"Implicit in the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis is the proposition that that United States should sacrifice Israel in order to appease radical Islam and deflect its jihad away from the United States.
Follow the bouncing ball: U.S. support for Israel is a claimed "grievance" of the Islamists. If we withdraw support for Israel, we will redress that grievance and eliminate a pretext for Islamist jihad against the United States. To "throw Israel under the bus," the United States will need some rationale for abandoning a longstanding ally. Claiming that U.S. support for Israel is based not on the merits, but rather on the domestic political power of the "vast pro-Israeli conspiracy," provides such a rationale. Ergo, delegitimize U.S. support for Israel, provoke a policy shift away from Israel and toward the Palestinians, and thereby ingratiate the United States with Islamic radicals and the "Arab street."
The folly and fallacies of this thesis are too numerous to list. At bottom, it would be a disgraceful and dishonorable act of treachery that would engender contempt, not respect or appreciation, from its intended audience. But the left and the realist camp have been searching since 9/11 for a way to address on the cheap the fundamental dynamic giving Islamism its appeal, without doing any heavy lifting or getting their hands dirty: from Richard Clarke's proposal to do a really, really good PR campaign with our "friends" in the Arab world (and who might that be?), to John Kerry's "aggressive policing" using American special ops to "go after the terrorists where they live" (now, that would reassure the Arab street!), to the realists arguing for deja vu all over again by relying on those lovable "proxies" to maintain "peace" (how'd that work out the first time through?).
The Walt-Mearsheimer thesis is merely another in this line of policy proposals that share in common the relentless search for a plausible intellectual pretext to do nothing, see nothing, know nothing--until the next smoke cloud arises from a European or American city."