Israel

The Israeli-American Friendship: A Myth Debunked

Brandon Christensen Liberty , ,

While browsing through a number of Right-leaning blogs over the past couple of hours (I don’t start work until Monday) I have noticed that more than a few of them have those cheesy “I stand with Israel” tabs on their sidebars. I don’t think I would have paid much attention to them had I not read this article by Fania Oz-Salzberger in the Daily Beast titled “What America Means to Israel.”

The article basically tries to explain why a non-existent relationship resonates so deeply with both Americans and Israelis. The reality of the situation is far different. Large swathes of the Israeli Left harbor views that are more in line with the European Left concerning the United States, and large swathes of the American public are either indifferent to Israel or (falsely) consider the state to be a nuisance with more leverage than it ought to have. This got me thinking and as such I thought it’d be a good idea to debunk the myth of Israeli-American friendship. This is a myth that is largely perpetrated in right-wing corners of both Israeli and American society, although I would guess it is implicit in the center-left coalitions of each state as well.

In terms of international relations, Israel is no more a friend to the United States than is North Korea or Italy, and vice-versa. Is Israel important to the United States at the moment? Of course, but this strategic value is a far cry from friendship. In a world of states, “friendship” means absolutely nothing.

For example, Germany, Japan, the UK and South Korea are our valuable allies. Saudi Arabia is our most important ally in the Middle East. Germany and Japan have the third and fourth largest economies in the world. The UK is seventh. South Korea’s economy is fifteenth. Saudi Arabia sits atop the world’s largest oil reserves. Canada and Mexico are the US’s most important trading partners, as well as being longtime neighbors. These states are examples of allies and trading partners. Are they friends? No. There is no such thing.

What I can answer in the affirmative is if these states are important allies, and they are.

Strategically Israel has been, and continues to be, an important regional ally in the US’s post-9/11 Near East strategy, but with the war in Iraq over and Washington’s shift in focus to the Far East beginning to be implemented, Israel is becoming less and less relevant to the United States.

Since Israel means next to nothing to the United States why does it get so much attention?

I think anti-Semitism plays a small role, but that this does not sufficiently explain why Israel seems to get more attention than it warrants, especially when one considers the strength of the Israel-friendly Christian lobby here in the US.

I have come to the conclusion that the strategy of Israeli lobbies is responsible for the myth of Israeli lobbying power. That is to say: The Israeli lobby knows that Israel is not important to the United States so it invests massive amounts of time and effort into ensuring that Israel remains relevant to any conversation the US has on foreign affairs. This, of course, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if the Israelis don’t heavily invest in procuring good relations with the people of the United States it will forgotten. On the other hand, all that investment produces the illusion that Washington is under the spell of some sort of *sigh* Jewish cabal.

Pay careful attention to what I am saying. In terms of policy-making, the Israeli lobbies don’t have any special leverage over politicians in Washington. The various Israeli lobbies all know this, so in addition to fighting it out in Washington for influence they have taken measures designed to foster cultural relations with the American people, which in turn enhances the view that Israelis are somehow more important than they really are to US relations abroad.

If I were the Israelis and had no knowledge or understanding of libertarianism, I’d do the same thing. Yet it does Israelis no good to pretend that their state has some sort of special friendship with the United States. It makes them look like lackeys of American imperialism to their Persian and Arab neighbors and “sneaky Jews” to their anti-Semitic (and mostly Leftist) Western detractors.

Reaching out to the American people is a good thing, but if the Israelis don’t want to be bitten in the ass they would do well to make a clear distinction between state and society. Given the socialist underpinnings of Israel’s founding, this may be harder to do than one realizes. As the US shifts its gaze away from the Middle East to focus on containing China, the Israelis would do well to heed that distinction.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Zionism’s Colonial Roots

Brandon Christensen History, Politics , , , , , ,

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu is seen widely as a leader of the Right (although in comparison with Avigdor Lieberman and others who have held office in Israel lately, Netanyahu could look moderate), and Israeli politics have long been categorized in terms of Left and Right, with the Revisionists cast as right-wing no-goodniks. That was so from the 1930s: with the rise of fascism, it became quite common to characterize Jabotinsky as a fascist, a word widely used by his Zionist foes. Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent liberal Jewish American of his day, called Revisionism “a species of fascism,” while David Ben-Gurion—the leader of the Labor Zionists in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in British Palestine) and then a founding father and first prime minister of Israel—referred to his foe privately as “Vladimir Hitler,” which didn’t leave much to the imagination. And to be sure, while Jabo called himself a free-market liberal with anarchist leanings, the oratory of Revisionism—“in blood and fire will Judea rise again”—and the visual rhetoric—the Betarim in their brown shirts marching and saluting—had alarming contemporary resonances.

