Michael Walzer on Israel at 60

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"Over many years, Western Liberals and Leftists have not had great success at foreign policy. Their strength lies at home, and many of them probably believe that the best foreign policy is a democratic and egalitarian domestic policy. I wish that my friends in Israel could be good liberals and leftists in this old fashioned way. I wish that they could focus their energies over the next decades on reducing the inequalities of Israeli society, improving the quality of state education, separating religion and politics, addressing the rift between Israeli Jews and Arabs, facing up to environmental problems. Surely some of them will work on these and other internal issues some of the time, and so they should. But the hard truth is that the major challenge facing Israel at 60 won't be solved even by the best imaginable domestic policy.

The major challenge, as everyone knows, has to do with war and peace—but also, more specifically, given Hezbollah rocketry in the summer of 2006 and the daily rocketing of Sderot, it has to do with physical security. Israel is immensely strong and immensely vulnerable, and that combination is very hard to think about." ...