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I was always under the impression that the aid to Israel was mostly about them not shutting down the Suez again.
Pretty sure it's Egypt that makes that decision not Israel. Aside from the occasional boat oopsie.
Egypt is also the second largest recipient of military aid, and they're much larger a nation than their adversary in Israel.
Aid to Egypt increased enormously after they signed a peace treaty with Israel, as a sweetener. Likewise with Jordan IIRC. Keeping Suez open certainly had something to do with it, yet the primary factor in US ME policy seems to be whatever is most advantageous for Israel. If US just wanted to be friends with Arabs, secure Suez and secure oil, they wouldn't support Israel at all.
What would it take to convince you otherwise?
Obviously if we hung Israel out to dry on anything important. But since that seems pretty unlikely, is there any way you might be convinced that Israel really is the most practical ally in the region?
They’re relatively westernized. They aren’t Islamic fundamentalists, which has made Americans nervous since at least the Iranian Revolution. (Though we put up with the Saudis, so it can’t be too much of a dealbreaker…) Most importantly, they owe their security to us in a way that none of the other ME states can match.
I also wouldn’t underestimate the wedge that is Palestine, at least on the left. While my understanding is that the neoliberal, pro-Israel wing still dominates foreign policy, there’s at least some tension going on. If there’s a point where we really break with Israel, that’ll probably be it.
Practical ally? In strategic terms, there are two groups.
The Arabs/Islamic world, with population about 600 million in MENA alone. They have a lot of oil. They have a lot of useful bases. They have Suez. They have the power to create all kinds of problems for the US, by allying with US enemies like the Soviet Union, Russia and China.
Israel, population 10 million. No oil. Barely any useful bases, at least compared to the rest of MENA. They're better at fighting and high technology, yet the only people they fight are the Arabs (and usually do so with US equipment). They're hated by about a third of the world, see pic related (https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/693544044241076224/most-disliked-country-in-each-nation-2022).
Why on earth would any sane, unbiased strategic thinker choose to ally with Israel over the Arabs? The US wouldn't have any enemies in the Arab world if it weren't for Israel, that's by far the biggest problem with US-MENA relations.
Israel is the absolute worst ally the US could possibly have. And the alliance is the most one-sided alliance you could possibly imagine. On no occasion has Israel actually contributed troops to a US war. They soak up huge amounts of resources (consider the economic impacts of the Arab Oil Embargo caused by Arab hatred of the US-Israeli alliance), incite enormous amounts of anti-US sentiment, get free US equipment, billions of dollars in aid. They sell loads of US technology to China, they lure the US into stupid wars like Iraq with false intelligence and their political influence.
Because the Arab world is a basket case that fights itself as much as anyone else. Israel isn’t the best ally, but it has the benefit of being a functioning country that has predictable enemies and doesn’t fall victim to coups.
Do you honestly believe that? It’s impossible to get involved in the Middle East without picking sides that pisses someone off, and a lot of these countries are unstable basket cases that can’t resist openly stabbing their sponsors in the back and throwing temper tantrums, which Israel for all its faults at least does a lot less of.
Aside from numerous coups, there's the Iraq-Iran war, the Gulf War and a rather desultory North-South Yemen war. That's it. Four out of 7 inter-state wars in the Middle East involved Israel (First Arab Israeli, Suez, Six-Day War, Yom Kippur). 4/8 if you include the Syrian Civil War/ISIS war and (generously) consider Israel not to be a primary participant. 5/9 if you include Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
And Israel's predictable enemies include every state in the region! Don't pick the side that angers everyone.
When did Egypt or Syria stab Russia/SU in the back? I don't recall them attacking Soviet ships, selling Soviet technology to the US, sending faulty intelligence to encourage Soviet invasions, frustrating Soviet diplomacy by being universally hated in the region.
