@gleick I recently started reading "US foreign policy and the Israel lobby" by John Mearsheimer, and fucking wowzers. There's so much good stuff in that book, can't recommend strongly enough. But if I have to make one comment - the idea that Israel is more "like us" (the West) than the Arabs, which somehow I personally had never stopped to question before, is Israeli propaganda. The historical record shows something very different, as extensively documented in that book.