America is a Zionist nation, and it has been for about a century. We believe that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish nation, run by Jews, defended by Jews, and settled by Jews, and specifically we believe it belongs in that nook of the Levant currently and bothersomely occupied by it’s native inhabitants.
America naturally believes this of course because America itself started this way. But there’s more to the story. After all, we deny Russians the right to live in Ukraine, a nation that didn’t even exist fifty years ago and a people that didn’t exist much longer than that. We believe Russia is in the wrong - most of us of course, pending November 5th - in their attack and invasion. But Israel is different.
Why? It essentially comes to the main difference between Europe and America - religion. America is a devoutly religious nation, religious in ways that are hard to fathom for European minds. People here live, breathe, die for God. America believes that Israel needs to exist as a Jewish nation so it can be destroyed on Judgement Day in order for Jesus to return again in his great glory to judge the living and the departed… et cetera. Those familiar with those words feel the welling inside, that religious furvor that all who were raised in the steeple understand intimately. This is something that Europeans lack not because they lack religion, but because they lack fear. They live in luxury, supported by the latent wealth of the empires of long ago trickled down into social nets that maintain unbelievable standards of living for a billion people who never even step over starving or homeless in their lives.
America is different. We as a nation have just as much wealth but due to our capitalist mentalities, only experience a tiny fraction of it ourselves, instead knowing it exists in a gated community or condo far away from us. We instead have to deal with living in close proximity with starving, homeless, jobless, diseased vagrants in every major city. You can walk in the middle of the night from one end of Barcelona to the next and face no fear or threat - I personally have done this. In New York even in Times Square, the literal heart of American prosperity, you could get stabbed the second you step out of the Uber. Everyone knows it. We just deal with it.
It’s that fear that drives our religion, and it’s our religion that drives our Zionism. Because the algebra that puts our desire for safety above the existence of other humans, their own lives, is the same algebra that Israel has calculated for their own safety. In order to truly be safe, Palestine as we know it must cease to exist. And Lebanon as well. And Syria, and Jordan, and probably Egypt and more. They feel the fear we do, and justifibly, no doubt about it. But that fear has put them in a dangerous place - it’s put them in the corner, where all animals find themselves making the same calculation, and coming to the result that ‘my safety means your death’.
It’s not Israel’s fault, and it isn’t America’s fault either. It’s the fault of animal nature. This is what it takes to live in the jungle. It’s just that humanity left the jungle.
But the jungle didn’t leave us.