A lot of Greek people were demanding Instanbul for a long time on the grounds it used to be their city (and I’ve heard some of them still do if they get drunk enough) but that issue was settled on the battlefield in the 1920s.
Interestingly enough, as of early in 2017, Jewish fertility rates are higher than Arab fertility in Israel proper, and the same has been true for a while now in the West Bank. (Israel is essentially the only developed country of significant size in the world with a high fertility rate). It’s looking increasingly unlikely that Arabs will become a majority anytime in the foreseeable future.
Leaving aside the rest of how dumb this is, you do realize that even Islamic militants aren’t necessarily dark skinned right? Ramzan Kadyrov for example, who’s far more politically influential than ISIS, Al Qaeda or any of the rest of these guys, is a blue-eyed redhead who could fit in seamlessley at an Irish MMA competition.
Still haven’t seen a strategic argument.
Military: The US does not need the Israeli military, but we are happy to let Israel do our dirty work.
Political: It arguably costs the US to support Israel, in terms of relations with other nations.
Economic: The US does not get any critical resources from Israel
Intelligence: There is information sharing - don’t know how much or its value though.
So - back to the OP (instead of the usual fight over history, the Palestinians, etc.). Does anyone have an argument (or a different definition of strategic value) that makes a case for the US continued support of Israel?
Any move to the contrary would result in major domestic political fallout. That’s the real reason.
My instinct is that you’re right. Military and intelligence agencies don’t usually hold press conferences detailing coordination and cooperation with other countries. Usually that coordination by its very nature is deeply top secret.
This is an excellent post which, if this board had a rep system I would rep, as well as the one above.
For one thing, the U.S. intelligence services lack for speakers of Arabic and Farsi. As far as Arabic goes it is, I believe, and official language of Israel. Many signs are in Hebrew, Arabic and English. Israel is unlikely to publicize the role of its loyal Arab residents, who speak Arabic and mix easily with other Arabs. One can just imagine their usefulness to Mossad. Some Arabs may prefer Israeli governance to the dubious governing skills of other Arab leaders. As far as Farsi goes Israel has a large community of Jewish immigrants from Iran. So does Great Neck, New York but Israel’s is larger.
Israel is a valuable ally for, among many reasons that you state its fight is for existence. These are not battles of choice. And unlike the denizens of France, Germany and most NATO lands Israel’s Jewish inhabitants, by and large, would not be welcome in most other lands. Add to that the likely invaders would annihilate them.
That’s right. People talk as if Israel is the barrier to peace. The problem is that the Arab side has made it clear that they regard all of the State of Israel as being occupied. It is not a question of “1967 borders” or “occupied territory.” Peace to me means what prevails between the U.S. and Canada. Stopping the belligerency is simply not on the table.
The Palestinians have and still have every opportunity to make real peace. Any such peace would need to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. That is simply not on the table. Nor is disarming or a cessation of a belligerent posture.
[QUOTE=TonySinclair;20472784
Sure you can. The Palestinians aren’t demanding Istanbul, either. Like the Kurds, they didn’t live in Istanbul for centuries, so they have no reason to demand it. Like the Kurds, they’re demanding only the land that they did live on for centuries, which happens to include Jerusalem.
In fact, they are demanding far less than that. Even though they lived in what is now Israel for centuries, they are willing to give it up. The Arab Peace Initiative, which would recognize and normalize relations with Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from the occupied territories, was endorsed by the Arab League, the OIC (including Iran), the Palestinian Authority, and the majority of the Palestinian people. Hamas, AIPAC, and Israel mostly oppose it, but even they have factions that have shown encouraging signs. If Israel would agree to abide by it, and a multi-national force (including the US) would agree to enforce it (e.g., from bases to be constructed within the Negev), IMO Hamas would be marginalized, and hopefully would cease to exist.
[/QUOTE]
The problem is that the Arab Peace Initiative still includes a “right of return”" which would swamp any territorial version of Israel with returning Palestinians. It is a formula for more war, not for peace.
Dunno. But question: What are the probabilities that Israel will survive as a Jewish state for at least three decades with U.S. support? Without U.S. support?
Yeah, domestic politics is probably more “important” than the survival of Israel. OTOH, the whole geopolitical posturing of the U.S. — especially the U.S. alliance with its own Arab enemy — is 19th century’s Great Game run amok.
Geography makes Israel a beachhead which won’t take a Normandy, Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal-style bloodbath to invade.
At the very least we need the geographical beachhead. As far as assets that Israel has and the U.S. either doesn’t have or not the same quality I don’t think either military announces that. See below on intelligence, which in most respects is a military asset.
When it comes to diplomatic niceties I’m not sure what other than a few good rounds of golf or drinks at U.N. cocktail parties diplomacy gains us. In general, nations have interests, not friends. I don’t think that prices at the gas pump would drop if the U.S. pulled the plug on Israel and Arabs were dancing in the street, much as they jubilated over the September 11 attacks.
As Apple and other hi-tech companies that question. They will disagree.
I doubt that the Mossad, CSIS, Scotland Yard and/or the CIA will disclose how much information sharing there is or its value. Let’s just say that Israel’s Mossad is amazing.
See above. I don’t think that if Israel were merged into surrounding Arab lands and became another Syria that any of the above benefits would be available.
My understanding is that this increased Jewish birth rate is largely the result of high birth rates among ultra orthodox Jews who do not serve in the military and are frequently on the public dole. but they vote and they keep voting themselves more stuff and they keep voting for more extreme anti-Palestinian politicians.
The waiver for military service has been ruled unconstitutional:
Again, the notion that we’re best buddies with Israel because someday we may need it as a beachhead for a massive invasion of the rest of the middle east is obvious nonsense.
