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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38209 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I don't fully understand the Israel conundrum.

The ideological stake over the issue hasn't been divided merely between the left and right, but within each aisle too. In recent years, it seems as though liberals have fallen out of love with them and many of them believe that (on principle) Israel shouldn't exist. While others believe in the two state solution. The mainstream media has been louder about the IDF's excesses in occupied territories (like this one, a cursory search). Tankies over at GrayZone and related websites are convinced that western mainstream media is still defending Israel. I don't get this position, are they arguing that western media isn't criticising Israel enough or that the media is silent altogether? The right seems to be divided too, many of them enthusiastically support them while others don't like that billions of dollars of taxpayer money is sent to Israel every year and they're convinced that their lobby in the US is most supportive of liberalism and progressivism and the war machine.

My questions are what drove the evolution of these views into what they are, exactly how influential is the Israel lobby in the US, why do tankies believe that Israel doesn't get criticised in the media, are the liberals starting to decouple from Israel, are there any other reasons besides the treatment of Palestinians that the Israel question takes up so much oxygen in the foreign policy room?

Read Mearsheimer's 'The Israel Lobby'.

It's absolutely astonishing how much Israel gets from the US and how much harm it causes the US.

Israel didn't participate in either of the Gulf Wars (in fact they sucked up Patriot missile batteries that could've been used elsewhere due to Iraqi Scud strikes attempting to fracture the US-led Coalition). They provided dubious/faulty intelligence on Iraq's WMDs to encourage the second Gulf War. Their invasion of Lebanon in 1982 led to the foundation of Hezbollah, which then attacked US forces in the area. People like Ramzi Yousef (first WTC bomber) was a single-issue anti-Israeli terrorist. Osama Bin Laden was heavily influenced by US support for Israel (and its treatment of Palestinians) in the development of his views. Iran's nuclear program is a threat to US interests aside from Israel but it was heavily motivated by the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Said arsenal also exposes the lie in the US's non-proliferation efforts and makes it harder for the US to negotiate.

While Israel did help beat up Soviet allies in the Middle East, US unwillingness to sell weapons to Egypt and co pushed them towards the Soviets in the first place. The Cold War is over, so the US could dump Israel like they dumped South Africa.

The US-Israeli alliance angers a lot of Arabs making them uncooperative with the US (even supposedly US-friendly states worry about losing their legitimacy by openly helping the US). When the US provided massive aid to Israel in the 1973 war the Arabs responded with an oil embargo that cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars.

Furthermore, US aid to Israel is unusually generous in scale and type. The US funded billions for the development of indigenous, Israeli-only weapons like the Merkava tank and the (cancelled) Lavi aircraft. The US prepositioned military supplies in Israel (ostensibly for their own use there), which the Israelis then used for their 2006 war in Lebanon. The US provides billions of dollars to Israel's neighbours like Egypt and Jordan to maintain good relations with Israel. The aid Israel gets has very little oversight and it gets sent out at the beginning of the year rather than in monthly or quarterly installments, so they get interest on it.

And then there's all the espionage, selling US technology to the Chinese and the USS Liberty incident.

The US has allies who actually participate in American wars, who provide useful intelligence and bases, who don't cause all kinds of problems for the US. Nobody else gets special treatment like this, a fact that is due to the astonishing power of the Israel lobby. They have tremendous influence. I'll add some excerpts from the book:

Former House Speaker Richard Armey said in September 2002 that "my No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel."

Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once noted, "There are a lot of guys at the working level up here [on Capitol Hill] . . . who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level

Bill Clinton once described AIPAC as "stunningly effective" and "better than anyone else lobbying in this town," while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it "the most effective general-interest group . . . across the entire planet."

