The post-Israel Middle East

Norman Finkelstein has predicted that Israel is two wars away from complete destruction. That sounds about right. The next one, psychologically required after losing in Lebanon, will be a partial success, setting up the final over-reach.

The Zionists have put all their eggs in the basket of American support, but that basket has developed two holes. One is the paradox that support for the Zionist series of wars and conflicts has so weakened the United States that it is no longer a reliable ally. Faced with a real crisis in Korea, the Americans are powerless to do anything, and have to rely on China to fix things. It’s China that is going around the world – Africa, South America, Asia – sealing up oil contracts, and not, contrary to what I keep reading about the Bush Administration’s great geopolitical plans, the United States. It’s Russia that is methodically reestablishing its power over the ‘Stans, Ukraine, and Georgia, and dangling promises of hydrocarbons at Europe. Americans are so nackered from fighting Israel’s wars that the world’s sole superpower isn’t so super any longer.

The other hole is the fact that Americans are slowly waking up to the power of the Lobby, and don’t like it. A Zogby International poll (Zogby remains the only fair American polling company, as witnessed by the fact that its results are correct, instead of the ‘push-polls’ sold by all the other corrupted pollsters):

“ . . . reveals that 39% of the American public ‘agree’ or ‘somewhat agree’ that ‘the work of the Israel lobby on Congress and the Bush administration has been a key factor for going to war in Iraq and now confronting Iran.’ However, a similar number, 40%, ‘strongly disagreed’ or ‘somewhat disagreed’ with this position. Some 20% of the public, or more than one in five, were not sure.”

This despite the fact that a significant minority of Americans are religiously insane (if you extract the Christian Zionists from the Israel Lobby poll, it appears that practically every sane American opposes the Lobby). Perhaps more importantly, 50% of those between the ages of 18 and 29 agreed that the Israel lobby had a hand in forming the current pro-war policy. The tide is turning.

It is time to consider what a post-Israel Middle East will look like, and how Judaism handles post-Zionist Jewish settlement in what used to be Israel.