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America and Israel: Sentiment and Strategy
I was recently at a dinner party in mixed company. The political views of my fellow diners ranged across the spectrum from archconservative to radically liberal. I prefer the sort of arrangement. I’m a bit of a contrarian and I find nothing more tedious than agreement. This is particularly so when, as in this case, everyone at the table is intelligent and articulate.
Because we were a politically minded group, the topics focused mostly on current events, including Ukraine, the Obamacare rollout, and the latest Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. Eventually conversation turned toward the recently failed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and, inevitably, to a discussion of settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute generally.
Opinion at the table was fairly evenly divided, with conservatives taking a staunchly pro-Israeli stance and the liberals (with the exception of one of my friends who is Jewish) taking a more sympathetic view of the Palestinian position. I tend to side with Israel because I admire its liberal democratic values and military prowess, and I consider the Palestinian leadership to be at best corrupt and disingenuous and at worst genocidal terrorists. On settlements I’m fairly agnostic, as I have not taken the time to delve into the intricacies of the subject. To the extent that I care about the specific issue of settlements or even the larger Israeli-Palestinian dispute, it is through the lens of how it affects America and its interests.
In the course of arguing that Israel was justified in breaking off negotiation with the Palestinian Authority, my friend said that America needs to support Israel, not merely because it is the morally just thing to do, but because Israel is America’s closest and most valuable ally in the Middle East. This is a commonly held opinion, particularly on the Right, and usually goes without question.
As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an issue that I do not feel strongly about, I had been largely a passive observer of the conversation, a position to which I am unaccustomed. Feeling the urge to participate, as well as desiring to divert a conversation which showed signs of degenerating into charges of apartheid and anti-Semitism, I asked my friend what made Israel a particularly valuable ally to America. Specifically, I asked him to explain why, setting aside the moral case for doing so, it was in America’s strategic interest to be closely allied with the State of Israel.
This was not meant to be a gotcha question and I had every expectation that my friend would provide a convincing answer since up to this point he had demonstrated a knowledge of subjects relating to Israel which was masterful, bordering on encyclopedic. However, to my considerable surprise and mild disappointment, the question seemed to stump my friend. Aside from saying that Israel shares intelligence with United States regarding Islamic terrorists and Arab states, and that we conduct some joint military technology research, he didn’t have much of a response. Even these reasons were presented in the most general terms, contrasting sharply with the level of detail and specificity with which he had made his previous points.
I was actually a bit shaken by his lack of a robust answer. So, I submit it to you Ricochet members, what does America gain strategically from its close alliance with Israel and why, from the perspective of someone who is solely concerned with American interests, is America’s close alliance with Israel a net-benefit?
Dean Rusk, former Secretary of State, stated in the 1960s that America’s alliance with Israel was based more on sentiment then on strategy. Was he wrong? If so, why?
Published in General
I agree that labeling the settlements apartheid is unfair and unhelpful and I’m not terribly concerned about the Pollard spying case (though I’m not sure I’d excuse it with “feh” either).
I am much more troubled by the fact that the Chinese J-10 fighter is based largely on technology from the Israeli Lavi fighter, which is in turn largely based on the F-16s we sell Israel. This isn’t the end of the world since the Chinese also bought an F-16 from Pakistan (though the F-16s we sell Pakistan are not as advanced) to copy and the J-10 is reported to be a pretty bad airplane, but I’m not crazy about Israel’s cooperation with our biggest strategic rival.
It can’t really be said of Australia’s involvement in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
I thought I offered some substance in #8, but I’ll be more specific. There has been US testimony on the benefits of intelligence sharing in the GWOT (in which Israeli assets have, so to speak, “fought alongside” US assets). Israel continues to share cutting-edge R&D on drones, medevac, light arms, and urban combat tactics, and shared a lot of tactical lessons from the last Lebanon invasion with their US counterparts, lessons that have been put to use in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel gives firmer diplomatic support, especially in the UN, than US’s NATO allies. Israel consults on civilian anti-terror prep — at airports, for example. Israel is a strategic ally with substantially overlapping values and interests — a democratic state such that there’s no need to explain why the US’s women in uniform should not be treated differently. When there is global trouble, that strategic alliance means that the leaders can work effectively together, without preliminary horse trading.
