view the rest of the comments
No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
Tl;Dr - Massive unopposed lobbying campaigns for the last couple decades and the Cold War.
Honestly? Domestic politics. Israel has had an influential lobbying arm in the US since World War 2. Combine that with post war guilt about turning Jewish refugees away during the Holocaust and the cold war position of Arabs and you have a slam dunk case for the US backing Israel until the mid 90's. Which is what you see in history.
However Bill Clinton correctly identified the political time bomb inherent to Israel after peace talks fell through and began pressuring them to end new settlements. The lobbying groups helped get George Bush elected because of that. (To be clear these are Americans, some Jewish, some not, that believe in Israel for varying reasons. Not Isreali agents or anything like that.) George Bush also did not want that political hot potato and kept Clinton's pressure going. Especially as he tried to rally support for a second war.
At this point around 2003 alarm bells started going off in the pro Isreali lobbying groups and in the Israeli government. They sensed that now that the cold war was over they would not receive special treatment anymore. So they began laying the ground work for major lobbying efforts at the city, county, state, and federal levels. They also began a pressure campaign on media to have issues presented on a light partial to Israelis. In 2004 conservative Israelis and their allies had a taste of their worst nightmare. The Israeli prime minister ordered settlements in Gaza to be abandoned. This was because of international pressure.
Netanyahu and the pro Israel lobbying groups proceeded to work at making America a shield for Israel over the next 15 years. Resulting in many states and localities passing laws to prohibit the BDS movement and define any criticism of Israel as Anti-Semitism. This is known as the IHR definition which the US House just adopted.
While there is a significant portion of the US population that supports Israel as a result of decades of cold war propaganda, they aren't why the government is so vehement about it. Israel and its friends have lobbied our government directly for nearly 20 years without much resistance. Pro Palestinian groups, and positions have been seen as largely terrorism aligned in a country that's been at war with groups labeled as terrorists for 20 years. So any resistance that was encountered was easily dismissed.
That's why our actual infrastructure of government favors Israel in places. Now why are we so actively supporting them instead of just letting the government do its thing? That comes down to one man and no one knows his reasons but him.
Other suggestions -
Christian End of The World Theology- This explains some grass roots support but not the majority of grass roots or the government's support. The US government has historically been hostile to this theology.
Oil - This doesn't track. We're in a big push to be independent of foreign oil and trying to transition to green energy. It could have been a reason 20 years ago, but not now.
Military Asset - This was true until the cold war ended. Now the US has bases all over the middle east and Turkey, a NATO ally, is emerging as a competent weapons manufacturer with far less support than we give Israel.