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That wasn’t the question…
I’d like to hear your reasoning on that. It doesn’t seem to apply to Iran, which manufactured quite the list of complaints about Western culture. Nor is it necessary to explain al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups. The “American-Israeli alliance” is a footnote in bin Laden’s motives. But then, I expect the Christians were enough to get us (via the UN) intervening in Lebanon.
Not so. Per your own link:
The other guy who bombed the World Trade Center back in 1993, Ramzi Yousef, was primarily motivated by hatred of Israel and sought to bomb American targets to bring about change. Key Islamist leaders like Sayyid Fadlallah or Sayyid Qutb hated America for its support of Israel.
As for Iran, while the US has non-Israel related incentives to prevent Iran dominating the region, Israel makes things much harder harder. Israel has constantly been pushing for the US to invade Iran, constantly trying to prevent a diplomatic solution. Even in the 1990s, the Israelis lobbied for the US to adopt dual containment of Iraq and Iran, bringing in a large number of troops to contain Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (thus creating another of bin Laden's agreements). AIPAC has undermined US relations with Iran, mobilized to strengthen anti-Iran sanctions. For example, when Iran chose an American oil company, Conoco, to develop the Sirri oil fields as an overture, Clinton killed the deal. Clinton later said that Edgar Bronfman, former head of the World Jewish Congress was one of the deal's most effective opponents. AIPAC was also involved. There are many such examples.
If Israel didn't exist, there would probably have been US-Iranian rapprochement.
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United States has, thus far, successfully managed to ally with both Israel and the (oil-wise the most important) Arabs, ie. Saudi-Arabia and the Gulf states, though. Of course recently Saudi-Arabia has taken steps away from this alliance (ie. now joining BRICS), but I daresay that has less to do with US stance vis-a-vis Israel and more to do with general strategic/trade concerns and the uncomfortable match with America's (claimed) human rights agenda. Whatever current enemies US has with the Arab world are not particularly important in the grand scale of things.
It is also an attempt to force the US to play hardball with Iran without Saud firing up their own nuclear program, which I think is understated as it concerns the American Alliance.
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Iran isn't Arab but it is Islamic and they really don't like Israel. Iran is 3rd strongest in the anti-Western axis, fairly important and well-placed to block oil exports.
If our allies look to jump ship the moment the unipolar moment ends, then it's not a very useful alliance. The moment we need them, they don't want to work with us. The population of these countries uniformly hates Israel and this poses a stability problem for their leaders, who need weapons and alliances with a great power. If they have no choice, they'll go with the West and smooth over the contradiction with welfare and repression. But now that they have a choice? Do we want ME oil fuelling Chinese war industry?
True, the human rights agenda doesn't help either.
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Israel is the only country in the region that is even remotely sharing western values. Especially if you view politics as a fight between worldviews, you're essentially asking "why aren't we fucking over our own team to instead make deals with enemies that hate us, our views, and only work with us because they can't beat us?" You can certainly view everything in more narrow teams, but most people nowadays think in very large, globe spanning teams, and Israel is then part of "our" team already, whether we support them or not. It might still end up not worth it, but it's not as easy as you make it out to be. Especially assuming they need our help to not get swallowed by the arabs you may think about it in terms of the following thought experiment to understand the people who favor the alliance with Israel:
Imagine a much less centralized US that is more like a european union of states and that Mexico moved in a very different direction in terms of religion and values (say that they still follow some kind of central american religion, maybe not outright human sacrifices but incompatible with modern values to the same degree that conservative arabic Islam is), and is still hostile about the annexed territories and, in particular, about New Mexico. They are willing to work with the greater US in a limited capacity, but there's frequent costly border skirmishes and threats of war. New Mexico itself has a significant minority of mexican-identifying people that want to become independent/join Mexico, and the state in general is somewhat irrelevant and can't protect itself. You're in a far northern state and there is no chance whatsoever that you're at a direct threat from Mexico, and the US as a whole is clearly superior to Mexico in terms of military. Somebody comes along and asks you why the hell are you allying New Mexico when you can just abandon them and ally with Mexico instead? It's just a much better ally in any category you can imagine!
