Explanations for the United States’ bloody-minded support of Israel’s wars in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran tend to fall into three categories.
There are geopolitical explanations: Israel is a bulwark against America’s foes; economic explanations: US public wealth is recycled through aid to Israel back into the coffers of American arms manufacturers and politicians; and conspiratorial explanations: Israel uses kompromat to hold its putative allies hostage.
What unifies these views is that they all place responsibility on elites, whether they are in America or abroad. For all their strengths, they overlook the more straightforward possibility that there might be something homegrown about American Zionism.
For around fifty years, US politicians have contended with the political reality that between one-fifth and one-third of the American electorate, depending on the election year and how polling questions are worded, vote as a nearly unified bloc on American policy toward Israel. Evangelicals, whose other chief concern is abortion, constitute the most powerful political constituency in the United States. Unlike Catholics, for example, they vote together. They emerged as a bloc to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980 and have been decisive in the election of every Republican president since, up to, and including Donald Trump.
While Israel enjoys strong bipartisan support among elected officials and is somewhat insulated from electoral politics, having such a disciplined social base has strengthened the Republicans. Evangelicals raise hundreds of millions of dollars for Israel annually through a carousel of church federations; the biggest today is Christians United for Israel, founded by the veteran televangelist John Hagee, which claims ten million members.
Churches and evangelical institutions fundraise for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), “adopt” illegal settlements, manage Aliyah programs, which facilitate the migration of Jews to Israel, and…
Auteur: Arron Reza Merat
