Before posing this question let me say that I have no quarrel with Israel. My criticism centers on the US government which has knowingly put America at risk on Israel's behalf. The reason I raise this question is because I have just finished reading through advice given by George Washington as he retired from the US presidency, and our current foreign policy seems to me to be in direct opposition to Washington's thoughts expressed as follows:

"a passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and Wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite Nation) facility to betray, or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption or infatuation."

1. Is there a genuine U.S. national security interest in the survival of Israel?

2. Is our adversarial relationship with the Palestinians and Muslims a direct result of our "attachment" to Israel?

1. Is there a genuine U.S. national security interest in the survival of Israel?
Not that I can see. Nevertheless, we have made commitments and in so far as Israel is being challenged within internationally excepted boundaries I think she should be defended.

Great excerpt of Washington by the way and most timely.

2. Is our adversarial relationship with the Palestinians and Muslims a direct result of our "attachment" to Israel?
In the case of the Palestinians, completely. In the case of other Muslim groups it would vary with the group how much our relationship with Israel is a problem. But it appears to be a problem to some degree with most of them.

1. Is there a genuine U.S. national security interest in the survival of Israel?

Not really – esp. since we are now in the Middle East and will be for some time. They can serve as a check on Iran to some extent – but then they draw so much hatred that its hard to say. Clearly Osama started his little group to go after Israel and the US (for having troops in SA).

2. Is our adversarial relationship with the Palestinians and Muslims a direct result of our "attachment" to Israel?

Well that is what they say when you ask them and I have no reason to doubt it. OBL grew his group on Israel hatred and still uses it today.

The relationship is very strong even though apparently most Israelis don’t “approve of us”.

That said their lobby in the US is very strong and they are predominantly Democrats so we will never see a bill passed that they don’t like.
This is also why when some folks say that if we just pulled out of the Middle East we could have peace with the AQ and Iran etc. I have to laugh.

Israel will always be their flash point for hatred of the US – now and in the future – and nothing short of dropping all support and funding for Israel will ever make a dent in that.

Taking it logically from an outsiders perspective

1). One could make a reasonable argument that the the survival of Israel is contrary to U.S. national security interest. It has no strategic material reserves. Its geographic position is less strategic than Syria, Jordan or Egypt. On the contrary aligning with Israel has created costly (understatement) issues for the U.S.
U.S. interest in Israel one can argue has very little to do with a logical approach to National Security. It appears at least to the outsider that it has everything to do American national politics and its dependance on money rather than issues and causes.

2). Obviously - the almost unquestioning support
(See number UN resolutions condemning Israel vetoed by U.S plus the amount of U.S. aid that goes to Israel) of a occupying (as defined by UN resolutions from 1967 on) country who is killing of 10 to 40 your civilians for every one Israeli you manage to get is not going to win hearts and minds.


But then what has logic got do with this?

1. Is there a genuine U.S. national security interest in the survival of Israel?

United we stand, divided we fall. If we allow an alliance of China, Middle East and African dictators, and maybe even Russia to slowly pick off our friends one by one, eventually we will have no friends left to turn to when they get to us. This is like asking if being a part of NATO is in the US's best interests. The refusal of both Clinton and Obama to say that they come to Israel's aid if attacked by a nuclear Iran during last week's debate points to a major shift in the long standing alliances that protected us through the Cold War. Complacency since that time has allowed authoritarianism to gain strength globally while democracy fades. I think that each and every country that is democratic improves the United State's national security.

2. Is our adversarial relationship with the Palestinians and Muslims a direct result of our "attachment" to Israel?

Disagree with the premise that we are advesaries with Muslims. We're on very good terms with many Middle Eastern and South Asian countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India (the world's second largest Muslim population), and Pakistan.

There were several logical points made the last time we discussed this. Maybe you should take a look. 46% of those voting thought that we supported Israel out of pragmatic self-interest.

US Support for Israel - Cui Bono

I'll have to get back to answer the debate questions another time, but I'm leaning towards "yes, in our national interest" for part one, and "adversarial?" for part 2.

Actually, Osama started his little group (with a little help from his friends in the US government, I might add) to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. This was the origin of Al Qaeda.

