Major U.S. magazine calls for end to Washington-Tel Aviv special relationship
Washington, May 30 (RHC)-- Leading American news publication Foreign Policy says the United States should no longer give Israel unconditional economic, military, and diplomatic support due to the “zero” benefits of such policy and its rising costs.
“Instead of a special relationship, the United States and Israel need a normal one,” Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, wrote in the publication.
Consistent with Zionism’s core objectives, it said, Israel privileged Jews over others by conscious design, expanded illegal settlements, denied Palestinians legitimate political rights, treated them as second-class citizens, and used its superior military power to kill and terrorize residents of the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, and Lebanon with near impunity.
“Given all this, it is not surprising Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have recently issued well-documented and convincing reports describing these various policies as a system o apartheid,” according to the magazine Foreign Policy.
In the aftermath of the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza, which began on May 10 and lasted 11 days, Israel has been increasingly described as an “apartheid” regime, including by HRW, B'Tselem, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and last but not least, by the French government.
However, the United States has continued to back Israel’s “right to self-defense” which amounted to heavy bombardment of civilians in Gaza, killing at least 254 Palestinians, including 66 children, and displacing over 72,000 people in the besieged enclave.
According to FP, in the past, it was "possible to argue Israel was a valuable strategic asset for the United States, though its value was often overstated," but that argument holds no water any more. “During the Cold War, for example, backing Israel was an effective way to check Soviet influence in the Middle East because Israel’s military was a far superior fighting force than the armed forces of Soviet clients like Egypt or Syria. Israel also provided useful intelligence on occasion.”
“The Cold War has been over for 30 years, however, and unconditional support for Israel today creates more problems for Washington than it solves. Israel could do nothing to help the United States in its two wars against Iraq; indeed, the United States had to send Patriot missiles to Israel during the first Persian Gulf War to protect it from Iraqi Scud attacks,” Foreign Policy added.
According to the publication, the real costs of the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel are political, saying that as demonstrated this month, unconditional support for Israel makes it much harder for the United States to claim the moral high ground on the world stage.
FP also made a reference to the United States’ unilateral vetoing of UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions as well as its authorization of sending Israel an additional $735 million worth of weapons, saying Washington’s claim to moral superiority stands exposed as “hollow” and “hypocritical.”
“With a normal relationship, the United States would back Israel when it did things that are consistent with the United States’ interests and values and distance itself when Israel acted otherwise.”
