On Sun, 8 Aug 2010, SA wrote:
> By the way, Obama's current director of policy planning at the State Dept,
> Anne-Marie Slaughter, wrote a response to a Stephen Walt essay (about foreign
> policy in general, not directly about the Lobby) in the Boston Review in
> 2005. On Israel, Walt of course said the US should totally reorient its
> policy 180 degrees, etc. Slaughter, of course, didn't agree (otherwise she
> wouldn't be in this job), but I found her reasoning interesting.
Tying together 2 threads, the last time I saw Tony Judt speak was at the "Israel Lobby Debate" at Cooper Union in 2006. John Mearsheimer's article in the LRB (co-written with Stephen Walt)is what touched it off, and on his side were Tony Judt and Rashid Khalidi. On the other side was Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and Schlomo Ben-Ami (Oxford-trained historian and former Israeli Foreign Minister).
And the moderator was Anne-Marie Slaughter, who seemed quite at home in that position, and sounded just like your excerpt: sympathizing with the anti side's arguments about strategy, and the pro side's arguments about difficulty.
Judt, BTW, was the most impressive, and seemingly entirely healthy. It was a shock to hear later how fast he deteriorated.
Michael