Interesting Articles.

This is a nice article by Amira Hass detailing the humanitarian crisis facing Palestinian people. She describes how desperately poor Palestinians are and how much Israeli policies (withholding tax and custom revenues, making it hard for Palestinians to do business) are aggravating the situation.

This is a good article by Robert Frisk explaining how Baker report suggests that the American empire is on the verge of collapse. He tries to bring out the parallels with the disappearance of Roman empire. We will have to wait and see if his analysis is born out by the reality.

This is a kind of funny article by Yossi Paritzky claiming that the current avatar of the strong US-Israel alliance is mainly fundamentalist. During travels in American South he discovers the appalling extent of lunacy of Christian right and according to him this lunatic crowd is in fact the base of Bush team and plays the major role in formulating the foreign policy. May be.

I have no doubts as to how crazy these people are or that their insane ideas receive audience in the Bush white house. However, I do not think this is the most important motivation for the foreign policy. Uncritical American support for Israeli policies is not a recent phenomenon - it has been there for at least forty years now. No doubt it reached new heights in the current administration. Partly it is due to the neo-conservative ideology of "black and white", whereby Israel is "good" or "on our side", and the other side is "against us", or "evil", or "terrorists". Partly it is due to the efficiency of "Israel Lobby" which found more sympathetic audience in the current administration. The religious fervor is no doubt a factor. But I doubt if it is the most important one.