Consider this: Some reservations are more equal than other reservations

Moving on from last week's column on the Indian Health Service and Israel, the question becomes, why does the United States support the relatively sophisticated reservation in the Middle East known as Israel, as opposed to the relatively crude reservations we created, for our own purposes, for the Indian in America?

To quote the late Sen. Jesse Helms, Israel is "America's aircraft carrier in the Middle East."

Since its founding in 1948, the state of Israel has been economically and militarily dependent on the United States and, in return, Israel has been expected to represent and strengthen U.S. interests in the Middle East. After World War II, U.S. interests could be defined as protecting Arab oil and gas production from Soviet encroachment.

Norman Bernstein

The Palestinian Jews, who had worked closely with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, during World War II in the war against Nazi Germany, became the Mossad, Israel's elite intelligence service.

And, as we all know, the OSS became the CIA.

Israel's military and intelligence operations were funded by the U.S. and the intelligence product was shared with the U.S., including detailed information, previously unknown, about Soviet-built weapons systems that had been captured by Israel.

The CIA is particularly reliant on Israeli intelligence on the Middle East and the U.S. supplies Israel with the latest satellite imagery and other intelligence that is not supplied to any other country. The U.S. also looks the other way when the fact is brought up that Israel is the only country in the Middle East with an extensive nuclear weapons program.

U.S. presidents from Truman through Reagan maintained the "special relationship," which was formalized under Reagan in 1983 with the formation of the "Joint Political Military Group" and, in 1984 with the construction of two "War Reserve Stock" facilities for the stockpiling of about $500 million worth of U.S. military equipment in Israel, which can be transferred to Israel if and when necessary. The United States keeps jet fighters and bombers at six sites in Israel, as well as logistic support facilities. The tallest radar towers in the world are located in Israel, at the U.S.-operated Dimona Radar Facility, which is designed to track ballistic missiles up to 1,500 miles away, providing ground-based missiles with target intercept data.

Under President Clinton, and the two Bush presidencies, the basic relationship with Israel, with some ups and downs, remained essentially unchanged. But the U.S. token recognition of the Palestinians, from about 1993, made a difference, and definitions began to change. The U.S. and Israel began to diverge on what it means to "keep peace and security in the region."

Israeli cluster bombs spread wider, as did the permanent Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel expansion continued into more and more Palestinian territories, as Israel's neverending search for secure borders continued.

Even though many U.S. companies, including Microsoft, Intel, Motorola, and IBM, have built major research and development centers in Israel, and there are more Israeli companies listed on the U.S. NASDAQ stock exchange than from any other country outside North America, the divergence is ongoing.

Even though President Obama has pledged to "maintain Israel's qualitative military edge" over all other countries in the Middle East, and even though Israel probably leads the world in terrorism threat prevention, and Israel and U.S. counter-terrorism officers regularly meet in both countries to exchange intelligence and enforcement techniques, with the Soviet Union dead, and as long as the U.S. keeps fracking away and solidifying its world lead in oil and gas production, Israel's function as historical cat's paw for the U.S. might be limited to Iran, and probably will be eventually abandoned, in its historically defined form. This is in spite of the fact that President Obama signed a bill in 2012 that guaranteed Israeli government debt through 2015.

The geopolitical importance of the Middle East is on the decline, and so is the importance of Israel. Israel becomes less of a factor in U.S. foreign policy decisions as America's need for Middle East oil declines. Recent discoveries of massive quantities of shale oil and gas make the Middle East, and Israel, of less consequence to U.S. needs for energy independence.

The United States has never really sent foreign aid dollars without it being in its perceived best interests. As those interests change, and in spite of the fact that most of those dollars are spent for purchases from U.S. corporations, then benign neglect might be in the cards for Israel, just as it has long been the policy toward our reservations at home, after genocide didn't completely do the job.

Norman Bernstein is a roving correspondent for the Havre Daily News.