for peace talks, for Palestinian rights, for moderation in Gaza, for compliance with UN resolutions and official US policy forbidding Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza, etc.] on the reasoning that leaving the Israelis free to settle things with the Palestinians between themselves is only way to reach a settlement. 

It is clearly not. 

So the policy should change.

That's not good enough.

That's not what we should do.

We should walk away from Israel, altogether.

PS.

Look again at the first quote from JM, the one about the basis of our security relationship with Israel in shared values and deep mutual affinity.

If that's a good reason not just to sympathize with Israel (which I most certainly do) but to provide a flat guarantee of its security, would it not also have applied to the same effect - to both same effects - to other European settler-states in Africa?

Algeria?

Kenya?

South Africa?

If not, why not?

But when conservatives made exactly such claims the left told us their talk of shared values and mutual affinity was just code for racism and the official view of the liberal Occident was that both white minority rule and partition, where practical, were unacceptable; the US and the West had to support local majority rule all over Africa.

So tell us, please, why Israel is special.

Recognition that it's not special, recognition that it's in a case on all fours with European colonialism that came to an end in the decades immediately after World War Two, is what drives abandonment of the two-state solution, of the idea of Israel as a truly Jewish State, and of both by increasing numbers of the left and even the Jewish left.

It even drives some of those folks to actively oppose, and insist the US and the UN and the world ought to oppose, both the two-state solution and the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

Friedman, the other day, in the Times, told us that if the two-state solution is abandoned then if Israel remains democratic it will not remain Jewish.

And he pretty clearly liked that idea better than the alternative of decades of ethnic cleansing to push the Arabs out of all of Israel, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Maybe Josh Marshall feels the same way.

But the preferred solution, for him and I think Friedman, is partition and recognition, in Palestine, of both a Jewish State (Israel) and a Palestinian State, with explicit security guarantees for Israel from the UN and the US.

They might even insist that the Palestinian State have no army of its own, and that the Jewish State have a right to police or even invade the Palestinian State to prevent or oppose terrorism.

So again I ask Josh and those who agree with him, why is Israel special?

Why is a Jewish settler state in Palestine maintained in the face of deathless native opposition by constant and unchallenged security assistance from Europe and America OK while similar arrangements in Algeria, in Kenya, in South Africa, and elsewhere in Africa were not?