Warning: Long-ass rambling post follows...
========================================
Purely as a matter of personal opinion, I believe that America's support of Israel is due to a wide array of factors:
1. We like Jews better than we like Muslims.
2. We are a secularized Christian country.
3. Judaism is the source from which Christianity sprang; it's the religious Mothership.
4. Islam is a Johnny-come-lately knock-off/spin-off/rip-off hybrid of Judaism and Christianity, plus Arab paganism, which is looked down upon by The West.
5. Islam has a long history of hostility-to and conflict-with both Judaism and Christianity.
6. In modern times, in practice, Islam at-large is less tolerant than Christianity or Judaism.
7. In modern times, in practice, Islam is far more misogynistic than the other two religions.
8. Jews have been living embedded in Christian countries for 2000 years.
9. Muslims (in any significant numbers) are a new element in Western immigration.
10. Muslims are considered alien and backwards in culture, religion and philosophy.
11. Islam has a formalized bloodletting component lacking (in practice) in the others.
12. Islam has an extant, operative collection of canon law that does not mix well in The West.
13. Muhammed locked-out changes 1400 years ago; no Reformation of Islam is likely; leaving it in a perpetual Medieval or Neanderthal state.
14. The Europeans (Nazi Germany and collaborators) slaughtered 6,000,000 Jews within living memory.
15. The West (largely composed of and governed by Euro-descendants) manifests a Collective Guilt post-WWII in dealing with the Jews.
16. Leading-edge representatives of The West (the British Empire) promised the Jews a homeland of their own in Palestine.
17. That promise was echoed in both League of Nations and United Nations proposals.
18. The West, and both the LoN and the UN, reneged on that promise.
19 After that breach of faith/trust, and after the Holocaust, the Jews (finally!) stopped trusting the promises of 'outsiders' and took matters into their own hands.
20. The Jews shocked the hell out of everyone in 1948 by surviving their Declaration of Independence and Statehood, and the subsequent Arab-initiated 1948-1949 War against the infant State of Israel, against all odds.
21. The Jews shocked the hell out of everyone in 1967 and 1973 by kicking Arab ass repeatedly and against long odds, after the Arabs had massed troops and war-assets on their borders in preparation of invasion.
22. People who fight for themselves and win against overwhelming odds capture the admiration and imagination and support and affection of The West.
23. After 3000 years of holding themselves together as a belief-system and 'people', the Jews had already earned the admiration of many in The West even before 1948.
24. After 1900 years of being pushed-around since the Sack of Jerusalem (70 AD) and being scattered to the four winds, to make such a comeback as the Jews have done, and largely on their own in 1948 and 1967, and to win-back their old spiritual and ancestral homeland after being driven nearly to extinction by the Holocaust, the Jews managed to excite the Martial and Historical Admiration of much of The West.
25. The US arms industry began pumping huge quantities of arms into Israel AFTER the 1967 War in order to (a) offset Soviet re-supply to the Arabs after that war and (b) replenish expended Israeli munitions and (c) to cement a practical alliance between Israel and the United States.
26. The US arms industry has had a fairly good-sized stake in the US-Israel relationship ever since the 1967-1973 timeframe, but it was not a factor in the relationship prior to 1967, during which earlier times other (see above) reasons manifested by which the two countries had begun to grow much closer.
27. The media (including movies) was a strong influence in encouraging and cementing the relationship between the United States and Israel.
28. The United States voluntarily carries much of the practical burden of Western Guilt ove the Holocaust and long-ago decided to support the (then) underdog in the region (Israel) against the wide-array of larger and more powerful Arab countries and Arab coalitions - countries whom the Europeans ass-kiss in order to have access to petroleum products.
29. The United States came to shoulder much of this burden of Western Guilt because the Euros were busy rebuilding for the first 20-30 years after WWII - coinciding with the first 20-30 years of the existence of Israel, largely - and we grew into the role willingly.
30. The Jews in the US have an influence in society and culture and finance and media and education which is disproportionately higher than their numbers might otherwise reflect; a ghostly byproduct of 2000 years of being forced to maintain closed communities and being obliged to seek success in finance and other key areas due to Dark Ages and Medieval European prohibitions against Christians engaging in such areas of trade and commerce; but this influence, although disproportionate, is not controlling, nor dominant at-large.
...and on and on and on and on.
There are a great many reasons why the United States and Israel are friends.
Including - I am sure - a great many that I have not conjured-up here.
But we are friends and allies, and there is more symmetry and kindred spirit between The West and Judaism than there is between The West and Islam, and, if that has not changed in the past 1300 years since Islam broke out of its cradle, it's not likely to change anytime soon.
The United States and Canada and Australia are - in large part and for all intents and purposes - extensions of Europe, including its culture and religion and philosophy and laws and morals and traditions, etc.; even though all of these are largely 'secularized'.
Even if the United States was 100% atheist, it would still be a nation whose founding and controlling population demographic springs from older European Christian traditions.
Two thousand years of culture and tradition and emotion and inclination and leanings cannot be set aside through something as new-fangled as our own (highly desirable) Separation of Church and State.
A society's laws and interactions with the rest of the world springs from its culture and its traditions and its heritage as much (if not more) as its circumstances du jour.
We (our culture and traditions and international behaviors) are a product of our heritage, and our heritage does not include trust nor friendship with Islam or Muslims, although we (as a culture) struggle heroically to be a little more impartial than our ancestors were.
We are better at this impartiality than our ancestors but our cultural and historical bias leeches through our laws and foreign policy to this very day, and their echo will still be manifest centuries from now.
This long-standing Western Bias against Islam has as much (if not more) to do with our roots as it does present-day circumstances.
Even if Israel did not exist, we would still not be overly-friendly with Muslim countries.
Their belief-system and laws and traditions and cultures are alien-to and incompatible with The West.
The Jews are not burdened by that same handicap.
Rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, like it or not, that is the way of things.
Or so it is perceived, by this amateur reader and interpreter of history, and pro-Israel non-stakeholding observer.
========================================
< turns off rambling half-assed amateur dissertation switch and climbs down >
