Many people have stated that our alliance with Israel is based upon the fact that they are Western and to some extent that they are “white.” Putting aside the fact that many Israelis are of Middle Eastern origin and some are black, i.e. the Falashas of Ethiopian descent, Israel is a major, probably indispensable Western asset.
Israel is vital to U.S. and overall Western interests in ways that may not be totally obvious. If you are familiar with WW II history, Hitler controlled Europe to the Atlantic Ocean. Spain and Portugal were “neutral in favor of the Axis.” Italy was separated from most of Europe by the Alps, and in any event was not conquered until sometime in late 1943 or early 1944.
The only usable avenues of attack to regain Europe was on the beaches of France; Normandy and/or Calais. The battle to make a beachhead was a bloodbath. Israel is a giant “Normandy” in the Middle East, a fraught and unstable area. Should the West need to enter the Middle East militarily, Israel is the only country that, as a stable democracy, that can be counted on as a springboard. That is why some Arab countries and groups want Israel out so desperately. Knocking off Israel knocks the West out of a large chunk of the world.
During the Obama years, his approach was that there is really only one world and that no country’s military should dominate. A beautiful dream and a recipe for chaos. I feel that most Presidents and especially their Defense Departments understood the essential role Israel played. The State Department, in general, has considered Israel to be an obstacle to peace. Over the years, during the Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II, Clinton and Trump years (Ford and Carter were decidedly of two minds, as was Obama, and Eisenhower was hostile to Israel) the U.S. has been pro-Israel or neutral in favor of Israel.
I consider that we should be allied to Israel both as based on ideological similarities, i.e. it’s a democracy, and for strategic purposes.
“That is why some Arab countries and groups want Israel out so desperately. Knocking off Israel knocks the West out of a large chunk of the world.”
One has to be utterly delusional to think that Israel can possibly be “knocked off”. Of course, “utterly delusional” is often an apt description of “some Arab countries and groups”, so - yeah.
That’s my concern, and the tendency of foreign secretaries and secretaries of state to fall for the pipe dream of a “comprehensive peace.” The sickening casualties in Syria and Yemen should belie that fairy tale.
Ask just about every U.S. Secretary of State. John Marshall almost resigned the Truman administration over the issue. And John Kerry looked like a puppy dog salivating over a steak on a counter over the prospect of convincing Israel to cave.
The West has entered the Middle East militarily several times in the last few decades and Israel has never been involved. Even if SA turned against us, the west would still be able to dominate the entire region through NATO member Turkey.
That said, Israel is immensely valuable for their intelligence assets and, as HurricaneDitka says, their ability to police the area when things reach a tipping point.
Countries in the Middle East that are of strategic value to the US and the West are those sitting on a large oil and gas field or control access to a major trade route and their lack of democratic ideals never got in the way of business.
We don’t need Israel to be a springboard for troop deployment in case of a major land war in the Middle East, we can make our own landing areas.
We enjoy letting Israel do our dirty work (Syrian, Iraq), but it functions much like we pay Blackwater’s progeny to operate in certain nations - we are too embarrassed to do it ourselves.
The nations of the Middle East do not get along with each other, and the only thing that ever allows them to pretend to be on the same side has been their enmity towards Israel.
Israel does not have strategic resources, her position on the globe has less and less importance in modern warfare, and our continued support comes with a cost as well.
Now - I don’t find the other nations of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia to be that great either. But stating that we have to support Israel as a strategic need for our nation calls out for a better list of strategic values that our alliance with Israel supposedly provides.
There are good reasons to support the State of Israel, and I would consider myself in a qualified sense, sympathetic to the existence of a Jewish State. “They’re western” and “it’s a [liberal] democracy” aren’t among them.
Most Israeli Jews at this point are of Middle Eastern origin, and if you add them together with the 15% or so that emigrated from the former Soviet Union after 1989 (who are Ashkenazi but not particularly ‘western’) that’s a very large majority of Jews who aren’t ‘western’. It’s true that the institutions of the state of Israel were largely formed by the early settlers many of whom were from western Europe, but Israel has evolved since then both demographically and culture, and mostly away from American liberal ideas, largely because of the influx of Russian and Middle Eastern Jews. (You can consider it a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t consider it entirely a bad thing, but it’s certainly a thing).
Israel is a liberal democracy today, if you don’t consider the treatment of the occupied territories in your calculation, but I doubt it will remain one for many decades into the future. (I don’t think liberal democracy will end up having deep roots in Eastern Europe either, for very similar reasons). Anyway there are other liberal democracies in the region too, like Tunisia and Turkey.
Yeah. How many US troops in the recent Iraq war went thru Israel? I think that would be approximately… let’s see… ZERO. Besides, Turkey is a NATO ally.
Israel isn’t going to remain a liberal democracy into the foreseeable future, because the center of public opinion is swinging hardline ethnic nationalist and this will create tensions that cause liberal democracy to collapse. Anyway there are other liberal democracies in the region as well. (I’m not saying this as criticism of Israel, since I personally am not an enthusiast of liberal democracy anyway so it doesn’t especially bother me).
I’m quite surprised you still consider Turkey a “liberal democracy”. I’d put them pretty high up on the list of countries that have taken a decidedly-authoritarian turn in recent years.
OK let’s neglect Turkey then: I don’t know enough about Turkish internal affairs to have much of an opinion about the future of liberl democracy there.
The idea that Israel is our unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle east is ludicrous.
We have don’t have any bases in Israel. We have lots of other bases and equipment and deployed soldiers in other countries in the middle east. If we’re going to attack Iran or Syria or Saudi Arabia we’re going to do so from Iraq and Qatar.
It’s a very silly notion that they reason we need Israel is so we can use it to invade other countries. In the post WW2 era we’ve intervened militarily in the middle east literally countless times, and in none of those cases did we use Israel as a staging area.
Israel is not actually a military ally of the United States. Their main military asset to the United States is intelligence. I mean, you’d think after 14 years in Iraq we’d have a pretty good network running there, but for some reason the United States has a reputation for abandoning people who worked with us.