I agree with lots of your analysis, but I think you underestimate the degree to which much of the American ruling class sees Israel as a bulwark of "civilization" against the Arab hordes. Israelis are people like us, struggling to subdue an enemy whose irrationality and violence is almost hardwired into their mysterious heads. Israel is like a besieged outcropping of Europe - only with big balls and heavy weaponry - fighting our fight.
Doug"
It's remarkable the way you stated that - I used almost the exact same language in one of my articles analyzing this question - but the fundamental question here you have to answer is *why* America is fighting this fight, why it has adopted the Israeli dynamic in terms of how it views the racial Other.
There are competing and evolving tendencies and contradictions in American society - the Manifest Destiny strand is obviously quite similar to Zionist expansionism. But the same case could be made for British colonialism, or French settlerism, or Spanish conquistatdorism - why aren't these countries so rabidly pro-Israel based on a civilizational approach?
I attempted to address this question in an article I wrote about a year ago, focused mainly on certain psychological-political aspects of colonialism generally and how our invasion of Iraq feeds into the Israelized view of Arabs specifically, called
"An Anti-Civilizational War?: America and Israel on the Front Line of Colonialism"
(http://www.counterpunch.org/alam03102004.html)
I think as far as developing a full-on analysis goes the thing has serious limitations, but the way the question is posed opens up, I think, possibilities for deeper inquiry.
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