Ask any "artificial intelligence" whether Israel is an ally and friend of the United States; you’ll get a thousand-word compilation of points provided by "the Israeli lobby." As I keep saying, AI technologies are not intelligent, at all. They are big data search engines on steroids.

According to the lobby, Israel and the U.S. are not only strong allies but their relationship is marked by deep political, military and economic cooperation. They could give you a long list of the areas to find proof of this partnership, like historical ties and diplomatic relations, the so-called shared democratic values, military and strategic cooperation, economic and technological initiatives, cultural and social connections, etc.

Those and many other "factors" made the U.S.-Israel alliance what it is today: unconditional and unreservedly strong U.S. support for whatever Israel’s actions are. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. was somewhat critical of Israeli settlement expansion, viewing it as an obstacle to a two-state solution; but when the Israeli lobby showed the tip of the stick to him, Obama gladly joined the six previous presidents who visited Israel and signed the bill for an additional $70 million to ensure that Israel could maximize its production of the Iron Dome system for 2012. How could he not straighten up and do as one is supposed to do if he could not have collected enough donations for reelection?

Then, President Donald Trump took a more pro-Israel stance, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, moving the U.S. Embassy there, and supporting the sovereignty of the Golan Heights. His administration also put forth the "Deal of the Century" peace plan, which was more favorable to Israeli positions. It was supposed to be a peace plan to end Israel’s war on Palestinians, but it didn’t contain the words "Palestine" and "Palestinians." It looked like a real-estate deal opening the Gaza Strip to those Arab sheiks to build resort villages that Trump’s son-in-law, young real-estate mogul Jared Kushner could market in Hollywood.

Later, President Joe Biden's administration signaled their desire to maintain strong ties with Israel while expressing concern about certain policies, particularly regarding human rights and the treatment of Palestinians. It was mostly lip service until Israel’s war on Gaza started following the Oct. 7 Raid of Hamas militants on the Israeli military in the occupied territories. As soon as the Israeli Defense Forces knocked on the U.S. Central Command, Biden and his Secretaries of State and Defense began heaping rockets, bombs, ammunition and all the necessary equipment to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Actually, Netanyahu didn’t even have to ask: Biden had quietly signed more than 50 weapons "sale" (including 2,000-pound unguided, low-drag general-purpose bombs) to Israel before the Hamas’ raid.

Besides, the U.S. did not need a new excuse to stand by Israel; the U.S. will always have Israel's back, Biden said in 2021 when Israel started bombing high-rise buildings in Gaza after the Palestinian youth started a stone-throwing campaign against the Israeli occupation forces. On a website named "Honest Reporting" (!) an editor, appropriately titled "BackSpin," quotes Representative Steve Rothman in a Business Week commentary listing five reasons that American military aid to Israel benefits the U.S.

Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer confuted prevailing arguments about the essentiality of the U.S.-Israel alliance in their seminal work "The Israel Lobby," which caused the largest literary controversy of the last two decades. Also, real-life examples repudiate all the points that the Israeli Lobby has been pounding into American heads since the 1930s. Now, suppose any willing U.S. citizen wants to explore the answer to the question of whether Israel is a strategic asset or liability for the U.S. In that case, he’ll face great difficulty because the Israeli lobby has been plowing the field, so to speak, to dominate the public discourse in America, to tell the think tanks what to think, to educate the media pundits about which side they should take about the Israeli-Palestinian issues.

Yet, there are a few smaller organizations that are not mandatorily pro-Israel; the Cato Institute is one of them where you may find Jon Hoffman’s article in which he evaluates the benefits and hindrances of that "alliance" between the two countries and concludes that the Biden administration (or the incoming U.S. president, Harris or Trump) faces a choice: "continue following the Netanyahu government into the abyss or forcefully pressure it to change course."

But before going into the ledger item-by-item, I assume that we have to name that relationship correctly. An "alliance" is a relationship based on the similarity of interests, nature or qualities. There must be mutual benefit, especially between countries so that they create a union based on them. In other words, all unions and associations cannot be allied without mutual benefits.

Yes, during the Cold War, American politicians assumed that they would receive substantial benefits from having military and economic relationships with the Middle Eastern countries and, among them, Israel if the Soviet Union could not persuade them into granting military bases. Israel possessed a very limited value for the U.S. before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Even though the lobby had been working to have pro-Israel Jews and Christians elected to Congress, Judaism and Zionism had no special meaning for the American public in general. When the U.S. noticed that Israel could help control Soviet client states like Syria, Iraq and Egypt, and provide information about the military capabilities of the Soviet army, the U.S. administration began supporting Israel. However, it inflamed Arab-Israeli conflicts, contributed to anti-Americanism and pushed more Arab states toward the Soviets. The U.S. administration tried to play an evenhanded role in the area. But as the U.S. support for Israel increased, so did the anti-Americanism among the Arabs and Muslim people.

Years later, the U.S. intelligence community learned that the intelligence Israel provided to its ally was lousy, laughably inaccurate... gossip mostly.

Such misleading and inaccurate information, as we all know, led to the U.S. miscalculations about the actual danger that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein presented. Israel has never been a reliable proxy safeguarding the U.S. interests in the region. Even the Zionist Martin Kramer of the Washington Institute had to confess that "Israel’s value as a low-cost regional stabilizer" was seriously overstated. Israel never played the role an ally is supposed to play in maintaining peace in its region; in fact, Israel has continually been a headache for America. Israel was never requested to join the international task force the U.S. put together during the Iraq wars; for its participation was deemed harmful to the international alliance.

But the Israeli lobby made the Americans believe that Israel was a "partner against terror." After the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said: "You are fighting against terror; we are fighting against terror. It is the same war." Even the mostly pro-Israel New York Times columnist William Safire admitted that Sharon "played the President (Bush) like a violin."

What Sharon and all the Israeli prime ministers have been fighting against was not terror, but Palestinians' rightful and morally justified reaction to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Even the "global terrorism" that President Bush declared war on had not happened in a vacuum; it was, in a sense, the result of anti-Americanism and the U.S.’ unethical support of Zionist expansion policy in Palestine.

Moreover, the claim that only Israel shares similar democratic values with the U.S. in the Middle East is not more than a farcical idea. Israel is an open-air prison for millions of Palestinians who cannot travel out of their towns; if they manage to go from Gaza to the West Bank, for instance, they cannot return back. Israel is the only apartheid state in the world today.

Israel has been stealing the U.S. technological know-how and committing copyright infringements for years; it has thus become the fifth largest arms exporter. Israel is earning billions of dollars but it has not paid back a single penny for the U.S. sales credits it has received since 1967. A bunch of representatives and senators the Israeli lobby helped elected, silently provide a bill to write off Israel’s debts, and others, fearing the Israeli lobby might help their rivals, raise their hands to seal the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Israel once again.

So, until the American people wise up and reject the artificial but not intelligent conclusion that Israel is a close ally of the U.S. and their relations are not built on "a combination of shared democratic values, strategic interests, military cooperation, and cultural ties" but on fear installed into their minds by the Israeli lobby, this thick fog on American wisdom will continue to obscure their judgment and ethical clarity.