The U.S. Role in the Four Wars

I appreciate many of Michael Walzer’s thoughts on current Israeli-Palestinian conflicts (“The Four Wars of Israel/Palestine,” Fall 2002)—a topic on which he and I have often had trouble seeing eye-to-eye. The best part of his message is his insistence that any decent solution of this tangled struggle requires both parties to renounce their fantasies of suppression or physical removal of “the wrong kind of people” on the other side.

I have disagreements, too, many of them predictable. But what I want to share is more a reaction to what is missing in the essay than to anything asserted there. Reading it, one might almost conclude that Israel charts its strategy against the Palestinians strictly on its...