Any explanation of the political success of the Israel lobby has to focus not on the American Jews, but on the American gentiles who for sixty years have been persuaded of the rightness of Israel's cause.

The Zionist narrative resonates deeply with a lot of non-Jewish Americans because it is the American pioneer narrative. The settlers get off the boat, build an advanced material civilization with their own sweat and brains, and defend their work against the assaults of the jealous, resentful natives by a combination of superior technology and superior character. Their effort is sustained and justified by a combination of God, History, and Identity (or to be blunt, Race). In a country where every foot of ground we stand on was taken away from the natives at gunpoint by Euro-Americans with a sense of Manifest Destiny, it is easy to equate the Israeli halutz with the American pioneer, and the Palestinians with the Comanches. The equation is reinforced by way English and American evangelical Protestants, from the days of the Puritans onward identify themselves with the Hebrews of the Old Testament. The Israelis, in sum, are People Like Us, and a lot of Americans think of themselves as People Like Them.

For exactly the same reasons, the European left and its American counterpart loathes Israel. The Zionist narrative, from this viewpoint, is no different from the history of Ulster, Rhodesia, South Africa and Algerie Francaise. (An English friend once told me that in Nationalist neighborhoods in Belfast people flew the Palestinian flag and in Unionist neighborhoods they flew the Israeli flag.) Post-colonial European guilt demands that the Israelis either submit to be ruled by the surrounding native majority or abandon what they have built in order to "return" to the West. From the American point of view, that would be like giving the country back to the Indians.

Why are Jews the only people on the planet not entitled to any part of their homeland? Even american indians are given that much.

Your analogy fails in that aspect; that part of their world is not "colonized" by Jews, they're returning to a place, their historical homeland, that they've been driven from.

Additionally, the state of Israel also has arab members in their parliament and has no policy aimed at the extermination of the palestinian state and people. Can the same be said of Hamas?

Drop the marxist thinking, the "if someone is strong it's because they're oppressing someone closeby" mentality. Sometimes peoples and states are weak because of their own self-destructive tendencies, misrule, and corruption.

Finally, if you lived next to someone who taught his kids to hate you and that blowing themselves up to kill your family was their goal in life, you'd be a bit touchy as well.

The whole Israel/Palestine conflict is a racist civil war which has been going on forever with no end in sight, because the Jews have no intention of making peace when they can get away with being an apartheid state instead.

There's simply no good reason the U.S. should be taking one side over the other, because all we are doing is perpetuating the mess, and earning the enmity of any one who sympathizes with the other side.

Only if you believe in the Biblical promise is Israel the homeland of the Jews. We believe that, but why should any non-Jew agree? At least I've offered an explanation of why a lot of American gentiles do.

The issue is that the Jews mostly went and lived somewhere else and then came back. If, instead of being slaughtered to near extinction, the American Indians could also have, say, mostly left North America, multiplied in exodus, and then desired to return by the millions to US territories thereby displacing millions of US citizens...

Well there would have been hard feelings on all sides I'm sure. (Please also note that there were actually about 70,000 Jews living in Palestine in 1900.) I guess the problem really stems from people (on all sides) feeling that they are entitled to land that other people posess, and their willingness to do terrible things to "make things right". Kill or learn how to share really are the only solutions in that case.

jack_cerf:

Only if you believe in the Biblical promise is Israel the homeland of the Jews.

When even a society's God is racist, there's little hope in sight.

The scary thing, theologically, is that the American Protestants who have sided with the Zionist's ideals actually want an apocalypse/holocaust in Israel as part of their vision of the endtimes. But there will come a point where these same Protestants will move on to the next theological fad, and make an about face on their support for Israel faster than you can say "Martin Luther" (I mean, after all, their religion was founded by an anti-Semite). Strange bedfellows, indeed.

The Anglo-American Protestant identification with the Biblical Hebrews is much broader than the group who think that they are bringing about the End Times by supporting Israel.