There is a good article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in the London Review of Books called The Israel Lobby. (via James Wolcott) It is good reading. I don’t have the time or space to talk react in depth, but here are the lead paragraphs.
For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.
Two thoughts:
1) We revere Israel because it is from the Judaic trend that the idea of humans as redeemable has come. Paul Johnson in his “History of the Jews” says that over two thousand years ago, there were two competing ideas in Western culture, based roughly on a Greek and Judaic models. I’m paraphrasing here, but the difference between them was that in the Greek idea, Man was the toy of the Gods, and in the Judaic, there was a plan to the world, but Man had choice and could control his destiny. In the former case, man was damned, in the latter man was redeemable though exercise of free will (but only if he followed God’s laws). In narrative structure, we label the first a tragic hero and the second a comic hero. Aristotle praised Oedipus Rex as the perfect story in his Poetics. But it is ultimately uninteresting for us because Oedipus is damned by his hubris. (There is an interesting digression that could be made here with regard to Bush and his hubris, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.) Samson is damned because he doesn’t listen to God, and for us, we must find the God inside us. Samson also perishes, but he redeems himself by finally doing God’s bidding. That is narratively more interesting. We can become better, we can advance morally, we can be redeemed of our transgressions, we can learn to live in love: that is what we get from the Judaic tradition.
2) We owe Jews a debt for discovering monotheism, for it was the stake in the ground that said that life has order, and that the order is knowable. It is from that second clause that the scientific method has sprung. I was at a dinner some years back and the techonerds around me were discussing what would be required to boot up civilization. What would be required to get civilization started and keep it going? They were talking about a variety of things when I interjected the need for God. God, the belief in God, the study of God, was a framework that kept learning alive during very dark times. (There is an interesting digression that could be made about how the belief in one or another Gods often led to the dark times, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.) But more directly, monotheism posits that the world has order. Other civilizations have made observations about the motion of planets and stars and formulated ideas about the heavenly structures. But monotheism asserts an order, and leaves it up to us to find it; knowing the order is implicit in finding it.
3) Israel is in a horrible numbers game. At some point in the next 20 years, Jews will be a minority in Israel. They have been close to a minority before, but an influx of Russian Jews in the last 20 years stayed this terrible calculus. Jews in Israel follow an industrialized pattern of having fewer children and Arabs in Israel follow the agrarian pattern by having a lot of children. The solution, to allow greater economic integration to Arabs would degrade the democracy, such as it is, and hasten an end to Israel. There is a vanishing point for Israel and it will happen in this century. Americans know this and are sympathetic to it.