As an American myself, I’ve asked several people this question. No one seems to know why either. Is it strategic position in the world? I don’t think they have anything the US can exploit besides that really. Am I missing something? Political arguing aside what exactly is the motivation? Thanks for any explanations.
Religion
- There is one specific spot, Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock/Mount Moriah, that is the holiest (to Jews, Muslims and Christians) place on Earth. I can’t summarize everything, go read about it, its really interesting even if you’re not religious. Once you learn about it, you’ll be “holy shit, this will never get resolved”.
Geo-strategy
- Yes. It is right in the middle of two continents, Europe and Africa, and could be considered the gateway into Asia (from the West). After WWI, the Germans were defeated but so was the Ottoman Empire. The British filled that hole but after they got kicked around in WWII, their empire crumbled too. The Brits left Palestine and turned to the United Nations to leave some sort of “Western” influence in the area. United Nations made the 1947 partition map that created Israel and here we are (after a bunch of violence since then)
Israel is a neocolony that serves a vital strategic interest. The entire empire is held up by oil. Israel gives them say into how oil production is managed in the region. So many middle east countries feel inclined to play ball with the US because Israel exists. Anyone who sees the problem with this arrangement is strongly encouraged ($$$) to play ball also.
Your simple question has a simple answer. The answer is that different people and different companies have different reasons for supporting Israel.
Some people are racists, some people sell weapons, some people want money for their political campaigns, some of those groups overlap, etc.
So obviously the answer is that it depends who you’re talking about.
profit, corruption, and the genuine belief that they need to protect Israel in order to go to heaven.
these are the same people that believe god has already determined exactly how they die so they can do anything - if they didn’t die, it was god’s plan.
they also believe god meant for the existence of poor people. blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (while the rich and famous go to heaven)
they also believe god meant for the existence of poor people. blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (while the rich and famous go to heaven)
Which is extra funny when you remember that Jesus explicitly stated that rich people don’t get into heaven.
It presents a friendlier, strategic area to conduct attacks in the middle east for oil for the past century almost. As well as majority of them are white. In addition Israel lobbies the fuck out of our country to be friendly to them and their genocide.
Man! That’s a can of worms!
Entire books have been written on the subject.
The U.S.and Israel have a tangled history going back most of a century at this point.
The short answer is that there are enough historical, religious, and cultural ties for the two countries to be allies long term. Since the us, and by extension NATO, needed a place of projected power in the region, and there was an opportunity to make that happen, Israel happened.
And, being real, Israel has mostly been a reliable ally since its creation as a country. It’s hard to point to a time when Israel didn’t fulfill its expected role in the relationship.
As such, it’s really no surprise that when both countries have leadership that are absolute fascist pricks, that the governments would go whole hog in supporting each other.
Again, that’s the disgustingly short, over simplified version. I don’t have enough interest to turn it into an essay, nor even a discussion, just wanted to drop my take on the matter in a simple way since I didn’t see anything in other comments to just upvote and support with a subsidiary comment as being super close to the way I would say it.
You forgot the part where Christian fundamentalist believe Israel is one of the key components to triggering God’s apocalypse. They think it’ll send the world and rapture them into heaven. Never mind that is such a thing were real, that’s not where their own handbook says they’re going.
Didn’t forget it. Just left it at religious compatibility.
Profit.
It’s also the fear that someone else might take your profit. Honestly, I think this is the primary motivator for these obscenely wealthy types. No amount of more money will make a difference to their lifestyles, but they are utterly terrified of losing their hoards. A competitor might rise up and take it all away, or worse, the poors might gain class consciousness and demand it all back at the point of a gun.
Imperialism is an attack on two fronts. It puts more resources into the imperialists’ hands, but it also removes those resources from anyone who might oppose the imperialists.
The Middle East has always largely been oppositional to western imperialism, so Israel was created to make a beachhead from which they could destabilize the region.
Dude came into my gym and said he gets to workout for free because god promised him a free membership 2000 years ago.
Did he also say this gave him the right to cancel other people’s memberships and start talking about his right to shoot anyone who is in the gym without his permission?
AIPAC political donations to lawmakers and politicians. They’re the second largest lobby contributor and influence politicians for Israel.
They’re responsible for promoting the idea behind the Evangelical salvation end days propaganda that induces people to think a war in Israel will bring on apocalypse and rapture.
Evangelicals look forward to the rapture. I’ve been to a lot of Evangelical churches, and, without exception, they want it to come.
Do you mean the rapture of -99, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011(sure this time), 2013 (I mean 13, right?!!), 2014, …
Well yeah, if that comes then they’re proven right and they get to go to heaven while all the “bad” people stay here.
That’s my point.
