Today, Explained - Why does the US always side with Israel?

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

This was the top question we got from Today, Explained listeners. Joel Beinin, Middle East history professor emeritus at Stanford, has answers. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Isabel Angell, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last week, we asked you to call the Today Explained hotline with your burning questions about this new, old war in the Middle East. Hello, this is Adeline from Houston, Texas. My name is Chris. I'm calling from Seattle, Washington. Calling from Portland, Maine. I am a farmer in Tennessee. Mother, wife, American. We got one question over and over. Why is the United States such a strong supporter of Israel? We got one question over and over. You know, is it some kind of treaty that has to do with weapons? Probably a simple question, but I'd love to hear a full episode of Diving Into the History there.

Essentially, their relationship. I want to know everything. Answers, ahead on the show. All right, thanks. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. You're listening to Today Explained.

If you've been online the past few weeks, you've probably noticed there are lots of people who want to mansplain everything about this conflict, including why the United States always sides with Israel. But we figured we'd find someone who's been mansplaining it for decades. My name is Joel Bainan, and I am the Donald J. McLaughlin Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History Emeritus at Stanford University. Professor Bannon, fit the bill. I taught Middle East history at Stanford for 35 years before I retired with an interim of two years at the American University in Cairo. We got a short answer and a long answer, and we'll start with the short one. The short answer is a combination of Israel's role in maintaining American imperial hegemony, not only in the Middle East, but even globally, and the power of the Israel lobby, which includes

organizations like Christians United for Israel, it's not simply a Jewish lobby, the power of the Jewish lobby electorally on Congress. There's more than that, but if you want the long answer, I'll give you that. I had been to Potsdam and I'd seen some of the places where the Jews had been slaughtered by the Nazis. Six million Jews were killed outright, men, women, and children. And it was my hope that they would have a homeland where they could operate. There was a great deal of guilt in the United States, and many people, including President Truman, thought that the way to compensate world Jewry for having stood by and done nothing to prevent the extermination of six million Jews was to give Jews a state in Palestine. But don't think that decision to recognize Israel is an easy one. I had to make a compromise with the Arabs and divide

Palestine. The United States didn't maintain a close embrace of Israel during the Eisenhower administration because the Eisenhower administration was closely aligned with American oil interests. The real embrace of the United States and Israel began after the 1967 war. Until the 1967 war, France was Israel's most important Western ally and supplier of arms and aircraft and so on. After the 1967 war, the United States began to realize that Israel could be a Cold War asset,

and that's when American military assistance to Israel began to escalate. Peace in the Mideast is of interest not only to your nation and your neighbors, but to the whole world because of what could happen in the event that war were to break out there, the repercussions that that could have all over the world. So during the 1970s, 1980s, Israel was a major Cold War asset, and that went along with the growing power of the Israel lobby.

The most prominent name in that period was the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, but also a sort of silent partner in the Israel lobby has always been the military-industrial complex. Handshakes, hugs, and a ceremonial signing as the United States lays out how much money it will give to Israel, each step meant to send the message that the countries are the best of friends. This MOU nonetheless greatly increases our military assistance commitment to Israel. 9-11 is another inflection point because if people are old enough to remember that event, a day or two after 9-11,

then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon flew to the United States, embraced President Bush, and said, oh, now you guys know what we live with. We're going to teach you how to combat terrorism because we've been doing this for a long time. And President Bush didn't understand very much about anything and basically accepted that embrace and accepted Israel's guidance on how to deal with 9-11. The prime minister, as you recall, was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush. And we all know what happened with that decision. And so particularly in the arena of surveillance and intelligence and counterterrorism, the embrace of the two countries grew much, much closer, and relations deepened a great deal in the post-9-11 period. And for the last several years, that military aid has been $3.8 billion a year,

and there will be a big supplement coming now in the budget request that President Biden has submitted to Congress, which if the Republicans ever get it together and they elect a Speaker of the House, will be forthcoming pretty quickly. In Israel, we must make sure that they have what they need to protect their people today and always. The security package I'm sending to Congress and asking Congress to do is an unprecedented commitment to Israel's security that will sharpen Israel's qualitative military edge, which we've committed to. Has this alliance over the decades brought more stability to that region? No, the opposite. It's brought more instability because even though several Arab countries have normalized their relations with Israel and signed peace treaties, Egypt, Jordan, in the Abraham Accords, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, and then subsequently Morocco and Sudan, the cause of Palestine is very popular in the Arab world. So in the last week,

