Or let's assume that abstract "Empire" is not the only decision-maker, that elite interests are contending with and having to accomodate the democratic voting power of the American people, however imperfectly. People ask why military folks support Israel as a client state despite its inconvenience at time in pissing off other countries?
One explanation is that if "Empire" picked some other country as its client state, the American people might not support the funding for it or look the other way at its human rights abuses.
My point is that the present policy towards Israel is a multi-dimensional combination of humanistic impulses, religious millenialism, military hawkishness and Jewish familial solidarity. Probably no group gets exactly the Israeli policy it would prefer, but as to shape its goals in order to maintain the actual political coalition that drives policy.
And the two-party division just adds to the confusion, since the Democrat-Labor affinity is counterposed to the Republican-Likud affinity based on economic and social issues that are outside the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israel's own democratic politics thereby interacts with our internal divisions to create a whole other complicated dynamic effecting policy in the region.
-- Nathan Newman