Turkey was a useful part of NATO during the Cold War. It provided a potential southern front against the USSR and we based missiles there. As you’ve pointed out, Turkey has been decidedly unhelpful in recent years. Aside from the vestigial NATO membership, I don’t think anyone would consider Turkey to be one of our closest allies the way that Israel is generally considered to be. As to the specific point that Valiuth was making, having docking privileges at Haifa is indeed useful, but it is by no means vital or unique.
Son of Spengler: One of the versions I read is that Pollard stole information on both 1) the identities of US spies in the Soviet Union and 2) US nuclear submarine specifications. Whom else would Israel have possibly sold these secrets to? And if they didn’t sell them, what on Earth would they use that information for. Perhaps “technology” was the wrong term. But Israel regularly purchased or received large amounts of Soviet armaments during the Cold War.
In any event, Israel was by no means an unambiguous US ally during the Cold War.
iWc: I’m not sure in what sense “I crossed the line.” Israel is one of our closest allies by “any metric?” Would you care to dial that back a bit? You can’t possibly be serious. You can’t conceivably compare our relationship to Israel with our relationship to the UK, Canada, and Australia. We have fought wars with them. We share values, history, language…
iWc: While it’s true that allies spy on one another, it is NOT true that they all our allies sold intelligence to the Soviets!
Most unworthy sir, very much a slander.
On Ricochet we may on occasion jibber perhaps even going so far in a heated argument as to gabber but to sputter? Never.
The only Soviet weapons Israel used, as far as I’m aware, were captured from Israel’s Arab enemies. Do you know what type of weapons (tanks? small arms? planes?) Israel would have purchased? Can you be more specific? My understanding is that virtually all of Israel’s weaponry was American (esp. artillery) or French (esp. jet fighters), or homegrown.
Again, can you point to specifics? The USSR was supplying Israel’s enemies, sponsored the UN’s “Zionism is Racism” push (according to historian Paul Johnson), waged a propaganda war internally and globally calling Israel a “terrorist state”, and persecuted Jews who tried to emigrate to Israel. I am unaware of any Israeli-USSR cooperation — material or immaterial — during the Cold War, and would welcome evidence to the contrary.
#35 True Blue
Your 1) on Pollard (identities of US humint assets in the USSR) would actually be Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
Any limited armaments supplies that Israel received from the USSR would have been obtained only during the very initial years of Israel’s independence and before Stalin went off the deep end and ordered a mass pogrom and mass internal deportation (to Siberia) of the USSR’s Jews just before he died in 1953. (The pogrom/internal deportation orders were not carried out, fortunately.)
The chief arms merchant supplying Israel during the 1950s and 1960s was France, although de Gaulle’s ascent to the French presidency led to a gradual tapering off of that relationship followed by a total French arms embargo in the aftermath of the June 1967 war.
LBJ then saw to it that the US would fill in where France had been.
Moreover, Nixon airlifted a massive re-supply to the IDF during the 1973 Yom Kippur War — while putting the US forces in the region on nuclear alert and explicitly putting the Soviets on notice that he was doing so.
So somebody classified Israel as an unambiguous US ally during the Cold War.
#36 True Blue
The US, UK, Canada, Australia, and others in the Anglosphere *get* their values from the ancestors of Israel’s Jews.
You’re welcome.
Israel has need for its own nuclear submarines. There is zero evidence that Israel took that information to the Soviets, or cooperated with them in any way.
There is, in contrast, a plausible case that Israel exposed CIA operatives in the course of operations to protect its citizens. If that is true, Pollard and Israel bear that responsibility. No need to exaggerate guilt with wild speculations that Israel horse-traded away the lives of Americans.
Glad you asked Son of Spengler,
1) in 1947 Stalin supported the partition of Palestine enacted by the UN.
2) Beginning in 1947, Israel received weapons from Czechoslovakia and were supported by the Soviets in the 1948 War. If you’d like to google it, you can see the exact specifications. It’s pretty well documented.
In 1948, founders of the little socialist country were unsure who they should ally with. But by the mid-1950s, Israel was solidly (and unambiguously) in the Western camp. The Wikipedia description isn’t bad:
Israel picked the US side around 1955 or 1956, and never looked back. This hardly makes Israel an equivocal ally.
