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America is supporting Egypt to support Israel!
It's pretty clear. As soon as Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel they got a flood of US aid. They got $5.9 billion in US aid in 1979, when the treaty was signed, up from about $1 billion in 1975 when they were signing disengagement treaties over the Sinai. Before, in 1974 they were getting $70 million. When Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, they got $700 million in debt relief from the US and about half a billion in annual aid since, 10x what it was before.
The fact of the matter is that there are enormously wealthy and powerful Jewish billionaires and lobby groups who generously donate to candidates and encourage them to be pro-Israeli. Adelson on the Republican side for example. He gave Trump at least a hundred million dollars, possibly more. Besides funding pro-Israel political candidates, he funds Jewish-Israeli institutes at universities to improve its image and discourse power there.
Besides Adelson (and many other billionaires funding other pro-Israeli candidates who I've left out for conciseness), there's AIPAC which is tremendously powerful.
And there are many other Jewish slavishly pro-Israel groups.
US support for Israel is primarily motivated by this wealthy and influential band of lobby groups and billionaires, who are predominantly made up of Jews supporting their coethnics/religious brethren. There are also Christian Zionists and more dovish Jewish groups but they are in the minority.
Israel gets away with so much - they bomb/invade their neighbors, sell US technology to China, spy flagrantly on the US, supply misleading intelligence about the Iraqi nuclear program, bomb a US ship. They never join in US wars and yet get the most aid, despite being a rich country. The US suffers hundreds of billions in economic damage due to the Arab oil embargo - because they resupply Israel during the Yom Kippur war. Israel delegitimizes the non-proliferation treaty, they motivate Iranian nuclearization. They're a massive strategic deadweight. Only the lobbying can explain such ongoing US support.
Even if that were true (which I don't really know to be true or false), that would still prove the very point @Amadan was making. Because if we were supporting Egypt to support Israel, then we aren't doing it to support Islam, much like Amadan said.
Well no the US isn't supporting Islam. But he was saying it's 'not supporting the establishment of religion' generally. I'm saying US support for Israel is motivated by the Israel lobby in the US, who is primarily motivated by religious feeling.
That isn't how I understood it. He was using the support of Egypt to establish a point: that support for a country is not because one supports its religion. Nothing to do with establishment of religion more generally, simply saying that if you support a country it can be for reasons other than because you support its religion. And in that light, even support for Egypt in order to support Israel would prove his point. Which having proven that point, goes to show that US support for Israel is not necessarily due to support for Judaism, but could be for other reasons as well.
He was arguing, in contrast to OP, that US support for Israel was for broader strategic reasons, not religious reasons.
I'm saying that US support for Egypt is to support Israel, which is motivated by religion. Thus US support for Egypt is due to religion, albeit not Egypt's religion.
The strategic reasons to support Israel don't merit the enormous amount of leeway and aid it recieves, compared to the amount of harm the alliance causes the US, as I said above.
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I don't know who this Adelson person is that you're talking about, but if you were even vaguely familiar the last 100 years or so of middle eastern history/politics you'd recognize how just how absurd that claim is. Egypt has been one of Israel's chief adversaries/rivals since it's founding. We support Egypt not because it helps Israel (just the opposite in fact) we support Egypt to keep a lid on North Africa and because over 10% of the world's shipping passes through the Suez Canal. Meanwhile we support the Israeli's because "democracy" and as a counterweight against the Iranians. We paid the Egyptians off because it's a bit awkward to have two ostensible US allies fighting each other.
Now if you had chosen the Saudis as your example you might have been able to make a case, but you didn't because you don't know middle eastern history/politics.
Did you miss the part where I described how US aid went up an order of magnitude as they signed treaties with Israel?
Why would the US not care about Egypt in 1974, like them 10x more in 1975 and then even more in 1979? If you were right about the shipping, you'd expect aid to be consistent through that whole Cold War period. Or at least it would rise when they open the Suez canal, which it did in 1975. Your theory explains only the 1975 surge but not 1979. And then there's Jordan too, a country not known for its shipping lanes.
If it's just Egypt and just 1975, maybe they're buying the shipping lanes. But Egypt and Jordan, just after they sign treaties with Israel? The common denominator is Israel.
Don't say I don't understand Middle Eastern history when you haven't even understood my post.
Did you not understand my post? What do you think the "Pay off" I was referring to was?
The Egyptian-Israeli talks at Camp David happen in the context of a long simmering border conflict between Egypt and Israel punctuated by three shooting wars in as many decades. Despite the pro-West Egyptian monarchy being overthrown in '52, the US had formally recognized the new government and supported them against against the French and British. The US thinking at the time being that a stable and "neutral" and Islamist government in Egypt would be vastly preferable to a Communist one aligned with the Soviet Union. The countries that are now Syria and Iraq had already started cozying up to the Soviets and there were concerns that the whole region might "go red". This put the US in the awkward position of supporting both Egypt and Israel even while Egypt and Israel were at war with each other. As such, any support for one naturally viewed as a betrayal by the other. I can't help but notice that as much as Reddit-Nazis and the BDS crowd both like to talk about the USS Liberty and similar incidents they never talk about why tensions between the US and Israel were so strained through the 60s and 70s. Anyway, in an effort to resolve this awkwardness the US put pressure on Israel to relinquish Gaza and the Sinai to Egypt while simultaneously offering the Egyptians a security pact and generous financial incentives to walk away from the conflict. The rest as they say is history. Israel relinquished the Sinai and Egypt got paid.
My point is that it's not just Egypt and it's not just '79, nor is it just Israel, it's a whole tangled mess going back to first world war.
If the US wanted to gain favor with the Arabs, they could simply not support Israel, their number one enemy.
Syria and Egypt started cozying up to the Soviets precisely because the US was extremely reluctant to provide them weapons that might be used against Israel. The region was going red because of US support for Israel.
Tensions between the US and Israel were hardly strained through the 60s and 70s. They were improving, despite Israel's best efforts. Israel nuclearized, making the NPT into an even bigger joke and successfully got massive US miiltary aid in the '67 and '73 wars, bringing down the Arab oil embargo that cost the US hundreds of billions.
The US might have wanted Egypt onside but clearly not at the cost of dumping Israel, otherwise they would have. There's nothing messy about it, the situation is quite clear. The US clearly weighs Israeli security very highly, they were and are willing to sacrifice relations with the Arabs, oil security (quite literally when it comes to the deal where Israel gets a guaranteed US-supplied oil reserve), nuclear-nonproliferation and considerable amounts of money for this goal.
If the US was so concerned with Egyptian security, why not provide them military aid? Why not fly in billions worth of armaments if they look like they're losing a war? Because the US did not want them to defeat Israel, Israel was valued higher.
And there's US aid for Jordan too, as I keep mentioning.
??? You are surely aware that Syria got its independence from France in 1946, that the shortlived United Arab Republic was between Syria and Egypt, not Syria and Iraq?
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