Why do us protect israel

They express strong desire to vote based on the Israel issue and are clustered in Florida and Pennsylvania, large swing states in presidential elections. By contrast, 31 percent of white evangelicals think the US has reached the right level of support, while 46 percent want the US to support Israel more. Add evangelicals, Jews, and broad public support together, and you get consistent, bipartisan support for Israel.

Neither survey is particularly statistically rigorous , so don't take the specific rankings too seriously. Is the group actually steering US politics and foreign policy in a direction it wouldn't go on its own? The two eminent international relations scholars argued that there's no way to explain the US-Israel relationship, from an IR perspective, other than as AIPAC and its allies pushing the US to act counter to its own interests.

They reject that either strategy or shared values fully explain the US support for Israel, so lobbying must. This argument is hugely controversial, including among international relations theorists. Some argued that The Israel Lobby creepily invoked classic anti-Semitic tropes of Jews secretly controlling the government. Others dismissed it as, in one particularly memorable phrase , "piss-poor, monocausal social science. One of the main criticisms of Walt and Mearsheimer's thesis is that they don't present very much direct evidence that AIPAC lobbying influenced specific votes.

Another criticism is that Walt and Mearsheimer premise their thesis on the argument that Israel is neither strategically nor morally worthy of American support, and so policymakers must be supporting Israel because they've been coerced into it by AIPAC, whereas a number of policymakers will tell you they earnestly believe the alliance is worthwhile absent lobbying.

Critics also argue that the definition of "Israel Lobby" beyond AIPAC used in the book is so large as to encompass basically the entire American foreign policy establishment. Whatever you think of this debate, it can be easy to get lost in a binary between "the Israel lobby is all that matters" and "the Israel lobby is irrelevant. AIPAC doesn't always win.

For instance, it lost a major fight in Congress when it pushed for more sanctions on Iran in February ; the sanctions were likely designed to kill the ongoing US-Iran nuclear negotiations. AIPAC's influence is a product of financial resources and power, sure, but also of choosing to push for policies that have public support and are consonant with American grand strategy in the Middle East.

A rally against the Gaza offensive in New York. Bilgin S. It's hard to know where one driver of America's Israel policy ends and another begins.

For instance: early in his administration, President Obama pushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt settlement growth in the West Bank; Netanyahu resisted this in part by rallying his allies in Congress. Netanyahu's allies in both parties, who are always eager to appear pro-Israel, pressured Obama to drop his anti-settlements push, which he did.

The question here is whether, in this case and others, US foreign policy interests or US domestic politics was ultimately more consequential to driving the US-Israel relationship. For example, w ould Obama have pushed harder against settlements had Netanyahu not been able to call up so many allies in Congress? Were those members of Congress primarily driven by pure domestic politics, which do favor pro-Israel policies, by an earnest concern that Obama's approach was bad for Israelis, or by a belief that Obama was hurting US foreign policy interests?

In thinking about the future of US-Israel relations, it's much more helpful to examine what might cause these broad-bush factors to change. In simpler terms: is there a scenario under which the US and Israel drift apart?

Barnett, the George Washington University scholar, sees Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank as the greatest threat to the relationship.

Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, tried to fight it, but the Bush administration stood firm. Shamir lost, both in Congress and with the executive, because the Israeli position wasn't consistent with the US vision of a Western, democratic Israel. Beinart argues that Israel's ongoing occupation of the West Bank is already alienating younger and more secular Jews, and that AIPAC and other mainstream Jewish organizations risk losing their broad base of support unless they become more willing to criticize Israel on these points.

Barnett's conclusion only follows if you think "shared values" are the linchpin of US-Israel relations. Maybe the US would still think it's strategically useful to support Israel. Maybe Israel remains popular among certain Christians and the broader public regardless of its Palestinian policy.

Maybe Israel comes to an agreement with the Palestinians and Barnett's point becomes moot. For now, though, there's little evidence that American support for Israel is fundamentally breaking down — whether you think that's a good or bad thing.

Many states in the Middle East, including undemocratic ones, that are now accepted as sovereign entities — Jordan, Israel, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, to mention but a few — did not exist as such in early 20th century.

In international eyes, their current legitimacy as sovereign entities is strictly a function of their admittance to the United Nations, not of their own narratives about their creation.

In the American discourse, the line between anchoring policy toward Israel in international laws and norms, and anchoring it in the Jewish narrative about Israel, has been blurred.

This was the case long before the Trump presidency, which relied on the support of evangelical Christians who backed a religious narrative about Israel, sent an envoy to Israel who openly affirmed that narrative, and rewarded that evangelical support with recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Though support for Israel among young American evangelicals is declining , as I recently wrote. Everyone is entitled to their own national and religious narrative, but those narratives cannot serve as the basis of sovereignty in relations among states — and certainly not for American foreign policy. As a sovereign state, Israel can define itself as it likes. But the United States — especially under the Biden administration which prioritizes the fight for democracy — must not embrace and advocate what inherently contradicts the cherished values of democracy and equality it wants to defend and promote.

In that vein, we must stand for states that belong to all their citizens equally, not ones that belong to one group of citizens at the expense of others. Order from Chaos. A how-to guide for managing the end of the post-Cold War era. Instead, the trend has been in just the opposite direction: major U.

Similarly, U. Also in the mids, Jordan still claimed the West Bank and stationed large numbers of troops along its lengthy border and the demarcation line with Israel; today, Jordan has signed a peace treaty and has established fully normalized relations. At that time, Iraq was embarking upon its vast program of militarization. This raises serious questions as to why U. In the hypothetical event that all U.

Israel has both a major domestic arms industry and an existing military force far more capable and powerful than any conceivable combination of opposing forces.

When Israel was less dominant militarily, there was no such consensus for U. Though the recent escalation of terrorist attacks inside Israel has raised widespread concerns about the safety of the Israeli public, the vast majority of U.

In short, the growing U. Rather, as elsewhere, U. There is a broad bipartisan consensus among policymakers that Israel has advanced U. The pattern of U. After attacking Arab armies in the war were successfully countered by the largest U. Aid quadrupled again in soon after the fall of the Shah, the election of the right-wing Likud government, and the ratification of the Camp David Treaty, which included provisions for increased military assistance that made it more of a tripartite military pact than a traditional peace agreement.

Aid increased yet again soon after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It also received another half million dollars for the development of a new jet fighter. During and immediately after the Gulf War, U. When Israel dramatically increased its repression in the occupied territories—including incursions into autonomous Palestinian territories provided in treaties guaranteed by the U. The correlation is clear: the stronger and more willing to cooperate with U.

Therefore, the continued high levels of U. Indeed, leaders of both American political parties have called not for the U. Since the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, there has again been some internal debate regarding how far the United States should back Israeli policies, now under the control of right-wing political leader Ariel Sharon.

Some of the more right-wing elements, such as Paul Wolfowitz of the Defense Department, have been arguing that Sharon was an indispensable ally in the war against terrorism and that the Palestinian resistance was essentially part of an international terrorist conspiracy against democratic societies.