enablers

the below is taken from Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, writing about Israel and Palestine.

LibertarianLeft makes an important point that can't be emphasized enough:

Enabling Israel's self-destruction

The irony, of course, is that by making a two-state solution impossible, Israel is hurtling down a path likely to lead to its destruction as a Jewish state due to demographics.

American diplomatic and financial pressure on Israel to halt the construction of West Bank settlements and ultimately dismantle them -- and to come to an agreement based roughly on the Arab League’s two-state proposal -- is the only hope that country has for long-term survival.

Instead, the U.S. has been behaving like the enabling spouse of an alcoholic, making endless excuses and paying the bills while indulging in a shared denial of reality. The self-styled friends of Israel in the Lobby and in Congress are may love the Jewish state, but they're helping the object of their affection to destroy herself.

Indeed. The very restrained efforts back in 1991 by Bush 41 and his then-Secretary of State Jim Baker to pressure Israel to cease settlement expansion in the West Bank (by conditioning further U.S. aid on its cessation) provoked the intense scorn of what Bush called "the power of the pro-Israel lobby," and to this day, Baker is despised and demonized as "anti-Israel" and even "anti-Semitic" by the allegedly "pro-Israel" Right in the U.S. because of that very mild attempt to use the massive amounts of American aid to influence Israeli actions. Yet imagine how much better off Israel would be (to say nothing of the U.S.) had Bush and Baker succeeded (rather than been thwarted) in those efforts.