Historically, this hasn't always been the case, and the US were actively opposed to Israel's covert Nuclear program, for example, which was built with French support against the wishes of the US government at the time. The world has change significantly since then, including the French and American governments alignment of interests and weighing to pros and cons. I'm sure other people here can provide more nuance than I'm able to on the 'why', although there is a lot of emotional nonsense and baggage that comes with this particular topic, so you need to take it with a healthy dose of skepticism that there are NO blanket right and wrong people here and there is blood on everyone's hands.
Essentially, though, ignoring conspiracy theories and set in stone agendas, Israel simple represented a palatable partner in an incredibly complex, hostile part of the world and there is simple more in common between the two countries, despite their own at times competing interests. But US interests align far more with Israel, or politically moderate countries like Jordan than some others in the region.
I'm sure there is an element of playing to your electoral base TODAY, but honestly, I think it's just pragmatism at the end of the day in a region where the math can be brutal and bloody, and there are no easy choices of solutions, and real partnerships are fleeting in the region since the powerbrokers in one country or region today maybe be out of the picture tomorrow. Despite internal politics in Israel looking like a bloodsport from outside, they are at least a consistent voice in a highly turbulent region.
That's just my relatively uninformed, I'm sure biased opinion, but I don't have a fixed opinion on who the good and bad people here are, and thing there's a lot of blame in every direction, and no real will to change that on any side.
I agree that it's mostly interests rather than electoral politics, though there's a certain amount of the latter as well (and Israel have invested heavily in public diplomacy programmes to try to keep their stock high in that regard). It's worth noting that one of the other closest allies of the US/UK in the region is Saudi Arabia, who nobody would describe as 'politically moderate' or close in values.
There clearly aren't a lot of good bedfellows to be had in the region. US engagement in ME politics is rife with contradictions and blind self-interest, as are political calculations in the EU, China, or anywhere else with enough reach to matter. When you have to weigh blood, oil, military projection, and short-term regional influence in a unpredictable region, it's hard to see anyone as being on the right side of anything. At least the Russians aren't even pretending otherwise, which is sadly refreshing!
Anything involved Israel just has a depressing tendency to quickly degrade into double standards, name calling and selective vision from otherwise intelligent-seeming people I would normally respect. That's what really depresses me: the inability to have an intelligent rational discussion on anything involving Israel.
Be mercilessly critical if it's justified! I certainly am, and don't think oil is worth so much blood. But it's as necessary with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Palestine as it is with Israel. Just be lucid, honest and fair about it, and willing to admit you don't have all the facts or answers. Why that's so damned hard baffles me, especially from people like engineers who trade in complexity and nuance and edge cases days in and day out.
> But it's as necessary with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Palestine as it is with Israel.
If Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine have reasons to hate each other, then why intervene? It's not like backing one side will stop the conflicts and bring peace as recent history showed us.
The Iraqi prime minister just escaped a bomb attack a few days ago. No friend of Saddam, but I believe the US has responsibilities now. Well, that would be true for Iran as well...
It's not just the US and UK supporting Saudi Arabia (and other Middle Eastern dictatorships like the UAE), but pretty much all of the EU as well. Look at the sort of military tech they're able to get quite easily from Germany (despite the occasional temporary freeze after bad press, later quietly lifted), France, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc.
It's all geopolitics in the end, and Saudi Arabia not only has influence by virtue of controlling so much of the world's energy supply but because it's a relatively stable and consistent power and its regional aims are in line with the US and Europe's desired strategic outcomes.
There isn't a single European government that would rather Saudi Arabia be a democratic country right now.
The second largest political party in the first Knesset was Mapam, which had ideological ties to the Soviet Union (the largest party was the center left Worker's Party or Mapai). The USSR was the first country to recognize Israel, followed by future Warsaw Pact members Czechosolvakia and Poland. Then Hungary and Romania recognized Israel. The next year, the US decided to recognize Israel. So Israel initially had better diplomatic relations with the future Warsaw Pact than the USA.
