US global dominance in the Middle East required Israel as the region’s key ally

Evidence

In a Wall Street Journal essay titled “What the Heck Is a ‘Neocon’?,” leading neocon Max Boot stated unequivocally that “support for Israel” has been and remains a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” For the neocons, Israel is instrumental in advancing US power. If the United States was going to maintain its dominance in the Middle East, it followed that Israel, the most pro-American country in the region, had to be its key ally. This is not unique to the neocons but has been a bipartisan commitment. However, the neocons developed a relationship with their counterparts in Israel, the right-wing Likud Party, to develop the notion of the “terrorist” as a threat to democracy and civilization. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 432

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Echoes the realist-hegemonic explanation of the US-Israel alliance found in Mearsheimer and Walt’s ‘Israel Lobby’ and in materialist analyses of US Middle East policy.

Related

• Neocons and Israel, not the whole establishment, first pushed Islamism as the new enemy (similarity 0.84)
• Neocons partnered with Likud to frame the terrorist as a civilizational threat (similarity 0.82)
• Neocons urged Israel to destabilize Arab states to defeat the Palestinian cause (similarity 0.82)
• US and Israeli conservatives jointly framed the global Arab terrorist threat (similarity 0.80)
• Middle East oil control drives virtually every US regional intervention (similarity 0.80)
• Neoconservative Middle East think tanks advance pro-Israel agendas in US policy (similarity 0.79)
• US support for Islamists continued in the 1980s despite threats to Israel (similarity 0.79)
• 1967 solidified a quasi-colonial regional order tied to US alignment (similarity 0.79)
• Neocons and Likud rejected Oslo even though the accords heavily favored Israel. (similarity 0.79)
• Neocons in 1996 advised Netanyahu to destabilize and overthrow Arab governments. (similarity 0.78)
• Likud strategists sought to weaken Arab states to destroy Palestinian support (similarity 0.78)
• Neocons opposed the Oslo Accords as a unilateral Israeli retreat to hostile Arabs. (similarity 0.78)