No conspiracy here

"Looking back," Tony Judt writes in a NY Times op-ed on the Israel Lobby controversy, "we shall see the Iraq war and its catastrophic consequences as not the beginning of a new democratic age in the Middle East but rather as the end of an era that began in the wake of the 1967 war, a period during which American alignment with Israel was shaped by two imperatives: cold-war strategic calculations and a new-found domestic sensitivity to the memory of the Holocaust and the debt owed to its victims and survivors."

He continues:

For the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East — and its enduring implications for our standing there — has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

In Judt's telling, the Likudnik endorsement of the Iraq war was an act of desperation that has gone terribly wrong (maybe not, for some) and will probably accelerate the disintegration of the US-Israeli partnership.

For the sake of the Palestinians, let's hope so. The United States is the primary obstacle to a settlement of the I/P conflict, so presumably any chipping away at the "special friendship" we hear so much about will increase the likelihood that some kind of two state solution can be crafted -- a solution, hopefully, free of Bantustans, transparent acts of ethnic cleansing, and the assorted violence that underlines everyday reality for both Israelis and Palestinians.