I’ll defend Israel’s right to exist because it does, now . . . but if I could go back in time, I would buttonhole Theodore Herzl and say, “This Zionism thing . . . forget it. Don’t even start. I’m a time traveler and I’ve seen what it leads to. [and give him details] The movement will succeed, but you’ll be buying a lot more problems than it will solve.”
Of course, even if he believes me it might not discourage him.
Would you also tell him about the Holocaust?
There was a lot of captured Soviet equipment Israel made available to the USA for evaluation. Israel’s air force found out the hard way that current USA built F-15s had some unforeseen weaknesses against Soviet bloc anti-air defenses, and they passed that info on to the US. Israel has access to some intelligence that the US doesn’t have. And when the F-16 a friend of mine was flying over Libya on a, um, training mission one day picked up some damage from, um, some tree branches, he was permitted to land in Israel to have the, um, dent pounded out from the skin of the F-16.
I would – and I would tell him the Zionist movement could do nothing whatsoever to prevent it anyway.
Yeah, I’ve heard about it. They use it to spy on the U.S. a lot.
Golly gee willickers, that’s shocking. Glad the U.S. doesn’t get up to such shenanigans as spying on it’s allies!
From 1933 to 1936, about 174,000 Jews, most of them from Germany and Eastern Europe, emigrated to Israel. Over the entire time period of 1929-1940, about 250,000.
If we could convince them to join the United States as our 51st state, we could build permanent military bases there. With the added security, industry could move in an tap into the cheap labor pool among Palestinians making everyone involved rich. Start dangling Chevy Volts in front of the would-be terrorists maybe they think otherwise.
I now see Captain Amazing making about the same point, but:
There were about 400,000 Jews in Palestine at the start of World War II. I don’t know exactly how many of them had come, since the start of Zionism around 1880, from places in Europe where they probably would have been killed. But, very roughly, I think that it was maybe half. Let’s say that two-thirds of them would have been killed by Hitler, since about 2/3 of Europe’s Jews were killed by Hitler. So, then, Zionism saved maybe, say, 130,000 Jews.
I don’t think it would go over too well with him to call that nothing.
He also might not have thought that Israel taking in most of the Jewish population, expelled from Arab countries as colonialism faded, was nothing.
You could balance that against 100,000 people killed in Arab-Israeli Wars. But I wouldn’t, because if not for Zionism, the non-Zionist Jewish population of Palestine would have been thoroughly massacred by now. One thing not taken into account, in these kinds of discussions, is that there were massacres, in Palestine, before Zionism.
There are other historical figures, associated with national liberation movements, you could tell things to. You could tell George Washington that separating from Britain would embolden the Germans to attack Western Europe and Russia in the two highest death toll European wars of all time, with America required to belatedly come to the rescue both times with great loss of life.
I could argue that Americans have less right to most of the land in the United States than do the Israelis in Israel. Or is it OK because native Americans, who still controlled big areas of the American west when my grandparents were born, were more thoroughly defeated than the Arabs?
This is fair enough, and of course applies to lots of countries.
As far as I know, we haven’t asked our allies to fund our intelligence operations that spy on them.
This situation is like giving pocket money to an indigent nephew to do sneaky shit to you.
That’s how that part of the world works, and the apartheid is based primarily on nationality rather than race or religion. Israeli Arabs are full citizens, Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian Arabs are not. They are hostile populations under occupation and treated as such.
Now that doesn’t mean that Israel’s behavior is peachy keen, but I’d put their record as an occupier up against anyone’s, including our own.
Perhaps, but you might also want to tell the Pilgrims that too, and possibly all those tribes of white people that destroyed the Roman Empire. Heck, why not tell Europe right now that in 200 years they’ll be part of the Muslim world so they can act now to prevent that.
Given the establishment clause of the First Amendment, that would be the end of the “Jewish State,” and would cause a lot of follow-on disruptions to their society. I don’t think they want that.
Yes, sort of. One of the conditions of the aid was that if any of the countries had a coup overthrowing the government, the aid was supposed to stop. Egypt had a coup and overthrew its government, but Obama and Congress decided not to press the point.
Regards,
Shodan
Last night I read the lengthy article in the new Atlantic about Obama’s views on foreign policy. To paraphrase, he feels not much in the Middle East is vital to US interests, and he feels there are more positive possibilities in the future in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Talks at length about how traditional “allies” such as Saudi and Pakistan, are not so much.
So, yeah, if we feel we need to be involved in the Mideast, Israel is of some use to us. But I find myself wondering if the Mideast would be more or less fucked up were it not for Israel. If we felt some loyalty to the Jews, why don’t we give them a slice of our own desert? Maybe include a port in California to allow them shipping access. Heck, maybe give them a thin slice all along the border with Mexico - 2 birds with one stone! 
Sure the Jews - and other tribes - place value on specific plots of dirt, but if there were an all out war in the area, it wouldn’t take long for Israel to be rendered uninhabitable.
If Trump wants to build his wall, maybe around the friggin’ Mideast might be a better place than Mexico!
I’m not anti-Israel as much as a don’t care about the Mideast other than that they keep their crazy to themselves. And, unfortunately for Israel, that’s where they are.
I don’t think Canada could build a functioning nuclear weapon that quickly. Certainly they could be built and Canada has the materials and know-how to do so, but actually designing and construction a working warhead would take longer than a month or two. A crash building program and maybe you have one in six months. It’s a really complicated thing to build, and part and parcel of it is having some sort of delivery system for the weapon, which Canada presently doesn’t have, even if it’s just building a bomb casing.
I would favour gradual reduction, too, as being basically no longer necessary.
However, on a purely value for cash basis, the US payments to Israelis and Arabs alike has proved to be a successful foreign policy strategy.
There hasn’t been a large-scale war involving Egypt, Israel and Jordan since the payment started.
Contrast this with the rest of the ME, now involved in protracted, ruinous war - even after the US spend something like two Trillion dollars fighting in Iraq. If stability is a US goal, paying countries to behave has proved more successful and less expensive than direct intervention.
Why is it in the US best interests to preserve peace in the region? Why should they care? Well, for one, because a good part of the world’s energy still comes from the region. In the past, Arab-Israeli wars have led to oil price instability, which has affected the US.
In the future, this factor will include Israel itself. Though this fact has not made its mark on public consciousness yet, Israel has discovered large reserves of natural gas (such as the “Leviathan” field), and has plans with Greece to export this to Europe, a fact which has geopolitical importance (Europe currently imports a lot from Russia).
In short, Israeli reserves can act in the future to counterbalance (somewhat - the Israeli reserves are quite small compared to the Russian) Russian energy influence in Europe.
What has Israel ever done for us? Where the hell do you think Jesus came from???
In what fantasy world is this existing?
the Lebanon: a secular republic, semi-democratic
the Syria: secular republic, socialist authoritarianism
the Egypt: secular republic, socialist authoritarianism that became military authoritarianism
the Jordan: secular monarchy
but I suppose it is an accurate statement of the Hollywood action film understanding of the region that the americans have and their distorted stereotypes of the savage sub-human sand peple. Just like the star wars.