further gives Germany a reason to crack down on pro-Palestinian protestors. Although supporters of the Palestinians have not staged international attacks for a long time the history of this in the 1970s explains why my Uni suddenly instituted a clear bag policy at sports games a few weeks after the lid blew off in Gaza last year. (When I started doing sports photography at the beginning of the semester I could pack a big camera bag and even take extra lenses)
Also Israel has a high GDP and involvement in international trade, academia, etc. Israel has 50x the GDP per head of Rwanda so they have a large impact in terms of Intel's Haifa office, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Sodastream, etc. My thesis advisor traveled to Tel Aviv a lot to work with collaborators.
Not to mention Israel has been receiving absolutely immense amounts of financial, military and political support from the USA for decades, to the tunes of billions.
Israel fought and won 3-5 wars (depending how you count them) without US military aid, and it seems that Egypt, Jordan and Syria no longer have any interest in prosecuting further wars against them.
They started getting military aid from the US after all those wars, and it seems that the only reason they still get it is for political reasons. I don’t think any military analyst believes they actually need that aid to survive.
It goes both ways, but I'd say it is more driven by the value of Israel's economy rather than the other way around. Of course you have to consider that Israel's defense sector is also part of their economic dynamism.
Big picture here is my take. Since 1948 there have been conservatives in Israel such as Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu who have had a policy of ethnic cleansing in that they cannot tolerate there being a non-Jewish part of the polity which is large enough to have political power. The plan has elements such as (a) dividing the population into different fragments such as the West Bank, Gaza and Arab Israelis that don't work together, (b) developing occasional crises that result in the killing or expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians, (c) most of all making sure that the Palestinians do not develop effective leadership, economic connections, soft power, etc. The destruction of academic organizations is critical to this plan because they don't want Palestinians to succeed the way that Jewish people have, instead they want ignorant stupid and desperate Palestinians to make bad moves such as the attacks last year, Munich, numerous 1970s airplane hijackings, the attempt to take over Jordan and such which justifies their persecution in the minds of Israelis and many others
I had a harrowing conversation with a Jewish mathematician about 15 years ago where he explained that it wasn't genocide because the Palestinians were not "a people" which at the time my answer was "boy you sure sound like the leader of Germany from 1933 to 1945" but I've chewed on and have an interpretation of:
Say the remnants of the Iroquois contacted aliens or got some machine like Drexler talked about and decided, now that they had the means, they wanted to take back New York. Are the people who live in the boundaries of New York really a "people" or "nation" or they are just people who live in a certain boundary? (Certainly you find every kind of white, black, Asian and indigenous person from absolutely everywhere here.)
The Ottoman empire despite claiming to be a Caliphate was actually very cosmopolitan and all sorts of people could live everywhere in much of the middle east (a Jewish friend had family that came from Iraq!) so they can make the case that the pre 1948 population of Palestine was just a bunch of randos like us New Yorkers.
Genocide is a crime on top of mass murder because of not just the harm to those killed or the trauma to the survivors and children of the survivors who recapitulate the crime 80 years later, but also the the whole world in the sense that the extinction of a species is a loss to the whole world. Germany is worse off today because of the holocaust because of all the things that aren't there and all of the richness that Jewish people brought to Germany that was lost. (20 years ago I could not find a good bagel shop wherever I went in Germany!)
It's a technicality whether it is genocide or just mass murder in my mind, but it's a good line to get into mind of people like Netanyahu who are thinking ahead hundreds or thousands of years with events like
as clear in their minds as if they happened yesterday. On a bad day I think the polities of liberal democracies are like children in the hands of gods when it comes to facing those kind of people as our politicians often seem to be thinking two or three days ahead, at most to the next election and we are so self-centered and focused on stupid little things like the price of eggs that they can do what they want with us.
On the other hand there are so many positive things about Israel and Israelis but they cannot find it within themselves to constrain Netanyahu and they are paying a price for it now and will continue to pay a price for it. It is likely that if Netanyahu's program succeeds they'll face a crisis of meaning when they no longer have an enemy and they might lose their culture in just a few generations and at best continue start the cycle of losing their way and getting dispossessed which is repeated several times in the Old Testament and in history.