With the 1967 war, these Warsaw Pact countries all broke diplomatic relations with Israel (except Romania, which was in the process of breaking away from the USSR). Relations between the US and Israel improved dramatically in 1967. In 1973 Israel had an ill-fated war with Egypt, whose Sinai peninsula was occupied by Israel since 1967, and in 1977, Likud took over the Knesset for the first time.
So 1967 was an important year in the relationship shift.
Comparing the blood on the conquerer hands and the blood on the conquered hand is always a strong indicator of either misinformation or bad faith.
It would be like saying 'Sure, the USA did a lot of terrible things in Afghanistan, but did you know that Taliban recruits child soldiers? There are blood on everybody's hand', well yes detective it's called a war, nobody is innocent in a war. The relevant issue is who let the first blood flow, who broke into a land not theirs and started the whole deadly recursion. Certainly not the people who lived there for 2000+ years.
No, I'm saying that the US also committed human rights abuses, so it's not very useful to look at human rights abuses as a measure of who's more evil. You have two tools, both run on linux and windows, so portability is not a useful measure of which tool is better, remove it from both sides of the equation and look at what's left.
If you remove human rights abuses from the side of Taliban, you get a bunch of people defending their home lands. If you remove human rights abuses from the side of USA, you get an empire willing to violate the sovereignty of an entire nation because it's government didn't cooperate enough with them in chasing down one outlaw. Compare those two and decide who's more at fault in the war.
Applying the same procedure to the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict is left as an exercise for the reader.
“Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.”
— Alexander Haig (former Secretary of State under Reagan and four-star general.)
Today they have a lot of common economic interests and trade, similar to a European country.
> “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world
Alexander "I am in control here" Haig made that statement prior to witnessing Desert Storm and the three decades of conflict to follow. The thing that makes that statement ironic is that we can't really fly much from there, and at times had to actively lobby Israel not to fly attack missions in their own self-defense, because doing so would alienate our other allies in the region.
I believe the point he was making was that they were/are the US's proxy wrt. foreign policy. Not being able to fly there is congruent with "does not carry even one American soldier." The thing about proxies is that you're not always in complete control of them but the benefits often far outweigh the costs. You can confirm both of those conditions by looking at a lot of parts of the Syrian Civil War.
Israel and the US have deep strategic and economic relations.c Tel Aviv is one of the hottest startup hubs in the world targeting mainly the US. The US sells military technology to Israel and vice versa. Most of Israel's enemies are hostile to the US as well: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas to name a few. Not sure it is relevant but historically the Jewish-American community was pro Israel and lobbied for Israel in the US and in Israel there is a significant amount of American-Israeli citizens in diplomacy and power positions
(e.g. prime ministers, ministers of foreign affairs). Culturally, Israel is the closest state to the US and Europe. Also, most people in Israel's big cities have a good grasp of the English language.
A more instructive question might be (warning: this is meant to get people thinking, but at least I'll be straight forward about it):
Why does nobody else follow up on the UN resolution from 1948?
(Just like in the case of India / Pakistan UN decided to divide the area into two parts, one for Jews, one for Arabs.)
I can also ask: why does so few other support the single somewhat functioning democracy in the region?
Then, on to your question: After initially being supportive of Israel, USSR took the other side early on and propped up the surrounding nations with weapons so US was kind of forced to do it.
Later on it has turned out to be a beneficial although controversial deal for both parts.
Er... you mean the UN resolution which produced this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_... ? Well, today Israel opposes the current "two state solution" proposal which would give the Palestinians a much smaller territory than on that map, so I kind of understand why the proposal from 1948 is not on the table anymore...
Please also keep in mind that Israel have occupied far more land - and promptly given it back as soon as a lasting peace agreement with the country in question was signed (more or less the entire Sinai. And the country who signed a lasting peace treaty and never had trouble with Israel again is Egypt).
Also, please keep in mind that significant more Jews has been chased out of surrounding Arab countries than Arabs from Israel so anyone asking if UN really divided it in a fair way should also have a good case if they weren't up against almost the entire western world, especially academia and journalists who by now have a deep and vested interest in keeping such facts of the table.
