Israel's dropping of massive bombs on residential buildings in Beirut sparked a fresh wave of
global condemnation against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
And why not? He has virtually unlimited U.S. weapons as well as bi-partisan support from U.S. politicians. It's as though we're just setting our attack dog loose on everyone.
It's fucking astonishing that we have any relationship with Israel at all these days. The U.S. gets absolutely nothing out of this one-sided relationship.
Israel offers us:
-No unique strategic military position (we have that area covered already).
-No high-value industrial benefits (no natural resources or unique trade).
-No military arsenal or manpower support (their arsenal comes from us and their personnel is quite limited).
It's time to let them make friends with their neighbors on their own. They don't need us to do that and we sure as fuck don't need them.
The US is a parent sitting and watching its problem child beat the shit out of the other children in the playpark. Other concerned parents keep asking the US to do something, to which they shrug and say "kids will be kids, what can you do" while handing their child a knuckleduster.
Hacking and Blackmail are Israeli strengths. The two most common theories I hear are that that elected officials are impressed with the Israeli hacking capabilities and rather keep them on our side, or they are actively exploiting those capabilities to bend politicians to their will. Seeing how Israel operates in public with innocent civilians it seems rather obvious our predicament.
The problem with hacking and intelligence is they're vulnerable to hard power. In other words you can hack stuff but you're not going to hack your way out of Delta raiding your office. If Israel is using their hacking and intelligence to blackmail politicians then they're constantly one fuck away from "find out".
My understanding is the primary trade between the U.S and Israel is diamonds. We each export over $1B worth of diamonds and also each import over $1B worth of diamonds between one another. In the past year, the U.S. imported about half a billion dollars more from Israel than it exported to Israel (again mostly diamonds in both directions).
The diamond trade between our countries does not justify our participation in unnecessary wars (or genocides) in my opinion. It seems unlikely to be the reason we are so committed to this relationship. I think AIPAC's financial involvement in our elections represents a much bigger reason we support Israel.