Those who claim to love Israel should look carefully at this moment

Read this article and begin to weep for the two state solution.

And note this video about the growing economic gap within Israel, showing that the "reforms" (deforms, really) of the 1990s are finally having the effect of undermining community values.

Years from now, many will look back at this moment and say that Israel had an opportunity to create a lasting peace with the Palestinians, but ignored it to its peril. Israeli politics is increasingly being controlled by yahoo fundamentalist elements, Jewish and indirectly Christian. Israeli governments continue to oppress Palestinians, while Palestinian leaders are afraid to completely renounce violence as a tactic for a Palestinian state. However, it remains quite clear that Palestinian leaders, including elements of Hamas, have, more from a temporary exhaustion, moved closer to a position where true negotiations can take place. See this December 29, 2011 editorial from Ha'aretz, for example.

Yet, the American-Jewish yahoo organizations--Israel Uber Alles groups, I call them--are more than ever caught up in promoting strife, not peace. Stand with Us is one such organization which has sprung up over the past decade. As a local temple president, I get missives from the local San Diego chapter of this group, constantly telling me to attend some rally that promises to protect Israel from its enemies. Most of the time, its rallies are poorly attended. However, its propaganda permeates throughout most temples and that propaganda from it and other Jewish-American organizations shuts down any true discussion that one may still find within Israeli media such as Ha'aretz or Yediot Achronot.

Simply put, the door to avoiding an all out war of survival among Jews and Palestinian Arabs is closing over the next decade unless there is a fundamental change in the mind set of Israeli leadership. Stand with Us, and their fundamentalist allies in the evangelical movement, may get their apocalyptic wishes, but as some wiser leftists have on occasion told some less wise leftists when the latter say, "The worse it gets, the better it gets":

"No. The worse it gets, the worse it gets."