Why U.S. Support for Israel?
A recent talk by Rod Such to the East Side Democratic Club in Portland.
By Rod Such
LeftLinks
Thanks very much for the invitation to talk with you today about the situation in Gaza. When Herschel first approached me about giving this talk, he suggested that a burning question was, 'Why Does the United States Give Unquestioned Military Support to Israel?' And I have to agree, it’s an essential question given the long uninterrupted history of that military support.
By way of introduction, I am a retired encyclopedia editor, first for World Book Encyclopedia and later for Encarta Encyclopedia. The Middle East was my subject area for both. Currently, I write for The Electronic Intifada and The Palestine Chronicle, and I am active with three local organizations—Amnesty International, Democratic Socialists of America, and Jewish Voice for Peace. Needless to say I’m not speaking for any of these groups today. These are my views and mine alone.
So why does the 'United States Give Unquestioned Military Support to Israel?' I’d like to break it down into five components, which I label 1) the imperialist component 2) the war profit component 3) the congressional component 4) the ideological component and 5) a shared culture of militarism and interventionism.
Let’s start with the imperialist component. Our current president, Joe Biden, probably gave the clearest and most succinct answer to why the U.S. gives unquestioned military support for Israel. As a U.S.senator in the 1980s, Biden gave a speech on the Senate floor in support of a resolution for billions in military aid to Israel. In this speech he said, “Were there not an Israel the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”
This strategic thinking in the U.S. establishment goes as far back as 1949, when the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the heads of each branch of the armed services, submitted a memorandum to President Harry Truman. In that memo they spelled out what those interests in the region were: oil and controlling who has access to it. The Joint Chiefs were impressed with Israel’s military performance during the war with the Arab states in 1948-49 who were opposing the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. The Joint Chiefs recommended that the United States make an alliance with Israel as a regional force that could help protect U.S. access to and control of the Middle East’s oil resources. And it’s been that way ever since.
Every 10 years the U.S. Congress renews a 10-year $40 billion military aid package to Israel, the largest amount given to any country. But often overlooked is a provision in that package requiring that Israel spend 78% of that amount with U.S. weapons manufacturers. In other words, in addition to our enormous so-called defense budget, each year we toss in a few extra billion in aid to Israel, 78% of which must be spent with U.S. weapons companies. Icing on the cake.
So the profits to be made by our own military-industrial complex are another big reason why the United States has always provided unquestioned military support for Israel.
Now to the third component: the U.S. Congress. We’re all familiar with President Eisenhower’s warning in his farewell address to the American people to guard against “the undue influence of the military-industrial complex.” Little known, however, is that in his original draft, Eisenhower called it “the military-industrial-congressional complex.”
That added component represented an acknowledgment that the Pentagon had purposefully and carefully spread out its military spending over the entire country. The Pentagon identified congressional districts to create jobs and ensure a congressional majority for its military spending.
Every U.S. military aid package to Israel is almost always unanimously approved in the House and Senate because of this military-industrial complex and because of the existence of a powerful Israel Lobby. More on that later.
But there is yet another reason for US support, and once again Biden is a good example of this. When Biden flew to Israel and embraced Israeli prime minister Netanyahu after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, he declared “I am a Zionist.” Of course, Biden is a devout Catholic so that makes him a Christian Zionist like much of the Republican Party’s base. But what does this mean, and why did Biden feel the need to declare it?
I think this represents yet another component of US support for Israel, the ideological component. So what is Zionism and why is it important to this discussion. After declaring his intention to run for the presidency in 2020, Biden gave a speech to potential donors and said, “I get it. I understand why it’s important to have a Jewish state. It’s because of the long history of the persecution of the Jews.”
Of course, this statement ignores many other important facts, such as the long history of the Palestinian people’s desire for self-determination and the monumental injustice inherent in the very creation of the state of Israel.
Most people are unaware that the original United Nations partition plan was a recommendation, not a binding resolution. And most people don’t know of the inherent unfairness of the plan; namely that it gave most of the land of Palestine to the minority of the population that was Jewish. It’s no wonder the Palestinians rejected this plan.
Bear with me here because what I’m about to elucidate also goes to the heart of why there’s been unquestioning US military support for Israel.
Even fewer people are aware of how the leader of the Zionist movement at the time, David Ben-Gurion, viewed the UN recommendation. In a meeting with the leadership of his party, Ben-Gurion said that the UN plan created only a 56% Jewish majority in the state that was to be Jewish. This was unacceptable, Ben-Gurion said, because it meant the Zionists might have to enter into a coalition government with an Arab party. Keep in mind they were envisioning a parliamentary system. Co-governance with Arab political parties meant the Zionist movement wouldn’t have a Jewish state, which was its openly proclaimed goal ever since 1942.
