This article is Part 3 of a series of on the current conflict in Gaza. The opinions are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Valiant News. Please click here for Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Bonus Round as they are published.
The topic of Israel has a way of turning normally-objective and otherwise-sane people into rabid unthinking animals, for one side or the other (this author included). Due to the abundance of propaganda on both sides of the current conflict, I found while researching this article series that most fairly well-informed people – even experts – were completely misinformed about what’s actually going on. So this will be an attempt to distill something resembling the truth from the raging torrent of propaganda and blinding fury that has flooded the internet, not to mention practically every mainstream media outlet covering the conflict.
I will attempt to apply a filter of sanity to the biggest questions and myths surrounding the conflict:
- Are we headed to World War III?
- Were the 10/7 attacks an Iranian operation or an inside job?
- Is the U.S. government run by Israel or vice versa? What role does Christian Dispensationalism play?
- Is Israel committing war crimes or crimes against humanity?
- What does this mean for the peace process?
BONUS ROUND: What’s the deal with the USS Liberty, Jonathan Pollard and the Talmud? Also the one conspiracy theory that’s factually true.
3) Is the U.S. government run by Israel or vice versa? What role does Christian Dispensationalism play?
In short: no, no and practically none.
The Jewish Diaspora may be small in population compared to gentiles, but their community politics are dizzyingly fractured. Ironically, the Jewish community is so fractured that many left-wing American Jews (especially the youth) choose to remain ignorant of these political differences, or any practical knowledge of Israel itself for that matter. For instance, even if the overwhelming majority of American Jews are pro-Israel, the vast majority are also anti-Netanyahu.
I could write an entire article about how many antisemitic beliefs are comically disproven by very basic knowledge about Jews (and will, for the Bonus Round), but suffice it to say that – no – the Israel Lobby is indeed a powerful force, but it does not represent a control mechanism of the American government for a united conspiracy of globalist world Jewry. Furthermore, only someone completely unfamiliar with the long-standing tradition of Arabists in the American intelligence and foreign services could believe that the Government is “Occupied” by Zionists.
Imagining that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu is conspiring with George Soros and Hasidic rabbis to promote cultural degeneration in the West… is like imagining that Donald Trump is conspiring with Hillary Clinton and Mormon bishops to promote tea in England. It’s laughable.
These parties are often fundamentally opposed to each other, often virulently opposed to their imagined objective and… let’s just say that selling abortion and pornography to Americans is like selling ice to Aleutians. Netanyahu himself also gained many MAGA skeptics when he fully embraced COVID hysteria during the pandemic but, if his Branch Covidian policies were authoritarian and harmful, then his primary victims were his fellow Israeli Jews.
The simple truth is that Israel is just popular with Americans and – for obvious reasons – very popular with American Jews.
The Zoomer generation may have been raised on anti-Israel propaganda in high schools and especially higher education, but Boomers were raised on pro-Israel Hollywood films like The Juggler (1953), Exodus (1960) and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), the latter two being action films set during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Americans grew up watching household names like Paul Newman, Lee J. Cobb, Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and Kirk (as well as Michael) Douglas star in popular films set in Israel, humanizing their people and romanticizing their struggles.
Israeli leaders also made a lot of friends in the West by spurning early support from the Soviet Union to instead align with the United States and the Western Allies. They’ve also always been at the front lines of the war with Islamist terrorists long before they became the primary focus of American warfare.
In a sad way, it’s the US military’s perfect laboratory for counterinsurgency warfare; the roughly $1.4 billion per year that the US has sent to Israel over the last 75 years has yielded invaluable advances in drone, prosthetics, emergency medicine, active protection systems, anti-mine and counter-missile technology. That $130 billion total may sound like a lot (almost exclusively vouchers that can only be used to buy American hardware), but it’s a fraction of the cost of the perennially-troubled $1.7 trillion F-35 program for advances that have actually saved American lives. American generals can count on Israelis to come up with innovative military technology like their lives depend on it because, in the grand scheme of things, they do.
There’s another reason behind American aid: leverage. It’s in American interests to avoid a major war in the Middle East, so having the Israelis dependent on American aid means the President can stop any given Israeli prime minister from making a move that lights a tinderbox.
The Palestinians, by contrast, made the opposite impression with decades of unrelenting, unrepentant terrorism.
They were the first to hijack airplanes full of innocent people. They were the first to spill blood at the Olympic Games, with assistance from West German Neo-Nazis. They were the first to popularize suicide bombing, which was a heavy lift legally because – in Islamic jurisprudence – beheading infidels is recommended but burning alive is strictly forbidden, as “only Allah shall torture with fire“; ultimately, Sunni legal authorities ruled that high explosives kill through mass expansion and fragmentation, not burning, for the purposes of this rule.