You communicated that part badly, your comment looks like you are saying it’s false and the only reason people believe Evangelicals want that is because of AIPAC.
You read that point badly and assumed that what I was saying that the reason Evangelicals want this is because of AIPAC.
See how that works?
jeees you love a religious conspiracy fantasy eh
the jews needed a place to go and palestine had loads of land for sale
the rest is history
How much did the palestinians get at San Remo,, where the national home of Jewish people was established? That’s right, they were not represented. Or who sent the Balfour declaration to Lord Rothschild, which was the first declaration of establishing a Jewish nation in Palestine. The foreign secretary of Britain sent it, palestinians didn’t have a say. But you’re not wrong to say some land was bought. The Haavara agreement allowed German Jews to transfer money to the region to solve the Jewish problem. The palestinians however didn’t have a say in this agremeement either. All this actually led to the Great Revolt. But none of this should be news to you if you know the history.
WTAF is wrong with you?
If Jewish people have a “Right to exist,” do Palestinians? If not, then where should they go?
People have a right to exist, but states do not. States change. Does Ukraine have a right to exist? They used to be a part of the USSR and were solidly inside those boundaries. Is Russia’s incursion into their sovereign territory lawful?
Where do you draw the line? Who gets to exist and who gets to die? What about the children who were born there? Do you just say, “woops, you suck because I hate your parents. die, babies.”
The future is not history and you are a Zionist prick.
Who funds AIPAC is probably a better question.
We do. The US government gives billions of dollars to Israel, who in turn launders that back into AIPAC and into our politicians pockets. Sure, there are other donors like Miriam Adelson, but she can’t fund the entire government (even though it takes as little as $10,000 to get a politician to change their vote.)
I imagine the us government can’t fund its own candidates and so has to go this route?
The US government has legalized bribery in the form of Political Action Committees, aka “PACs”. Each PAC is a special interest group that contributes to a politician in order to help get them elected. The PAC then expects an ROI - return on investment - for the money they contributed to the campaign. The ROI usually comes in the form of shilling for said special interest.
To add fuel to the fire, when Citizens United was overturned in 2010, it allowed dark money to be invested into campaigns. This shit was so significant, that I can actually remember where I was when I heard about it and can still feel the echos of dread. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained
This country is fucked. No politician will ever vote to repeal that. Why would they? The amount of money they receive from it would make Scrooge McDuck blush.
AIPAC, and Zionist supremacists pay the most for elections every cycle, and just demand that their clients say nice things about Israel, and mean things about its enemies. Relative to other US oligarchy, the bribes to cash back ratio is small in most years. Because all US media is controlled for Zionist supremacist goals, it is far easier for all politicians and oligarchy to go along with Zionist genocidal absolutism, than to be labelled an anti-semite extremist.
USA has a large population of Jews. Not all are zionists, in fact there have been many anti-zionist Jews protesting against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. However, some are zionists. Some Jews see Israel as a backup plan - if shit goes south in the USA they can always flee there.
USA has a lot of evangelical Christians. Somehow (it’s not in the Bible) they have convinced themselves that a Jewish return to the Holy Land is necessary before the end of the world happens. Which they want to happen, because they believe they are the good guys and will go to heaven.
USA has a lot of racists. They see Israel as an ethnostate, they like that and support it. Their hatred of brown people is stronger than their hatred of Jews so they are happy to see Israel oppress Palestinians.
USA also has anti-semites who are glad to see a place exist where Jews “should” go to. And they are ecstatic that Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is igniting a new wave of anti-semitism.
Many Americans also see Israel as the only democracy in the middle east. It isn’t a democracy, of course, since it has de facto control over Palestine and therefore a huge population is disenfranchised. But wait - rights only for a certain group of people, oppression for the rest - that’s like America when it was “great” (ie pre-Civil Rights era) and they want America “great again”.
This paints an extremely bleak picture of the US population that really doesn’t match reality very well.
To start, there are about 10 million Jews in the US, if we consider the most liberal possible definition of being Jewish, which includes even people who don’t consider themselves Jewish but who live in a Jewish household. Source. With the current US population of 350 million, that means about 3% of the population is Jewish. That is not enough to sway any real policy decisions, unless the group formed an extremely organized voting bloc, which they do not.
Evangelical Christians make up a more significant chunk of the US population, but they tend to be more concerned with restricting women’s bodily autonomy. If you were to grab a random evangelical off the street, they might know about this rapture theory, but they would probably be like “why are you talking to me, I’m trying to buy milk”
It is difficult to measure how many people in the US are racist or antisemetic, since such topics are taboo and people tend not to advertise their stances. But I would guess that the population of racists or antisemites who are really in the weeds enough to support Israel would be lower than the population of Jews. Most of these people are not smart enough to pull off those mental gymnastics.