Wearing one of my hats I see a good analysis of that kind of situation to be a political analysis and not a moral analysis. I think most people are looking for a moral analysis and I don't find people get a lot of satisfaction out of political analysis.
I have access to a lot of public opinion data at work and have a brief spiel about public opinion on transgender issues backed by citations that I've market tested in person with a few people who all hated it precisely because they interpreted my lack of moral judgement as a moral judgement. (pro and anti hated it and don't care hated it because they don't want to hear about it) From my point of view it is deliciously ambiguous and it drives morally oriented people crazy.
I haven't written it up though because I expect to just get trouble out of it and I hate the online discourse (pro and anti) about the subject and don't want to add to it.
They’re a western bastion in very close proximity to the Middle East, with a cultural and religious tie to a not insignificant number of Americans. It’s also a wealthy country.
I see what you mean, but I'm not sure that's such an easy question?
Imagine if Israel, the US and UK hadn't funded and spread ISIS and Al-Qaeda throughout the region. Look back at how Iran was before the West decided a pliable dictator would be preferable. Look at how Syria was before the west decided they wanted that oil. Look at what Gaddafi was trying to achieve in Libya before the west decided they didn't want that. Lebanon somehow remains quite western.
My point is that a lot of the Middle East is the way it is because of the West and our destructive behaviours.
> don't understand how a tiny country like Israel has become so important in global politics
The simple reason is that global politics (at the UN) led to the partition of the Mandate, against the will of entire regions, which, right now, represent 30% of world's population. Besides, anti-Muslim racism and anti-Semitism always rears its very ugly head during this conflict, especially in the US.
Subsequently, the lack of stability in the Middle East did Israel no favours in how it is perceived, even if it may not be solely its fault (it isn't).
Plus, the silencing of voices (particularly against patently unfounded claims such as, "the most moral army", "anti-Israelism is anti-Semitism", "the only democracy in the middle east") themselves come with their own Streisand Effect.
Also, socio-culturally, after Tibet & Cuba, it is one of the last/few remaining geo-political global movements with the added disadvantage of cutting through all 3 major Abrahamic religions.
> The simple reason is that global politics (at the UN) led to the partition of the Mandate
That was a piece of paper which changed nothing.
The Arab and Jewish populations had been in an escalating conflict for years, culminating in an all-out civil war. The Israeli population would have declared independence as soon as the British left regardless of what the UN said. Similarly the Arab states had no intention of letting Israel exist, and attacked as soon as the British left.
> I don't understand how a tiny country like Israel has become so important in global politics.
Here are some of my favorite sources on that! These are all leftist and pro-Palestinian sources, but they are academic and studied. These are about why Israel is important to the "interests of the USA" (ie, what those with power to decide national interests think).
* The first chapter of "Palestine: A Socialist Introduction", “How Israel Became the Watchdog State: US Imperialism and the Middle East" by Shireen Akram-Boshar. The publisher Haymarket is giving away the ebook for free. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1558-palestine-a-social...
(Odd to me that I'm getting downvoted for suggesting the US support for Israel has to do with US interests, and providing sources going into detail on that, and people are getting upvoted for saying it's because Jews have a lot of influence! It's really not mostly because Jews have a lot of influence.)
Sorry, but it's really, really hard to read anything about US politics and not to think "wow, Jews really do have an enormous amount of power".
From the lobbies (e.g. AIPAC), to the actual members of the government and leading institutions, to the CEOs of the biggest companies and chiefs of financial institutions, to the media and newspapers, to Hollywood, etc...
Not saying they don't deserve it, but still, just to think how over-represented they are...
Most Jews are white people. There are more Jews in certain industries, but in general disproportinate representation is not as great if you compare to other white people in general. Not saying there still isn't some in some places, which I can't totally explain. (Also why are so many doctors from the Indian subcontinent right? Why are black women over-represented in home health care and latino men in kitchens? Anyway, this is now just an offensive stand-up routine) White people have a lot of power in the USA, wealthy white people have most of the power for sure.