especially after the bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. Cell phone footage captured the moment an explosion turned an overcrowded hospital in Gaza into a massive fireball. Hundreds are thought to have been killed in what might be Gaza's worst single loss of life yet. Hamas won the public opinion war on that because they claimed that Israel bombed it. And that's the story that was believed

throughout the Arab world. And very quickly, there were demonstrations in several Arab capitals. So the fact that the governments of the Arab world are willing to normalize relations with Israel, even governments like Saudi Arabia, which don't have an open peace treaty with Israel, but Saudi-Israeli relations have been quite good for some years, that creates a tension in the Arab world, and particularly in Lebanon and Jordan. Before we move on, we should note that there's still no consensus on what caused that explosion or who's responsible. Since we spoke to the professor, U.S. intelligence has said, with high confidence that the explosion was caused by a malfunctioning Palestinian rocket.

Like so many others, I'm heartbroken by the tragic loss of Palestinian life, including the explosion at the hospital in Gaza, which was not done by the Israelis. Okay, so both countries are getting a lot out of this relationship, despite the fact that this relationship is bringing even more instability to the region. Who do you think gets more out of it, the United States or Israel? That's a hard question. I would say that both countries benefit enormously from the relationship. Probably Israel is the greater beneficiary in the sense that were it not for unrestrained U.S. support for Israel militarily, diplomatically, and so on, Israel would be exposed to considerably greater international pressure. Just a recent example,

the United States vetoed a resolution in the UN Security Council the other day which called for a ceasefire release of the Israeli civilians being held hostage. So Israel wouldn't have abided by such a resolution if the Security Council had passed it. It's in violation of more than 40 resolutions of the Security Council. It simply doesn't pay attention to the UN.

Many other countries, including the United States, also don't, so no surprise there. But American support does protect Israel from that kind of international condemnation that it otherwise would have been subject to. Okay, so you've given us quite a history lesson here from, you know, the 1940s to the present moment. When these attacks were perpetrated on Israel by Hamas, President Biden immediately kicked into this staunch U.S. support of Israel gear that we've been talking about through the decades. What informs him in this moment? Is it the fact that he's practically been around the entire time and buys in to this history? That is a part of it. Emotionally, I think he sincerely and deeply feels a bond to Israel, which is brooded in the American and more broadly Western sense of guilt

over having done nothing to prevent the Holocaust. Secondly, the Democratic Party at this point has been for decades tied at the hip to the Israel lobby. And what that means is that there's the presumption that any significant criticism of Israel is going to cost the Democratic Party not only votes, but maybe even more importantly, money, because politics in America these days is all about the money. That's for domestic politics. The other reason that Biden embraces Israel is the foreign policy imperial reason. a key asset in the maintenance of American imperial hegemony in the Middle East. And the Biden administration totally buys into this militaristic understanding of American security. That's the Biden, Obama, Clinton understanding that we won't use armed force as recklessly as the Bush administration did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we're going to use it a lot anyway, and they have.

We're going to make sure Iron Dome continues to guard the skies over Israel. We're going to make sure other hostile actors in the region know that Israel is stronger than ever and prevent this conflict from spreading. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos

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which we've committed to. Today explained Sean Ramos' firm. It isn't just our listeners wondering about America's staunch support of Israel. As the president is repositioning warships, shipping off weapons, and asking Congress for more money to support Israel, people throughout the United States are protesting in support of Palestinians. Protesters from an anti-war group Jewish Voice for Peace have staged a sit-in inside a congressional building. The demonstrators are calling for an immediate ceasefire as the death toll rises in Gaza.

Some protesters wore shirts with the words, Not in our name. Last week, CBS and YouGov polled Americans about President Biden's response, and the results were mixed. More than half of Americans disapprove of how the president's handling the Israel-Hamas conflict, and notably, a third of Democrats disapprove.

