Below is a portion of an article written by Stephen Walt, an international relations theorist and commentator, in Foreign Affairs. The article argues that the U.S. policy of unwavering support for Israel has been a complete failure. Here is an excerpt that I found interesting:

If you’re still upset that Iran has been smuggling weapons into the West Bank, ask yourself how you’d feel if the situation was reversed. Imagine that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six-Day War in 1967, leading millions of Israelis to flee. Imagine that the victorious Arab states subsequently decided to permit Palestinians to exercise a “right of return” and establish a state of their own in some or all of Israel/Palestine. Suppose further that a million or so Israeli Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to a narrow enclave such as the Gaza Strip.

Then imagine that a group of former Irgun fighters and other Jewish hard-liners organized a resistance movement, gained control of the enclave, and refused to recognize the new Palestinian state. Moreover, they proceeded to obtain backing from sympathetic supporters around the world and began smuggling weapons into the enclave, which they used to attack nearby settlements and towns in the recently founded Palestinian state. And then suppose that Palestinian state responded by blockading and bombing the enclave, causing thousands of civilian deaths.

Given these circumstances, which side do you think the U.S. government would support? Indeed, would the United States have ever allowed a situation like this to emerge? The answers are obvious, and they speak volumes to the one-sided way in which the United States approaches this conflict.The tragic irony here is that the individuals and organizations in the United States that have been the most ardent in shielding Israel from criticism and pushing one administration after another to back Israel, no matter what it does, have in fact done enormous damage to the country that they were trying to help.

Consider where the “special relationship” has led over the past 50 years. The two-state solution has failed, and the question of the Palestinians’ future remains unresolved, in large part because the lobby made it impossible for U.S. presidents to put meaningful pressure on Israel. Israel’s ill-advised invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (part of a foolish scheme to consolidate Israeli control of the West Bank) led to the emergence of Hezbollah, which now threatens Israel from the north. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials tried to weaken the Palestinian Authority and block progress toward a two-state solution by covertly backing Hamas, thereby contributing to the tragedy of Oct. 7.

Israel’s internal politics are more polarized than the United States’ (which is saying something), and its actions in Gaza, which most groups in the lobby defend at every turn, are helping turn it into a pariah state. Support among younger Americans—including many Jews—is cratering.And this unhappy situation has allowed Iran to champion the Palestinian cause, get closer to having a nuclear weapon, and thwart U.S. efforts to isolate it. If the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies were capable of self-reflection, they’d be mortified by what they have helped Israel do to itself.

By contrast, those of us who have criticized some of Israel’s actions—only to be falsely smeared as antisemites, Jew-haters, or worse—were in fact recommending policies that would have been better for the United States and Israel alike. Had our advice been followed, Israel would be safer today, tens of thousands of Palestinians would still be alive, Iran would be farther from having the bomb, the Middle East would almost certainly be more tranquil, and the United States’ reputation as a principled defender of human rights and a rules-based order would still be intact. Finally, there would be little reason for Iran to smuggle weapons to the West Bank if these lands were part of a viable Palestinian state, and less reason for Iran’s leaders to contemplate whether they might be more secure if they possessed their own nuclear deterrent.

AOC’s rely to the question: “What do you say to a young progressive or an Arab-American who says to you, ‘I just can’t vote for Biden again after what he’s enabled in Gaza.’? AOC is in my view one of the outstanding spokespeople of the left. Or to put it differently, she strikes me as radically realistic and realistically radical.

A few days ago the New York Times, which has been a longstanding supporter and defender of the Israeli state, editorialized:

“The U.S. commitment to Israel — including $3.8 billion a year in military aid, the largest outlay of American foreign aid to any one country in the world — is a reflection of the exceptionally close and enduring relationship between the two countries. A bond of trust, however, must prevail between donors and recipients of lethal arms from the United States, which supplies arms according to formal conditions that reflect American values and the obligations of international law.Mr. Netanyahu and the hard-liners in his government have broken that bond, and until it is restored, America cannot continue, as it has, to supply Israel with the arms it has been using in its war against Hamas.”

Shifts like this should be welcomed, not cynically dismissed out of hand. Or, minimized as too little too late. Or characterized as nothing but a smoke screen. Not by itself, but in combination with the shifting positions of other political actors, including the Biden administration, and the actions of protesters on the street, they are the stuff out of which majoritarian movements are born and morph into the powerful engines of substantive and, hopefully, enduring change.

I saw this phenomenon decades ago — ancient history for some —with the rise of the Civil Rights in the “sixties.” Since then other movements (or perhaps, more accurately, coalitions) that are diverse in their political and social makeup and loosely united around a political objective have arisen. Of recent vintage is the anti-Trump, anti-Maga coalition whose work is obviously not done and whose attention is increasingly on the November elections.

My reply to a high school classmate who complained about Trump haters: I’m sure much of what you say in defense of Trump was said by Hitler admirers in defense of Hitler in Germany in 1932. Only later did many Germans regret their worship of the Fuhrer. But by that time it was too late. Trump isn’t Hitler you are probably thinking. That’s true, but in our 200 plus years as a country, no president or presidential aspirant has come closer to Hitler in his politics and demagoguery than Trump. Or different in some ways, but they are found in the same ball park.

It is hard to figure what the political calculus is for Biden’s resistance to curb arm’s shipments to Israel and insist on a permanent ceasefire. The November elections? U.S. international standing? A desire to turn the White House’s attention to China and Asia? Congressional Democrats? The foreign policy establishment? Jill Biden? Former President Barack Obama? Not likely! If anything each is a prod to cut off shipments and shut down the guns of war.As Detroit’s Bob Seger sang long ago, “Turn the page!”