I've looked at that and there seems to be putting a lot effect before cause. Yes an eastern Mediterrranean ally would be in U.S. interest, but in the immediate post war time frame a lot were up for grabs. One could argue that it was the U.S. adopting Israel that put the surrounding states into the soviet sphere. Egypt was definitely pro- U.S. immediately after 1956. Perhaps Cyprus would have been a better eastern Mediterranean"aircraft carrier" I'm sure the U.K. could have been persuaded to hand over the base along with Diego Garcia in order to not have the pound forced to float as part of repaying the post war U.S debt. Another argument was Democracies are the U.S. natural allies. Supporting democracies is fine but when they are using helicopter gunships firing rockets in to one most densely populated areas of the world as a reprisal tactic one has to question whether a democracy in the hands of extremists because of their peculiar politcal landscape is a better ally than a dictatorship or a military Junta.

Since we seem to be "putting a lot effect before cause," perhaps you can enlighten us as to why and at whom those helicopter gunships are firing? And for bonus points, why the population is so dense?

well, I don't believe they have ceased to spy on us, and attempt to breach our security networks, despite thier recent protestations:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/24/2225847.htm

On Tuesday, US authorities announced the arrest of Ben-Ami Kadish, on charges that he disclosed secret defence information, including on nuclear weapons, to Israel between 1979 and 1985.

Kadish, who worked as a mechanical engineer at a US army weapons centre in New Jersey, provided classified documents to Isreal's consul for science affairs in New York, the Justice Department said.


Israel denies continues spying- I don't believe them for a second. I can't believe anyone would be gullible enought to believe otherwise.

With friends like these- who needs enemas?

Enemas?

States spy on foes and friends alike. Information is the coin of inernational relations (P. Lang). If your nation state isn't spying on friends you should be worried. Perhaps the U.S. doesn't spy as much as other states do because our HUMNIT training and cultivation has always lacked and we tend to cheese it by buying off regimes, but I'm sure we spy on Israel, Britain, etc., just the same. And if we make an exception for Israel heads should roll at the Pentagon.

Is there a genuine U.S. national security interest in the survival of Israel?
I don't thnk so. Israel doesn't have a commodity we depend on, I don't think we need it to influence Turkey (when we can influence Turkey), they couldn't appear on Bush's coalition list for political reasons (the deck is that stacked against them, despite our billions in aid) and they, a Middle East country, can't participate in a Middle East invasion instigated by their benefactor for political/logistical reasons.

Is our adversarial relationship with the Palestinians and Muslims a direct result of our "attachment" to Israel?
How could it be argued otherwise? People say that giving up on Israel would inevitably mean we have to make nice with tyrants. We're already in bed with the region's despots out of pragmatism and show no sign of changing course. Our dependence on oil costs us dearly but "fortunately" our mistakes cost foreign peoples many times over. Dragging Israel along in our great baggage of foreign policy mistakes isn't exactly out of character.

If one reporter is correct Kadish was outed because of an internal leak driven by a separate issue. If accurate, the Israeli intelligence wanted to momentarily cool down the responses to Olmert's and Cheney's new military/diplomacy initiative against Syria by drawing upon last year's refuted bombing episode.. In short - wider war. Kadish's outing was convient for Israeli intel because I doubt he's has been an active spy for quite a few years but would still achieve the desired effect.

Agreed

I wouldn't say no sign of changing course.
And the last sentence fully explains to me why it is in our national security interests to stand by Israel.

How does McCain's pretty speech change anything about our foreign policy? This snippet sounds like Bush's rhetoric pre-invasion Iraq. Four years later the leader of the free world gives the Saudis a bucketload of new guns. Don't you get tired of hearing recycled condescending talking points?

What of it if Israel is a democracy. What does that change? Don't they need land and resources just like anyone else, and like anyone else, aren't they willing to do everything necessary to get it?

You said we have no sign of changing course. If McCain is elected, that speech is a good indicator of what he would do. McCain is not George Bush. Aside from RP he was the furtherest thing from Bush in the Rep. primary.

Being a democracy has everything to do with being allied to Israel. You can't have a relationship with someone that you can't trust. Check out the discussion on League of Democracies if you want further arguments on why it matters. NATO is full of democracies for a reason. Before turning you decide that it's a good idea to abandon our allies in NATO, remember that it was a Democrat who first signed us into it.

Are you saying McCain isn't going to treat with the Saudis and Middle East autocrats? He's not going to arm them against a perceived Iranian threat? McCain is different?