Then, in the final coup de grace for Palestinian public relations, they were filmed celebrating in the streets – shouting “Allahu Akbar!” – after the 9/11 attacks. While PLO leader Yasser Arafat and his subordinates scrambled to condemn 9/11 in public statements, the common people of Palestine had become so accustomed to celebrating with parades and candy in the streets after terrorist attacks that it was practically a reflex.
The mystery isn’t why Americans – especially older Americans – support Israel. If anything, it’s a mystery why Hollywood – despite heavy Jewish representation – completely stopped making pro-Israel films, and why the Jewish-American intelligentsia failed to anticipate that virulent anti-Israel sentiment in academia would eventually lead to a surge in hatred for Israel – especially on the Radical Left.
Kirk Douglas and Yul Brynner on the set of “Cast A Giant Shadow” near the Judaean Mountains.
Conversely, the idea that Israel is simply a puppet of the Globalist American Empire is not true either. At most, it’s a satrapy. If Israel were truly helpless before the might of the American presidency, then the Jewish state would never have survived the Carter Administration. Neither would Bibi have survived the Obama Administration’s attempts to oust him from power.
In 2015, the Obama State Department sponsored and funded an Israeli political campaign to destroy Netanyahu’s political career after he humiliated Obama by urging Congress in a speech to reject his signature foreign policy “achievement” – the Iran Deal. By 2017, that campaign eventually morphed into a – stop me if this sounds familiar – years-long wide-ranging criminal investigation of Netanyahu on thin premises designed to scuttle his chances for reelection. Netanyahu’s trial for corruption formally started in 2020 and still has not concluded.
This crisis wracked the Israeli government for years, resulting in multiple threats by other Israeli parties to fracture his coalition, which ultimately succeeded in 2021. The whole torturous process led to five elections in nearly four years, culminating in the closest Israeli equivalent to a constitutional crisis when – after Netanyahu returned to power in the final days of 2022 – he promoted reform legislation that would cripple the power of the Israeli judiciary and legal-industrial complex (the left-aligned Israeli Bar Association currently has more control over judicial appointments than elected officials).
Protests erupted across the country and rare direct criticism from the military – as well as the proximate firing of the Minister of Defense – effectively paralyzed the government throughout 2023. Extremely awkwardly – in retrospect – some Israeli military members warned that they would refuse to respond to Palestinian attacks if Netanyahu didn’t relent.
Suffice it to say: if Israel were truly under American control, they’d probably be less dysfunctional.
I saw some "Queers for Palestine" waving this flag but don't know what kind of gay sex it represents. pic.twitter.com/bBQQpscyxv
— James Lindsay, America's top op (@ConceptualJames) October 28, 2023
Finally, there’s dispensationalism – a Christian theological belief that Jews remain bound to the Mosaic Old Covenant as Christians are bound to the New Covenant, closely tied to the idea that the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem will usher in the Apocalypse. It’s a common misconception – especially among Jews who have little contact with evangelicals – that the majority of American support for Israel comes from fundamentalist Christians trying to bring about the End Times.
While the biblical interpretation of dispensationalism is technically widespread in the United States, most Baptists for instance have no clue who John Nelson Darby is (he’s the father of dispensationalism). It does not remotely explain American or Christian support for the Zionist cause.
There are certainly some Christians who support Israel because they believe that a red heifer will sanctify the Third Temple and usher in the Rapture. However, they are outnumbered by many more who support Israel simply for being the only state in history to guarantee access to holy sites for pilgrims of all religions, for the cultural reasons mentioned above, for their fight against Islamic terrorism, to defend future Jews from the next Holocaust and because of all the non-dispensational biblical support for Zionism.
The latter is particularly important: it may come as a surprise to many but – in an embarrassing difference from my fellow Catholics, Orthodox and Eastern Christians – evangelicals actually read their Bibles and take them seriously. Without getting too deep into theological esoterica: the Hebrew Bible – or Old Testament – becomes an extremely silly document if you presuppose that All-Knowing, Almighty God was crossing his fingers all the times that he promised Israel to the Jews in perpetuity and vowed never to completely abandon them – simply because Jesus cursed at a fig tree.
A certain degree of philosemitism is natural for biblically-oriented Christians, which shouldn’t be surprising because the vast majority of the Bible’s books were written by devout Jews.
This article is Part 3 of a series of on the current conflict in Gaza. Please click here for Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Bonus Round as they are published.
