Why does the US support Israel?

[Michael McMahon]

Israel's status as a nuclear power is extortionate on the rest of the world no matter their committment to democracy. Having a huge population like France doesn't guarantee that they'll be moral but it does ensure that their political system is somewhat balanced through economies of scale. A small country is less potent but can still have more volatile moods than a large country. A larger country is more spiritually and socially connected along the lines of their cultural beliefs. For example the larger gatherings within Spanish Catholicism will always be more transcendent than Irish Catholicism.

Secondly Israel has to be resistant to Holocaust denials and must respond to such racism in an angry rather than violent way. Israel would only end up undermining the merciful reputation of Judaism after the Holocaust by being very vengeful to Palestine. Nothing could atone for the horror of the Holocaust. Yet if we wanted to be pedantic then the German prisoners of war could have been imprisoned much longer or subjected to house arrest. Whatever happened the ringleaders were fully prosecuted with the other soldiers eventually being forgiven. The trouble with the Nuremberg death penalties is that they gave an extreme punishment to the worst offenders while neglectfully letting many of the accomplices off the hook. Hence the death penalty can give an illusion of justice even in genocidal trials where it might be justified. Anyway most German soldiers were indirectly punished through the decades of poverty after the war. The awful war rapes in East Germany by Russian soldiers and the bombings in Dresden only emphasise that many Germans were also sincere victims. The abandoned Israeli plot to poison a German city would not only have scapegoated civilians but would also have been grossly disproportionate to the fact that they'd already surrendered and were held in loose captivity. Israel must accept that the decisions to release German POW's after a year was either a forgiving act by the Jews or an apathetic response by the allies. The historical past cannot be changed and maintaining a sense of rage is no longer appropriate when Palestine is bearing the brunt of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakam

 

[Michael McMahon]

If NATO wanted to democratise their nuclear arsenal then they could have representatives of each member in the US submarine fleet as a form of collateral. Indulging Israel with a nuclear arsenal is a slippery slope to other small nations demanding the same privileges.

 

[ataraxia]

It's because they are currently the only democratic country in the ME, but a history lesson is in order.
In the 1950's, the USA was concerned with the threat from the USSR. Russian weapons systems were mostly unknown. The Egyptians were using soviet equipment, tanks planes, etc. The Pentagon supplied Israel with our military hardware, in effect to test our weapons systems against the Russian competition. Yep. True.
Did you think it was because of some religious reasons? Hahaha.
Needless to say, that relationship has carried through to the present day.
I will say though that Israel's current enemies are far more evil. And these days, the IDF have their own weapons systems that sometimes outperform ours.
A snippet of reality.

This is a good question. I am not sure supporting democracy is the only reason. After all, in the 1950s the US overthrew a democratically elected prime minister of Iran to reinstall the Shah in the notorious Operation Ajax- sowing the seeds of anti-American hostility which would manifest a few decades later in the hostage crisis at the US embassy. So supporting democracy in the ME alone can’t be the reason.

I think for American Christian Evangelicals, they support Israel because they believe that the Jews returning to Israel is a final step before the return of Jesus and the Rapture. Seriously. That’s how those guys make foreign policy decisions.

There is also the consideration that Ashkenazi Jews are often considered more white than those brown dirty Palestinian Arabs- so that gets the vote of the racists.

Also, I think many Americans were outraged by the horrors of the holocaust, and really wanted the Jews to have their own homeland after WWII.

I Can’t think of much else.

 

[Surrealistik]

It's complicated. Neither Israel's fanbois nor their harshest critics get it right, IMO. The US actually took sides against Israel in the Suez crisis b/c they wanted to maintain ties with Arabs who had a choice between being a Soviet or American client state. As a result of the 1967 conflict, the US gives Israel aid; it also has given aid to Egypt. The US has tried to conduct a balancing act, but the balance began to tilt harder in favor of Israel in the 1980s because Arab dictators began rejecting US interventionism. Despite that, the US showed pragmatism, which wasn't without controversy. The US supported Israel at the same time it supported the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, and the House of Saud.

The immense and sustained Israeli lobbying spend was and is also a huge and indispensable part of that skew that is hard to overstate.