Expository Essay on Personal Topic

America has been inherently pro-Israel in the past forty years. This viewpoint stems from a variety of sources, but the most obvious and well-supported idea seems to be the fact that American-Jews and Jewish lobbies alike have enormous influence on the actions of the American government. Organizations such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have tremendous influence in Washington. While AIPAC has been in existence since the 1970s, a new wave of support has also been constructed in recent years: the neo-conservatives. People like John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz, who have been in the political spectrum for some time now, have recently come to great power under the Bush administration and these individuals have had long standing ties with right-wing Israeli parties. On top of that, a large amount of America’s recent foreign policy in the Middle East is said to have come from these neo-con ties. The Iraq War, for instance is believed by a variety of scholars to have been a war fought with Israel in mind. The Bush Administration is said to be supporting Israel’s nuclear program as a reason to keep Iran from moving forward with its nuclear program. There are a variety of reasons that the United States supported Israel for the past forty years, more so than any other country it has allied with, but it seems that the most plausible justification for these strong ties are tight-nit, influential Jewish lobby groups in America.
American-Jewish organizations in the United States seem to be the primary reason that the United States has backed Israel. For one, America has nothing to gain by being allies with Israel, as a large part of the rest of the Middle East’s spite for American stems from the fact that they are so closely aligned with the Jewish state. America is essentially making more enemies by standing by Israel and when analyzed from an opportunistic perspective, it simply does not make sense. If the U.S. were allied with countries like Iraq or Iran, it would be much less of a target for global terrorism. According to Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, as quoted in the article “Unsettling signs for Israel over alliance with US” printed by The Irish Times in April 2006, the idea that America supports Israel because of its similar terrorist interests is simply preposterous. “The US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel not the other way around.” Essentially what the professors are saying is that the United States looses much more international safety and credibility by siding with Israel. Thus other claims about the close U.S.-Israel relationship, such as the notion that they share similar terrorist threats, are ludicrous. Clearly the only logical conclusion is not drawn towards Jewish lobbyists, but it definitely makes these groups strong candidates.
The fact that these organizations have been influential for decades, some even set up before the creation of a Jewish state, provide evidence in favor of this argument. The AJC in particular, celebrated its centennial in 2006, which the president not only attended, but gave a speech in which he promised to do all he could to prevent a nuclear program from being developed in Iran according to the article “Bush: US ties to Israel 'unshakable'. Annan Merkel also address centennial gathering of American Jewish Committee” which appeared in the Jerusalem Post in May of 2006. Similarly the AIPAC is being indicted by the UN for handing confidential documents to Israeli diplomats concerning Iran. While is arguable that these instances point more to the U.S. wanting to carry out its own will in the Middle East, the fact remains that America would not need to be as concerned for its own safety, if it did not support Israel. Yet, despite this obvious fact and the knowledge that the U.S. global image has only suffered as a result of this partnership, American leaders intrinsically support Israel, leading one to believe that there must be more at stake than mutual interests in Middle East foreign policy.