If we collectively feel so strongly about continuing to support Israel as our strongest ally in the Middle East, then why don't we just do it in a big way?

Our support for Israel now is so transparent to their announced enemies as to be laughable. Why don't we just fund Israel in a big way--$3 billion a year or even triple that is an insignificant proportion of our national budget--and just tell them to go ahead and occupy as much of Gaza and the West Bank as they'd like. They've certainly got the military might to do that if they so choose. It seems to me that we wouldn't make any more enemies among the Muslims and Arabs around there than we already have.

When the word spreads, it might make life for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan a lot more dangerous than it already is, but that would be the price of that kind of support. That was the strong forewarning by the Joint Chiefs which was sent to the State Department and the White House. The generals don't get all the "paid advice" that the elected members of our government get from the likes of the Israel lobby and all those companies selling arms to Isreal, so they tend to tell it like it is. What's are the words so often used, "...listen to the generals on the ground."

We might also consider what effect our undisguised support for Israel might have on our relations with other Muslim countries--Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the friendly, smaller gulf states. You know, the ones with all the oil or control over the waterways thru which the oil is shipped to the U.S.? Might those relations suffer as well? But I guess that would be more of the price of taking the veil off our support for Israel.

One other question: If Israel makes the unilateral decision to attack Iran's nuclear facilities to avoid the possibility of attack on them and starts a really bad shooting war in the region, what should the U.S. do? Would Israel simply be "our dog in the fight"? Or would we jointly enter the war with Israel against Iran for control of the region? I might point out that Iran has a much larger and even more well-equipped military than Israel. Their equipment and weapons are all supplied by Russia.

If we will support Israel unconditionally, in essence will we have ceded our decision-making over our foreign and military strategy in the Middle East to them? I'm not sure I trust Benjamin Netenyahu and their conservative and hawkish Knesset more than our political leaders, however much we criticize them.

Nope, the more I think about it the more I conclude that we really need to lean hard on Israel to perform the way we wish. Both the U.S. and the rest of the world have a lot more riding on trying to build some sort of peaceful co-existence among all the peoples of the Middle East than to permit some Israeli political cowboys put it all at risk in order to build 1,600 housing units right in the middle of the West Bank. If that means really getting tough with Netenyahu--so be it. What's the more important relationship, the fact that we have a nation of 7 million people that's about the size of Massachusetts as our best ally in the Middle East? Or the fact that without the money and arms provided by the U.S., the Arabs would have long ago overrun the newly formed state of Israel?

It seems to me that if we tell them what we expect and how we expect them to act with their neighbors, they'd have little choice but to comply. Ahhh, but then there's all that money being thrown around Washington by the Israel lobby and the arms makers.