Telegraph columnist: Israel has no US power advantage

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00:00OK, so Jake, what do you make about that?

00:03Jake is questioning whether it's self-defence

00:05and whether Israeli lobbyists are really the ones pulling the strings here.

00:12What do you make of that?

00:13Well, I mean, on the first point, I mean, obviously it was self-defence.

00:16I'm not sure how it's possible to describe Israel's campaign against Iran

00:21as anything other than self-defence.

00:24Israel didn't gain any territory, didn't gain any natural resources,

00:28didn't gain any financial benefit.

00:30In fact, it made a great loss financially and also lost lives of its civilians as well.

00:36Gained nothing apart from the security of its own citizens

00:39who no longer have Iran's nuclear threat trained upon their population centres

00:44and its ballistic missiles in danger of obliterating the Jewish state

00:48at the press of a button.

00:50But certainly on the other point that Jake so eloquently made

00:54about the alleged power of Israeli lobbyists over the American democracy,

01:01I would only point out that every country, every major country in the world

01:04has a lobby on Capitol Hill and the amount of money that Israel spends on its lobby

01:10is dwarfed by the numbers of dollars spent by many other countries,

01:15including particularly the Gulf states, but also other Muslim and other countries.

01:18And so the idea that Israel has some kind of special power over the United States,

01:24again, is an idea which has some very unpleasant antecedents

01:28and is totally at odds with the facts and the reality in America and overseas.