The real reason the US supports Israel (Hint: it has nothing to do with Jewish people)
By: Arié Moyal
Tags: Christian, Israel, Middle East, Military, History

The real reason the US supports Israel

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

We often hear that the United States is sympathetic to Israel and it’s usually assumed that it has to do with the influential Jewish lobby or because of guilt over the Holocaust or some other reason that lays the blame squarely on the shoulders of Jewish people and it’s often used, both by the right and the left, to attack Jewish people or to call any critics of Israel antisemitic which further inflames the ire of those who oppose the existence of the state. But it has nothing to do with any of that! The instability in Southwest Asia (also referred to by the Eurocentric term “Middle East”) is by design.

Here’s why:

The majority of arms manufacturers in the world are based in the US and the US has a military budget as large (or possibly larger now) than the rest of the top ten countries in the world when ranked by military spending, combined. Without endless conflict, those companies fold and the gravy train for its shareholders ends. Military aid in the US budget is also money laundered from the Treasury and into the pockets of the military-industrial complex’s shareholders because the aid can only really be used to buy arms from American companies. Instead of making this clear, the US is happy to use Israel and the Jewish people as scapegoats when, in reality, Israel is just another client state created for the purpose of serving imperialist interests. One lie employed by the right as much as by the left is that US military aid to Israel – which in reality ends up in American pockets – is the reason Americans don’t have the universal healthcare Israelis do, implying that it’s the fault of “the Jews” that Americans are suffering and willfully ignoring the real bad actors.

What’s convenient (and racist) about destabilising the region for profit is that the people dying are mostly brown and/or Jewish and therefore hold less value to the white supremacists who control the US. And I don’t just mean the Prideful Manchildren or the rest of the alt-right. I mean anyone who believes in the dogma that the US is a legitimate state rather than a white supremacist institution built on stolen land.

Seen through this lens, Islamophobia, which actually is about othering brown people regardless of their faith, is a cover for the greed of US defence contractors. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that (former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s first UN Ambassador) Nikki Haley all but renounces her Sikh roots in favour of Christian Zionism (from which Jewish political Zionism derives) for political gain and in order to support the “American” justification for destabilising the region. It’s also no coincidence that her next move after leaving her post as UN Ambassador, where she stoked the flames of instability in the region, was to join the board of America’s largest recipient of corporate subsidies and other forms of welfare: the arms manufacturer Boeing. (Yes! THAT Boeing, they don’t just make passenger airliners that fall out of the sky). Could this have been the reason she resigned from her post?

(She claims to have stepped down from the board earlier this year when Boeing applied for COVID-19 relief funds because it was unfair and irresponsible of them but it’s more than likely about preparing a run for the White House in 2024 as a proponent of the “fiscal responsibility” meme. I guess the rest of the money they get was just fine by her, though! Especially the bits she put in her pocket.)

Haley is a member of the second, but not at all mutually exclusive, group of powerful people pushing US policy makers to support Israel. According to Pew Research, evangelicals make up 25% of the eligible voters in the US with Roman Catholics a close second at 20%. This makes these extremist Christians the largest religious group in the US! They have been promoting ghettoising Jewish people in Israel under the guise of causing the Rapture, which they say can only happen when we all return there, since the Puritans landed on Turtle Island. Not only have they held influence over what became the US since the very beginning, which is evidenced by the Calvinist dogma which feeds the US’ rapacious capitalism but they are also a very wealthy and powerful lobby whose voices are further amplified through multifaceted voter suppression and a disproportionate number of Senate seats and electoral college votes. They hide the antisemitism inherent in political Zionism (“Jewish people don’t belong anywhere but Israel” = we don’t want them here) behind talk of “self-determination” and support for Israel’s right to defend itself. It makes them look like our friends and it also keeps the region unstable at very little cost to the lives they truly value: white Christian lives. For them, so-called “Islamophobia” also helps to ensure that white supremacy remains the norm in the area. This has been the plan since the Crusades and is very apparent in the writings of Lord Shaftesbury in support of “Jewish Restoration” (ie “get these Jews out of here but let’s use them strategically”) in the early 18th century as well as in the Sykes-Picot Agreement which betrayed promises of Arab independence made to the people living under Ottoman rule in exchange for their help overthrowing the empire. All in service of their greed and not very “Christian” at all. (Or is it?)

The region has also been a playing field for the Cold War since the Czechs (then part of the Soviet Union) ignored the arms embargo placed on a socialist-run Israel by the UN in 1948. With this embargo, the self-proclaimed “liberator” Allies left us for dead, YET AGAIN. I say again because they ignored the evidence of death camps, did very little to stop our extermination and then, after finally liberating some camps, made us rot in displaced persons camps with conditions similar to those they claim to have liberated us from (armed guards, barbed wire, threadbare clothing, limited food) with the added bonus of making us live side by side with Nazi collaborators who were also interned in those camps, making it that much more dangerous and traumatising; none of these “Allies” wanted us as refugees either; not before, during or after. One official in Canada even went as far as to say that, as far as post-war Jewish refugees were concerned, none was too many. This is par for the course. After all, the Allies all represent states that result from British imperialism and none have had a great track record with Jewish people. In fact, the Soviets did most of the liberating.

The Czech defiance of the embargo is the only reason that the Jewish people who had made it to Israel by 1948 survived what could have been another genocide. The British-influenced UN partition plan for the region had betrayed the hopes of Arab nationalists whom the British had been exploiting since the early 20th century, with promises of self-governance – but the British never intended to relinquish power once they seized it. The first indication of this was made public when the terms of the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement were revealed to the press in 1917. The Soviets discovered the treaty following their rise to power in the Russian Revolution that year. Imperial Russia had originally been part of the agreement and was promised a share of the Ottomans’ oilfields. One could say this marks the beginning of the struggle for control of the world’s oil between Russia and the US which continues to play out to this day.

Indeed, the creation of the State of Israel was advocated for by the British from 1918 onwards, despite knowing full-well the chaos it would cause and with the blessing of Christian Zionists (aka evangelicals) and the military-industrial complex. After all, if there is money and power at stake, why should anything get in the way? Especially not Jewish lives. No matter how much they want you to believe we are responsible and no matter how much money Jewish billionaires give them, political Zionism and their support for Israel will always be on their terms.

To summarise, the US supports Israel not because of Jewish people who make up less than 2% of the voters there but because it benefits two of the most powerful and far from mutually exclusive special interest groups in the country, if not the world: evangelical Christians and military-industrial complex shareholders and executives. Given the allure of money and power, US policymakers will never risk losing their seats (and 6 figure salaries) by getting in their way which is why this support endures. Let’s stop blaming Jewish people, shall we?