Also, you're argument pretty closely applies to Ukraine, as well.
I'm sure you'll find some ways how this example is different from the Israeli example, but this is - I think - quite close to how supporters of Israel view the situation.
Why do they hate us? Why does anti-Western Islamism exist (and before that anti-Western pan-Arabism)? Why did Egypt and Syria and Iraq all move to favour the Soviet Union? Why does Iran hate us? In a nutshell - Israel. The US was unwilling to provide weapons that might be used against Israel, so those countries moved to work with the Soviets instead. Now they're cosying up to China and Russia precisely because we favour Israel. Israel has done huge damage to democracy and liberalism in the Middle East, it makes Arab liberals look like spineless, impious and unpatriotic rats in a grand confrontation between good and evil.
Well they have nuclear weapons now, (so much for the non-proliferation meme). Why do they need help? The help that the US gives Israel was used to invade actually weak countries like Lebanon.
There are a whole host of differences here, like said annexations happening within living memory (Golan Heights for example), a large population of forcibly displaced Mexicans wanting to go back to New Mexico and the fact that there's no European union of states. Europe and North America aren't even on the same continent as Israel, it's a different region entirely. Mexico also isn't the world's largest oil producer. New Mexico in this case, I assume, is not a nuclear power.
And let's not forget all the things Israel actually did. Pre-emptively bombing its neighbours, annexing strips of their land, resettling their people onto annexed land, blowing up a US vessel, luring the US into a costly and futile occupation of Iraq (and calling for a sequel in Iran based on a nuclear program that's six been months away from a bomb for the last 20 years)...
Precisely. It's foolish to ally with weak countries that have little marginal value, angering strong countries in the process. The economic consequences of our Ukraine initiative is already hitting Europe hard. Strength should be conserved and wielded where it's most needed, which is clearly Asia. Angering Russia by getting involved in Ukraine opens up a second front, gives China a useful, resource-rich ally and worsens our position overall.
I think you're being very naive here, and also with Ukraine. I'm hardly a hardliner on both issues - back during Maidan time I was actually in favour of the russian territories getting their independence referendum, and I currently work together with different muslim researchers that work in arabic universities. I can see the value of working with people even if they have very different values. But the arabic world has been opposed to the west for a long time now. The alliance with the soviets was purely out of convenience and correspondingly never very stable. The Israeli issue might be the most legible complaint they can give us, but I'm quite confident that if we had given up on the Israelis we'd have different things we'd be fighting over with them. Likewise, they can take our aid and weapons and then abandon us if it suits them just fine, and in terms of their own worldview they'd be perfectly justified in doing so. The same goes for Russia, there was a time where there was a decent chance they may switch to the western side, but I don't see such a chance with the current leadership anymore.
The key here is how people identify their teams. Most people nowadays consider themselves something like "Team Western World", which spans the globe and so to them being on different continents is not a reason to not send (military) aid. You, from what I can gather, consider yourself primarily "Team America", so I gave an example that applies directly to America, to get you in a similar headspace as the average Israel supporter. It's not about the example being perfectly comparable - it never is - , the purpose is to understand how others think about an issue due to their values differences. If you want, you may imagine many displaced Mexicans - with the average values as other Mexicans - wanting to live in New Mexico for the purpose of the example, and similar.
Imo, depending on Russia in terms of energy was foolish long before the Ukraine, and having to look for other options was overdue. I'd surely have preferred if we had followed your tag line and build enough nuclear plants to be independent before the conflict, though. Likewise arming Ukraine is actually a reasonably cheap way of bleeding Russia, and the basic logic of geopolitics dictates, independent of Ukraine, that Russia had to align itself with China if it has any aspirations of defending against westernization and being a superpower. If we were to give up on Ukraine, they could just take it ... and ally with China anyway. In the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has actually shown remarkable weakness (and/or Ukraine has shown remarkable strength). It is reasonable to conclude that this is a good point to invest resources to strengthen your position.
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