Ben-Gurion proposed that the new Jewish state must have at least an 80% Jewish majority. That is when the expulsion of the Palestinians was envisioned. At the time it was called “transfer.” Military planning began almost immediately under the name Plan D, and by April 1948, 350,000 Palestinians had either been expelled or forced to flee due to massacres and military attacks on their villages.
That was one month before Israel declared itself a state, an often overlooked fact because Zionist historiography likes to portray the refugees as a result of the war declared by Arab states in May 1948. Ultimately, 800,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled from Palestine and made refugees, more than 500 villages were destroyed, and Israel controlled more than 70% of the land. Palestinians call this the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. By 1949 only about 100,000 Palestinian Arabs remained in Israel, making it a de facto Jewish state.
Because Israel was created on this foundation of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, it was certain that it would not be able to provide safety for Jewish people. Injustice never guarantees safety, and indeed, the Jewish citizens of Israel have faced two wars and ongoing, unrelenting popular resistance to their occupations. Peace and safety only come with justice and equal rights for all
Today, with the recent passage of the Nation-State Law, which states openly that Israel is a state of the Jewish people and the Jewish people alone, Israel is a de jure Jewish supremacist state.
Most of us think that a democratic state is a state that belongs to all the people, and in which the people are sovereign.Today 20% of Israel’s population is Palestinian Arab. Yet they are told that the state does not belong to them. They are inherently unequal. And so are Palestinian refugees still living in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and here in this country. A Jew living anywhere in the world has the right to become a citizen of Israel, yet Palestinians are told they do not have the right to return to the homes and land from which they were expelled.
Imagine if a candidate for political office in this country declared, “This is a state for white people, and for white people alone.”
And this is where I’m suggesting that the United States government has an ideological affinity with Zionism and the state of Israel. Because in fact we do have more than 200 years of history of white supremacy. We did expel and commit genocide against Native Americans. And then we confined the remaining indigenous refugees to reservations.. We enslaved black Africans. And with the defeat of Reconstruction in the Deep South, we disenfranchised Black people in the South and confined them to ghettos in the North and the West. We have only begun to come out of this period in the last 50 years and then only partially.
We are ourselves a settler-colonial society, much like Israel is today. The values we share with Israel as a Jewish supremacist state are the same values of a white supremacist state. And like Israel, we have a militaristic culture of might makes right, as we’ve attempted to impose our will not only on minorities within our country but on countries around the world.
Most of our current Congress and the Biden Administration itself doesn’t even blanch at the genocide unfolding in Gaza. But this probably shouldn’t surprise us because neither have we ever come to terms with the genocides we carried out in Vietnam and in Iraq.
Finally I want to talk about our shared culture of militarism and interventionism with Israel. And in doing so, let’s bring it back to Gaza.
It’s important to see the parallels with Israel’s reaction to the 2006 parliamentary elections in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The blockade of Gaza actually began after Hamas won those elections. Israel imprisoned the Hamas legislators who won their elections in the West Bank, then, together with the U.S., supported a coup attempt against Hamas in 2007. After the failure of that coup, the stranglehood on Gaza–what could come in and what could come out–tightened even further.
Similarly, when the U.S. doesn’t like the outcome of elections in certain countries, we also stage coups and support assassinations and try to impose a military solution, as we did in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. It’s in our DNA, the DNA of settler-colonialism,militarism, and intervention in the internal affairs of other nations and people striving for self-determination. This culture of militarism and interventionism is the fifth component of our unquestioned military support for Israel.
We must break with it, and there is a crack in the wall finally with the growth of the Squad in Congress. Significantly, the 18 members of Congress who originally called for a ceasefire were all people of color. And significantly the Israel Lobby–particularly AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel–have pledged $100 million in the 2024 congressional elections to defeat them.
Ultimately it comes down to building an electoral majority that rejects all forms of colonialism and imperialism. We don’t need access to the oil-rich regions of the Middle East. Just the opposite. We need to keep the oil in the ground because burning fossil fuels is fundamentally altering our climate and ultimately threatening mass extinctions.
We don’t need yet another ethno-supremacist state claiming that other people–migrants and refugees–for example, are “poisoning our blood,” a phrase echoing the Nazis that Donald Trump, one of Israel’s biggest supporters, just used.
What the Biden Administration has done is unprecedented in many ways. Past administrations have eventually admonished Israel for bombing civilians in Gaza and pushed for ceasefires. But not this one. Biden is complicit in a genocide, and he is trying to pressure every progressive in Congress to fall in line.
Witness the congressional delegation in Oregon where only Senator Merkley has called for a ceasefire.
Biden must demand an immediate ceasefire and push for a political solution or step aside and announce he will not run for re-election. Otherwise, he will continue alienating young voters, Arab Americans, people of color, and vast numbers of people of conscience. He will usher in Trump.
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