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The right's support of Israel never made sense. Israel has created a perpetual refugee crisis on Europe's border, it costs a fortune in foreign aid, and it is a PR nightmare. Meanwhile, ADL, AIPAC and every mainstream jewish groups work against the interests of social conservatism in western countries. Simping for the Israel lobby while the ADL wants to ban conservatives off Twitter is a one way relationship. Israel is oppressing Christians and has sponsored terrorist groups in Syria. Israel works to destabilize the region when the rest of us benefit from it being stable.
There is absolutely no reason to burn political capital defending some of the bloodiest and most brutal wars in recent history in the middle east. Israel can't really provide any tangible benefit to social conservatives in the west. Especially not when Ben Gvir who is Minister of National Security of Israel wants to relocate large numbers of Palestinians in the west.
Had Israel supported similar politics in the west as they promote in their own country, it could have worked. But "nationalism for me, open borders for thee", will upset the left in the west that doesn't like nationalism as well as the right in the west that doesn't like the "open borders for thee"-part.
Most of the migrant crisis moving forward will be from Africa, not the Middle East. And there would be still be plenty of tension in the region without Israel, it’s ethnically and religiously diverse and the center of one of the world’s most violent modern sectarian conflicts, between Sunnis and Shiites.
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You're doing what SS and his crew do, and assuming that Jews are all part of an orchestrated ZOG movement. Jews in the West are generally sympathetic to Israel, obviously, but Israeli political concerns are very different from Western ones - Israelis generally are not trying to get Western countries to open their borders. They don't care. They actually do have specifically Israeli concerns, they aren't seeing everything through the same lens of "Jewishness" that people who hate Jews do.
As for why conservatives have traditionally supported Israel, it's pretty simple: even if most conservative Christians don't particularly like Jews, they dislike Muslims even more, and geopolitically, a local boot to put on Arabs in the region is very useful.
And that's without addressing the Christians who genuinely do believe that support for Israel is Biblically mandated.
No, black people overwhelmingly vote democrat. There is no conspiracy, no centralized control and there are individual black people who are right wing. Jews have been overrepresented in promoting their ethnic interest which is in stark contrast to our ethnic interest. When Jared Kushner talks about moving the population of Gaza to Europe that is promoting his ethnic interest against ours.
Ben Gvir has been publically promoting ethnic cleansing in Palestine with the goal of bringing in migrants to the rest of the world. ADL and AIPAC have worked hard for open bordres for everyone except Israel along with the pro zionist donor class.
How was the war in Iraq useful? The war in Libya was a terrible example of the west shooting itself in the foot. Afghanistan gave us heroin, migrants and two trillion dollars of debt. We haven't been putting a local boot on Indonesia, the largest muslim country and that hasn't created a problem for us. Israel has not benefited christians in the region, they have not benefited christian Palestinians and they have pushed millions of muslims into Lebanon that used to be more Christian and Greek. Israel is supporting Azerbaijan cleanse Armenians. Meanwhile, Israel has if anything opposed relatively secular nationalists in the middle east and backed islamists who fracture and weaken nearby arab states. This is the polar opposite interest of the rightwing voter.
Let's say the first part is correct: why do you think his goal is "bringing migrants to the rest of the world" (as opposed to just wanting them out of Palestine so Israelis can settle there)?
Are not Israeli.
In my opinion, it wasn't, but the argument (whether or not you believed it at the time) was that Saddam Hussein posed an existential threat to the stabliity of the region (and oil prices). The reason it is useful to have an outpost in the region is oil, and Iran.
I'm not personally defending US misadventures in the Middle East (of which there are many). I'm explaining why conservatives would find Israel useful for reasons other than "Da Joos hoodwinked us."
We don't have national interests threatened in or next to Indonesia.
Well, Christians have it better in Israel than in most Arab countries. Of course, so do Arab-Israelis.
The Muslims who got pushed into Lebanon were a result of Black September, which the Palestinians did to themselves (by trying to start a coup in Jordan).
Not being a right wing voter, I will not disagree with you that they often choose sides poorly. But the bottom line is that Israel is, at least from a Western perspective, the best of a bad lot in the region, and we cannot escape our interests in the region.
They are going somewhere. The best option is if they stay put. Moving millions of arabs around 300 km from the EU is a terrible idea.
Imagine in a Han chinese lobby claimed they were not a Chinese lobby, just ethnic Han who love China.
