Al Franken, in one of his books, answered the "why Israel" question with "because it's the only democracy in the middle east and that ought to count for something." That said, it has become an increasingly illiberal democracy since Rabin was assassinated in 1995 and, if we're being honest, has been about Israel first, last and always from the drop. Israel has great PR, though, is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world from a lobbying standpoint and has goals that have traditionally aligned with the US often enough for us to let them get away with murder. Should you question this decision they remind you of their PR and lobbying and that's it for you. Lemme show you a li'l movie about terrorists and terrorism: From a simplistic, uninvestigated standpoint, the Middle East is full of hook-nosed stereotypes we'll never understand, all of them hell-bent on annihilating those poor people Hitler tried to finish off. Question that narrative and find another line of work.The pro-Israel, vehemently anti-Trump contingent of American liberals will never make sense to me.
I’ll have to be fair to their argument though. The reason Jews are so gung ho about Israel and so willing to do anything to defend it it’s basically about hundreds of years of Jewish history. Jews got kicked out of their homes, exiled, pogroms everywhere, often for things that they had nothing to do with. And of course there’s the holocaust after all of that. From that perspective, Israel is basically the only place where Jews can at least to some degree control their own fate. And that’s not something they’ll give up, obviously.
Except that there have been incidents of antisemitism in the USA as well. It’s not something that you can easily guarantee because Jews in NYC are at the mercy of the rest of us, and like most in NYC are not allowed to be armed. I really don’t have a good answer, but as I said, the history of Judaism when Jews don’t have an Army and Navy is pretty bleak. Even leaving aside the Nazis, Jewish history pretty much shows why they need an ethos Tate somewhere with an army and navy under their control.