We’ve done a couple massive invasions of countries in the middle east in the past decades, and in none of those invasions did we use Israel as a staging area.
Who exactly are we supposed to be invading in our next war that we need Israel for?
Lebanon? Syria? Jordan? Egypt?
If we’re getting into a shooting war with Syria, how’s that going to work, what with Russia and Iran being Syria’s best buddies? And we’d be invading from Iraq, where we’ve been conducing military operations since 2003.
If we’re invading Egypt, why exactly are we doing that? What does Egypt have that we could possibly want? It’s a country with no oil. Yeah, lots of people live there. It has no oil. We have no interest in invading Egypt.
Lebanon and Jordan are the same. Tiny weak countries. If we were going to invade and occupy them we wouldn’t need a Normandy style invasion, now would we? And neither country has any oil. No oil, no invasion.
It’s not just that we need to control the oil. It’s that oil sales are what gives these governments the extra cash to spend on military equipment and troublemaking. Countries without oil like Egypt and Jordan don’t have spare cash lying around. They have to buy their shiny toys by collecting taxes from poor citizens. Oil is what fuels the Saudi war with Yemen. No oil, and Saudi Arabia has no military.
Except Saudi Arabia can’t afford to get into a shooting war with the United States, because during a war there’s no oil sales. Turn off the cash, and the country falls apart in five minutes. And Saudi Arabia doesn’t border on Israel anyway, so an invasion of Saudi starting from Israel would violate the territory of some other state. We’d have to drive through Jordan. And anyway, the oil fields that would be the objective of such an invasion aren’t in the Hejaz anyway. So we’d be invading the Persian Gulf side, from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain.
And if we’re not talking about Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, or Saudi, then what are we talking about? Other countries? That are nowhere near Israel? Then Israel won’t be staging area for invasions of those countries. Invading Iran or Libya, Israel is far away. We support Israel for other reasons, not because they’re a Normandy-style beachhead in the Middle East.
Among all the silly assertions made on the Straight Dope, this is certainly one of them.
Israel is a strategic net loss.
Benefit:
gain one small ally
Cost:
Make enemies of the rest of the region
Actually I’m not against supporting Israel, I just think that “national interest” for a superpower is “a cocktail of domestic interests and ideology” not some special Realpolotik.
I agree that we don’t need Israel as a staging ground or beachhead, but I think the idea that we only invade countries with significant oil deposits or production is almost as silly. Here is a (probably imperfect) list of countries that USA has invaded recently:
Grenada
Panama
Iraq
Kuwait
Afghanistan
Somalia
Haiti
Bosnia
Kosovo
Libya
Syria (I’m adding it as an update to the 2014 list above)
How many of those “have oil”?
Do you think Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Egypt, and Turkey consider the USA their enemy? If not, doesn’t that disprove your theory about the cost of making Israel an ally?
Dude, I’m just dismissing the idea that we’re going to be be invading Lebanon or Jordan or Egypt. Yes, the United States has strategic interests around the world that don’t involve oil. If we have a shooting war with North Korea that won’t involve oil in the slightest.
Same with Grenada and Panama and Haiti, which didn’t involve oil.
As for Bosnia and Kosovo, we didn’t actually invade them, I must have missed that. We bombed them, but we didn’t invade them. Technical difference.
Same with Syria, which we didn’t invade.
Libya has lots of oil, but we didn’t actually invade Libya either.
Afghanistan, has no oil. But remember 9/11? So that happened.
Iraq, Kuwait, and then Iraq again for sure involved oil. Saddam invaded Kuwait to steal their oil, we invaded to send him home again to protect the oil. And of course Saddam wouldn’t have had a large army to begin with if he didn’t have the oil to fund his adventures.
My point is that oil wealth in the Middle East is a driver for conflict, because countries that have surplus oil wealth spend it on their militaries, which are just sitting around waiting to be used. And countries with oil wealth also are targets.
So which countries in the Middle East are we going to be invading, that we need Israel as a landing point? The only country where it even makes sense is if we’re invading Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t make sense either, because we’ll be invading on the Persian Gulf side, not the Hejaz side. We sure ain’t invading Iran from Israel. We aren’t invading any country from Israel. It’s a silly silly idea that we’re best friends with Israel because we know we’ve got to keep an airport open in the middle east.
We have lots of bases in the Middle East. None of them are in Israel. They’re in Turkey, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq. Our chumminess with Israel is not because of their strategic value as a beachhead for invading other countries.
There actually now is a U.S. base in Israel. There probably has been such activity on a covert basis for a long time.
In the context of this thread, I think everybody but you understands “base” to mean a facility capable of staging offensive operations, not a couple of radar towers.
No cite needed; a certain logic will suffice: Israel is defined as America’s friend and America’s interest. By that definition, any opposition to it is opposition to America itself. Ipso facto treasonous. One might as well put it that Israel is America, and America is Israel. No daylight between them. America has no interests other than Israel’s interests.
End? :dubious: Take another look, it’s halfway across. All that water between Tunisia and Gibraltar? That’s the Mediterranean too.
So Palestine was invented in 1967? Can’t let this nonsense pass without calling it out.
WP: “The Arabic word Filastin has been used to refer to the region since the time of the earliest medieval Arab geographers. It appears to have been used as an Arabic adjectival noun in the region since as early as the 7th century CE.* The Arabic newspaper Falasteen (est. 1911), published in Jaffa by Issa and Yusef al-Issa, addressed its readers as “Palestinians.”**”
Kish, George. A Source Book in Geography* (Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 200.
**“Palestine Facts.” PASSIA: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs.