Now Playing: is jimmuh carter rotting yet?
So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?If you are looking for an exhaustive catalogue of all the reasons why Israel sucks and why America shouldn't permit itself to be manipulated by an international cabal of big-nosed diamond merchants, you can scarcely do better than this paper by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, published earlier this month in The London Review of Books.
Mearsheimer is a political science professor at the University of Chicago and Walt is an international affairs professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. But the prominence of their positions isn't what makes this anti-Jewish screed so offensive; rather, it's the moral equivalence of their argument in vacating the Arab and Muslim responsibility for the current infestation of Judenhass in the world.
"The Israel Lobby" ---as it's entitled at the LRB--- has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosphere, but I actually came across it via one of my very favorite websites, Arts & Letters Daily (a staple link here at Neognostikos). I recommend reading it in full.
I'm not going to get into it tonight because my Longhorns are playing in a while, but let me leave you with a small sample of their reasoning:
The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.Note that Israel is to be blamed for that pesky necessity of having to defend itself. Is there any more universal a right than that of self-defense? But Mearsheimer and Walt won't concede it with respect to Israel: it is their fault that they could not contribute to the efforts in the Gulf War because they are themselves the cause of Arab and Muslim anger.
No criticism of the infantile and retarded attitudes of the Arab nations? What mindlessness.
I would argue ---and will again, you may be sure--- for Jewish exceptionalism, but if that is any more irrational than the double standards and excuse-making that go into the Left's defense of the poor oppressed Palestinian people, I will be amazed to know it.