There are always exceptions. We have relationships with some of the worst regimes on earth—some of them republics.


Any intelligent discussion will show that spreading democracy is in the best interest of democratic security.

Yes, well, spreading Islamic revolution is in the best interests of Iran, but we may take to it as well as insurgents have taken to democracy in Iraq. And frankly I think it's an excellent idea to abandon some NATO allies. Specifically the Eastern European states Clinton invited, breaking Bush Sr.'s promise to Russia in the process and antagonizing our former Cold War nemesis. But that was back when Republicans weren't down with warmongering.

The question is facile since the answers are the well known ones. But for completeness
The israeli defence forces quoted targets were the organisation responsible for various acts against the people and property of Israel.
The high density is from:

• Refugees from the 67 war,
• The post war reprisals including the demolition of palestinian villages.
• The displacement of population from the land occupied by Israeli settlements

The gunships and other tactics are effective in a killing ratio which varies from year to year between 10 to 40 Palestinians for every Israeli killed. The majority of the Israelis killed are IDF, the majority of palestinians civilian non- terrorist. (this information is widely available from israeli sources). From the amount of "collateral damage" one could postulate that the most terrorised population is the Palestinian rather than the israeli.
Is it in the U.S. national interest to align itself so wholeheartedly with a state who engages in such dispropionate tactics whose main victims are a civilian poplulation when these tactics have proven not only ineffective but alienate a very large religeous/ethnic section of the world?

Your post in factually incorrect. This study invalidates your entire post.

Your beliefs are common, but they are not true. If Mexico started shooting rockets at Texas malls, you would be demanding a swift and deadly response. 54% of Palestinians killed are active fighters. These do not include unknowns or rock throwers. Of all the Palestinians killed, 95% are male. 1 in 8 of Palestinian non-combatants killed were killed by Palestinians. This directly refutes your beliefs.

It also shows that 80% of Israelis killed by Palestinians are non-combatants. 31% of these are women. Clearly, these are random attacks against non-combatants.

Please take a few minutes to educate yourself on this subject by not only reading the summary in the link I provided, but also read the entire study. If you have a study with factual data that backs up your point, please provide it.

Edited to fix misstated values

If Mexico was being occupied by the US and divided up into bantustans to make way for American Settlements I might at least understand some of the reason for the rocketing.

Give the Palestinians some Apache helicopters and let them roam about Israel at will and maybe they might get more precise in their targeting.

Totally irrelevant. If a group of ex US marines decides to get together after they get out and become terrorists or back robbers or whatever is that the fault then of the US government for training and “supporting” them? Ludicrous argument.

Yes - he is. I think he makes it fairly clear - "We must not act rashly or demand change overnight. But neither can we pretend the status quo is sustainable, stable, or in our interests." Do we have interests there that we can't afford to upset right now with some autocrats? Sure. Is it a good idea long term? No because you can't trust someone you don't have common ground with. I don't see any of the other Presidential Candidates calling for immediate severed relations with the Saudis. It would be foolish if they did. McCain's stance is more against oppressive regimes than anything that I've seen from the other side.

Like Israel, NATO nations all have parliament or House elected bodies. I don't know exactly which ones you want to abandon, but we'll pay for it later if we do.

JLmA, with all due respect, McCain has made it a point of his campaign that he embraced Bush's GWoT. You're going to see change by emphasizing parts of his speech that support your interpretation. I'm seeing more of the same with better pronunciation and more nuanced speechwriting.


If we didn't have common ground with them we wouldn't be dealing with them. Yes, Middle East regimes aren't sustainable, especially Saudi Arabia's with millions of Wahhabis disgusted with the royal family's rational greed. Yet we continue and will continue supporting them because the democratic alternative may not turn out to be amenable to our interests. We don't want democracy in the Middle East no matter which electable candidate weaves this palatable appeal into their rhetoric for public consumption.


We may pay for it in terms of these elected bodies rolling back economic/trade reforms and ditching U.S. arms for Russian or Chinese manufacturers, and ditching the construction of more bases. Or they might keep the reforms and ditch the bases since I doubt they'll pool the money to prop it themselves.

