There is very little doubt that Israel has an inordinate amount of control over Washington's agenda in the Middle East with the nation being the beneficiary of hundreds of billions of dollars in various forms of aid as shown on this graphic from the Council on Foreign Relations:
Most of this aid support's Israel's military with approximately $3.3 billion in annual funding provided as grants under the Foreign Military Financing program. These are funds that Israel must use to purchase United States military equipment and services to maintain the Israeli qualitative military edge which allows the nation to "defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damage and casualties.". This is enshrined in Public Law 110-429 dated October 15, 2008 as shown here:
With this is mind and given their high level of influence on global and, in particular, American geopolitics, let's look at how many Jews there are in the world so that we can get a sense of how many people are controlling much of America's agenda in the Middle East. For the purposes of this posting, I am using data available on the Jewish Virtual Library website which you can find here.
Here is a table showing the global Jewish population between 1880 and 2023:
If we use a global population of 8.187 billion people (most recent United Nations estimate) and rounding up the number of Jews to 17 million, people of Jewish heritage comprise a very small 0.21 percent of the world's population.
Here is a table showing the nations with the highest Jewish population:
I thought that it was rather interesting to see that the United States has more Jews than even Israel, accounting for 44.5 percent of the world's total Jewish population. If we use a United States population of 346 million and again rounding up the number of American Jews to 7.5 million, people of Jewish heritage comprise 2.2 percent of the American population.
Looking at Europe, there are 791,200 Jews in a total population of 445,500,000 people, making up 0.18 percent of Europe's population. The largest number of Jews are found in France with the 440,000 French Jews making up 0.67 percent of the population. The second largest number of Jews are found in the United Kingdom with the 312,000 Jews making up 0.46 percent of the population.
It is quite clear that the 17 million Jews in the world "punch well above their weight" when it comes to their influence on global geopolitical theatre, particularly when it comes to the United States political system. In the grand scheme of demographics, the tiny fraction of the global population who identify as Jews is far outweighed by the 2.83 billion Christians, 2.04 billion Muslims, 1.2 billion Hindus and 520 million Buddhists.
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First, the CFR is slightly wrong about their dates as Israel didn't even exist until 1948. Regardless, they are correct about the monetary amount of aid from the US: a total of about $310 billion in combined military and economic aid granted to Israel over the span of 2023 - 1948 = 75 years (in 2022 dollars).
ReplyDeleteContrast that to the amount of military and economic aid given to Ukraine in a mere two years and 10 months: According to CFR, a total of $175 billion, see here https://www.cfr.org/article/how-much-us-aid-going-ukraine
US aid to Israel is aid to a foreign nation with strategic benefits to the US (much like Egypt, which is number two on the chart). It isn't aid to Americans who are Jews. Keep in mind that 20% of Israeli citizens are Muslims.
What nation is the nation of Christians, or Buddhists, or Hindus? Your point is valid in questioning amounts of foreign aid to a country. You seem to be suggesting that all Jews, including American citizens, are foreigners, i.e. Israelis. Do you believe that to be true?