Why does the US back Israel?

13 August 2014 | Vashti Kenway

In the past month, untold destruction has been heaped on the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military. The death and destruction could at any time have been stopped by the US government. It chose to let it continue.

The afternoon of one of the most shocking moments of recent weeks – the shelling of a UN school designated as a safety zone – the US allowed Israel access to a cache of weapons that the US military keeps in the country for emergencies.

The stockpile includes ammunition, missiles and military vehicles. “The storage belongs to the US military”, writes Noam Sheizaf in +972 Magazine, “but the president can authorise a sale to Israel under special circumstances, as it did during the Second Lebanon War in 2006”.

And as Amnesty International protested on 1 August, “This latest ammunition deal was preceded by a shipment of 4.3 tons of US-manufactured rocket motors, which arrived in the Israeli port of Haifa on 15 July. These deliveries add to more than US$62 million worth of munitions, including guided missile parts and rocket launchers, artillery parts and small arms, already exported from the US to Israel between January and May this year.”

As the situation in Gaza worsened, Republican politicians were working in Congress to provide $225 million in additional funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield. Furthermore, recent reports leaked by Edward Snowden reveal that the US National Security Agency is sharing intelligence on “Palestinian targets” with Israeli spy services. All up, from January 2012 to May 2014 the US supplied Israel with more than US$270 million worth of weaponry.

While Israel’s military was being supplied by the US behind the scenes, front of house spokespeople for the White House were mouthing condemnations of Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians and the bombing of UN compounds marked as safety zones for the residents of Gaza. “The United States is appalled by today’s disgraceful shelling outside an UNRWA school in Rafah sheltering some 3,000 displaced persons, in which ten more Palestinian civilians were tragically killed”, reads the statement from State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki. Words are cheap to the US State Department.

So why does the US back Israel? The US relies on Israel to provide an internally stable regime in the Middle East that will back up its economic, military and strategic interests. This has been Israel’s historic role. Since Israel’s military victory in the Six Day War of 1967 – when Israel defeated three Arab armies – the US has seen the Zionist state as a vital prop in the defence of Western capitalist interests in the region. “Between 1967 and 1972, total US aid to Israel jumped from $6.4 billion per year to $9.2 billion per year,” wrote US socialist Lance Selfa in 1998. “US loans for Israeli purchases of US-made weapons jumped an average of $22 million annually in the 1960s to a yearly average of $445 million between 1970 and 1974.”

In return, Israel served as a “regional enforcer” for the US. The Nixon administration developed a policy “of subcontracting US foreign policy to local client states”, Selfa wrote. Israel was one of these. “Nixon and his errand boy, National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, assembled a ‘strategic triangle’ of Saudi Arabia, the Shah’s Iran and Israel to guard U.S. interests in the Middle East.”

Israel and Saudi Arabia continue to be two of the most internally stable friends of the US in the 21st century. Indeed, the war on Gaza, far from fracturing cohesion inside Israel, has strengthened it. This makes Israel a valuable prize for the US. This is why it continues to arm the Zionists to the teeth and provide generous funding for Israel’s military.

Despite occasional strategic differences and condemnatory huff and puff from White House spokespeople, it is clear that Israel is a key link in the USA’s imperial power network.