Politicians are terrified of the protests, but they are even more terrified by the prospect that the protests could continue past the end of the school year, spilling over the bounds of the campus and into a long, hot, summer. It is the responsibility of anyone trying to stop this genocide to ensure that their nightmare becomes a reality.
Politcally, you’re probably right.
But Israel isn’t the golden goose, it’s treatment of Palestine (specifically Gaza, but also the difference between Gaza and the West Bank) is. It’s not a symptom of unconditional support, it’s one of the reasons for unconditional support. Palestine, for the US, is a labratory in the same way that different aspects of South America were in the last century.
The US tech space is great at big data, broad spectrum surveillence tech. It’s shit at targeted, specific tracking / facial recognition etc, especially when targets aren’t American and white. Israel (whether it’s provided or not) fills that gap. Israel is a testing ground of missle defence. It’s a lab for targeted communications interception. It’s a ‘high intensity’ test bed for border control and everything that entails from fences to automated weaponry. There’s a reason riot cops and death squads in all but name in ‘western liberal democracies’ get training from the IDF and Israel. It’s less talked about and surface level, but Israel’s ongoing, illegal, and not additment ownership of nukes offers insight into how to hide, move, and set up nuclear capacity. And of course, it’s also a lab for public policy when it comes to how much militarisation, blood abroad, propaganda tactics etc that the imperial core willl tolerate (although this last point has diminished as Israel got increasingly high on their own supply).
The importance of Israel isn’t that it’s a friendly airbase in the middle east (although that helps). It’s that it’s the perfect testing chamber for the West’s most fascist domestic instincts, from surveillence to policing to torture to counter-insurgency.
That level of conscription would be far too destabilizing in the imperial core. I think that they have been successfully psyopped to be a garrison in a way that a multiethnic society without the same conditions or history would struggle with. Perhaps the most successful radicalization project the west has ever undertaken. As the ROI starts to drop you can probably keep enough people there to bleed Iran in one last crap shoot. The ones from North Africa and West Asia would probably have a harder time fleeing than Ukranians at this point.