Edit: my point in the second paragraph is that I don't think it is fair to demand that Israel retreat from hard-to-attack positions that gives enemies significant advantages (especially Golan) without a lasting peace agreement.
Edit 2: as for Judea and Samaria which constitute a large part of the remaining "occupied territories" they were first captured by Jordan (which was supposed to be the Arab part of the British mandate from the start and which got 70% of the land before the UN resolution which cut the remaining 30% into a Jewish and an Arab part.)
Israel then took it from Jordan in the 1967 war and has been administering it since then.
This is always presented with the implication that they should have accepted the plan.
I think if someone, even the UN came to you (and by 'you' I mean group of people of multiple religions living in your state / country etc ) and said "I've got a wonderful plan that I want you to accept. You people who currently live in the whole of this land will get to live in less than half of the land. What do you think about that?"
You bring up good points. I don't want to undermine them. I think I understand the people on the ground somewhat. My country was occupied for five years and it stuck around into well into my childhood ("Germans" were our natural enemies and the bad guys in pulp literature as well as war comics until well into my childhood at least.)
That said:
Want to hear a joke? The UN. [1]
Have you ever seen me defend the UN on this site?
But, when the UN is responsible for todays situation to such large degree, and when someone pulls out that map, then the fact that only one part agreed to that map becomes a point.
[1]: This however is not a joke: You know why there are so many resolutions from the UN against Israel compared to the other way around? Because USSR used its veto power to block almost every single proposal that suggested condemnation of Arab states while USA allowed a number of those who condemned Israel to slip through.
While it may be true that Jews were "chased out of the surrounding Arab
countries", this doesn't justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
A crime is a crime.
Let's be clear, forcibly removing an indigenous population of over 750,000
people (this included my parents) is a crime. These refugees and their
decedents have a right to return to their land. This has to be acknowledged and only then will the region move on.
Here, South Africa is a great example of a peaceful coexistence: while it has its problems, the country has moved on after Apartheid.
This is the root Palestinian problem. It's not a complicated story.
All you write until the part about South Africa more or less makes sense but you are leaving out a whole lot:
Yes, forcibly removing 750 000 people can absolutely be considered a crime.
But what then about the more than 750 000 Jews that were forcibly removed from their homes in the neighboring countries?
Should they also have the right to return?
Does it matter that Arab leadership encouraged your parents and others to leave? (In addition to the barbaric actions of certain Israeli groups.)
Because both sides are displaced, only your side was on top of that also betrayed by their own leadership and used as a pawn while the Israeli side took care of its own people including to a large degree Arabs who chose to stay.
When it comes to South Africa I have close friends and even relatives there. A fellow sysadmin friend of mine got knocked to the ground there by a gun (used to hit, not shoot) just last year in a robbery. People have to use guns, barbed wire and more to protect themselves. Politics is more or less crazy as far as I understand.
> I can also ask: why does so few other support the single somewhat functioning democracy in the region?
In the West Bank, Palestinians are not allowed to form an army, have control over borders, or even control of travel around the West Bank. So they are made to nit have their own country (which Israel opposes) but to be part of Israel. So can they vote for Knesset candidates? No. (Yet an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn who has never been to the Middle East can make aliyah to a West Bank settlement and vote for Knesset candidates immediately).
> a beneficial although controversial deal for both parts.
How did the US benefit? Did that benefit go to the US population as a whole, or to a few oil companies? Does that benefit exceed the astronomical cost of the many middle eastern conflicts the US has gotten tangled in?
Intel has a significant presence there as has probably a number of other American companies and since they stay there despite the logistic and PR issues there must be some advantages.
A whole lot of other products and tech originate in Israel it seems, so much that every boycott Israel campaign only get so far before everyone figure out it isn't worth the trouble.
Besides Israel has been invaluable in getting intelligence about Russia, which as far as I have understood was the reason why the US military became so close friends with Israel in the first place.
> Intel has no trouble getting engineers to immigrate to the US when it comes to other countries.
For some reason Intel keep a significant presence in Israel. I'm not an Israeli and not an Intel employee so I can only guess that they find it beneficial somehow.
> There's a lot of room between "unquestioning military support" and "boycott".
