# What would happen if the US started withdrawing support from Israel? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 28, 2010, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134 "2010-03-28T19:37:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/121 "2010-04-03T01:54:25Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Israel needs a friend that will not do the equivalent of letting her drive drunk, a friend who will take the keys away and keep them away even if she yells at him and has the other friends yell at him too. Israel will in turn be able to decide what the US can build in Washington, D.C. then? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/122 "2010-04-03T03:19:13Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > Israel will in turn be able to decide what the US can build in Washington, D.C. then? The trouble with that analogy is that there isn’t the least dispute over what people or governing body is entitled to make building decisions in Washington, D.C. I know that many Israelis and others who support their view **claim** that it’s indisputable that the Israeli government is fully entitled to make decisions about urban planning in East Jerusalem, but that claim doesn’t make the dispute go away. Lara Friedman and Daniel Seidemann [assessed the claim in a March 19 _Foreign Policy_ article](http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/19/jerusalem_settlements_and_the_everybody_knows_fallacy) as follows: > [@](#): > > Throughout the past week the world has heard Israeli government officials and their allies in the US --particularly among the pro-settler crowd – defending construction in East Jerusalem settlements on the grounds that “everybody knows” these areas will always be part of Israel. […] > > “Everybody knows these areas in East Jerusalem will always be Israel,” they say, “so when the Palestinians (and the Americans) make a fuss about new construction plans, it is just for political purposes, not because there is any real issue.” > > Those peddling this rubbish are guilty of transparent manipulation. Those buying it are guilty of having short memories and an excess of credulity. > > In 1993, when the peace process was taking off, the settlement of Ramat Shlomo – which last week caused such a headache for Vice President Biden – didn’t exist. The site was an empty hill in East Jerusalem (not “no man’s land,” as some have asserted), home only to dirt, trees and grazing goats. It was empty because Israel expropriated the land in 1973 from the Palestinian village of Shuafat and made it off-limits to development. Only later, with the onset of the peace process era, was the land zoned for construction and a brand-new settlement called Rehkes Shuafat (later renamed Ramat Shlomo) built. > > If in 1993 you had asked what areas “everybody knows” would stay part of Israel under any future agreement, the area that is today Ramat Shlomo – territorially distinct from any other settlement and contiguous with the Palestinian neighborhood of Shuafat – would not have been mentioned. […] > > Some will argue that these are the facts on the ground today, and the fact is that Israel will never part with the big East Jerusalem settlements. So regardless of sins of the past, why make a fuss about new construction in them? > > The answer lies in a closer look at what Netanyahu means when he talks about what “everybody knows.” > > Because if he meant that everybody understands what will be Israeli and what will be Palestinian in Jerusalem, this would potentially be great news: it could mean an agreement is possible, at least on Jerusalem, tomorrow. And if that were what he meant, then just as he suggests that Israel can build without restrictions in the areas that “everybody knows” will stay Israeli, he would have no problem with Palestinians building without restrictions in the areas that everyone knows will be Palestinian. > > But there’s the catch: for Netanyahu, there is no place in Jerusalem that “everybody knows” will be Palestinian. > > What Netanyahu really means is that East Jerusalem land falls into two categories: areas that “everybody knows” Israel will keep and where it can therefore act with impunity, and areas that Israel hopes it can keep, by dint of changing so many facts on the ground before a peace agreement is reached that they move into the first category. > > It is an approach that can be summed up as: “what’s mine is mine, and what you think is yours will hopefully be mine, too.” It discloses with stark clarity the underlying principle of Netanyahu’s Jerusalem policies: the status of Jerusalem and its borders will be determined by Israeli deeds rather than by negotiations. This is simply not the same thing as the US government making urban planning decisions in Washington D.C., an area in which it has universally recognized and absolutely unchallenged sovereignty. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/123 "2010-04-03T03:20:50Z")
If the United States was taking a lot of Israeli money in and relied on Israel to protect it from the sanctions that the rest of the world was trying to impose on it then uh yeah, Israel would be able to use those things to influence what the US built in Washington, and elsewhere, if by so doing the US was acting against what Israeli leadership decided was Israeli interests. But only if Israel was actually really willing to withdraw some of that support if America did not comply. And I have little doubt that Israeli leadership would use that influence, they’s nobody’s fools. That would be realpolitik, which was what the op asked about. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/124 "2010-04-03T04:10:14Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > This is simply not the same thing as the US government making urban planning decisions in Washington D.C., an area in which it has universally recognized and absolutely unchallenged sovereignty. I suspect some Native Americans may have issues with that. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/125 "2010-04-03T04:15:29Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > Please elaborate. 🙂 Consider the US Army in WWII, for example. The US Army in WWII was not particularly effective. The war in Europe was won through sheer numbers, and the production of materiel, not because our soldiers were better than theirs. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/126 "2010-04-03T04:26:55Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > I suspect some Native Americans may have issues with that. 🙂 They’re all US citizens. Why would they? ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/127 "2010-04-03T04:30:37Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > I suspect some Native Americans may have issues with that. But we’re not talking about certain hypothetical individuals in a historically oppressed and displaced minority group hypothetically having personal “issues” with the absolute and unchallenged sovereignty of the state entity that historically oppressed them over the territory they used to inhabit. We’re talking about nations and international organizations worldwide _officially disputing and challenging_ the claims to sovereignty of a state entity over a particular piece of territory. Most of the nations of the world officially disagree with Israel’s claims to control East Jerusalem, to the extent that they have refused to move their embassies in Israel from Tel Aviv to Israel’s declared new capital of Jerusalem. No country would consider for a minute the idea of refusing to locate an embassy in Washington on the grounds that the US government ought to be sharing its capital with American Indian Nations. Face it, Jerusalem’s status is disputed on the world stage in a way that Washington’s status simply is not, never has been for the past two hundred years or thereabouts, and never will be in the foreseeable future. I can’t really tell whether you actually understand this and are simply making these comparisons as a joke (which your use of smilies seems to suggest), or whether you’re seriously attempting to argue that pressuring Israel about its urban planning policies in East Jerusalem really is in any way rationally comparable to pressuring the US about its urban planning policies in Washington. If the former, sorry for spoiling your joke by taking it seriously, and if the latter, well, it’s kind of hard to know what to say that would have any chance of getting through the tinfoil. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/128 "2010-04-03T05:27:14Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > . > I can’t really tell whether you actually understand this and are simply making these comparisons as a joke (which your use of smilies seems to suggest), I was being polite. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 5:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/129 "2010-04-03T05:39:09Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > I was being polite. Oh, okay, I appreciate it. I’m afraid I still don’t get whether you were seriously attempting to claim that there’s any realistic analogy between the recognized territorial status of Washington D.C. and that of East Jerusalem, though. (And by the way, just a clarification of my remark in the previous post about Jerusalem as the “declared new capital”: it was of course declared as such before the Jerusalem Law in 1980, but that was when a lot of the physical institutions of national government were moved from Tel Aviv.) ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2010, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134/130 "2010-04-03T12:25:59Z")
Either way it misses the point. You can agree or disagree whether or not America has “the right” to influence the policies of other countries in ways that America perceives are in its best interest (either directly or indirectly) - and that analogy is an apparent attempt to imply that America has no such right - but the fact is that countries will try to influence policies of other countries, and the tools of aid and actions (or inaction) in international bodies are some of those tools. Focus people. The question is how would America actually using those tools effect realpolitik considerations. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-happen-if-the-us-started-withdrawing-support-from-israel/534134.md?page=6)