On the issue of foreign policy towards Israel specifically, rather than sociological mysteries in general, I posted articles (from Palestinian and Arab scholars and activists sympathetic toward Palestinians!) making solid arguments for why this is not the explanation of US foreign policy towards the mid-east, and thinking it does is a distraction from what's really going on and how to change it (which I want to as well).
> in general the over-representation is less compared to other white people in general.
Genuinely curious about this. It would basically mean that Jews are under-represented among white people, and this sounds... well, implausible. Jews are about 2% of the US population, can you name any high-profile position in which less than 2% of the total white representation is Jewish?
For example, in the current US cabinet there are 26 members, of which about 13/14 are arguably white, more or less in line with the percentage of whites in the general population (between 60 and 70%). Of these, half (7) are of Jewish descent. That's a ~15x over-representation.
Many scholars argue that the US uses Israel to destabilize the region so that all other countries besides Israel are unable to form a bloc and resist US hegemony, but perhaps that's what you meant by "keep the region in check".
"We're also going to discuss the iron-clad commitment-- and this is-- I'll say this 5,000 times in my career, the iron-clad commitment the United States has to Israel based on our principles, our ideas, our values. They're the same values. And I've often said, Mr. President, if there were not an Israel, we'd have to invent one."
Added emphasis to clarify the context of the quote.
> Iran and basically the rest of the Middle East, US needs an ally to keep the region in check.
The US (and also UK/France/Germany) have been bending over backwards to prop up Israel since LONG before Iran switched to an anti-US theocratic government.
Think about the crusader states[!] and Taiwan. You'll see a pattern there. Israel was important for the British, now the Americans and will be important for the next hegemon. It's a very old strategy used by empires to control whole regions. Having a whole "country" beats having a military base or an air-craft carrier by orders of magnitudes.
According to Sachs, Israel has masterfully manipulated US influence to extend its global reach, primarily through AIPAC's incredibly efficient lobbying - spending just hundreds of millions to secure billions in aid and trillions in military spending. Netanyahu's strategy has been particularly clever, pushing the US to overthrow Middle Eastern governments that oppose Israeli policies, as seen with Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Through campaign financing, Israel has basically bought out Congress for surprisingly little money, ensuring the US consistently backs them internationally - like vetoing UN resolutions that favor Palestinians. This US shield is so strong that when the UN voted on Palestinian self-determination, only the US, Israel, and a couple other countries opposed it. Even when Biden sets boundaries for Israeli actions, they just ignore them without consequences. The whole system's genius lies in how Israel's managed to maintain its policies despite global opposition, though Sachs thinks this might backfire by making Israel too isolated and blocking any chance of a two-state solution.
It might have been wise if Netanyahu hadn't propped up Hamas in the interests of keeping the Palestinian Authority from managing Gaza as well as the West Bank.
It might also have been wise for Israel to abandon the policy of settling the West Bank by force.
As you say, it takes two parties with a real interest in peace to achieve a two-state solution. Right now I'm not sure we even have one.
Equating GDP per capita with the quality of humans is... a tad inhumane. Individual influence to GDP per capita is non-existant for the vast majority of people, even in the richest countries.
Israel is a colony of US imperialism and functions as the US attack dog in the middle east, taking actions and expressing rhetoric in support of US hegemony that are politically infeasible.
From my weak understanding, it’s the only ally the west (USA) has in the Middle East, so they’re important strategically - for military bases and other reasons I don’t really understand, and so are propped up by financial aid and weapons and other help (intelligence etc?) beyond what would normally happen to a similar country.
The US has several allies in the middle east. Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar all have major non-NATO ally status with the US, the same status as Israel. Jordan in particular is a very close US partner.
I should add, none of these countries are treaty allies of the US, i.e. none of them have a mutual defense treaty with the US. The one country that is a treaty ally of the US in the region is Turkey, though that relationship has been strained in the last couple of decades
Given Israel is the motherland for many Jewish people, plus almost 2.5% of the USA is Jewish, plus there are almost 16 million Jewish people globally, I would imagine that.
