Like other capitalist states, the government of the United States seeks to further its capitalist interests. It uses its friends and abuses its foes, trading when it can, invading when it cannot. It installs puppet governments to secure favorable economic relations and facilitate the import of natural resources — oil from Iraq and Saudi Arabia, gas from Afghanistan — that are essential for capitalist expansion. Millions perish every year of curable disease and chronic hunger in the third world and millions more meet their proverbial maker in the many imperialist wars we wage. As egregious (or not) as we might find this, it is the standard M.O. of the capitalist nation state. It is no big surprise, as they say.

What is surprising, however, is the U.S. political establishment’s insistence on maintaining a detrimental relationship with one state in particular: Israel. Unlike any other state, only Israel can be sure of U.S. military, economic and diplomatic support, year after year, decade after decade, regardless of its international and domestic policies, regardless of whom it invades and whom it occupies. This “special relationship,” as JFK called it, provides Israel with military and economic superiority in the region that allows it to continue its war-mongering unchecked. Specifically, Israel receives about $4.3 billion in direct foreign assistance (economic and military aid) per year, the majority of it coming in grants, not loans and totaling over $154 billion by 2005 — a sum far greater than that received by any other state. In per capita figures, U.S. taxpayers subsidize every Israeli with more than $500 per year, compared to the meager $20 per year that each Egyptian receives. Diplomatically, U.S. support of Israel has included 42 vetoes of U.N. Security Council resolutions that indicted Israel between 1972 and 2006 — more than all the vetoes of all the other Security Council states combined.

Democrats and Republicans alike have blindly supported Israel for decades, rarely if ever debating why this should be U.S. foreign policy. Just look at the front-runners in the 2008 presidential race.

Sen. Hilary Clinton remarked at Princeton in January 2006: “the security and freedom of Israel … has been a hallmark of American foreign policy for more than 50 years and we must not — dare not — waver from this commitment.”

Her Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, echoed her words at an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in March 2007: “We must preserve our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully funding military assistance.”

From the “other side” of the political spectrum, Sen. John McCain adds: “In addition to her moral commitment to Israel’s security, America must provide Israel with whatever military equipment and technology she requires to defend herself.”

Although U.S. Middle East policy is clearly in crisis, neither Clinton nor Obama nor McCain seems willing to question unconditional U.S. support for Israel. They did not criticize the Israeli invasion of Lebanon; they do not criticize the anti-Palestinian apartheid, even though many progressive Israelis loudly voice their opposition to their own government’s belligerency; and, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden has repeatedly cited the unequivocal U.S. support of Israel as a central cause behind al-Qaeda’s jihad (defense of Islam) against the West, the presidential candidates refuse to acknowledge that such guaranteed support for Israel is a security liability for the people of the United States.

Do these professional politicians not understand that Islamist militancy is a reaction to our foreign policy in the region? Do they not see that the last 50 years of this foreign policy cost us the lives of over 3,000 New Yorkers on 9/11, not to mention hundreds of more in Madrid, Glasgow, and London? Do they not see that unconditional support is not necessarily the best policy for Arabs, Israelis or U.S. citizens?

Of course they do. However corrupt and morally bankrupt they are, neither Clinton nor Obama nor McCain is stupid. Why then do they preach in unison that the United States “dare not waver” from this “moral commitment” by “fully funding military assistance” when it is clear that a more evenhanded policy in the region would best serve U.S. interests — not to mention principles of peace and justice?

Put bluntly, they all want to be the next President of the United States of America. They are all acutely aware that in order to win the presidency, they must support Israel unconditionally. If they do not, the Israel Lobby will run their campaigns into the ground, and they know it. In a recent book entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University describe the Israel Lobby in Washington as a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations” comprised of both Jews and non-Jews, including Christian Zionists, that uses its immense power to manipulate public discourse in pro-Israel ways, turning those who seek healthy dialogue into “anti-Semites” and “Jew-haters.” President Jimmy Carter, for example, suffered an intense smear campaign and was labeled a “Jew-hater” with Nazi sympathies for condemning Israel’s brutal human rights record in his book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, even as he vehemently defends Israel’s right to exist.

Unlike various other ethnic lobby groups — including those for Irish-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Armenian-Americans, all of which have swayed US foreign policy — only the Israel Lobby has been successful in creating such a “special relationship” with its interest state. Why? Because it has far superior resources, a fact that raises another important question about the nature of U.S. democracy: do we want a governmental system in which money can legally buy policy, or would we prefer one in which votes mandate it? As long as lobby groups continue to dictate both domestic and international policies, we are stuck with the former system.

Yes, the threat is real. If we do not check the Israel Lobby and others like it, if we do not initiate more open and more critical dialogues surrounding U.S. support of Israel, the War on Terror, and Middle East policy in general, we will inevitably create a world of increasing chaos, a world of which we are a part.

Evan Baker-Smith is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at ebsmith@cornellsun.com. Praxis Makes Perfect will appear alternate Tuesdays this semester.