This idea is frankly insane.
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, I recall at home my mother was a fan of Israel. Basically, she sort of thought it was a small nation that really stood up to larger neighbors, sort of an underdog things. She also thought that it was a fulfilled promise of the New Testament that it existed, which is something I've heard the very orthodox Catholic theologian Jimmy Akin also express.
My father, however, was not as sympathetic. He didn't express a lot of views on Israel, but basically he thought it came about as a way for Western nations to feel better about the Holocaust but that it foisted a large European population on an Arab populace that had a different religion and didn't want them there, and that wasn't a good idea. He also felt that Israel had a tendency to pick on its neighbors a bit.
When I was quite young, I shared my mother's view, in part because it seemed like every time it got into a spat it really cleaned up on its neighbors. By my teens, however, my view was shifting and ultimately shifted a great deal. I didn't become anti Israel, but I frankly sympathized to a large degree with the Arab Palestinians in regard to what had happened to them. By my 20s, additionally, I was of the view that Israel's ongoing existence as a Jewish state was a demographic impossibility.
Later my views shifted more towards the middle, but I've never really been in the "support Israel at all costs" camp. One of my good friends, of an Evangelical background, holds the view that supporting Israel is mandated by the Bible. I'm reminded, however, that the Old Testament is fully of examples of the People of Israel acting badly, which was frequently a reason that God would send a prophet to them, with the prophets frequently being unwelcome.
I'm a Catholic, of course, and I hold a much more nuanced view of the modern state of Israel. It might be that modern Israel is indeed a fulfillment of the Biblical promise that the state would be restored, but I don't think that means at all that the country gets a free pass at everything.
And I'm much more of my father's view, and frankly probably well to the left of it, that American support of Israel has a lot to do with war guilt from the 1940s.
The 1940s are now a long time ago. Israel is a country and it deserves to exist, although I still feel that its existence is very tenuous given the demographics of the neighborhood. It doesn't deserve to be attacked, but it doesn't have license to wage genocidal level wars on neighboring territory, as the recent war in Gaza became. Long term, if Israel is going to continue to exist, it's going to have to come to some sort of accommodation with its neighbors, and that means the entire region needs to figure out what to do about the plight of the Palestinians, which nobody has demonstrated an inclination to do.
Under Benjamin Netanyahu I suspect the silent Israeli policy, opposed by a large number of Israelis, is to drive the Arabs out of lands that were within British Mandatory Palestine. That has never been openly stated, but if they were driven out, the thought would run, the demographic problem is solved.
The moral one certainly wouldn't be.
Anyhow, the modern GOP is more in love with Israel than any group of Americans has ever been, and that says something. Israel always had the solid support of both parties, but now the GOP is absolutely besotted with Israel. So much so, that we're integrating our militaries to a certain extent.
The irony of this cannot be overstated. Since he came into office Trump has beat the National Conservative drum that the US is to be an isolated entity until itself. He's come as close to taking us out of NATO as he can, and doesn't seem done trying, and he's ignored a major war that actually involves a major Western country, Ukraine. He's all be declared that if Russia attacks Western Europe he doesn't care. He's threatened to outright invade the territory of a NATO member, Denmark, in order to steal land from Greenland, which doesn't want us there.
But with Israel, it's totally different.
We're not only supporting Israel, with which we have no written treaty, we're backing Israel up in one of its wars, the one against Iran, which we can now not get out of and are basically carrying on, and losing on our own. In spite of that, we're about to significantly merge our defense industries to no benefit of our own, but major benefit to Israel. And in doing that, we might note, we're going it for a country that has periods in which its been governed by the extreme Socialist left. It's also been a country which actively spied on the United States.
This is just flat out nuts.
Israel has been in existence for nearly 80 years now and it can defend itself. I see no reason at all to tie the US to regional wars which have a heavy religious element to them. If Israel is going to persevere, it needs to find a way to do so with Arab allies, not the United States. It's come a long ways towards doing that, and facilitating that is in the interest of world peace, even if it really has nothing else to otherwise do with US interests. Fighting Israel's wars for it is flat out wrong, but this makes that more likely, and we're already doing that right now.
Indeed, if the US had a sane leader and a sane policy, we'd be looking for ways to pull out of the Middle East entirely. We don't due to petroleum oil, which provides a good reason, in addition to the environmental one, to do what China is doing, which is to pull away from petroleum as rapidly as possible. The whole world should be doing that, and recent actions by the Saudis, as well as some of the past decade, show that Saudi Arabia expects that to be done.
If we'd started it a decade ago, we'd be largely petroleum free, to everyone's benefit, right now.
So why are we doing otherwise?
It's really for the simple reason that the GOP has been captured by the American Evangelical right and that body has a strong theocracy behind it that views supporting Israel, and an eventually conversion of the Jews to (Protestant) Christianity as a prerequisite for the Second Coming. Israelis know this and make use of it, which is how Netenanyu was able to push Trump along into a major war it could not have pulled off itself.
If this keeps up, this is going to have a bad end.
It likely will not, however, keep up, which is the irony.
In the 2022 election Muslim Americans, enraged over Joe Biden's moderate support of Israel following the attacks on it by Hezbollah, voted for Donald Trump. But at the same time younger American voters were shifting their views towards the Palestinians. Younger Americans have no personal memory of the Holocaust. Their parents weren't swept up by it, and indeed, their grandparents weren't. It's something in the rear view mirror, part of history. Israeli attacks today, however, are not.
Also new is the large numbers of Muslims in the US.
Only 1.3% at most of Americans are Muslim, but only 2.4% are Jewish. There are, therefore, more Jewish voters than Muslim ones, but in both instances their votes are only significant where they are concentrated, and Muslims are very much concentrated in some places. They're making an electoral difference in those places.
The GOP is doing a really good job of angering massive numbers of Americans. By now, it's largely lost Hispanics, who helped pull it through in 2022. It's no doubt completely lost Muslims. Those people who really didn't want the US in foreign wars are now wondering what happened. Economic conservatives are horrified.
I very much doubt this provision will survive in the Senate. It shouldn't. But already, during the Trump Administration, we've seen the rise of outright antisemitism due to the war with Iran. We haven't seen anything like this since 1940. It will grow worse.
And this will be one of the factors that's going to drag the Republicans down in the fall. If passed, it won't survive the next administration. And not only is it going to be a factor in dragging down the GOP in the fall, it'll help drag down far right Evangelicalism in general.
Indeed, I suspect the Israeli far right knew that, which is why it had to strike while the iron was hot, and Donald Trump in office. It doesn't expect this era to last in the US.
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