Reply To: Zionism and anti semitism
Chomsky has often repudiated the charge of American middle east foreign policy being set in the interest of Israel but I don’t think he can deny that there is active manipulation to steer that policy by pro-Israel’s but not always by American Jews. The US right wing saw Israel as a counterweight to the leftist/baathist Arab countries and many of now rare secular Palestinian leftist national liberation movements.
I read somewhere that it was only the result of the 1956 war that the US eventually opted to ally with Israel and until up to then was ready to align with Nasser. Historically, when Israel was created it was France and Russia via Czechoslovakia that supported it militarily. The UK foreign office was dominated by what were called the Arabists and probably still thought Israel was a terrorist-created state.
Little is said about the US aid to Egypt, particularly military. Between 1979 and 2003, Egypt acquired about $19 billion in military aid, making Egypt the second largest non-NATO recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel. Also, Egypt received about $30 billion in economic aid within the same time frame. General Anthony Zinni, the former Commandant of CENTCOM, once said, “Egypt is the most important country in my area of responsibility because of the access it gives me to the region.”
“…A second impediment to American aid to Egypt, of course, was Israel. Eisenhower was not so personally concerned with the fate of the Zionist experiment as his predecessor, Harry Truman, had been, but neither was he oblivious to the political salience in the United States of the Israel issue. Abba Hillel Silver told Eisenhower in 1956, “You can be reelected without a single Jewish vote,” and he was undoubtedly right. Eisenhower liked to make much of his independence of the Israel lobby. At the height of the Suez crisis, he wrote to a friend that he had ordered the State Department to “inform Israel that we would handle our affairs exactly as though we didn’t have a Jew in America…”
It is a useful link to read as a summary of the ins and outs, the going and froing of Middle East diplomacy to show that nothing is ever simple.
So is this alliance also designed by America’s Zionists. Some will say yes, others will determine that it is America’s independent interests being expressed.
Off Topic
[One of my mum’s sister met and married a Norwegian who was involved in the Shetland Bus as the wartime boats between the two places were called, so I have a Norwegian branch of my family.
When the sisters (5 sisters. One brother who is a bit of a mystery, a skeleton the cupboard) ll meet up they always reverted to their Shetland dialect
But my maternal antecedents were newcomers to Shetland as a result of the whaling industry but even so they considered themselves distinctly Shetlanders.
Paternally, ancestors were from a Border reiver family, tinkers from Galloway, but to become full of Orange and Freemason connections.]