Read the rest, it’s very good throughout.

The Israeli-Palestinian Mess: Some Historical Context

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Liberty, Religion , , , , , , , , , , ,

I just finished up an anthropology course on the Middle East as a culture area, and for reasons beyond my explanatory power, I got to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a bit more in depth. A brief narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict follows.

The historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can best be understood by breaking it up into three separate but interrelated segments: the collapse of cosmopolitan empires, the emergence of nation-states, and seismic shifts in demography that accompanied collapse and rebirth.

The post-World War I era can be defined largely in terms of the collapse of the cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The spectacular collapse of these centuries-old empires has been attributed to the policies of democrats in western Europe and the President of the United States at the time, Woodrow Wilson, by a number of historians. The underlying idea being promoted by Western elites for central and eastern Europe was that of national self-determination, a belief that each ethnic and linguistic group should have the right to govern itself within a free and democratic state. The movement was intended to break the back of “despotism” in eastern and central Europe (as well as the Near East), but the policies unleashed instead a hotheaded nationalism amidst pockets of power vacuums prevalent throughout the now-dead empires. Continue reading →

The UN vote on Palestinian Question: Some Comments

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law , , ,

Recently the UN voted to make the Palestinian territories as a “non-member observer state,” rather than a “non-member observer entity.” The vote was 73% to 5% with 22% abstaining.

As I’ve previously noted, I think the UN is a now-worthless organization, and CNN gives a good interpretation of the facts on the ground here if you’re interested.

My own take on this vote is scrambled, so bear with me as I lay it out here.

The Israelis have objected to this vote because they argue that the Palestinians are trying to forego direct negotiations with the Israelis. This is a fair objection.

However, the Israelis often argue that their state was legitimized when the UN voted in favor of a 1947 partition plan (the vote was 72% to 13% with 15% abstaining). That is to say, there were no direct negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians when the partition of Palestine was being drafted by the UN.

Much of the property owned by Jews in Israel today was acquired legally.

I think that the UN move by the Palestinians is a good one for two reasons:

  1. It gave the Israelis a taste of their own medicine by applying their own legal logic against them.
  2. It follows an ingenious tactic that the Israelis recently unveiled with the inclusion of expelled Jews from Arab states during the wars in the middle of last century.

To conclude, I favor a one state solution. I don’t like the idea of defining states in terms of religious or ethnic denominations, but I think the two-state solution is a good one to pursue for the time being. Both sides are guilty of practicing diplomacy in bad faith, but I have to hand it to the Palestinians on this one. It’s a stroke of genius.

Israelis Deliberately Slaughter Palestinian Civilians; Assad Cool!

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , ,

As I write, the Israeli Air Force has killed almost twenty Gazans including an important terrorist leader. It did this as a part of its never-ending self-defense against terrorism emanating from Gaza. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of Gazan dead rose to near one hundred in a short time.

In the past, Israel exchanged hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli captive. Once it was against the corpse of an Israeli. The same sort of strange arithmetic prevails with respect to the civilian victims of Israeli military action, according to world-wide liberal opinion. Collateral killings of Arabs by Israeli Jews are unspeakable atrocities. When Arabs deliberately target and massacre Arabs though it’s not really so bad, not really. Mark my word, it will take only days, if not hours, for the liberal media to treat the twenty, or the hundred victims, of Israeli action as more reprehensible than President Assad 20,000 ( and counting).

Look again: 100/20,000.

It’s pretty clear anyway that Arabs killed by other Arabs just get up and dust themselves off when the cameras are gone.

