Biden also told the media that Xi Jinping is a dictator only minutes after speaking face-to-face with Xi in California. It is Trump making the absurd claim. The way that you quoted my sentence makes it seem like I said that.

Arrogance often leads to bumbling oafdom.

I honestly don’t know what conversation you’re referring to, but I get the impression you’re straw-manning whatever it was and just trying to have the same argument again.

Look, I’ll engage and in good faith.

Israel is more than a vassal. You’re right. To simply say Israel is a vassal is too simplistic about the relationship.

Israel definitely is a client-state. But so is Egypt, Jordan, etc. And they don’t get the relationship that Israel gets, so yes you’re right. There’s something here that requires analysis.

Now to acknowledge some truths on the other side of this argument. Israel does serve and has served US interests in an extremely powerful way since at least the 1960s by slicing the Arab world in half, separating Egypt from Syria and thereby firmly disrupting the pan-Arabism that was a real threat to US power in the 1970s.

It continues to perform this function today, very obviously so given the way the Abraham accords are the center-piece of the US alliance structure for the region despite the Abraham accords being against the interests of every single one of the Arab client states.

But let’s attack that idea as well.

Why do many US elites want to cut Ukraine loose, even though Ukraine is performing a similar function in Eastern Europe? Why has opposition to the genocide in Gaza been criminalized throughout the west while you can still more or less freely read and write think pieces about the Russian point of view in that war? Mearsheimer and Tucker Carlson were only criticized for the crime of not being anti-Russian. Meanwhile grandmothers are arrested en-masse for saying you shouldn’t bomb Palestinian children. So Israel isn’t simply a US military project. Something else is afoot. You’re right.

One major difference, the difference that you point at, is the prominence and reach of the Zionist lobby in the USA.

It makes sense that you identify this as the critical difference.

But did the Zionist lobby transform the US or did it transform Israel?

Israel in the 1960s and 1970s was a very different state. It was still colonial, genocidal, and apartheid to be sure but it had a different politics and ideology. It was far more secular and it even embraced ideas that were basically socialist. The kibbutz is a synthesis of Zionism and socialist communalism.

The American zionist lobby exported US millennialism to Israel. The American Zionist lobby with its strict and patriarchal conservative and capitalist morality is the synthesis of radically political Evangelical Christianity and Zionism.

It’s not a foreign ideology. The Zionist lobby are not foreigners. Almost all of them are American. Israel does contribute cash to the project but overwhelmingly the financial power of the American Zionist lobby comes from American Zionists, and the large majority of American Zionists are politically radical Evangelical Christians of a distinctly American flavor.

The American Zionist lobby didn’t take over the USA. It rose in prominence within the USA alongside the rise of politically radical Evangelical Christianity, and as it rose to power in the US, it also swept away the leftist (genocidal, settler colonial, ethno-fascist, but still economically-populist and thereby leftist) “Labor Zionism”.

The US-Israeli alliance began in the 1970s and in the 1970s it was more an alliance of convenience. The US wanted to break pan-Arabism, and Israel wanted to break their neighbors.

Politically radical evangelical Christianity became a dominant force in the USA really in the 1980s and has become more dominant ever since. The American Zionist lobby is simply part of that movement.

Every other US client-state in the Middle East is just an alliance of convenience. The US knows that Saudi Arabia fucking hate them. They know that the people of Egypt don’t want them, that almost all Jordanians (regular Jordanians) hate Israel.

Just look at the way Bahrainis were cheering as Iran bombed Bahrain.

The Arab client-states are not reliable partners. The only thing really holding the Arab states in that alliance is that without US backing, that collection of absolute monarchies would one by one meet the fate of the Romanovs. Those despots are only with the US because they don’t have any other option.

But Israel.

It is a very special relationship with Israel. There has been a profound ideological fusion between the state of Israel and the USA.

The Zionist Lobby are almost all Americans. It would be incorrect as a matter of fact to say it is a foreign influence because they almost all are not foreigners. The money is overwhelmingly coming from domestic sources. The funds Israel provides are small compared to the funds provided by very wealthy Americans.

And it’s also incorrect as a matter of simple fact to say that the Zionist lobby is even Jewish.

It’s not. The very large majority of them are politically radical evangelical Christian Americans.

The relationship between the US and Israel is so special because it’s eschatological. That eschatology very very very directly has its origins in politically radical evangelical Christianity.

You just do not see this eschatological world view in Judaism before the 2000s. Like, you’d need to really find some fringe figures within Judaism to believe in this end of times shit. But now it’s mainstream. It’s dominant in Israel. It’s the ideology that drives the state.

The American Zionist lobby represents the ideological takeover of Israel by politically radical evangelical Christianity.

The Zionist lobby absolutely does have immense power within the USA, it’s extremely powerful. But it’s not a foreign influence. It’s the overwhelmingly an expression the eschatology of politically radical evangelical Christian’s and the synthesis of Zionism and that eschatology has absolutely stripped away almost all ideological features that Zionism had in, say, the 1980s and replaced them with the State Ideology of the USA.

You’re absolutely right that saying Israel is merely a vassal is an incomplete analysis.

To really explain the state of Israel today and to explain the absolute devotion of the western ruling elite towards the Zionist project, you need to incorporate the eschatology.

Israel isn’t just a proxy for US military power. It’s a proxy for all Americas beliefs about itself.

Settler colonialism. Apartheid segregation. Rabid violence sitting beside wanton consumerism. Genocide as its founding act, of downright constitutional importance. The aggrieved siege mentality while they inflict suffering on the world.

Israel is America, and it became American by its ideological and eschatological capture by politically radical Americans who believe that all of those things are glorious. The Zionist lobby is an expression of US ideology that has very little relationship to the “Labor Zionism” that defined Israel prior to it’s ideological capture and fusion with the US eschatological right.