I was reading stoids GD, asking about the connection between Oil/Iraq/Energy Policy… and it got me thinking. For the record, IANAE on this subject, but try to read all I can.
This is all hypothetical, of course, but if the Middle East did NOT have the vast oil reserves, would the US even care what was going on there? And by extension, would they care what would happen to Israel?
I’ve heard theories advanced that oil or no oil, the US would support and supply Israel the means by which to defend itself. But why? Because they are a democracy? So what? I don’t think any of their Arab neighbors hate Israel just because they have elections. Whatever the rest of the region’s governments are (democracies, kingdoms, or whatever), I don’t see the fundamental reasons for their hate for one another changing. Muslim-Jewish differences go much deeper than that.
Could American support for Israel come from somewhere else, then? Guilt, perhaps over the treatment of the Jews of Europe and Asia during WWII and the US’s late entry? Political pressure from pro-Israeli lobbyists (and some sizable political contributions) here in the US? Or can it be as easy as Israel suppies the US with a strategic foothold in the hornet’s nest? Giving the post- WWII Jews with a homeland was nice, but doing that without understanding the ramifications was not too forward thinking.
If we did not support Israel (with intelligence, foreign aid, military equipment, etc.), how long would it have taken for the arab people (specifically the Palistinians, but all of their allies) to move in and secure the property because of their “rights” to the land? And would the rest of the world pay close attention? Unless that oil wasn’t there, I’m thinking that they wouldn’t.
Sorry if there are typos. It’s 3:15 am, and I’m sleeping
I’m sure Zionist voters and interest groups here in America would care. That means the politicians have to care. They need fundraising, they need votes. That means they need the Zionists.
Surely that’s the primary reason we still back Israel, despite the ever-growing list of problems that would be solved by withdrawing our support for that state. All the enemies we’ve made, all the trouble we’re in, the entirety of the threat from terrorism…it all traces back to that. The politicians must be pretty convinced that withdrawing support for the political state of Israel is career suicide, otherwise they’d have done so long ago.
Oil? We withdraw our support for Israel, switch sides and support the Arab nations, we’d probably get all the oil we want. The reason we’re backing the wrong horse in the Middle East is purely political.
Re: the OP, I go with the idea that a) there is a large pro-Israeli voting bloc in the US (hell, I’m one of them and I’m not Jewish) and b) there remains a degree of residual guilt over the Holocaust, as the OP suggested. It’s obvious on its face, I think, that US political support for Israel has nothing to do with maintaining availability of Mideast oil, and if anything has the opposite effect.
Nevertheless, currently we ARE in fact getting more or less all the oil we want from the Middle East, or rather as much as can be purchased at market prices. Embargo was tried as leverage against the US/Israeli alignment in the early 70’s, ultimately without success. OPEC, whose largest producing members are Middle Eastern countries, has occasionally tried to act as a cartel, artificially limiting production and driving up prices, and has found that this tactic also is unsuccessful in the long term.
Also, one could argue that if there were no Mideast oil, the Arab/Israeli conflict might have been far less heated (the action rather than the rhetoric, that is), simply because the economies of the countries involved could never have supported the huge arms buildups that enabled them to launch the wars of the 60’s and 70’s.
And just how far will politics allow the US go as a staunch ally to Israel, anyway? The US, in the several wars by Arab nations against Israel, never provided its own troops in defense of that nation, unlike its spirited defense of that bulwark of democracy, Kuwait.
[ol]
[li]We back Israel because it is the only nation in the Middle East that doesn’t change fundamental foreign policies at an idle whim. [/li][li]We back Israel because it is the only Middle Eastern country that does not have factions in its military or intelligence community conspiring against its own government. Coups that bring hostile governments into power are bad.[/li][li]We back Israel because it is the strongest, most effective military power in the region. Weak allies are useless.[/li][li]We have common cultural ties.[/li][li]They consistantly have “lived up to their end of the bargain”. Occasionaly true of Arab states too, but far from always.[/li][li]Israel controls the land where Africa, the Near East/Southeastern Europe, rge Middle East, the Mediterranean Sea, & the Red Sea meet. Strategic ground to hold.[/li][li]The Arabs have blackmailed us with oil before, who can trust them now?[/li][/ol]
I hear this argument all the time, and I don’t buy it. You think that the US supports Israel only because a small but vocal and powerful minority of Jews tells us to? Sorry, but there’s little support for this position. Polls repeatedly show a majority, or at least a strong plurality, of Americans supporting Israel. Unless you think that the majority of Americans are Jewish, this claim doesn’t hold water.
I agree that our support of Israel is partly political. Politicians know that our people support Israel. They’re being good politicians, and doing what their electorate wants them to do. I think that’s kinda the point of having representatives.
