“a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_aid#Notable_Military_Aid”>For each year of 1976-2002, Israel was the largest recipient of U.S. military aid. Egypt was second-largest 1981-2002. Since 2002, Israel and Egypt have remained among the top four annual recipients of U.S. military aid.

“… but I don’t think policy would have been particularly different without it. “

Well it’s quite like that neither Sadat nor Mubarak, nor any other US “puppet”, would have been in power.

The Egypt-Gaza strip barrier

The Rafah Crossing

Demilitarization of the Sinai

So then we agree that the things like “Jewish problem” or “Negro problem” can only exist in a bigoted mind, while the Palestinian problem (in reference to Palestine) is a very real one. I’ll add that your approach of assigning blame to “the Arab world” and “Palestinians” is very much unenlightened. Those are not ideologies, but large groups of people of all walks of life, sentiments, and convictions.

http://justworldnews.org/archives/002819.html
” Well, they started squeezing Hamas almost immediately. Originally, in the weeks right after the late-January election, Hamas wanted to form a relatively moderate government that would include a large number of political “independents” under the leadership of Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh as Prime Minister. But as I know– because I was the conduit of one of these threats– threats of lethal violence were sent by the Israelis to any Palestinian “independents” who might be even considering joining a Haniyeh-led government. As a result, none of them did; and the government that Haniyeh ended up forming was 100% Hamas.

On this conflict specifically, rather than the history, there’s a decent report at the International Crisis Group which touches on this (I’m not going to link as don’t know how to do it in a tidy manner, if you know what I mean – But it’s right there, under the heading ‘Israel and Hamas:’…..on their main page)

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster

People expect more out of the United States than they do out of North Korea. Somehow it has never occurred to anyone to complain about this fact. (Though now probably someone will uncover the National Review blog post that does exactly that.)

You offer no evidence that American aid exerts pressure on Egypt’s policy in this regard, although it wouldn’t suprise me if this were true (and, it might be hard to obtain documents or statements to that effect; certainly, the activities of the Pakistani authorities might be cited as a similar example)

But, I’m willing to read thru some authoritative sources (sadly, my only language is english) if you provide them, that support your point of view.

walt at 236 – go back and read the posts.
It wasn’t I who said that Israel should be held to a high std cause it was a westernized democracy – that is someone else. That can only mean that totalitarian nondemocratic nonwestern regimes can be held ot a lower std; hence my irony

@235 – politely, get up to speed or go somewhere else. You should, with only a most minimal amount of googling, be able to understand that “jewish problem” is areference to Nazi views which culminated in teh final solution, and that one can find, again with minimal effort, such sentiments expressed widely in the arab world (contrast with the attitude of israel toward the tomb of the patriarchs massacare, widely condemmed as crimminal – when have palestinians shown any concern ?)

First of all, it’s now clear that Hamas did win this round.

Second, something I should have pointed out earlier: Hamas’s primary enemy at this stage of the conflict is not Israel. It’s the PA. Hamas can’t begin its project of eliminating Israel until it displaces the PA as the representative of the Palestinian people.

Israel, as a result of its inability to resolve the contradictions within its own society, is unwilling or unable to constrain the settler movement and to move toward acceptance of a Palestinian state. So the PA, at this point, is able to accomplish nothing for Palestinians except to provide a degree of stability. But Hamas can disturb that stability with very little effort and by doing so, it can demonstrate that the PA is making no progress at all toward an end to the occupation. In doing so, it deligitimizes the PA and advances its own claim to be the true embodiment of Palestinian aspirations.

Hamas took a giant step forward in accomplishing its goals with Israel’s failure in the ridiculously named Cast Lead. Israel’s current failure in the equally absurdly named Pillar of Defense is another step toward Hamas’s victory over the PA. Just about everything that Israel has done since Sharon left the scene has strengthened Hamas, weakened the PA, and reduced Israel’s odds of existence in the long term.

Today, the West Bank is reasonably quiet due to the willingness of Palestinians there to accept the leadership of the PA, which tacitly agreed to end the Second Intifada in 2005. Once they turn to Hamas instead, we will have a Third Intifada, with who knows what outcome.

Another point: one of the most damaging side effects of the Gaza crisis is that it has provided cover for the suppression of secular democracy in Egypt, which might have happened in any event but which was clearly advanced by Hamas’s success. If fundamentalist theocrats prevail in Egypt and in Syria, which is beginning to seem likely, I really don’t see a good result for anyone living in the area between them.

Ezra, you continue to parrot this transparent untruth. The Rafah crossing is subject to the Israeli/Egypt “peace” accords, and Egyptian policing of the crossing has been required to be on a par with the Israeli crossings, not the least by the leverage that the US exerts through it’s kind “donations” to the Egyptian military and the Mubarak regime. While the new Egyptian government would probably prefer to relax policing at the crossing, it too is subject to the same pressures, and the military and economic consequences of disagreement.

The lawless situation in the Sinai is also somewhat affected by the demilitarisation of the area by the same accords.

Walzer argues that Hamas is an evil organization, which is sustained and maintained in power by the Israeli right because it enables them to keep a hold on power and avoid genuine progress toward peace. The analysis is hardly earth-shattering. It is more interesting that it comes from such a committed Zionist. When you have someone like Walzer saying, effectively, that the fault is equally on both sides you have a clear sign that US Jews can no longer be relied upon in the way they once could.

I don’t really begin to understand Ezra’s point. He is of course right that Israel commands a place in political discourse that it is out of proportion to its crimes. He sees in this evidence of anti-semitism, which is unlikely to be anything like a full explanation (Zimbabwe also receives a disproportionate amount of attention in the UK, and for the same reason as Israel: a history of involvement in the region plus sheer inertia: media cover things that they and their readers are familiar with). In any case, what is supposed to follow from the fact? Israel is not the worst place in the world, by a long chalk. So? Does that mean that its many and egregious faults are okay? That we’re not allowed to discuss them? Or only allowed to discuss them after discussing worse places? What possible justification could there be for that?

To be clear – in case it needs to be made explicit – there is nothing new or unique about this kind of racist justification of colonial settlement. There sure as heck is not anything “Jewish” about it, but then nobody here has ever claimed such – with the possible exception of Ezra himself who seems to claim that there is something specifically “Jewish American” about this kind of argument – brought about, if I understand him correctly by a fear of the Eternal Antisemite that is always present if temporarily hidden. In reality, in a country founded on the successful implementation of a program of eradication of the natives, a country with Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill, and a country that has not dealt with this history at all (indeed, in many ways it is not history at all but ongoing) no such mythical construct is needed to make the argument that the brutes are responsible for their own extermination.