Yet Chinese ships sail past Yemen without getting shot at and China buys middle eastern oil. They didn't have to invade any countries. Iran is in no way a threat and is if anything the group that has been the best at integrating in Europe. They even speak an indoeuropean language. Destabilizing Iran would be an absolute disaster. Our interest is a stable Iran with few migrants and stable exports.
What national interests does the west have around Israel that Israel helps with? Israel provides no oil.
Christians are being ethnically cleansed by Israel. Israel has backed jihadists in Syria that were wrecking Christian communities and Israel has had an anti-christian stance in the Armenia/Azerbadjan conflict.
How has Israel promoted stable arab states that produce few migrants and like to do business with the west?
I don't disagree. I disagree that moving Arabs to Europe is the end goal of right-wing Israeli nationalists (and Jews in general). They want to move the Palestinians somewhere, and usually the (very slightly more realistic) proposal is that neighboring Arab countries should take them in. (Only slightly more realistic because the Arab countries don't want them.)
Okay. I have no problem imagining that. Lots of Chinese special interest groups, political and cultural, exist in the US. I don't think most of them are fronts for the Chinese government or advocating the interests of the PRC.
A joint base of operations. Israeli intelligence. An allied military force in place.
That's a bold claim. Are you basing this on the fact that some Palestinians are Christians, or are you actually claiming Christians who live in Israel are being ethnically cleansed?
This seems like a very skewed reading of their interests. That said, yes, both Israel and the US have made very unfortunate devil's bargains with jihadists that have come back to bite us.
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Evangelical Christians used to love Israel. A lot. Like the way cringe weebs loved Japan, but even scarier. They pushed for carte blanche support of Israeli foreign policy, massive military aid funding, direct US support and intervention to ensure the survival of the Israeli state. They donated money and material support to settlers and and private security forces for settlements. And they were vocal supporters of the Netanyahu government. They basically thought that America’s entire spiritual purpose was to keep Israel and the Jewish people alive. Israel’s response to that massive war chest of foreign political support was to crack down on Christianity in Israel (which is negligible), and to intensify rhetorical denunciations of Christianity. A high ranking member of Likud stated that spitting on Christians in the street and other forms of low level violence and harassment was “part of traditional Israeli culture” (Edit: this wasn’t anyone in Likud, this was a settler activist, and his statements were harshly criticized by most of the the higher ranking people in Likud’s government, including I believe Benjamin Netanyahu). At home, American Jews (who thought Israel was cringe and unnecessary anyway) led a 20 year crusade against Christianity, succeeding in driving it out of politics and a lot of public spaces. Then starting in 2012 American Jews acted as the tip of the spear for a racialist movement targeting Anglo Americans with Southern and Midwestern evangelical whites being on the top of the shit-list. Unsurprisingly, Evangelical support for Israel and American Jews has cooled significantly in recent years.
Who?
This part I think I got wrong, it was Elisha Yered, a settler activist who is otherwise a bit of a nut, and was denounced by most of the government. It made the rounds on Twitter several months ago. I will work on editing my above post to reflect that when I can figure out how the formatting works.
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And to have a competent ally in the area against Iran, who's probably the US' most dangerous enemy these days after China, Russia, and maybe North Korea.
Israel's the worst ally the US could possibly have, their competence is irrelevant.
Consider the invasion of Iraq. You might naively think that Israel would be really useful, sending troops to help the Coalition in their mutual goal of destroying Saddam Hussein's regime? No, of course not. They didn't lift a finger to help the US. Of course they sent some false intelligence to suggest Iraq actually had nuclear weapons, of course they flexed their influence to encourage the invasion. They just didn't do any fighting.
Why? Because the Arabs hate Israel and it would've let Saddam reframe the war as yet another Arab-Israel war. He tried doing that in 1991 by throwing some Scuds at Israel. Israel's presence would've made things worse for America.
There's no convincing reason to think that Israel would help against Iran, based on past practice. If they did help it would probably be net-negative in creating more opponents for US forces. Dumping Israel would make it much easier to work with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Gulf, Turkey, Egypt...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
Israel had helped a lot there as one example. But ultimately I don't know and cannot know how useful Israel is, given how much secrecy is involved in military matters. But I have some amount of faith in the US military establishment being able to gauge how useful Israel is, and inform administrations of that.
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I think the dominant sentiment about Muslims in the 90s was ‘desert savages who oppress women on camels somewhere’.
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The unrequited love of Christian conservatives for Jews is really something.
Evangelical conservatives have a net +39 favorability rating of Jews.
Jews have a net -40 favorability rating of Evangelicals.