There are biases on all sides, and it’s often hard to extricate oneself from them to see the facts as they are.
You could flip the question and ask why is so much of the world anti-Israel, no matter what?
The data on this is that in 2020 the UN adopted 17 resolutions condemning Israel and 6 for the rest of the world.
Now it’s possible that Israel is so much worse than the rest of the world, and the US is biased. Or perhaps there’s a lot of anti-Israel bias globally and the USA is actually closer to neutral.
> The data on this is that in 2020 the UN adopted 17 resolutions condemning Israel and 6 for the rest of the world.
> Now it’s possible that Israel is so much worse than the rest of the world
According to Israel itself, it launched 50 bombing raids in Syria in 2020. Many of the UN resolutions condemning Israel were due to those bombings and other actions Israel has taken vis-a-vis Syria. Including Israel's occupation and settlement of Syrian territory since 1967, which the UN condemned then, and upheld in 2020 along with the other resolutions.
The reason the UN condemned Israel in 2020 and not Bhutan, is Israel decided to bomb Syria many times in 2020, and Bhutan did not.
Culturally both are fairly similar - both are "western"-style democracies (e.g. representative democracies with constitutions that value rule of law, independent judiciary, etc)
And, the following might be controversial - but many of americas strategic allies do much worse shit than israel, they just get called out on it less. Hell, Saudi arabia is literally murdering people in embasies and still seems to have a good relationship with the usa somehow.
Israel would have had zero issues with Iran if Iran wasn't on a quest to destroy Israel. In fact the two had normal relations until the Iranian Islamic revolution.
Ultimately the reasons why israel and iran are at odds don't matter much. Both are competiting to be regional powers in the middle east, and its the lines which alliances are being drawn around.
The point is swap out the people in those geographies, rerun the timeline, and you’ll find them in conflict. The reasons they each come up with in this iteration is dressing.
> The reasons they each come up with in this iteration is dressing
What reasons do you think Israel "has come up with"? To me it's quite clear there's one side that's bent on destroying the other, there is no symmetry.
it'd also be good to mention that there exists a strong, largely right-wing and evangelical, pro-Israeli lobby in the US that make it politically very costly to not demonstrate unequivocal support
I'm not the brightest bulb in American politics, but the trope of right wing evangelicals single-handedly being responsible for America-Israel bizarre parasitic relationship is tired and false IMO. If it were true, progressives and their allies would drop into this new fertile frontier of the culture war, and if that was true, we would see a lot more struggle and conflict than the meek 'meh' and shoulder shrug that the congress does every time an Israel-related issue is being discussed.
Look at abortion for example, do right wing evangelicals value this issue less than their support for a 10-thousand+-kilometer-away country? did they manage to make it controversial and costly to not adopt their position on it?
Right wing evangelicals do performatively praise Israel more often, but actual lobbying is strongly bipartisan and cuts across the conservative-progressive divide.
>Look at abortion for example, do right wing evangelicals value this issue less than their support for a 10-thousand+-kilometer-away country? did they manage to make it controversial and costly to not adopt their position on it?
Being anti-abortion is a political litmus test in many parts of the US.
It's vastly different scale. Yes it's costly and contraversial to say you're pro-abortion in _parts_ of the US, but not all of US. And not the congress, not the white house. Look at the sheer amount of flak the supreme court got when it decided to let the Texas law slide temporarily, even though they cited standard legal procedure.
Contrast that with majorities that pro-Israel laws always get in congress. Trump even recently complained outright that "Israel used to control the congress" and he didn't even mean it in a bad way, the ADL shat its pants and quickly tore into him saying that it's AntiSemitic (^TM) to say that. Nobody in the Democrats is willing to approach criticising Israel with an INT_MAX foot pole except possibly old-school anti-imperialism marxists, and they are fringe.
>Can someone explain the strong ties between US and Israel, and why US stands behind Israel, no matter what?
Others have tried to explain this, but I want to note that this impression is a tiny bit exaggerated.
