I am not sure there is much more to say: Josh said: "You were the one who brought up they hung on to South Africa after a dispassioned calculation would have suggested otherwise. I tried to credit this to the minds of the elites in a rut." I said: "All in all, in my view, it was politically "irrational" for the U.S.G. to oppose the ANC for as long as it did.  But these kind of political irrationalities are  standard problems that crop up in powerful systems of domination, such as U.S. imperialism. When at all possible imperial domination is maintained by funding a thin ruling group that usual resorts to violence.  This was true of every empire I have ever learned about and it is true of the U.S.  Thus trying to co-opt the ANC, what the state department labeled a "terrorist organization," was only a last resort and not the preferred solution." I'm not sure what you are objecting to in the above statement.....  Systems of political and economic dominance tend to produce an extreme form of "short term" rationality and "long term" irrationality.  This is particularly true of competitive systems.  It is also true of "imperial systems" where the system is motivated by competition with other imperial systems, rebellion from within, or has spread as a result of internal competition between various ruling coalitions, persons, groups, corporations.  (Rome, circa 100 BCE, for example, the European nation-state system 1600-1945, etc.) This is just a general observation so it is only a rule of thumb.  But I'm still curious about the "Holy Land 2000" sidelight and what in your view makes it relevant to the debate on the pro-Israel lobby.  P.S. This is off topic but -- There are some people, I have met, who are deeply religious and believe in the literal truth of the Bible (a form of irrationalism or subservience to authority in my view) who are "left" in all of their political views.  Engagement with the African-American church and with the religious members of the Central American Solidarity movement enlightened me to this side of "left" religion.  I consider my self anti-organized religion, but just because a person has been indoctrinated into a particular religion doesn't mean that they have come to reactionary political conclusions.  But I'm trying to figure out what all of this has to do with the debate at hand, which was about the relative weight of the pro-Israel Lobby on U.S. foreign policy and elite planning. Jerry