YBD: You wasted a few lines criticizing Burg when you could have used all your time blaming Palestinians for the dinosaurs' extinction, Madonna's ghastly road show, and the home mortgage crisis. You are slipping....

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that these worries are accurate, and that Israel is going to continue to move in a rightward and more violent direction. My concern is this: As Israel moves deeper and deeper into some combination of South Africa-style apartheid and Serbian-style ethnic cleansing, will the United States continue its fatal plunge into the moral whirpool of its relationship with Israel? Will those charged with guarding our national security, national interests and national reputation finally be able to make a break from domestic pressure groups, take a firmer line with Israel and and cast off this albatross? Or will those who claim they are interested in "restoring America's reputation and restoring America's leadership" continue to neglect the obvious and tie our reputation to the cause of Israel and its globally notorious system of oppression?

The key to an intelligent national response is information. Yes, there is strong support for Israel in the Untied States. But I don't think it is appreciated just how ignorant much of the US population is about the history of the conflict. Most of the ignorance is not due to stupidity, but to an unofficial media embargo on discussion of the history of Israel and Palestine.

I have spoken to numerous ordinary folks over the years whose perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes something like this: The state of Israel has well-defined borders and has always existed in its present location, going back to biblical times. The Israelis were peacefully minding their own business there, as they have for many centuries, when they were invaded and attacked by crazed bands of suicidal Jew-hating Arabs who come from the neighboring country of Palestine, and evidently want to take over the peaceful, democratic country of Israel.

Ignorant yes. But where is the average person, who gets most of their information from television news, supposed to get a more accurate picture?

For the US to start behaving rationally, it needs to break the spell of the national information lock-down. Is this possible? Maybe. It once seemed that progressives couldn't catch a break on the cable news channels, which were dominated by right-wingers. Then MS-NBC moved left with Olbermann and Maddow and discovered a huge latent and underserved market. What enterprising news company is going to do the same thing with the pent-up demand for frank talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Is it too much too hope that some day the get-Carter, get-Walt and get-Mearsheimer tactics by Israels's heavy-handed protectors aren't going to work anymore?

Let's be blunt about where the Israeli drift to the right might lead. At some point all of these hard line Israeli leaders may calculate that their only hope for national survival and the success of their long-term national aims is a major regional war in which they succeed in dragging the US, UK and some Europeans in on their side, a war which radically alters the power alignments and geography of the region, and during which they can rapidly and brutally drive masses of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, under the rubric of a "security emergency" while everyone else is busy with their own problems, and too busy killing Arabs and Muslims of their own to care about a few more Arab wretches in Palestine. Israel may already have concluded that it needs to do this while it still possesses a nuclear monopoly in the region.

There are any number of tactics Israel could pursue to light the spark of such a war. And when Israel went to war against Lebanon in 2006, with many in Israel and here in the states attempting to expand the war into Syria and beyond, was our next Secretary of State helping Tony Blair and Kofi Annan with their cease-fire plans? No, she was participating in a fanatical pro-Israel rally across the street from the UN on the very day Blair and Annan were introducing their proposal.

I dearly hope Barack Obama has some clue about the dangers that await him, and the political courage he might be required to show to keep tens of thousands of young Americans from being drafted into a grisly death on the battlefields of the Middle East.

Dan, are you familiar with the "A Clean Break" report written by Richard Pearle for Netanyahu?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break

It was a predecessor to the Project For a New American Century's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" paper:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
which concludes: "The process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor."

Remember that it wasn't just Iraq, but Iran and Syria also that were lusted over, and well before "9/11 changed everything."

Because even experts agree that even a nuclear Iran wouldn't nuke Israel, because of mutually assured destruction, I have to wonder how much the Palestinian issue plays a role in Israel's strong desire to attack Iran. Without any military rivals in the region, who is going to stop a quiet (at least in America) ethnic cleansing?

I don't want to catch or throw a bunch of name calling, but if there are two kinds of people withing a geographically bound sovereign state, and those people are identified by two different kinds of ID cards, and what kind of ID card you have determines where you can go and what you can do, then it's too late to stave off talk of "ending up as an Apartheid state."

Whenever I hear "Israelis and Palestinians clash," I think, what's a Palestinian? I go look at a map, and I see the region where it happened is in the boundaries of the country called Israel. So why doesn't it say "Israelis and other Israelis clash?" Because it has people in its borders who it doesn't treat as citizens of its own state. I believe the term for that system is called "Apartheid."

If you're going to put your religion as the name of your country and slap its symbols all over your flag, then write it into your laws, you might want to consider actually upholding the main precepts of said religion in dealing with your neighbors at the very least.

Rabbi Hillel, could you explain to me the Israeli policy towards Palestinians while standing on one foot?

Round and round the thinkers go. Why nobody listens, only the smart ones know. They are so dumb they don't see what we see, why we call them the Nazis of the Mediterranean Sea.

We are so smart, won't they just understand, it must be the Lobby keeping heads in the sand.

We are so smart, and they are so dumb but after a week nothing's changed and the Cafe is numb.

We are so brave when we call it apartheid, hoping we'll hear someone yell. . .anti-semite!

Round and round the thinkers go, it must be the Lobby, 'cause won't they just know?

We are so smart, won't they we hear what we say. Ahem, folks admit it. . .this is parlor game play.