Why U.S. supports Israel

[Brad DeLong]

>  > I agree that the Nazi legacy (and perhaps guilt over not doing enough)
>>  informs the way many in the U.S view the Middle East. But I'm not sure
>>  that you're comparison of the U.S. with Palestinians is fair. Were the
>>  Jews welcolmed with open arms to the U.S.? Yes, at the turn of the century
>>  there was a great deal of philo-semiticism in North America and in general
>>  the polygot culture of the US (and Canada) has been the best home the
>>  Jewish diaspora ever had. BUT, lest we forget, in the crucial decades of
>>  the 1920 to the 1960s, immigration to the U.S. was severly restricted, at
>>  the behest of nativists and anti-Semites. (Also in Canada: asked how many
>>  Jewish immigants Canada should accept, the head of Canadian immigration in
>>  the 1930s said that "none is too many.") The fact is, if the US and other
>>  Western democracies had the same immigration policies in the 1930s that
>>  they had say in 1910, most of the Jews in Europe would have been save and
>>  Israel would never have been established...

Very true...

I tend to want to forget the complicity of the U.S. in the Holocaust 
through the interwar "reforms" of its immigration policy... But I'm 
not sure you're right about "most"; most of the Jews in Europe were 
Polish and Russian after all; a lot would have migrated to the U.S., 
but a lot would have still been there when the Nazi tanks came...

Brad DeLong, trying to decide whether he should depress himself 
further by reading Benny Morris's _Righteous Victims_ or Christopher 
Browning's _Ordinary Men_...