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Notes -
Remember the USS Liberty?
As much Israel discourse as there's been in the last 45 years, you never hear about the time the Israeli air force and navy attacked an American ship in broad daylight and killed 34 Americans, except from the most conspiratorially-minded places like /pol/ (and Brett Favre when he's being trolled by /pol/).
Why? This seems strange. One might think this is because it blends into the background of innumerable incidents that make up the Arab-Israeli conflict, and thus most people simply shrug and accept that, "yeah, shits really fucked over there," and leave it at that, but this involved Americans. You know, the people that matter. There's some dispute about what really happened and whether or not it was deliberate. It's not surprising that this would be controversial; it's surprising that this is not a real issue at all.
My tentative opinion is that it was a deliberate attack. The USS Liberty was a spy ship. It was not supposed to be as close to the coast as it was. Israel didn't want the State Department jeopardizing their OPSEC in the 6-day war, so they made sure the Americans had no eyes on the ground (or the water). It was probably the right decision tbh. US leadership decided that the incident wasn't worth making major foreign policy changes over, and so they went along with the Israeli cover-up.
We certainly hear a lot more about the USS Liberty than we do about that time the British bombed the French fleet after their surrender to Germany, killing over a thousand sailors, or the many times commercial airliners have been shot down, among other such incidents. What sort of conversation do you think we should be having? Should we break our alliance with Israel because they killed 34 of our sailors? We're allies with Germany and Japan after all, and they've killed about 10,000 times more Americans than that.
Allyship? America sends billions to Israel each year, what does it get in return?
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