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AIPAC political donations to lawmakers and politicians. They're the second largest lobby contributor and influence politicians for Israel.
They're responsible for 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The politicians are into it for the campaign donations.
The average citizen supports it because they generally still have a post-WWII mindset and are resistant to criticisms of Israel and conflate anti-Israeli sentiment with antisemitism which Israel encourages.
It's a friendly nation in an area where those are scarce, so being able to base military operations out of there is seen as a key strategic asset.
Not defending, just explaining.
Yeah cause Saudi, qatar and UAE aren't bending over backwards to lick the US dick ..
Historically, the relationship between the US and Israel is far closer than others in the region. Everyone else are much more like fair weather friends. Intelligence between the two is highly integrated to a degree unseen outside of the closest US allies.
Israel is an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East. The Middle East is full of oil and independent countries that the US would rather control as puppets.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon - every country that doesn't bend the knee gets bombed. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Israel - those countries that do bend the knee get limitless military support, regardless of how oppressive they are.
The US is intent in conquering the entire Middle East by force. Israel is not unique, it's just the most firmly controlled US proxy.
Eh. The US really has no interest in actually conquering the Middle East. Outside the main US territories, the US is a trade empire, not a settler one. The US is never going to try and annex territory in the Middle East and make it a state. The US just wants to make sure the oil keeps coming out of the ground and that it keeps getting exported at an affordable cost. It's primary goal is to prevent Middle East nations from using their oil for political leverage or for purposes other than export. It would have made a lot of sense economically for a country like Saudi Arabia to not get into the oil export business. Instead, they could have kept their oil domestic, built up a supply chain of value-add products, and export those. Instead of exporting raw oil, they could mainly export plastics, highly refined fuels, and the things made from plastics. But the West wants cheap energy, and they want the higher places on the supply chain.
It's ultimately all about the oil. The day the oil runs out or the day oil is no longer needed, Israel will be abandoned and left to its own devices.
I call the US being able to dictate what happens to the oil as "conquest." Of course they aren't going to do formal annexation, there's no reason to.
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 ~~US~~ Military 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
There are obviously a lot of reasons - one I haven't seen mentioned here yet is that they're our only real ally in the region and the best spies in the world; a combination that makes them incredibly attractive as "strategic partners" if the goal is to influence politics in a region you have very little other indirect methods of manipulating.
They've worked damned hard to make sure they're in that position, too. Being invaluable to maintaining US influence in the middle east is the reason the US backs them militarily, and without that backing they'd get absolutely flattened by their neighbors. Thus the toxic symbiotic relationship you see today, with massive campaign contributions and influence operations from both sides designed to ensure they don't ever lose that mutual support.
They were basically a hedge against USSR in the region for 50+ years. People forget that. Both powers were interested in carving up the world, and Middle East was one of the battlegrounds.
This is the answer as i understand it.
They're a strategic partner.
The region is still very important from a geopolitical standpoint. As last months oil prices have shown.
Israel don't have (m)any friends in the region. They are a reasonably stable democracy. This makes them a dependable ally. What would happen if there was a revolution in Saudi Arabia for example? Probably something similar to Iran 1979.
So having Israel as an ally is a huge multiplier in power projection in the region.
Why do you need to project power when it's so expensive? It's sort of what superpowers do. Meddle in the affairs of smaller countries to further their own goals. If not the US then Russia or China.
Dude came into my gym and said he gets to workout for free because god promised him a free membership 2000 years ago.
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.
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.
My dad is in his 80’s and has been an atheist and hardcore liberal democrat for most of his life. The only political subject we’ve ever seriously butted heads on is Israel.
The last time we argued about it, his position was basically that, as a state, it had the right to defend itself from all the “hostile” countries around it. According to him, it even has the right to expand outward to protect itself by creating buffer zones. If Palestinians didn’t want their innocent children bombed to bits, all they needed to do was renounce Hezbollah and/or leave the area entirely.
I was pretty dumbfounded hearing him say this. He’s an avid reader and total history nerd, so to hear him hand-waving genocide was pretty shocking to me. I think it comes from growing up a boomer and a lifetime of deep-seated indoctrination that painted post-WW2 Jews as forever the good guy victims who are just struggling to recover from the atrocities of the past. A mindset that people born in the 70s, 80s, (and so on) just can’t relate to.
I know that doesn’t exactly answer your question, but I wrote this out as much for me as for you. I love my dad and he’s an extremely good person, so it’s pretty shocking for me to have this huge wedge issue between us. If he could learn to separate Jewish people from the state of Israel, he might understand, but frankly, at his age, I doubt he’ll ever come around.
I think it is as simple as it is far enough away that many "normal" people didn't want to look into the details of it and the news wouldn't cover the bad shit israel would do. I remember being content with that same narrative and sentiment your dad had, and I think it was just because I was focused on other things.
There is three groups that guarantee support for Israel the imperialist side who have Israel as an ally to keep control on resources and trade routes. There is the evangelical side who believe the rapture would happen once Israel have total dominance on the region and finally just people who get the money from the lobbies to get in position of power and express dominance .
American are copping when they only focus on the evangelic because they refuse to acknowledge that the USA was always imperialist . People have tendency of wanting to be proud of their countries
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.
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.
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)
AIPAC gives money to politicians, Epstein gathers dirt on rich people and politicians- politicians now have to do whatever they are told by Israel. citizens United accelerated this by making it easier to just bribe (sorry “give donations”) politicians than using pedophile honeypots to gain influence
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.
The Suez Crisis was the last major diplomatic action that the USA took against Israel, with the USA using its ownership of British and French debt to keep the Suez Canal Egyptian. After that, Israel invested a lot help shape the perception of Israel to Americans and invested in several pro-Israeli candidates in both parties through AIPAC and other means. It worked well.
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.
AIPAC has infiltrated all the way to the local level. Including Mayor and state legislatures, etc. Israel is the only nation that people dont have to register as a foreign agent for… Israel is our greatest enemy and it has fully infected every cell of our body