L'ossessione dell'America per Israele

Perché Israele è un argomento così inflazionato tra i media e nella società americana.

There's more than one reason that Israel became a topic of such constant conversation among American writers, opinion-makers, politicians, and policy wonks. Undeniably, Israel is interesting. It is conveniently located in an area that is continuously a producer of dramatic news, a place to which journalists can easily travel and from which they can easily write -- the one country in the Middle East that doesn't violently prevent the media from doing its job. Then there's the "special relationship" factor: Israel is a U.S. ally, and a strong and vocal lobby of both Jews and Christians is working to preserve the two countries' ties. It is a place for which many Americans have special affinity for religious reasons, meaning that any story on Israel is likely to generate both pageviews and impassioned comments. There's also the politics: Israel is a tool with which candidates for office hammer one another. That's to say nothing of the fact that American Jews, while a tiny minority of the U.S. population, are well represented among journalists.