Who is the biggest supporter of israel

It's within the realm of possibility, as some argue, that US support for Israel undermines regional stability and compromises America's status as neutral broker during peace negotiations.

The point here isn't to endorse the official US view, but describe the line of thinking that's been so influential in driving the American foreign policy establishment's approach to Israel. Jewish and Christian groups rally for Israel in New York.

US support for Israel isn't just about strategic calculation and foreign policy interests, or at least not anymore. For a long time, at the very least since the s, it's also been about domestic politics and the way American politicians read American voters.

Congressional votes on issues relating to Israel are famously lopsided. The Senate resolution supporting Israel's recent offensives in Gaza passed unanimously , as many "pro-Israel" bills and resolutions do. The simplest explanation for these lopsided votes is that supporting Israel is really, really popular among voters.

Indeed, Gallup data since consistently shows a much higher percentage of Americans sympathizing with Israelis than with Palestinians in the conflict:. So it makes sense that Congresspeople would take pretty hard-core pro-Israel stances: it's reasonably popular. But why is Israel so popular among Americans in the first place? One big reason is a perceived sense of "shared values.

Religious groups are two other critically important factors. American Jews and evangelical Christians are two of the most politically engaged groups in the United States. They're major constituencies, respectively, in the Democratic and Republican parties. And both are overwhelmingly pro-Israel.

There are nuances here: evangelical support for Israel tends to be more uncritical than Jewish support. For instance, a majority of reform and secular Jews — 65 percent of the American Jewish population — disapprove of Israel's expansion of West Bank settlements. And Jews under the age of 35 are the least likely to identify as Zionist though a majority still do.

On the other hand, the older and more conservative Jews who aren't entirely representative of the more liberal body of Jewish-American public opinion toward Israel, have a lot of clout with national politicians. They express strong desire to vote based on the Israel issue and are clustered in Florida and Pennsylvania, large swing states in presidential elections.

By contrast, 31 percent of white evangelicals think the US has reached the right level of support, while 46 percent want the US to support Israel more. Add evangelicals, Jews, and broad public support together, and you get consistent, bipartisan support for Israel.

Neither survey is particularly statistically rigorous , so don't take the specific rankings too seriously. Is the group actually steering US politics and foreign policy in a direction it wouldn't go on its own? The two eminent international relations scholars argued that there's no way to explain the US-Israel relationship, from an IR perspective, other than as AIPAC and its allies pushing the US to act counter to its own interests.

They reject that either strategy or shared values fully explain the US support for Israel, so lobbying must. This argument is hugely controversial, including among international relations theorists. Some argued that The Israel Lobby creepily invoked classic anti-Semitic tropes of Jews secretly controlling the government. Others dismissed it as, in one particularly memorable phrase , "piss-poor, monocausal social science.

One of the main criticisms of Walt and Mearsheimer's thesis is that they don't present very much direct evidence that AIPAC lobbying influenced specific votes.

Another criticism is that Walt and Mearsheimer premise their thesis on the argument that Israel is neither strategically nor morally worthy of American support, and so policymakers must be supporting Israel because they've been coerced into it by AIPAC, whereas a number of policymakers will tell you they earnestly believe the alliance is worthwhile absent lobbying. Critics also argue that the definition of "Israel Lobby" beyond AIPAC used in the book is so large as to encompass basically the entire American foreign policy establishment.

Whatever you think of this debate, it can be easy to get lost in a binary between "the Israel lobby is all that matters" and "the Israel lobby is irrelevant. AIPAC doesn't always win. For instance, it lost a major fight in Congress when it pushed for more sanctions on Iran in February ; the sanctions were likely designed to kill the ongoing US-Iran nuclear negotiations.

According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 82 percent of white evangelicals think God gave Israel to the Jewish people. Less than half as many Jewish Americans or Catholic Americans agree. And according to a Bloomberg poll , almost 60 percent of evangelicals say the US should support Israel even if its interests diverge with American interests. As Hagee noted in his speech, some of the basis for this support is theological.

Darrell Bock, a Bible scholar and professor at the Dallas Theological Seminary, believes evangelical support for Israel is largely rooted in the belief that God makes good on his promises. These beliefs are both deeply held, and widespread. Depending on how you define it, about one in four Americans are evangelicals. And that God blesses those who bless the Jews, and God curses those who curse the Jews.

In the hypothetical event that all U. Israel has both a major domestic arms industry and an existing military force far more capable and powerful than any conceivable combination of opposing forces.

When Israel was less dominant militarily, there was no such consensus for U. Though the recent escalation of terrorist attacks inside Israel has raised widespread concerns about the safety of the Israeli public, the vast majority of U. In short, the growing U. Rather, as elsewhere, U. There is a broad bipartisan consensus among policymakers that Israel has advanced U. The pattern of U.

After attacking Arab armies in the war were successfully countered by the largest U. Aid quadrupled again in soon after the fall of the Shah, the election of the right-wing Likud government, and the ratification of the Camp David Treaty, which included provisions for increased military assistance that made it more of a tripartite military pact than a traditional peace agreement.

Aid increased yet again soon after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It also received another half million dollars for the development of a new jet fighter. During and immediately after the Gulf War, U. When Israel dramatically increased its repression in the occupied territories—including incursions into autonomous Palestinian territories provided in treaties guaranteed by the U. The correlation is clear: the stronger and more willing to cooperate with U. Therefore, the continued high levels of U.

Indeed, leaders of both American political parties have called not for the U. Since the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, there has again been some internal debate regarding how far the United States should back Israeli policies, now under the control of right-wing political leader Ariel Sharon. Some of the more right-wing elements, such as Paul Wolfowitz of the Defense Department, have been arguing that Sharon was an indispensable ally in the war against terrorism and that the Palestinian resistance was essentially part of an international terrorist conspiracy against democratic societies.

If seen to be in the strategic interests of the United States, Washington is quite willing to support the most flagrant violation of international law and human rights by its allies and block the United Nations or any other party from challenging it. No ethnic lobby or ideological affinity is necessary to motivate policymakers to do otherwise.

As long as the amoral imperatives of realpolitik remain unchallenged, U. Some of the worst cases of U. In these cases, grass roots movements supportive of peace and justice grew to a point where liberal members of Congress, in the media and elsewhere, joined in the call to stop U.