Especially when it came to sending humanitarian aid to Gaza and weapons to Israel. You've got a strong majority saying, yes, send humanitarian aid to Israel, humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, a majority not as high

as for Israel, but notably not as much, more division on whether to send weapons and supplies to Israel. That gets division, humanitarian aid, less so. We asked Professor Joel what he made of the poll. I was actually very surprised because that does represent a sea change in American public opinion. Now, that's been building up

for quite some time as a lot of information about Israel's very severe and extensive violations of Palestinian human rights have made it into the consciousness of Americans who pay attention to global news and even in the American Jewish community. The professor pointed out that just a few years ago, a survey by the Jewish Electoral Institute found that a quarter of American Jews thought Israel was an apartheid state. This is huge. Nothing like that has ever been recorded in the American Jewish relationship with Israel since 1967, but maybe ever. And so there has been a sea change in American public opinion. That said, on this and on a good number of other issues, our representatives in Washington do not do what the majority of American people want. Health care for all is supported by close to 70% of the population. How close are we to

getting Congress to legislate that? Not at all. A majority of the American people support abortion rights, but the Supreme Court eliminated them. And we could go down the list of another issues where Washington simply does not do what the majority of the American people want. And the explanation for that is that the political system is controlled by money. If there was a world in which the federal government in this country was more responsive to the desires of voters, the majority of Americans who maybe say, we don't want to stop supporting Israel, but we would like to stop sending weapons, billions of dollars in aid, you know, repositioning our aircraft carriers to

support this country, keeping Israel as the biggest recipient of foreign aid in the world from the United States. What would that do to Israel? Practically speaking, it wouldn't do a great deal. So if the United States cut all aid tomorrow, which is not going to happen, Israel would have some difficulties adjusting, but it could, for the most part, adjust. What would happen, though, is that the United States would have very much greater leverage over Israel in the diplomatic arena, and it might allow an American government, which would be inclined to do this, to press Israel to reach some kind of peaceful resolution with the Palestinian people. But you sound so sure that this can't happen in the near future. And that's because of what? How deeply entrenched are militaries and intelligence operations and financial interests are? Yes, all of those reasons. And also that the balance of forces regionally in the Middle East is not propitious. So we can tell from the horrific Hamas slaughter of civilians that it's not a viable leadership for the Palestinian people.

Hamas is not a force which is going to lead the Palestinian people to liberation. And the other major political party in the Palestinian arena is Fatah, which is the main party administering the Palestinian Authority, which rules in the West Bank. They are utterly corrupt and discredited by their collaboration with Israel. So there is no Palestinian party. Now, that's not because the Palestinian people are bad or incapable. It's because Israel has made sure that the Palestinian people are politically divided and that no reasonable force can emerge among the Palestinian people. So the Palestinian people need to develop an appropriate political leadership that can win support from the majority of their own people and then propose some kind of viable deal for Israel. Whatever

it will be, two states, one state, confederation, I mean, I don't think it's worth arguing about those possibilities since none of them are on the table, but something that would represent a future that both Israelis and Palestinians could share and feel equal degrees of security, equal rights, democracy, national self-determination for both peoples, and so on. That's not on the table, not from the Palestinian side, nor from the Israeli side. It's clear that the United States and Israel have been huge benefactors from each other. It's clear that Israel has deeply entrenched itself in the United States foreign policy. I wonder, you know, is there a chance when this war is over, hopefully one day very soon, that this shift in public opinion in the United States could also lead to something changing, not only in this relationship, but on the ground, in Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank?

Does a diminished support for Israel amongst the American voter means some sort of tangible change could be in the cards. Perhaps, but not a very big change in the near future, because neither in Israel nor among the Palestinian people are there political forces that can propose some kind of realistic future that will meet the needs and affirm the rights of both peoples? No American government can say, okay, this is the deal, and you all do it, and we're going to force you to do it. That can't happen, and it won't happen. One scenario is that the United States has officially been telling Israel, President Biden and others, play by the rules of war. Okay, Israel already hasn't done that and has killed more than 4,000 people in the Gaza Strip.

If Israel invades the Gaza Strip, which I was just listening to Israeli radio this morning, and they are saying that they are preparing to do it, there is going to be a slaughter of Palestinian civilians of previously unseen proportions. Then people may say, oh, no, no, no, we didn't sign up for that. We don't support that. And maybe then there will be some kind of reconsideration of the relationship. Professor Joel Beynon, he is the Donald J. McLaughlin Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History Emeritus at Stanford University. Our program today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi and Isabel Angel.

We were fact-checked by Laura Bullard and edited by Matthew Collette and mixed by David Herman. Thank you for your questions. This is Today Explained.