Instead, the important thing to know about the average American is that they are not keeping up with global geopolitics. They understand that part of the reason for the creation of Israel was so the Jews wouldn’t get genocided again, and they know that Nazis and genocide are bad, so they support it. They might have heard about Hamas, Gaza, or a two state solution, but they would fumble if you asked them to explain the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah, or asked them to point to Gaza on a map of Israel. And if you asked them to explain the two state solution, a lot of them would struggle to remember what the other state even is. Their main concerns if you start talking to them about the Isreal-Palestine conflict are (1) to make sure that you understand that they are not a nazi, and don’t want the Jews to be genocided again and (2) exiting the conversation as soon as possible so they can buy milk and watch Survivor.
evangelicals and jews in the USA are far more political active though than the majority of the citizenry. there interests are over-represented in government, esp at the federal level.
especially evident by the power of their lobbying groups over members of congress.
This paints an extremely bleak picture of the US population that really doesn’t match reality very well.
lemmy.txt
You make good points - the reality is that most people whether in the USA or not are “apolitical” and have a surface-level understanding of things. Probably the thing to figure out is how that surface-level understanding is even formed. Those who DO have a strong opinion about things are more likely to be the ones trying to pull “common sense” or surface level understanding toward what they support.
they don’t care about it. anymore than your grandma cares about the latest video games coming out.
and if you talk about it to them they will acknowledge it politely and change the topic because they are not interested in your weird obsession
Probably the thing to figure out is how that surface-level understanding is even formed.
I think probably the biggest factor is simply the fact that WW2 occupies such a large space in the American historical zeitgeist. WW2 is a story that makes us look good, and we like stories that make us look good, so we keep telling them. And in the WW2 story, the jews are the victims, and their happy ending is creating a homeland of their own. So the American view, by default, is that Israel has an ethical right to exist as a home state for the jewish people.
Many jews in the united states, especially older jews, are very sympathetic to this view. While they have never experienced systemic persecution themselves, the jewish community at large is bonded over their historic persecution and internally reinforces these norms. Meanwhile, jewish people are significantly overrepresented in the entertainment industry, in wealth, and in positions of political power. The meme of “jews run the world” is a conspiracy theory - but jews do have an outsized influence in society relative to their population. This is likely due to founders effects of immigrating with some level of wealth or expectation of wealth, compounded over time with the additional benefits of being part of a social network which advances its own. For example, a young jewish comedian will have another jewish comedian friend who has an aunt who has a friend who knows Seinfeld’s neice’s boyfriend, who can arrange for him to open at a moderately popular LA comedy club. Being part of the jewish diaspora will give you opportinities that you otherwise wouldn’t get. And so you have a lot of wealthy jews in positions of power in the government and the media, with a culturally imposed mandate to consistently remind the non-jews of the jewish history of persecution and the need to support and protect them from further persecution.
jewish culture values education and creativity, that’s why. asian population also has higher incomes, but they don’t value creativity so they don’t really make it in media. asians do value certain things, like musical arts, so they are represented more there, but not so much in theatre.
I was super jealous of jewish friends/girlfriends because their family structures are way more supportive than your typical american families is. but every jewish kid i know also hated how their parents badgered them to marry other jews and keep their romantic/social relations restricted with non-jews.
With the current US population of 350 million, that means about 3% of the population is Jewish. That is not enough to sway any real policy decisions, unless the group formed an extremely organized voting bloc, which they do not.
Consider that much of the Jewish population is condensed into a few important population centers. This makes them a pretty strong voter bloc in some parts of the country.
Sure, in some parts of the country. But Jewish influence in national US politics comes more from the population’s outsized influence in wealth, certain industries, and political positions - not from the average jewish voting bloc itself.
Voting is nothing, money is everything. Don’t look at it as a matter of votes, but as a matter of donors, and AIPAC is a very significant donor.
Highest Percentage
by State:- New York: ~8.5%–8.8%
- Washington D.C.: ~8.4%
- New Jersey: ~6.2%–6.3%
- Massachusetts: ~4.5%
New York, DC & Mass are hardly battleground states, and while I don’t know as much about New Jersey they haven’t voted for a Republican president since Bush Sr
DC isn’t even a state
“Jew” is actually something us Khazars made up around the 12th or 13th century. I’m a partial Khazar, and I never knew that until I learned what it meant.
I think it is the religious end of things; by that the Americans can tell themselves they are protecting god’s chosen people. So in a way they are doing god’s will.
Also money talks and the isreali lobby has lots of it.
