The Realpolitik View: The US Alliance with Israel is Not in America's National Interest

Quite the opposite, in fact.

June 8, 1967. I was just 8 years old, but watching the news of the Six Day War on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. As I remember, Israel was being praised for making a successful surprise attack(when I’d been told Pearl Harbor was bad because it was a surprise attack), and had followed up by attacking the USS Liberty, an unarmed Navy spy ship that did something the Israelis didn’t like.

34 Americans dead, many more injured, but it was all just an accident. Just like the systematic Israeli attacks on Gazan hospitals and the slaughters of their staff and patients were accidents.

After the story about the Liberty, I asked my mom why we were supporting Israel. She said Americans felt sorry for the Jews after they learned what happened to them under the Nazis, and they had to go somewhere, and well, other than that she really didn’t know.

She said the Arabs had never done anything to us, or to the Jews for that matter until they started taking over Palestine, and it was the Arabs who had the oil, and there were so many Arabs that Israel couldn’t survive forever if they really wanted it gone, so what was the point? She’d rather see the money spent to eliminate poverty at home.

My mom’s gone now, departing this mortal coil several years ago after outliving all of her relatives to the ripe old age of 100, but in all those years I never heard a single good reason for the US to spend billions of dollars a year to support a country so self-righteous it made the Soviets look modest.

For the most part, American support of Israel has been damned near unconditional, and how, pray tell, did that support ever benefit the United States as a nation? What material benefit did Americans as a whole ever get out of supporting Israel?

Oh, the defense contractors have certainly benefited. In addition to the profits from all of the weapons sales, paid for by the US Treasury, Israel’s frequent military operations give them the opportunity to test their weapons, either upon Arab militaries or Palestinian civilians, on a regular basis.

Other than them, the greatest American beneficiary of unqualified support for Israel has been the Israel Lobby, notably the America Israel Political Action Committee(AIPAC). People convinced by Zionist propaganda donate oodles of bucks to AIPAC, no doubt Israel finances them with American money as well, and they expertly bribe and blackmail American politicians to reflexively support Israel no matter what Israel does.

So what about everybody else? Other than the wealthy who have investments in Israel, the US-Israel alliance has provided no material benefit at all to the vast majority of the American population.

Israel is constantly portrayed as this great and loyal ally, but usually for moralistic or ideological reasons. Let’s go through a few of them.

• Israel is The Only Democracy in the Middle East. Well, Israel’s a democracy in the same sort of way the Jim Crow South or apartheid South Africa were democracies, but any place with second class citizens based on ethnicity isn’t a democracy.

• Israel is necessary because Jews need a safe place to live. Excuse me, but the Jews have had safe places to live before, and certainly have some now. In fact, the United States is arguably THE safest place Jews have had to live since the days of Imperial Germany and the British Empire, to name two recent historical examples, and, irony of ironies, the Arab Caliphate of medieval times.

  • There were never any pogroms, Black Hundreds, expulsions of Jews, religious inquisitions, or PLO or Hamas attacks in any of those three places. No Nazi governments, either.

• Israel is an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US. Well, if one is of the opinion that we don’t need any aircraft carriers Over There to protect us from people who are upset at us only because of the Empire’s actions in the first place, and who knows the Empire isn’t in the best interests of the American people in the second, then it’s way past time to stop wasting money on that aircraft carrier.

• Israel has always been a steadfast ally of the United States. Bullshit. Tell that to the crew of the Liberty. When has Israel ever gone out of its way to support the US when such support did not directly benefit Israel? When has the Israeli Government ever done anything to help the American people as a whole? When did they ever send us oodles of weapons, or help pay for our education or our anti-poverty programs or our health care system, as we have done for them? If they ever have, it’s been so little as to be unnoticeable.

So just what has near unconditional support for Israel gotten the United States? It has earned us the hostility of most Arabs and Muslims in general, who would otherwise be quite happy to trade with us, not to mention to perhaps support us if they feel some other rising power is less preferable than America.

Israel has lobbied almost since its inception for American troops to intervene in nearby countries, contributing to, if not causing, our failed imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the destruction of Libya, the devastation of Syria, the chaos in Lebanon, and the destabilization and resulting refugee crisis emanating from all of those countries plus most of North Africa.

But what about Islamic fundamentalism, Zionists will scream. They want to kill us all! They hate us for our freedom! Well, what about them?

The sad truth is that most Arab countries after World War II had secular governments and many embraced pan-Arab nationalism, which only made sense as their borders had been drawn by European colonial powers, not by the Arabs themselves. This was clearly a direct threat to both Israel and to American imperialism, since a stronger Arab state or states that put the interests of their own people first would pose a threat to the mostly eastern European settler-colonial entity as well as to American Big Oil.

So what did Israel and the US Empire do? We encouraged Islamic fundamentalism as a counterbalance to Arab nationalism, and insured its triumph in Iran by supporting a brutal dictator friendly to both Israel and the American oligarchy. Ever since 1979, we’ve known what a great idea that was.

We’ve supported brutal dictators in Egypt, and feudal monarchies around the Persian Gulf. We first supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and then wrecked his country, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and hundreds of American soldiers in the process. We supported the most fanatical Islamists of them all, al-Qaida and ISIS, in order to oppose other people we liked less at the time. Hamas itself would not exist without Israeli support, which has been well-documented by some very good journalists. (below: the Highway of Death, southern Iraq, 1991)

Brutal dictatorships and fundamentalist Islamic regimes, fine, but no nationalism that might put the needs of Arabs and Persians over American capitalism and Israeli Zionism can ever be allowed. That’s been the story going on 80 years now. It is time to end that story.

Nearly unconditional support for Israel now has the US Empire managers in the position of lying about and financing an ongoing genocide, with even more treasure flowing into that country while our own cities literally crumble, because they can’t even imagine challenging AIPAC and subjecting themselves to charges of anti-Semitism, even though the Israelis aren’t Semitic, the Arabs are, and American Jews are often the ones leading the pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protests.

The Zionist argument now seems to be that all these other countries got to do their genocides, including the US, so it’s not fair to deny them the chance to do their own. In fact, it’s anti-Semitic to not allow a non-Semitic people to genocide a Semitic one. It’s impossible to make that make sense in any rational context.

So here we are. Israel has never acted as an ally to the US. In fact, it has been a hindrance to intelligent American foreign policy for decades, has cost us billions of bucks that could have been better spent at home, encouraged us to kill or displace millions of people, and alienated most of the rest of the world from us in the process.

Israel is an albatross around the neck of American relations with the rest of the planet, and it’s recent conduct is the perfect reason to throw that albatross back to the sea. It’s the realpolitik thing to do, and it is the moral thing to do.

Thank you for reading and have a good day.

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