Why shouldn’t the U.S. support Israel? Israel supports the U.S. whenever it can, and Israelis certainly like America a lot more than most other people around the world - Europe, I’m talking to you, - do. The two countries have very similar cultural backgrounds and share many common interests. It’s just a matter of like drawn to like; I mean, what does an American have in common with a Saudi?
The reason the U.S. supports Israel financially is because the Soviet union supported the Arab states financially first. America sent Israel money to balance that, then it started sending over similar funds to Egypt in order to bribe it to their side. The fact that the U.S.S.R is no more is irrelevant - if the U.S. stops supplying Israel, it’ll either have to stop supplying Egypt as well (which will cause it to lose two Middle East allies) or find itself going against American public opinion by supporting the Egyptian war effort against a pro-American democracy. Either way, it’ll be messy.
Saudi Arabia needs the U.S. more that the U.S. needs it - after all, who else would buy their oil? Besides, America, if properly pissed off, could seize the Arabian oil fields for itself in a matter of weeks. All it needs is an excuse to make the effort.
As to the OP, if the Arabs didn’t have oil, there’d be no need to care about Israel, because Israel wouldn’t have any problems. Remember, only the Arabs have oil - Israel never found any. Without oil no nation in the world would show any interest in supporting Arab states, and Israel’s enemies would have much, much less money to cause mischief with.
I said “Zionists”, not Jews. There are certainly alot of Christians here in America who support the Israeli political state. Perhaps this is due to their sense of affinity with the Jews over the Muslims. Whatever the source, support for the Israeli political state is widespread. And of course, more importantly, there are both voters and big donors to campaigns that feel this way.
To a certain extent politicians are supposed to represent the views of their constituencies. At another certain point, that must end. A plurality of voters does not give license to run roughshod over self-determination of peoples, safety of the public, and basic human liberties. This plurality that supports Zionism has given the politicians the message that they better support Israel. What has this gotten us? Danger from terrorists. What has it gotten the people of the Middle East? A suppression of their right to self-determination of government, several wars by Israeli aggressors, continuing human rights violations on the part of the Israeli government against people within it’s supposed borders, and an enemy determined to pull all the strings it can in the international community to continue it’s oppressive reign.
Politicians are there to represent the people…but they’re also there because they are smarter than the people, because they understand the situation on a larger scale than most individual voters. It’s time they started acting like they deserve their positions, it’s time to withdraw support for Israel.
I’m not a Christian. And I heartily support Israel, and would be disgusted with the United States if it pulled support of the Israeli people.
And there’s a practical point here that you appeasers never seem to learn. If you respond to aggression by capitulating, you simply encourage more of it. Israel has stayed free and relatively peaceful despite being surrounded by nations that want to destroy it not because it has good diplomats or because it makes constant concessions in order to buy peace. Israel stays free and relatively peaceful because it has, in the past, smashed down aggression against it with overwhelming military superiority.
The question, if you care to recall, is “why do we have a dog in this fight in the first place?”
Nobody called us “appeasers” for staying out of Rwanda during the massacres; out of Cambodia during the killing-fields period; out of Uganda when Idi Amin was killing a million of his countrymen. Or, oddly enough, out of Iraq when Saddam was gassing the Kurds, or nonintervening when he was attempting to conquer a chunk of Iran.
So not only is this an ad hominem insult, it’s a terribly badly-defined one, too.
Sam Stone – help me out with this would you ? I still see posts and articles about how the Palestinians are just itching to “push the Jews into the sea” and such like. Yet when I look at a map, I don’t see any countries, I don’t see any army’s, I don’t see even any organised groups – save for a couple of hundred militants/radicals/terrorist on the West Bank and in Southern Lebanon - even thinking about confronting the Israeli State, let alone actually doing it. However I do see 5 million people defended by state-of-the-art military equipment, each of them pulling in over $100 a year in aid for their country from the US.
But it’s strange because whenever I see Middle East coverage on the news, there are always Israeli tanks, or Apache helicopters, or first-generation attack aircraft moving across the landscape with lots of Israeli soldiers scurrying around for cover…all very Speilberg-esque.
Yet my understanding is the couple of hundred active enemy has a few rocket launchers (not anti-tank), old Russian rifles, explosives and a few bashed up old Merc’s.
…I just get the impression giving Israel all of this weaponry is a little like the US investing in NMD when the actual enemy carry’s bolt cutters or, in the case of Israel, straps explosives to themselves. But, damn it looks good – a nation under siege, a desperate people fighting for their survival…
Sure, there’s a militant/terrorist threat to Israeli people while there’s no Palestine but where’s the threat to the nation State ?Presumably you see something I’ve missed ?
BTW, if you’re thinking of Syria, it might be worth remembering the last time they fired up that ancient USSR hand-me-down hardware was against Saddam in the Gulf War.