As someone who grew up religious, this is it. The people primarily voting maga into power are christians and they fervently believe Israel is right because they are god’s chosen. Religion has absolutely no place in politics or we end up in situations like this.
ding ding ding, this is my exact thought, and I remember my ultra religious dad glazing israel while reading me the bible as a kid.
No thanks.
deleted by creator
i think religion does play a huge part of this.
as well as all of its variants – the og books of the bible are centuries old and prone to a lot of interpretations.
apart from that, i believe it is the special interests, the money and their invitations of “pilgrimage” to israel.
Well, Mossad and also their tech companies (very slight difference there lol) are actually very good, so we have to buy spyware from them like palantir or else we can’t intrusively peer into the lives of everyone on earth on a mass scale, and Mossad also just happens to have pedobytes (pun intended) of video data showing our leaders fucking children on some random island totally random yes so they’re able to blackmail the US into being their little bitch. That’s it.
Yeah cause this relationship is only a few decades old lmao
This is also definitely the first guy with a secluded location, and the only current one.
Wtf does that even mean? The second ww2 ended the US finished the Nazis original plan, we fucking sent “the Jews” to a far away chunk of land, and have not stopped bending over backwards for them ever since.
Edit: Them as in Israel, not Jews.
Well the UK actually started it with the Balfour Declaration and a Rothschild (perhaps unsurprisingly) before WW2.
I also assumed we were talking about today not in 1917, and idk what blackmail they may or may not have been using back then.
My point was poorly communicated sorry. I was getting at how we helped set up Mossad between 49 and 51, and have not stopped. Since it’s founding we have supported them financially, we have freely shared research and data with them that we do not share with anybody else (one way, it’s not reciprocal), we have peddled their propaganda across the world and our own country, we allowed them to lobby our government despite it being illegal and not allowing any other country to do so in an open official capacity (yes, AIPAC started in 1954…and weirdly the first president that called it out had an unfortunate accident).
The US is a global arms manufacturer with a democracy attached, if there wasn’t an Israel to prop up the US would find something similar and arm it to the hilt.
The
USMilitary Industrial Complex gets to remind everyone why it’s a superpower, it gets to make and sell it’s weapons, survialiance tech, etc, it keeps it’s opponents weak and desperate but armed such that there is always fear to keep selling the forever war (both to the US, but also ton Israelis (and to a lesser extent to Jewish people living elsewhere)), by political maneuvering it gets to police feespeach.liberals/conservatives get to feel like they are not racist because they support a minority led country, who many don’t consider white in that context.
If it wasn’t Israel it could be a different proxy state in the middle East or maybe Africa/Asia.
IMO it has very little to do with Jewishness and a lot more to do with geopolitics, yes they use the Holocaust for propoganda 🤢, but they don’t give a fuck about Holocaust survivors. Also and this is small compared to committing genocide, but they’ve redefined the Holocaust to exclude all of the non-jewish victims which were historically included as recently as a decade ago in common usage of the term (e.g what I learnt in school, what was on Wikipedia, etc)
with a “democracy” attached
Israel has its own military industrial complex. It’s an even bigger portion of their economy. They’re a very high tech nation. ICQ, the predecessor of AOL Instant Messenger, was invented in/by Israelis.
Without the US pumping all our tax dollars into it they wouldn’t have the money for universal healthcare, free college and unlimited war and genocide
Are you sure about that?
Looks like the US gives Israel about $3B per year.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-military-aid-does-the-us-give-to-israel/
Versus Israel’s GDP of about $700B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Israel
I think the main form of aid is the access to US weapons and technology and that’s largely about subsidizing the US defense industry. I think I read somewhere that US aid to Israel is literally sometimes in the form of vouchers/coupons they have to spend on weapons/defense tech.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t cut off that aid when it’s used to commit atrocities. Just saying get the facts straight.
We’ve given them over 30billion in cash and military equipment since January 1st. Trump literally bypassed congress to gift them a new fleet of fighter jets. We shouldn’t be paying them jack shit because they obviously are doing better according than us to you
True, I don’t like the term globalist as it’s too often abused, but the fuckers profiting from these arms companies can live anywhere and don’t give fuck about either country beyod their ability to capture the governments and sell them weapons & tech.
There are stronger bonds between arms manufacturers regardless of nationality than those arms manufacturers and the people of the country the company is “based in”.
It’s about economic and strategic interests for the US. These have held true for decades, across all kinds of US admininstrations, and predates any real evangelical fervor. The US is guaranteed Israeli support, since Israel depends entirely on the US for its existence. In the spirit of “the purpose of a system is what it does”, I don’t believe that the US ever disapproves of the horrors Israel commits. The US could exercise power whenever it wants, but it rarely if ever does. Of course, Israel has its own interests, but they rarely contradict US goals in the region.
