Israel is representative of the paradigm conflict arising from attaching ethnicity to nationhood, and religion to the state. Civil and human rights and international law go to wayside. Hannah Arendt's work on anti-semitism explains the relationship between the flawed origins of the western concept of the nation state, colonialism, and the rise of totalitarianism.
It is characteristic that discussions of this subject, when it comes to Israel, naturally devolve to a rationalization of partition and the representation that partition is a solution or resolution of a "democratic" nations problem. Ironically, emerging totalitarian leaders of the fascist period between the world wars focused on partitioning and ejecting ethnic populations as well. So that legacy is stood on its head.
In America, the dangerous connection between religion and the state is exploited by republican demagogues and unscrupulous popular culture politico-evangelists like Hagee, Falwell, Robertson, et al, who created the mass movement focused on events in the middle-east, the bible, and Israel(the holy land) in particular. Central to this are the politics of christian religious fundamentalism and its grinding attack on the rationalist underpinnings of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. This mass movement and its propaganda arm are supported by the current republican leadership as an essential part of its mass electoral appeal. This is the political center of gravity of the American attack on human rights at home and our belligerence abroad, not Israel.
The Israeli lobby's influence is exaggerated because its merely is a focal point for demagoguery and christian fundamentalist mass politics in the US. This is something the defense contractors and oil interests represented by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush patronize and exploit. It is, in the most basic sense, their political cover and central to their obscurantist theocratic mass movement. Israel's colonial relationship with Palestinians and the focus on "terrorism" is another paradigm exploited by the American national security apparatus and the corporate media to justify our aggression elsewhere in the middle east. Corporate America, the American defense department, and the international oil majors have no problem with any of this. I don't think that the Israeli state does either. It is however, a historical accident, that they are a convenient rallying point for the political constellation that supports American aggression abroad.