This is an unstable equilibrium. Why should Evangelicals support Israel when American Jews view evangelicals with sneering contempt? It's delusional. Evangelicals probably think that Jews love them back. A greater awareness of the true situation will lead to a rapid decline in support for Israel among U.S. conservatives.
(And yes, American Jews != Israelis, but let's be real here).
It’s because ‘like’ is measuring two different things. Evangelicals like Jews for eschatological reasons and because Evangelical Christianity embraced Zionism in its millenarianism. When asked if they ‘like Jews’ or what their ‘favorability towards Jews’ is, their understanding of Jews is twofold: Jews in a real world, domestic, sense, and Jews in an eschatological religious sense. And for committed Evangelicals, the latter is more important. The Jews of the imagination loom larger than real Jews, who are for geographic reasons not particularly common around the places where many of America’s Evangelicals live.
Jews are both often secular / atheist and do not have any religious role for Evangelicals in any event, they judge them only in a temporal, domestic, real sense, and therefore base their decision on the media impression of Evangelicals as backwards conservatives who believe the earth is 6000 years old and that Adam and Eve had pet dinosaurs. On some level Evangelicals often are presumably aware that Jews are mostly urban progressives who support abortion rights and gun control, but this is simply outweighed by the religious situation. It’s not caused by a lack of knowledge of what many American Jews think of them, for it to change they’d need to lose their faith.
I'd definitely be curious to hear what the favorability rate is of evangelical christians is among more observant jews.
I believe that observant Jews are much more heavily fundamentalist than the case among Christians, and the ultra-orthodox notoriously do not like Christianity or Christians in any capacity.
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It's religious (obviously). Evangelicals really do believe Jews are God's Chosen People and Israel is required for Biblical prophecy to be fulfilled. Jews understandably tend to view the idea that they are meant to, essentially, all be slaughtered * so Christians can have their Rapture with less enthusiasm. Plus evangelicals also try to convert Jews, which Jews dislike even more than most people dislike evangelizing. (@hydroacetylene says only super fundies still believe Jews are going to hell. I don't think that's true; most evangelical denominations still believe in exclusive salvation.)
Thus the phenomenon where evangelicals "love" Jews while Jews view them with distrust bordering on contempt.
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I'm sure a lot of conservative Christians do like Jews as individuals and admire them as a race, but, well, eschatology is a thing. That may just be my own personal notion of what "like" means - I know you can like someone while believing they're going to burn in hell, but it's not a circle I could square.
As for Muslims, Muslim terrorists were certainly on people's minds before 9/11 (Osama Bin Laden had been an infamous enemy of the US and the West for years), though obviously that event is what cemented the association to the rest of the world. Republican support for Israel has always been a combination of realpolitik (want a Western outpost in the oil-producing region and as a counterbalance to Iran), opposition to leftists, and religion.
Most conservative Christians today don’t believe Jews are going to hell, only the fundiest of the fundies do.
I think it largely depends whether they're dispensationalists, but most are dispensationalists.
Supercessionism is über-fundy coded. Almost all conservative Christians in the USA are dispensationalists in practice even if the literal text of their doctrines say things like ‘the old covenant is no longer in effect’.
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Most of the conservative Christians who like Jews that much are dual-covenanters, they believe Jews also go to heaven because of the covenant with Abraham.
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No, Israel is not responsible for the European refugee crisis. That's on disputes within the Islamic world. And European foolishness.
It's a "PR nightmare" because western NGOs make it so, which is no reason to do anything different.
The refugees generally come from the countries bombed by the US and Israel. Putting maximum pressure sanctions on middle eastern countries, bombing them and supporting groups that destabilize them make it far worse. AIPAC lobbies for war. The US and Israel bomb. IsraAID helps the migrants cross the mediteranean while ADL works to get those who oppose this banned. There is no reason why Syria has to be less stable than jordan or the Gulf states. The wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan have been destructive from a European perspective.
It is a PR nightmare because Israel is killing tens of thousands of people and engaging in an exceptionally brutal form of warefare with western backing. This goes against western tradition of rules of war and much of the non European world watches in horror.
Israel is not the reason for Syria's instability.
Ever heard of Verdun? Dresden? Hiroshima? The Battle of the Bulge? Dien Bien Phu? The western tradition of war where no enemy are killed, or no enemy civilians are killed, is a fabrication. It doesn't exist. As for non-Europeans, they're not any better. The "PR nightmare" is NGOs inventing an entirely fictional standard of warfighting and applying it only to one side.
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