Most Americans couldn’t name any Israeli political parties. I don’t think the government / administration has thrown their support behind a particular party either. We generally support Israel and leave to the Israelis to work out who their elected representatives should be.
Again, definitions:
The OP may have heard a number greater than 200 bandied about.
Speaking as a former Christian, there are millions of people in the US who think of Israel as Jesus’s birthplace and the Jews as Jesus’s ancestors. When I got baptized into the church, they gave me a bible which contained a dozen pages with color photos of, quote, “The Holy Land”. A politician who has an unfavorable attitude toward Israel would make all those Christians feel uncomfortable, as if they were disrespecting Jesus. When I read about the Crusades, it’s not very hard to imagine the propaganda campaign which convinced Europeans to travel all the way to Jerusalem to try to take it back from the Muslims.
Fun fact: The Baptist Church has its own version of Boy Scouts, called Royal Ambassadors. One of their “ranks” is called Crusader. :-/
It being a democracy is I think secondary to it being an ally. I’m pretty sure even if they were a military dictatorship or a monarchy, America would still be their ally. I mean, Saudi Arabia is America’s ally.
Someone needs to tell those people that many of the Palestinians are Christians. Of course, it is not only Israel who has fucked those people over, not by a long shot. The persecution of Orthodox Christians, whether Palestinians, Assyrians, Coptics, or Maronites, all over the Middle East, has been ongoing for a long time and most of the world does not know or care.
USAID Explorer. The United States has traditionally given military aid to countries like Greece, Turkey, and Egypt because of their strategic importance (basing proximity to the Soviet Union, unfettered access to the Suez Canal, et cetera). The US has no such interests in Israel, and in fact until 2017 did not have any military basing on Israeli soil. It does have a radar base in the Negev Desert near Dimona, which not all Israelis were very happy about, and mostly exists to protect Israel. In terms of both per-capita spending and Israel’s strategic value the amount of military aid from the US is grossly disproportionate. Furthermore, military aid to Israel has remained consistently high ever since 1968 while aid to other nations has fluctuated with need or strategic value.
The pro-Israel bias in American politics is widely understood but if you need evidence you can look at last congressional session’s HR 1697 “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” and injection of language into the omnibus spending bill to prohibit companies doing business with the government to engage in a boycott of Israel. For its part, the pro-Israel lobbying sector is one of the largest bipartisan contributors to Congress and has the second highest amount of avowed foreign money, short only of South Korea which has six times the population and has been in a declared war and bitter standoff with North Korea for six and a half decades.
There is, of course, Israel’s special place in some of the extralegal geopolitics like its formally unacknowledged but you-know-we-have-it nuclear program, and of course its infamous role in the Iran-Contra scandal of brokering arms sale to post-revolutionary Iran, not to mention its occupation of the Gaza Strip within what the UN has recognized as Palestine territory and the general refusal to recognize Palestine as a state, leaving millions of people as stateless refugees with no formal government or protection. But this isn’t really news to anyone, nor is there a genuine two-sided debate that Israel enjoys outsized influence in American politics regardless of any through-hat talking.
The Evangelical obsession with Israel and end-of-times prophesies is something else entirely, although the Israeli lobby certainly uses this bizarre apocalyptic bedtime story to their benefit. The confluence of white nationalists, Evangelicals, and conspiranoists makes a strange stew of wierdly conflicting beliefs and agenda that is nonetheless heartily consumed by people who feverently hope for the world to end in their lifetimes so they can be lifted bodily to Heaven.
Stranger
Jewish voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic/progressive, that hasn’t changed much in recent years and probably won’t in 2020 despite the occasional loud, bigoted nincompoop Democratic politician. Evangelical types play some role in supporting Israel, but there additionally appears to be considerable recognition among non-Jewish, non-religious conservative voters that Israel has values worth supporting (and common enemies worth presenting a united front against).
I wanna know what is this U.S.-Iraq thing, since they get quite a bit more foreign aid than Israel (aid to other Middle Eastern nations lalso exceeds that given to Israel). And about them Saudis…:dubious: