US support for Israel since 1940s has been unmitigated disaster

By Mark Dankof

As a member of the of the American old right in the paleoconservative wing of the Republican Party, which is admittedly a minority within the Republican Party, I actually agree with AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and her colleagues on this issue.  

I think the American support for Israel since the late 1940s has largely been an unmitigated disaster for about four or five reasons.

One is that the blowback against the United States worldwide for supporting what has basically been an ongoing land thievery since the late 1940s has not done the United States any good in terms of its relationships with most of the other nations of the world, especially in the Middle East.

And when we get into this situation, we also start looking at the economics of this.

The United States, of course, now has something like a 26 trillion dollar national debt, and more and more Americans, who are not at either end of the political spectrum, are starting to look at this relationship with Israel, and are asking fundamental questions in regard to whether or not it continues to be in the interest of the average American to be handing these people ten billion dollars a year, including 3.8 billion a year in military aid.

The fact is this has never made economic sense before. It makes even less economic sense now. We start looking at all of the political turbulence in the United States and the economic turbulence that has been created both by COVID-19 and also by the aftermath of this George Floyd tragedy in Minneapolis. It's obvious to more and more people in this country that this past relationship with Israel, at least in the form that it has taken since the 1940s, is absolutely unsustainable for the United States, and it needs to be either altered or discontinued altogether.

Two-state solution is a fraud

Thirdly, I'd say that this so-called two-state solution that people like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Democratic majority for Israel keep talking about is in fact a fraud.

It's impossible to have a two state solution when one side continues stealing all the land. And this is what this annexations situation is really all about, with the Trump administration and with the pro-Israel counterparts that they have in the Democratic Party, the United States is basically handed over East Jerusalem to the Israelis.  The United States has basically been supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza. And the United States, of course, is clearly in a circumstance where it's given a green light to Netanyahu and to the most radical elements in the settler movement in Israel to continue stealing the rest of the land in the so-called occupied West Bank.

That international law does not recognize Israel as having any claim to whatsoever. So this whole two-state solution is a fraud. It's a transparent fraud.

And I think what you're looking at the paleoconservative wing of the Republican Party with people like Robert Taft, the late Robert Taft, and so forth, I think they would certainly recognize that this is increasingly problematic and they would have a lot to say in agreement with AOC and these other people in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who are trying to get this situation under control.

There's a fourth thing that AOC isn't talking about in her letter or any of these other ladies that have signed this letter that has gone to Mike Pompeo, and that is that Israel has had a very adversarial role with the United States when Israel has deemed its espionage and military activities to be in its interest at American expense, despite the fact that the United States is their overwhelming political and economic backer in the world.

What have I referring to? There is the Lavonne affair in the early 1950s. There was the clear Israeli link to the Kennedy assassination with Meyer Lansky and David Ben-Gurion being involved in that among some of the other principal players. There was Israel's deliberate attack on the USS Liberty in June of 1967 that killed and wounded scores of Americans.

And when we started getting into more recent tragedies, there was the new Mekka nuclear materials theft in Apollo, Pennsylvania, the Pollard spy case, the 9/11 situation, certainly we start looking at the Israeli, the obvious Israeli-Mossad links to the Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislain Maxwell pedophile ring and the list goes on and on, in regard to this sick relationship that the United States has had going with Israel and with the Israeli lobby and with Jewish financial interests involved in this for many, many decades.

The last thing I would say is that it's going to be quite fascinating to watch the Democratic Party in this regard. The overwhelming amount of money that finances the Democratic Party is provably Jewish money.  It's well over 50 percent. Unquestioned support of Israel has always been axiomatic in the Democratic Party since the days of Harry Truman.

Stunning defeat for the Israeli lobby

But now we're seeing a real change in the Democratic Party where there's a real power struggle over this whole issue of Israel versus Palestine. The recent loss of Eliot Engle, who was the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, a strong advocate for Israel, a tool of the Israeli lobby, he ends up losing recently in a Democratic primary to a progressive Democrat challenger who is anything but pro-Israel.

I think this fellow's name, as I recall, as Jamal Bohlmann. This was a stunning defeat for the Israeli lobby, despite the amount of money that was poured into that campaign to ensure that angle was re-nominated and ultimately re-elected. He was not.

And this obviously has implications that had the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Democratic majority for Israel and all the rest of these groups extremely concerned in regard to what this portends for the future.

And I'm just waiting for the day -- it hasn't happened yet -- when there's going to be more traditional old right, paleoconservative old right opposition to the neoconservative pro-Zionist element that has hijacked the Republican Party in my lifetime and hijacked that the mainstream conservative movement in this country.

Support for Israel and Zionism is not historically an American right position, politically. It has been turned into that ever since the days of William F. Buckley and National Review magazine.

And what we might end up seeing in American politics with all these things going on in the Middle East and a domestic American politics, is that the ALCS, the progressive left in the Democratic Party, might increasingly be joined over time by more and more disenchanted America First conservatives who begin to recognize that Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and people of this ilk are political frauds. These people are not America First. They are Israel First.

What we might eventually see is a realignment of the American right between those factions that will continue to support Israel, governed by the Protestant evangelical right wing commitment to Israel. And those conservatives in the Republican Party who have begun to see that you cannot have an America First foreign policy and domestic policy and be a supporter of Israel. 

So there's a fundamental realignment of American politics on this issue that I think is just starting to happen. And that's happening now, principally for the time being in the Democratic Party. And I think that's what is so interesting about watching this from afar, both in terms of AOC’s letter to Mike Pompeo, along with the other signatories. And the other is this loss of Elliott Angle and his departure from the US Congress.

These are monumental political events and the Zionist lobby in the United States is extremely worried.

US lawmakers oppose Israel's annexation scheme

A group of US lawmakers oppose Israel

Mark Dankof is an American political analyst, pastor, broadcaster and former US Senate candidate who is based in San Antonio, Texas. He recorded this article for Press TV website. 

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