Israel’s ties to the U.S.

BENJAMIN JOFFE-WALT THE MEDIA LINE

It has been called the “eternal friendship,” the “ironclad bond.” Former U.S. president John F. Kennedy called Israel “the child of hope and home of the brave,” Ronald Reagan said the United States and Israel “will always remain at each other’s side.” And so on.

For more than 40 years, every Israeli prime minister and American president has devoted extensive, repetitive rhetoric to the deep diplomatic, economic, military and diplomatic relationship between the United States and Israel.

Israel has received well over $100 billion in U.S. assistance since its creation, today receiving more than $2.5 billion in annual military aid, most of which is used to purchase military equipment from more than 1,000 companies in 47 American states. The two nations have extensive strategic partnerships, the United States funds the research and development of various Israeli weapons systems and there is a special hotline between the Pentagon and the Israeli ministry of defence. The United States has provided expansive diplomatic cover for Israel throughout the years and, in return, Israel is consistently at or near the top of those countries voting most often with the United States at the United Nations.

Many U.S. colleges have student and faculty exchange programs with Israeli universities and several have joint degree programs. Almost every U.S. government agency has a signed cooperation agreement with their Israeli counterpart. The two countries have engaged in hundreds of joint high-tech research and development projects, set up hundreds of scientific exchanges between research institutions and shared in the development of various agricultural and environmental technologies. Israel even cooperates with the United States on macroeconomic policy. But things have gone awry as of late.

Whether by coordinated intent or a lack of internal communication, earlier this month the Israelis announced the approval of 1,600 new homes in east Jerusalem as U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden arrived for a visit. This “slap in the face,” described by the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a number of senior Obama administration officials as an “insult,” has snowballed into what is being described as the most significant “crisis” in United States-Israel relations in decades. But the diplomatic spat follows a larger trend, in which the United States’ political, military and academic elites have started to seriously question the nature, if not the premise, of their country’s relationship with Israel.

On the Israeli side, however, there are very few voices questioning the Jewish state’s relationship with the United States. On the contrary, despite the diplomatic crisis between the two nations, recently, Israeli pollsters revealed that Israelis are quite supportive of the Obama administration’s approach towards their country. A Ha’aretz poll found that Israelis perceive Obama’s treatment of Israel as fair and friendly, and that most Israelis are unimpressed by politicians who accuse Obama of being antisemitic.

Israel’s leading daily, Yedioth Ahronot, found that 68 percent of Israelis do not believe that Israel can “exist securely without the support of the United States,” coupling the poll with an accompanying series of reports on the damage a deterioration in U.S.-Israel relations would do to the country’s economy, defences and foreign relations.

Dr. Ephraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, said Israel has no choice but to remain loyal to the U.S.-Israel partnership.

“Israel lives in a tough neighborhood,” he said. “We are a small country with the security problems of a superpower, and it has been clear to all Israeli prime ministers that we need the support of America and, as a result, they try to minimize friction with the U.S. as much as possible.

“We have been in worse positions in the past. For example, in the 1970s, when there was an oil crisis and the world was much more anti-Israel than it is today, we’ve weathered this situation before, so I believe we can weather it again today. America is a democracy and understands that Israel is a democracy and that democracies make mistakes.”

But Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli parliament and former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, argued that the threat to friendly U.S.-Israel relations speaks to a core fear. “The Israeli psyche is brought up on a 2,000-year-old consciousness, amplified by the 60 years since the creation of the state, that the entire world is against us,” he explained. “Psychologically, we cannot believe that we are going to lose the only friend we have left on earth, so the reality is we are psychologically in denial.

“Israel was wrong to have an America-only strategy,” he continued. “America is a very different society today than it was when the Americans walked into our lives in 1967. We haven’t wanted to understand this because its immediate consequence is that America is no longer our sole big brother, but more of a broker between us and the Palestinians. This is a very difficult thing to digest.”

Dahlia Scheindlin, a political consultant, public opinion analyst and pollster, argued that Israelis have failed to understand the relationship between the government’s policies and the country’s image.

“The Israeli public overwhelmingly thinks their relationship with the United States, and more broadly their image in the world, is very important,” she said. “The problem is that Israelis got used to the wink-and-nod approach of the Bush administration and started to think their image can be controlled simply by massaging their relationship with the U.S.

“But now, Israel’s foreign relations are very dicey, and they are starting to confront the reality that this may not be true. They can’t just change their communications or improve their diplomacy and everything will be OK. They may have to actually change Israeli policy to improve their image and foreign relations. But polling shows that only a minority of Israelis support changing policy in favor of foreign relations.”

Bernard Avishai, an Israeli-American political economist and author of The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic, agreed that the status quo is unsustainable.

“Nobody’s questioning whether or not Israel should have a relationship with America. This relationship is much too deep and too wide and has too much precedent for it to ever really be at risk,” he said. “But now there is a really different scenario for American foreign policy, which is about engagement, global cooperation, arms reduction and mutual strategic interests.

“Yet for 25 years, the Israeli right, with [Binyamin] Netanyahu as their poster child, have believed that, in the final analysis, America will always see Israel as a strategic asset in some kind of Machiavellian fight against the evils of the world, be it the Cold War or, now, radical Islam, as if, in the end, America will always see Israel as its power forward – maybe the power forward takes cocaine and gets in trouble with women, but you can always count on him to get 25 points a game,” Avishai said. “This whole way of thinking is very anachronistic and a far cry from the evolving reality which Obama represents, in which the old narrative is being superseded by a more realist school of thinking.

“So Netanyahu is facing a kind of debacle in Israel’s relations with Western countries which is going to be as embarrassing to him as the intifada was to [former Israeli prime minister Ehud] Barak,” he continued. “You can’t have an economy like Singapore and a nationalities policy like Serbia. People won’t accept it and Netanyahu and the more rational parts of the Israeli right understand that political isolation will lead to economic isolation.

“So, it’s not just the money or the smart bombs or the aircraft that Israel gets from America,” Avishai concluded. “Much more important is that we export $60 billion worth of stuff every year. That’s $60 billion of relationships with developed world companies. If Israel starts to become the sort of spoiled brat of the West, where all kinds of Western companies start to distance themselves from Israeli companies because it’s too embarrassing or too much trouble for them, we could have an economic implosion here.”

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