The US has a strong relationship with Israel, but there are countries which have better ties with the US, or at least get more from the US - South Korea has a direct defence alliance, Pakistan gets (read: extorts) more money, Britain has the 'special relationship', Australia just got nuke subs, etc.
Also, can you think of any US President which did not have a public fight with Israel since Carter? Excepting maybe Trump, all of them had some nasty public spat with an Israeli government.
I suspect the main source of this impression is that it's useful for both Israel and its enemies.
Nuanced question with answers more appropriate to long form articles or books, but some reasons: deep cultural links on the left (Jewish Americans plus a history of socialism and kibbutz culture that captured the imagination of many boomers) and the right (religious Christians in particular), foreign policy geo political alignment during the cold War, deep economic ties "startup nation", personal ties for many Americans, the fact that many simply love the idea that there could be an ultra liberal "Berlin by the beach" in the heart of ultra conservative middle east.. the list goes on.
I've done so a number of times and even though it goes against the grain here on HN it usually only cost me a few stupid points.
Just stick to the facts:
- UN resolutions
- Well known and well covered history
- Be aware that the Israelis have a rather nasty history too, even if it is rather bland compared to their neighbors
- etc
and you should be fine.
Edit: what I mean is for you and me and everyone who has studied this for a while it is obvious that this is very complicated.
Most people however isn't too interested in it and then the explanation closest at hand is mainstream media who correctly tell them that the Arabs in Gaza are suffering badly and correctly point out that recent Israeli moves has worsened it somewhat - while conveniently leaving out that most of the suffering in Gaza is caused directly by their own administration and the rest of it is created indirectly by them by not only allowing bit also sponsoring and even directing attacks from their territories.
White men are also overrepresented throughout every circle of power and influence in America (and their corrupting ethnic nepotism is well-established), and Jewish people don't use whatever power they have any more than any other ethnic, social, or religious group. Just a reminder, antisemitism is the belief that "the Jews" secretly pull the levers of power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Definition
While Jews are overrepresented, their numbers are so low that even with that overrepresentation they don't hold much power in absolute terms. Moreover, Jewish people are more diverse politically than other groups, and so cannot be considered as a cohesive unit. For example, in America, white men lean Republican at about the same rate as Jews lean Democrat, but Christian Evangelicals lean Republican more strongly than Jews lean Democrat.
I always wondered who nibbled off the foreskins of Americans...
But seriously, I somehow expected such an answer and I believe it to be heavily misinformed. It is the old formula, Jews are somehow responsible for it all. Can you give an example for a policy or public influence that was made in favor of Jews?
I find them often very disagreeable. 2 Jews in a room can net you 5 different opinions. That is just a stereotype of course, but of what should this influence consist off? Israel? A large part of diaspora is often quite blunt with its criticism of Israel in a way that many Israeli don't hold back criticism themselves. Doesn't sound like effective collusion to be honest.
That is indeed quite a weird restriction. Sure that law was made by Jews? I think many would oppose such a move. On the other hand some feel compelled to enact such laws because there are groups tell funny stories about Jews or Israel. Any more examples?
Help for hurricane relief, as weird as it may be, doesn't indicate political influence, although many states have special protections for minorities of all kind.
This one favors them but is not targeted to American Jews rather Israelis.
Boycotting Israel is not about telling funny stories about Jews. I suggest you read a little about why the boycott exists in the first place if you truly want to know.
I had no idea Israelis thousands of miles away are considered minorities in states like Texas and Georgia and many others.
There is also a restriction on working for the state that you must not boycott Israel.
This is as clear as day that its a violation of free speech by gov actors.
I think BDS is not a feasible strategy but I am firmly against silencing them in any way.
That said, ask some Jews what they think about such policies. Again, this isn't indicative of anything aside from maybe a misaligned strategy to shield minorities.
I assure you that there are Jews that are very critical with the recent focus on skin color, quotas for access to education and narratives surrounding white people being the root of evil. There are Jews that support them too, sure, but just as many or probably even more white people do so.
I believe there was an explicit project by the Israeli government to do this called the Hasbara project. There is a wikipedia page about it which goes into some detail about the (successful) implementation in the United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_diplomacy_of_Israel
