Book Review: Allin & Simon’s ‘Our Separate Ways’

America’s alliance with Israel will not be the most urgent issue facing Donald Trump in his first weeks in the White House. But it faces an uncertain future – and not only on the (reasonable) assumption that a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is unlikely to be agreed any time soon. The Trump transition team could do worse than read a book that stands on the familiar territory of Middle East strategy and diplomacy, but which focuses, unusually, on long-term social and political changes in both countries. The signs are, it argues, that Israel will continue to move to the right and the US to lose patience with the most genuinely ‘special’ foreign relationship it has.