*Blankfort's an asshole.
*I don't really understand the focus on behind-the-scenes stuff -- State Department debates, Truman's preferences, goals of US planners, etc. -- any more than I understand the focus on unseen Zionist-lobby machinations. These things have at best a minor relevance to the facts on the ground. US planners can plan all they want, but they still have to implement that plan in a world frustrates their fantasies at every turn, starting with Palestinian resistance to those plans. I just read Eyal Weizman's fantastic Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, and even though he describes, in a wonderfully material way, what Israel and the US (and Europe) are doing to the Palestinians, he never tries to read the formers' minds; he's only ever concerned with the results of the effects of their actions, not their intent. He is, as David Green correctly says we should be, concerned above all with Palestinian self-determination, not the geopolitical fantasies of Israeli and US elites.
(As an aside, I find it interesting that people like Chomsky and some of the most active participants on this thread are so hostile to the pomos and their airy-fairy, ivory-tower, Theoretical works, yet they insist on deriving truth from the thoughts and (perceived) plans of a small group of people. Is there anything less empirical and more idealistic and theoretical than thinking that the plans hatched in Langley and Foggy Bottom actually describe the world we inhabit?)
*Blankfort and others here seem to think that US support of Israel is irrational or anachronistic because that support harms its economic interests. Besides the oddness of practicing statecraft without a license or even getting paid, this assumes that the state is always subservient to capital; or, to put it sharper, that the state lacks prerogatives of its own. Sure, most of the time the state is capital's reterritorializer, but it certainly does have autonomy and needs unique to it that can be antagonistic to capital: "War is the health of the state" is a slogan that's often simplistically chanted, but it's also eternally applicable. The state was born in and can only maintain itself with war (violence), but war is often destructive of capital.
*Someone mentioned that the US should move closer to the "international consensus" on Israel/Palestine. Sorry, but there's no light between US policies and the international consensus. Don't mistake the US's being the point man and Europe's occasional crocodile tears for there actually being substantive differences between them.
*In many ways, Blankfort's and Chomsky's positions simply mirror each other (though the latter lacks the odious racism of the former). Blankfort says Israel/The Jews owns the US, while Chomsky says the US controls Israel. Of course both of them evince a way of looking at the world that's seriously out of date: one does not need to "own" or "control" something to profit from it. Just as neoliberal capitalists try to distance themselves as much as possible from production "(Designed in California, Assembled in China," it says on the bottom of my computer), neoliberal states don't need to exercise direct control client states to benefit from them (or to keep them at bay; I'm looking at you, Chavez).
Israel's value to the west, at least since '67, has been that it's a laboratory for governing techniques: aerial warfare, roving sovereignty, extraterritorial control, etc., are things largely pioneered in Israel and later exported to the US, especially, but Europe also. There's no question of control here, but of borrowing and, possibly, of helping to create. If Israel is indeed losing some of its value to the US, it has nothing to do with its becoming an economic liability or its becoming more difficult to control, but it's because it's stopped being a fruitful experimenter. And it has become that: at this point, with its brutal sieges and blockades and its obvious expansion into the West Bank, it's acting like a old-school colonizing power; it's ceasing to innovate. I don't see how those techniques can benefit the US. Then again, I'm not one of those state planners, so what do I know?