I hope the new Islamist government of Egypt understands that any Israeli government will nuke parts of Egypt rather than see Israel, the state, and even more importantly, its population, seriously threatened. I am not confident that it does understand. Islamists are a parochial lot (ah, ah!) with feet firmly planted in the seventh century. I fear their ignorant, bellicose fantasies. Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , ,
  1. The Future of Freedom Foundation has revamped its website. Be sure to give those guys some love.
  2. Reason on the Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
  3. For some reason I keep coming back to this blog. The writing is just superb.

Have a good weekend!

Jews and Palestinians: Is the Elusive Peace Close By?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links, Politics, Religion , , , , , , ,

A couple of days ago I came across this fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal. It’s about the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands around the same time as the expulsion of Arabs from the new state of Israel and how the Israelis have finally gotten around to bringing this issue up in negotiations. Among the excerpts:

Within 25 years [of the establishment of Israel], the Arab world lost nearly all its Jewish population. Some faced expulsion, while others suffered such economic and social hardships they had no choice but to go. Others left voluntarily because they longed to settle in Israel. Only about 4,300 Jews remain there today, mostly in Morocco and Tunisia […]

And this:

Many of the Palestinians who fled Israel wound up stranded in refugee camps. Multiple U.N. agencies were created to help them, and billions of dollars in aid flowed their way. The Arab Jews, by contrast, were quietly absorbed by their new homes. “The Arab Jews became phantoms” whose stories were “edited out” of Arab consciousness […]

I think that the Israelis were right to bring these expulsions to the forefront of the debates with the Palestinians. A lot of people on both sides have suffered and it is a good thing that the plight of the Arab world’s Jews is now being highlighted. But now that this historical fact is being highlighted by the Israeli state in its negotiations with the Palestinians, will it do any good for the peace process?

The reaction by one of the Palestinian negotiators is telling: Continue reading →

Big Horrors, Small Horrors

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , ,

“Militia” members guided by official Syrian “security” forces massacre civilians in their houses.They use both tanks and knives. About fifty of the civilians – all terrorist opponents of the Assad regime, of course –  are children under ten. The response of nine rich countries including the US is severe: They call in the Syrian ambassadors, Assad’s buddies all, and they tell them severely to pack up and leave. No ifs and buts; teach the child-killers a lesson; the bastards will get the message now! Every one of those countries has an air force capable of destroying all Syrian tanks within three weeks.

Not so long ago, Arabs of all provenances were infiltrating into Iraq though Syria, precisely. They were on their way to kill the American oppressors who had destroyed that great assassin, the mass murderer of Arabs, Saddam Hussein. Where are the Arab volunteers now infiltrating Syria to go and protect Arab children from Assad’s slaughterers? If I were an Arab man from any country today, I would be dying of shame. Or I would consider donning the hijab. Here is a question: If the violent jihadists could do it, enter Syria clandestinely, why can’t you?

I am repeating myself, I know: When Arabs massacre Arabs it’s not so bad, right?

And, by the way, the silence of the Israeli political class regarding the atrocities next door wins Israel no friends I would guess. Continue reading →

Iraq to Jews: Don’t Come Back

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Liberty , , , ,

Dr. Foldvary is renowned for his predictive capabilities, especially after calling the 2008 financial crash in 2007. However, I’d like to highlight his keen sense of direction and justice in regards to foreign affairs as well.

From a 2005 article on the situation in the Middle East, Dr. Foldvary writes:

Before Israel become an independent state in 1948, there were 150,000 Jewish citizens in Iraq. Israelites have lived in Iraq for over 2500 years. In 586 B.C.E., Babylon conquered Judea and brought many Jews to what is now Iraq. Baghdad later became a major center of Jewish thought. During the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi ideology infected the Arab region. In 1941, led by a mufti allied with Nazi Germany, there was a pro-Nazi coup, followed by killing, raping, and looting of Jews. Iraqi Jews call this the “Farhud,” or “violent dispossession.” The British army then came in and squashed the pogrom.

After World War II, the government of Iraq enacted Nazi-like anti-Jewish laws. Most of Iraq’s Jews fled to Israel. In 1952, the Iraqi government prohibited Jews from emigrating. Additional restrictions were placed on Jews in 1963 when the Ba’ath Party came to power. After 1967, Jewish property was confiscated and Jews were executed. Most remaining Jews were allowed to emigrate from Iraq during the 1970s.

