The Arab-Israeli conflict is back in full swing, as the soldiers of Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces battle for control of the whole of Palestine. Hezbollah has joined in with occasional rocket fire, and Egypt has thus far maintained humanitarian corridors to the Gaza Strip. The ethno-religious conflict burns as hot as ever, but that is not the topic of today’s piece.
The United States maintains a special relationship with the so-called State of Israel, one which is unlike its relationship with any other state. For sure, the US has other questionable allies. The Saudis are known to chop off hands, the UAE is engaged in a protracted conflict in Yemen which is starving hundreds of thousands of children, the Turks occupy a large portion of the ethnically Greek island of Cypress, and Tunisia is allowing hundreds of thousands of Africans to flow through its territory and onto Europe, despite a recently penned deal.
But none of these relationships hold a torch to the extremely unique alliance between the United States and the so-called State of Israel.
Many people in nationalist circles are already aware of the central narrative: that a strong Israeli lobby its representation are at the core of American political and media life has led the United States into an, at times hysterical, devotion to the State of Israel. A particularly strong example is when Henry Kissinger defied direct instructions from President Nixon, and rather than representing American interests in a meeting with Soviet Officials, the US’ Jewish Secretary of State represented what he believed to be the interests of Israel.
Ethnically Jewish government officials so avidly sided with Israel in policy-making discussions that Nixon was eventually forced to order that no Jewish member of his government, including his own Secretary of State, be allowed to sit in on meetings where Israel would be discussed.
Nixon’s attempts to halt pro-Israeli influence over the US government failed, of course, and the United States has been engaged in an 80+ year affair with the so-called State of Israel. An affair which is decidedly not to the benefit of the American people.
All of these points are reinforced by the groundbreaking work: “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. A mainstream book we highly recommend as an introduction to the influence of the Israel lobby and politicians.