Religion behind US military support for Israel

ISRAEL’S military spending is the sixth highest per head in the world. You might wonder why it would need any further help. Yet last week the US pledged to give Israel almost $US3 billion in military aid in 2010.

(I use US dollars because that is the currency of the arms trade.) The US pledged $30 billion to Israel over the next decade. It will be about a fifth of Israeli military spending.

US military spending per head is less than two-thirds that of Israel.

Those are Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and CIA figures.

Why does the US persist with these vast, misguided military gifts to Israel, even under the new President who has called for greater understanding of the plight of Palestinians? The gifts have clearly not made the US more secure, to the contrary.

Rightly or wrongly, many in the Muslim world see the US as an enemy because of its support for Israel, especially its supply of weaponry that has been used in wars against Palestinians, and its virtual blind eye to illegal Israeli settlements outside its internationally recognised borders in occupied Palestine.

As a consequence the US is a target.

That does not justify the attempted and actual acts of terrorism against the US, but it does help explain them. So it is a mystery that US public opinion seems – quite irrationally — to support the continued identification of itself as an enemy of many Muslims, instead of withdrawing military aid and forcing a peace. Religion and history go some way to explaining the mystery.

We know, of course, that by and large the Arab and/or Muslim nations of the region are despotic hell-holes whereas Israel is a democracy. We know, too, that the militant Muslims who poison young minds to the extent they conduct suicide missions are utterly evil.

But that does not mean violence must be met with violence, or group economic punishment through blockades, or met with further settlement of occupied lands which augurs permanent loss for the original owners – either on pragmatic or ethical grounds.

The usual reason given for continued support for Israel is that the Jewish lobby in the US is so well-organised and well-financed that no political aspirant dare ignore it.

Further, the military aid is 75 per cent tied – it must be spent on US-produced things. That policy is quite popular in congressional districts where the military producers are based – and they are strategically well-scattered.

But there is another reason the policy is so domestically acceptable – it accords with the world view of fundamentalist Protestants.

Muslims frequently refer to the alliance of the US Britain and others as “Crusaders”. But that is a tad out-dated. The Crusaders were Catholics who sought to conquer Jerusalem and the “Holy Land” from the Muslims.

Pilgrimage and crusading were often ordered by priests, bishops and popes as part of the Catholic doctrine of intercession by a priest in the business of saving souls. A good pilgrimage or crusade would set you up for a place in Heaven.

Come the Reformation this changed. People could read the Bible for themselves in their own language. And whereas the Catholic priests had concentrated on the New Testament, the Bible-dominated fundamentalist Protestants turned to the Old Testament – the book of the Bible shared with the Jews.

It became manifest in the increasing use of Old Testament given names, particularly by Puritans in England and in the promotion of eye-for-en-eye justice and the like.

Throughout the 19th century in England, the Bible-adoring Protestants saw that Muslim control of Jerusalem was an impediment to the prophesised second coming. Quite a few British organisations were set up with the aims of promoting Jewish emigration to Palestine or converting Jews in Palestine to Christianity.

They naively imagined that it would not be long before all Jews converted to Christianity.

Oddly enough, Many Jews in Europe in the 19th century were against Zionism (the movement for a Jewish homeland or state in Palestine) because they thought it might undermine their hard-won civil rights – to vote, to sit in Parliament and so on.

The Empire builders saw Palestine as a critical possession in the route to India but were happy for a weak Ottoman Empire to possess it rather than it fall into the hands of another power.

After World War I and the defeat of Turkey, Britain took the League of Nations mandate over Palestine for that reason, having during the war promised the land to both the Arabs and the Jews in return for their support for the war effort – the Arabs for revolting against the Turks and the Jews for, among other things, Zionist leader Chiam Weizmann’s work on mass producing acetone for explosive production.

Between the wars, Jewish settlement into Palestine grew steadily, and it grew rapidly after World War II, so that statehood became inevitable with Jerusalem partly in Israel and partly in Jordan, till the Israelis took the Jordanian West Jerusalem and the 6000 square kilometers of the West Bank in 1967.

Jerusalem was in Jewish hands. From a Christian point of view – particularly from a Bible-believing Protestant fundamentalist view – that was just fine.

After all, Jesus was a Jew. From a Protestant fundamentalist view Jews are just unconverted Christians. Indeed, they think, when the Second Coming arrives, Jews will all inevitably become Christian.

Muslims, on the other hand, are pretty well beyond the reach of Christianity, beyond redemption. Jews, however, are just waiting to be redeemed. Much better the Jews control the Holy places than the Muslims.

These views (particularly given their naivety) should have nothing to do with a sensible policy on the Middle East, but religion is a powerful force in politics and fundamentalist Protestants are plentiful in America. No political aspirant in the US will lose many votes for supporting Israel.
CRISPIN HULL
This article was first published in The Canberra Times on 09 January 2009.