This Jew-hating ideology still reigns in Iraq. There is also a concern that if Iraqi Jews are allowed to return and become Iraqi nationals, they will seek to be compensated for their confiscated property. Also, if Iraqis abroad are able to vote in Iraqi elections, Israeli Iraqis would be voting also, and many Iraqi Arabs don’t want foreign Jews voting in their elections.

Muslims, especially Arabs, denounce Israel for not letting Arab Palestinians return to their original places. How, then, can Arabs justify not allowing Jews to return?

Now Dr. Foldvary is not pointing fingers, mind you. He’s just trying to point out the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics and introduce a level of fairness in the whole damned process. Do read the whole thing.

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Liberty, Links , , , , , , , ,

Don’t criticize Obama for being too rational about Israel by the Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf

Six Women Rape Man to Death

Obama’s Adventures in Africa by Gene Healy of the Cato Institute

The Folly of Nation Building by Dr. Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University

The Bell Curve of Despotism by loyal reader Hank

Hey, check out our Facebook page, too!

Atrocities: Municipal, State, and Zionist

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , , ,

The City Council of Santa Cruz, California is going to spend $200,000 to decorate, embellish, create a planned turnabout in an important touristy location. I am not sure we need a turnabout at all. It confuses Americans. If we need one, I don’t know why it has to have artistic qualities as judged by the philistines on the city council. The location itself is quite beautiful. Is the council determined to compete with Mother Nature? I guess there is no economic crisis after all. (The council is dominated by Leftists.)

To make things worse, the commission goes to an artist from Rhode Island, clear across the continent. The local paper, an objective ally of the council, does not say how the awardee was selected. Santa Cruz has thousands of artists. Sometimes, it seems that everyone who is not a therapist, an acupuncturist, a herbalist, or a teacher is an artist. Some residents combine two or more of the above avocations, as you might expect. The fiscal irresponsibility has reached the point where I am going to say “no” to any expenditure, I don’t care how justified the cause would seem to me if I understood it. I don’t want to know. It’s “No.” In the current context, this expenditure is an obscenity and a small atrocity.

I listened to the debate yesterday between the two California candidates for the beleaguered office of governor of this failing state. I am going to vote for Meg Whitman, of course, the former CEO of E-Bay. The main reason is that she is not Jerry Brown, a charlatan I have known all my adult life and a proven failure at every political office he has tried. He has tried most of them, incidentally, including Governor, twice, in the late seventies and early eighties. Continue reading →

Journey Into Leftistan

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

When I think of leftists, college professors protected from reality by the ivory tower come to my mind. But we are all limited by our own experience if we are not careful. Facebook is a wonderful means to take journeys through parts unfamiliar. That’s if you have the time, of course. I spend a good deal of last week taking a trip into the land of the special kind of American leftists who are obsessed with Zionism, Israel and its misdeeds, real or imagined. It was a worthwhile experience.

I could reproduce the whole exchange but then, I would be fairly obligated to comment and it would take me more time than I am probably willing to devote to this ethnographic study. So, here are the points of this week-long exchange that are the most salient for me.

The multilog took place on the Facebook of a Tennessee sometimes-politician and sometimes-radio show host. His name is John Wolfe. You can easily find  him on Facebook. Mr Wolfe obviously subscribes, in general, to commonly accepted standards of rationality; he is generally courteous, and he does not make direct anti-Semitic statements although some of his Facebook followers do.

His narrative of Israeli-Palestinian relationships is not frankly at an angle from what I know or think I know. Rather, his narrative is well off to one side. Yet, it falls within the parameters of how one might interpret known facts if one were strongly motivated. Here is an example: Continue reading →

The Arab-Israeli Mess

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , ,

I am currently studying the Arab-Israeli conflict under the tutelage of this professor, a world-renowned scholar on the subject.  We are reading a very good text, A History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Bickerton and Klausner, and I am just curious as to what readers have to say on this subject.  I am all in favor of a two state solution myself, but am open to other options if the case is well presented.

What are your thoughts on this conflict?

Laundry Day!

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , ,

Links from around the web by the consortium.

Brian Gothberg wants to save the whales.

In an oldie but goodie, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel writes about Federal Reserve accounting and insolvency.

Jacques Delacroix feels remorse for singing the praises of Newt Gingrich.

And Fred Foldvary gives his take on the Israel-Palestine mess.

Happy Friday, and enjoy your weekends!