The conspiracy theory behind this is that Jews control everything, and that’s why anti-BDS laws exist. Jewish media overlords don’t like mean things being said about Israel, so they pull the strings on their puppet politicians, and make them dance.
The reality is a couple of things. First, Israel is an ally of the US, and politicians have burned a lot of political capital propping the country up for the last 60-odd years. There’s a bit of a sunk-cost fallacy there; we need to keep supporting Israel, rather than finding new and less-sucky friends in the middle east (like, I dunno, maybe apologizing to Iraq for fucking their whole country over with the shah?, not that they’re great, but we def. made that particular pile of shit). The other one is that evangelical Christians need to support Israel, because they believe that Jesus is going to return as the Messiah in Jerusalem, to the Jews. Anything that can potentially threaten the possibility of Israel controlling Jerusalem would undercut their religious beliefs, so they really want to dump money into Israel. (No, that’s not a bad joke, or conspiracy theory itself; I can probably find links to sermons of guys like Greg Locke saying as much; they don’t like Jews, since Jews are Christ-killers, but they need Jews to usher in the apocalypse. AFAIK, this is pretty mainstream evangelical stuff.) Evangelicals have a lot of power in this country, even if they’re not that large of a population any more. Republicans are largely controlled by them, which is part of the reason that you won’t see any republicans opposing aid to Israel.
Anyway, BDS would threaten the support for Israel; therefore, anti-BDS is generally favored by Dems, and completely supported by Republicans.
I agree with most of that, but I think you’re reading a lot into two sentences.
This type of thinking is exactly what the Israeli lobby wants. If you can conflate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, then you can silence critics and make other people afraid to speak up. (Of course, some criticism of Israel is antisemitic, but it’s dangerous to start from that assumption.)
Here’s my issue:
The conspiracy theory behind this is that Jews control everything, and that’s why anti-BDS laws exist. Jewish media overlords don’t like mean things being said about Israel, so they pull the strings on their puppet politicians, and make them dance.
The reality is a couple of things. First, Israel is an ally of the US, and politicians have burned a lot of political capital propping the country up for the last 60-odd years. There’s a bit of a sunk-cost fallacy there; we need to keep supporting Israel, rather than finding new and less-sucky friends in the middle east (like, I dunno, maybe apologizing to Iraq for fucking their whole country over with the shah?, not that they’re great, but we def. made that particular pile of shit). The other one is that evangelical Christians need to support Israel, because they believe that Jesus is going to return as the Messiah in Jerusalem, to the Jews. Anything that can potentially threaten the possibility of Israel controlling Jerusalem would undercut their religious beliefs, so they really want to dump money into Israel. (No, that’s not a bad joke, or conspiracy theory itself; I can probably find links to sermons of guys like Greg Locke saying as much; they don’t like Jews, since Jews are Christ-killers, but they need Jews to usher in the apocalypse. AFAIK, this is pretty mainstream evangelical stuff.) Evangelicals have a lot of power in this country, even if they’re not that large of a population any more. Republicans are largely controlled by them, which is part of the reason that you won’t see any republicans opposing aid to Israel.
Anyway, BDS would threaten the support for Israel; therefore, anti-BDS is generally favored by Dems, and completely supported by Republicans.
I agree with most of that, but I think you’re reading a lot into two sentences.
This type of thinking is exactly what the Israeli lobby wants. If you can conflate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, then you can silence critics and make other people afraid to speak up. (Of course, some criticism of Israel is antisemitic, but it’s dangerous to start from that assumption.)