It’s Time to End the ‘Special Relationship’ With ‘Israel’ - FP

By Al Ahed Staff, Agencies

In an opinion piece published by the Foreign Policy, Stephen M. Walt said 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,” Walt 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 human rights organization B’Tselem have recently issued well-documented and convincing reports describing these various policies as a system of apartheid,” it said.

In the aftermath of the latest ‘Israeli’ aggression on Gaza, which began on May 10 and lasted 11 days, the Zionist entity 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 the Zionist regime’s so-called “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,” according to the author.

“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,” he added.

According to the publication, the real costs of the special relationship between the US 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,” FP added.