Thanks to De for opening this important discussion. I'd have been ignored or shouted down.

The Walt/Mearsheimer paper offers no new information - they even address that at the beginning of the paper - but they've opened the doors for a wider and hopefully constructive discussion of the huge problem which is the skewing of US foreign policy in favor Israel. While the discussion will favor the US, the problem this supposes for Israel - as a "zionist" entity promoting "western" and "zionist" interests in the region - is that Israel has no viable economy to stand by itself once sugar-daddy Uncle Sam stops the money flow. The "jewishness" of the place and its "zionist" identity would be called into question by virtue of necessity; they'd have to come to equitable terms with the arabs.

But, in an indirect way, an open and hurtingly honest discussion of Israel will be the only way to save Israel as a country and a place for Jews to live in. As things look right now, Uncle Sam has more trouble than he would like to, and eventually his capacity to continue supporting Israel economically as well as in the realms of politics, diplomacy and the military will wane, and when this happens, Israel (I mean the jews living there, not the Arabs)) as a nation will stand before some stark choices:

• Gamble it high and continue the rampage of gross injustice against Palestinians and eventually lose everything, and hope that the nations from where their ancestors immigrated will accept them before the Arabs overrun them. This might be a background for the "reviving Jewish culture in Berlin" bit mentioned above.
  
• Search for a new sugar-daddy to support the continuing of the genocide campaign against Palestinians. Would be nice (wouldn't it ?), but in a world living under a very different set of constraints (energy prices and all that ...) people might offer far more resistance to the idea of underwriting a genocide and looking bad with people who should be their friends (hint: those are the Arabs, muslims in general, who live above the oil).
  
• Two-state "solution" with bantustans for the Palestinians. Another gamble because it would involve continued military presence and bad PR for Israel and anybody supporting them.
  
• Some variation of ditching the kooks in the West-Bank colonies together with the outdated zionist ideology, stopping the apartheid and integrating all residents into one society for all (jews, muslims, christians, ...), paying compensation - even symbolic - to displaced Palestinians, welcoming back those who want, bringing down the wall of shame and letting the Palestinians either have their nation in the West Bank delimited by the "green line" or making one country from Jordan to the sea.

A consequence of such a scenario as the last alternative I sketch out is that Jews, especially Israelis, will have to come to terms with their crimes against Palestinians, in the same way as Germans and Austrians have had to come to terms with what the Nazis did. People in the military, in the government, in politics, in positions of power and influence will have to go to jail. This might be painful but it will be the best of all alternatives.

A secondary consequence of such a discussion would be that Jews would be knocked from their position of sublime sanctity and uniqueness in public discourse. This would without doubt do big strides to normalize how they relate to gentiles, and ultimately relegate those who shout "anti-semite, anti-semite !" at anybody trying to address all of this to their well-deserved place in the dunce's corner.

Last but not least I'd like to say that I am translating the Walt/Mearsheimer paper to German. I see a big need to open a similar discussion here, and the paper is definitively a help. I respectfully suggest that other people translate the paper to their own language and post it as well, as I am not aware of any translations.