Harry Lonsdale, the Democratic candidate who ran unsuccessfully against Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) in 1990, has described his own visit to AIPAC headquarters during that campaign. "The word that I was pro-Israel got around," he writes. "I found myself invited to AIPAC in Washington, D.C., fairly early in the campaign, for 'discussions.' It was an experience I will never forget. It wasn't enough that I was pro-Israel. I was given a list of vital topics and quizzed (read grilled) for my specific opinion on each. Actually, I was told what my opinion must be, and exactly what words I was to use to express those opinions in public . . . Shortly after that encounter at AIPAC, I was sent a list of American supporters of Israel . . . that I was free to call for campaign contributions. I called; they gave, from Florida to Alaska.

Philip Zelikow, a member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board ( 2001 - 03 ) , executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and counsellor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ( 2005 - 06 ) , told a University of Virginia audience on September 10, 2002 , that Saddam was not a direct threat to the United States. "The real threat," he argued, is "the threat against Israel." He went on to say, "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat . . . And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.

There's an entire chapter devoted to Israel's antipathy for Syria (over the Golan Heights which the Israelis annexed from Syria and the Syrians want back) and attempts to get America to deal with them. Familiar names like John Bolton pop up now and again, it's like seeing the prequel to a TV show. Now that Syria's been engulfed in an extremely bloody civil war, it's easy to see how Israeli influence might have been involved in bringing the US into the conflict. US troops still patrol parts of Eastern Syria to this day.

And the book goes on further! There's the Lebanon chapter, where the Israelis killed 1100 Lebanese civilians after Hezbollah killed a handful of their soldiers. They were partially using nominally US-owned weapons as part of their war effort, of course. The calumnies and skullduggery just goes on and on...

I have great sympathy for the tankies on the matter of Israel and media bias.

Israel didn't participate in either of the Gulf Wars (in fact they sucked up Patriot missile batteries that could've been used elsewhere due to Iraqi Scud strikes attempting to fracture the US-led Coalition).

I haven't read Mearsheimer's book so I'm not familiar with how he handles the subject, but there are good reasons Israel didn't participate in either Gulf War. Namely, the US didn't want it to. In Desert Storm, there was concern that if Israel got involved it would put the Arab members of the coalition in a precarious position and they would need to withdraw, as being openly allied with Israel would have been a political disaster for them internally. Given that the coalition needed to use these countries as staging areas, having them in was critical. Saddam understood this, which is why he launched SCUD missiles at civilian targets in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities—if he could provoke Israel into joining the war, the coalition effort would be imperiled. It took a great deal of restraint and US diplomacy to ensure that Israel wouldn't retaliate even after the attacks continued, and the crisis eventually passed.

Absolutely right. But what's the point of having this ally if they're really just a liability to your warfighting ability?

The mere existence of the US-Israel special relationship complicates US military strategy.

How did that limit the US's warfighting ability? If the US had stayed ambivalent throughout the entire Arab-Israeli conflict, once Saddam started launching SCUDS we would have been in a much less advantageous position when it came to keeping Israel out of the war. Can you imagine what the mood would be like in America if our cities were subjected to a month of missile attacks from a foreign adversary? Can you imagine any situation where there wouldn't be immediate calls for retaliation? It was largely because of our special relationship that we were able to convince them to cool it. If we were just some other country the Israelis would have looked at us and said "Who the fuck are you to tell us how to respond to attacks on our country!" Do you think Israel really gave a shit about Kuwait, a country that still doesn't recognize them? Before you knew it you'd have had Israeli bombers over Baghdad and the US and its Western allies scrambling to keep the Arabs in the coalition, along with uncertainty about how far Israel really wanted to take this. The SCUD attacks are an example of why having them as an ally enhances our warfighting ability in the region.

  1. Iraq invades Kuwait

  2. US and coalition attacks Iraq

  3. Iraq attacks Israel

Why did Iraq attack Israel? To break up the US coalition! If the US had stayed ambivalent throughout the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq wouldn't be diverting missiles to target Israel. They hit Israel because they're a US ally, because the other Arabs hate them.

If it weren't for Israel, it would've been much easier to create a coalition against Iraq, since countries like Syria wouldn't have lingering distrust with the US for aiding their enemy.

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