Traveling to various countries to speak about foreign policy during the George W. Bush administration, Walter Russell Mead encountered a single, widely held idea: that Jewish influence was the best way to explain U.S. conduct abroad. Yet both polling data and Mead’s own casual observations revealed that American Jews overwhelmingly disliked President Bush, making it highly unlikely he was doing their bidding. Then, when Barack Obama became president, Mead’s foreign interlocutors expressed their disappointment that Obama had not created more “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel—and concluded that “the Jews” must be holding him back. This assertion too failed to hold up to even mild scrutiny. Mead thus set out to discover the real reasons for the enduring American alliance with the Jewish state, resulting in his recent book The Arc of a Covenant, which he discusses with Michael Doran. (Audio, 66 minutes)

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.