Make no mistake. The invitation to join NATO was a political maneuver, not a defensive precaution. Russia isn't going to retake former satellite states. They have waged as unprincipled a war as terrorist separatists in Chechnya have but that's okay. Violent Islam has bumped Marxism for the number one spot as the greatest threat to mankind; the transcendent terror more palpable than the threat of plague, a weakening economy, an ascendant China and a host of other ordinary concerns. Better to leave Chechnya in Russia's capable hands.

But I could be wrong. Is it going to cost us in more ways than I imagine?

My statements were not as fulsome as they could have been. However your study is considered by some authors to be overly focused on a small time period i.e 2000 to 2003
The information I had was a lot more recent than 2003 and covered upto 2008 See this
There is a comparison of the studies in to casualities http://www.israelipalestinianprocon.org/deaths.html. I The ratio varies year to year more widely than I stated with an average over the whole period 2000 to 2008 of around 4-6 to 1 . The ratios in 2006 and 2007 are much,much more alarming and where I got my 40 to 1. see this from the economist

"If Mexico started shooting rockets at Texas malls..." . Being born in a country subject to frequent terrorist attacks I can tell you my response is it not be to send Helicopters firing rockets into urban areas or to send in tanks or to demolish villages. The way to combat terrorism is to separate them from their popular support by making the politics more successful than the violence.

Presumedly in your scenario the U.S. would have first invaded Mexico after declaring itself a state for one religion, barring ethnic Mexican-Americans from serving in the armed forces, and then inviting members of that one religion from Russia to take Mexican land from Mexicans by force. Declare the land of Mexico not to have really belonged to any nation. Then suspended law in Mexico after the Mexicans began to resist more fiercely.



edited for small typos

I read every study you posted and each one of them is heavily generalized. But one study did stick out, and that's the figure that 95% of Palestinians killed are male. Again, you can't randomly kill at a rate of 95% male. This shows conclusively that Israel is targeting combatants - not killing indiscriminately.

As far as firing rockets at our malls - you go ahead and negotiate. But I'll demand swift and deadly responses to make those attacks stop immediately.

As far as my study, you can dispute it all you want, but nobody started calling Israel a bunch of murderous thugs yesterday. This has been going on for years.

"If Mexico started shooting rockets at Texas malls..." . Being born in a country subject to frequent terrorist attacks I can tell you my response is it not be to send Helicopters firing rockets into urban areas or to send in tanks or to demolish villages. The way to combat terrorism is to separate them from their popular support by making the politics more successful than the violence.

Clearly no nation can or should put up with attacks like those on Israelie civilians. And retaliation is made very difficult by the tactic of the shooters to hide among the population making killing them difficult and hazardous to “civilians”. The alternative would be to invade the area and have troops guarding the border area to prevent the attacks.

That said I have to agree with you that Israel certainly has brought much of this on themselves. Palestinians have been living in “refugee camps” for decades and land captured in past conflicts is still held and developed illegally by Israel. Israel needs to come to the table with concessions that give back the land and allow for a Palestinian State – after which further attacks should be dealt with very severely imo.

Keep reading you will find that over the larger period the israelis have managed to kill a much wider demogrphic


But this didnt work for the israelis so why would it work for you.
relying on swift and deadly response against guerilla fighters with popular support doesnt work.
e.g.
It didnt work in 1776 in North America, It didnt work in 1812+ in Spain, It didnt in South Africa (Boer war), It didnt in Kenya, it didnt in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), it didnt in France 40-45, it didnt in Israel in 1947 (with the Irgun)
It didnt in Malaya, it didnt in Algeria, it didnt in Kurdestan, it didnt in Southern Ireland (1916 and all that), it didnt in Northern Ireland, it didnt in Iraq, it didnt in Vietnam... and its isnt with the israelis at the moment in Gaza.

So why is going to work for you with Mexicans? Are you saying that Mexicans lack the patriotism and intestinal fortitude of Americans, Spanish, French, Kenyans, Algerians, Vietnamese, Kurds, Rhodesians, South Africans, Malayans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Israelis, or the Irish? or that U.S. force is so much better than the British, French,Turkish,Iraqi,Israeli...


From about 1947 I think. They have been calling my country and countrymen similar names since the 13th Century at least. Probably the Romans had a few choice words about us as well.

The U.S. has aligned itself not only with a state that uses tactics that are questionable from a view point of morality and law, it has aligned itself with a state that uses tactics that are proven to fail unless you kill a substantial proportion of the population.

The U.S. should have at least the competence to back a state that is competent.