Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
Every now and then, I get out one of my globes to remind myself of the geography of America’s many distant wars. Here’s a photo I took a couple of days ago:
It’s always staggering to ponder how small Israel is vis-à-vis most other nations in the region and indeed in the world. My AI friends compare Israel to countries like El Salvador, Belize, and Fiji. When was the last time Belize was accused of dictating U.S. foreign policy? Or Fiji?
Just looking at the globe, you’d think the USA would be far more concerned with countries like Turkey and Iran. My globe doesn’t bother (or ran out of room) to label Israel as “Israel.” Doesn’t my globe know that Israel has a right to exist?
Of course, Israel now seeks a “greater” vision of itself, annexing Gaza and the West Bank while expanding into southern Lebanon and Syria. Unlike Israel, I guess those countries and areas don’t have a right to exist.
Actually, I think people have a right to exist. Don’t you? The borders of nation-states are constantly evolving. Empires come and go. Didn’t the Roman Empire once believe it had a right to exist? What about the Athenian Empire? Or the Ottoman Empire? The British Empire?
People have a right to exist, not nations and empires. People have a right not to be exterminated to make way for other peoples. Germany’s Third Reich didn’t have a right to exist, and it certainly had no right to exterminate Jews and other so-called racial inferiors and social undesirables (gypsies, the Roma and Sinti, also had no right to exist under Nazi racial laws).
Israel, of course, occupies land that is sacred to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. In fact, Christian evangelicals in America appear to believe they must support Israel, if only to precipitate the end-times in which Jews, as non-believers in Christ, await the grimmest of fates on Judgment Day. Israeli leaders like Bibi Netanyahu, it’s quite clear, enjoy Christian evangelical support while remaining unworried about Christ’s second coming.
Assuming humans survive, historians centuries from now will wonder how the tiny nation-state of Israel exercised so much influence over U.S. foreign policy. It’s an astonishing story that may be unprecedented in human history. Paraphrasing Churchill, never has a country with so few and so little exercised such influence over a country with so many and so much.
