“There is no way that Israel as a Sparta is going to be in the interests of the Israeli or American people,” noted Sam Lewis, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel who helped negotiate the 1978 Camp David Accords with Egypt under the Jimmy Carter administration.

I like their name — instead of K Street (boulevard of the lobbyists), J for Jewish, I guess.

Anyway, those who know me well have heard me say more than once that a state that is in a perpetual war will eventually lose. That’s just the odds. Long-term survival depends on having neighbors who don’t want to kill you. The right-wing in Israel will never be convinced, because they feel it’s a sacrilege to give up one square meter of land granted them by Yahweh.

Ultimately, I think Israel can make this work, but only by withdrawing settlers from the West Bank and giving it to the Palestinians as a homeland. How they will do that, when it seems that many of the governments there insist on actually building new Israeli housing in the West Bank, it a mystery to me.

After sixty years of letting right-wing neocons and evangelicals dominate discussion on Israel, a new group of progressive Jews are aiming to reframe the debate towards a better way of thinking….