That’s a bit of a stretch. Quite a bit has happened in the intervening two millennia. That said, I think it’s worth acknowledging that, as a Western pluralist democracy, Israel has a great deal in common with the Anglosphere. Certainly more so than any of its neighbors.
#45 Salvatore
No stretch at all, but thanks for the insult.
The Anglosphere wouldn’t have cultivated the values it did absent the seed that brought into being the two millennia you reference.
See here for example:
http://www.amazon.com/Created-Equal-Ancient-Political-Thought/dp/0199832404/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400726586&sr=1-1&keywords=created+equal+berman
See also here for example:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Hebrew-Republic-Transformation-Political/dp/0674062132/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y
So again, you’re welcome.
Meantime, in that intervening two millennia you reference, sure, quite a bit happened — mostly along these lines:
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/02/16/sympathy-for-the-european-devil/?singlepage=true
Whatever it once may have been, the idea that “sentiment” is the primary reason to side with Israel isn’t true anymore.
Not to derail this discussion, but please, where did you find smart liberal s that were willing to discuss anything intelligently? Seriously, where?
Sal, I’m starting to wonder about your description that:
I think we could benefit by hearing from your friend as to how he saw his answers. He might have seen them as being eminently satisfactory and just as cogent as his others. If so, it might be you in the equation that doesn’t find them satisfactory — I mean in looking over your handling of the answers here you seem to find them wanting. It’s not my reading — iWc, SoS, Danny and others seem like they have been giving very good answers. Ones you don’t accept here either. Do you think these people are stumped, too?
Really, I had no intention of being insulting and I honestly don’t think I was. I’m not denying the role Judaism has played in the development of Western Civilization, but you were being hyperbolic if you were actually arguing that the development of Anglo-Saxon common law democracy is primarily the result of Judaism.
Law school.
That’s not incorrect — and I like the Amazon links — but seems a little bit of a stretch to me too, for considering the common workaday values of the Anglosphere. The US owes a lot to Greek thought and Roman political experience too, but it’s also a stretch to suggest that present-day Greek and Italian states therefore have closely aligned values with us.
Rather, I’m inclined to agree with others who have noted that Israel and the US share modern democratic values — freedoms of speech and assembly, due process, minority rights, etc. — but not the ties of ancestry, recent history, language, and common law that bind the Anglosphere.
Larry- The answers my friend provided were similar to those which have been provided here, though not as detailed. It’s true that I haven’t been very persuaded by the arguments put forward here. That may be my fault, but I’ll explain why I’ve yet to be convinced. My question was not “Is Israel an ally of the United States and does this alliance provide some benefits to us?” It was, “Is America’s close alliance with Israel a net strategic benefit to the United States?” To answer this question in the affirmative it would be necessary to show that our close alliance with Israel (as opposed the friendly relations we have with Colombia or Singapore) provides us with strategic benefits which outweigh the substantial cost they entail, both in foreign aid and in worsened relations with our allies in the Arab and Muslim world. Thus far, no one has acknowledged that there are both costs and benefits to our ties to Israel (iWc’s agreement on aid excepted) and no one has explained how we would be worse off if we had an amicable relationship with Israel which was not as close as our current alliance.
#49 Salvatore
The primacy that Parliament achieved in England starting from the era of Cromwell is a development that originates in said development’s advocates’ gleanings from the Tanach.
Anglo-Saxon common law qua Anglo-Saxon common law did not evolve along vividly Tanach-related lines but at least from the early/mid-1600’s Anglo-Saxon democracy certainly did.
In any case, it is far from hyperbolic to say that Judaism spoke first to the world of human equality, grounded in our all being created BeTselem Elokim, in the likeness of the Almighty — the single unitary Deity.
This resulted in practical prescriptions (in the free Jewish commonwealth before the introduction of the Roman yoke) for the establishment/management of law courts, development of evidentiary standards (for both criminal and civil proceedings), property protections in civil proceedings, etc., etc., the likes of which were not seen at all even in the best of times in Greece and Rome — it’s all there in the Talmud.
In the non-Jewish world post-Rome, their like were not seen again — although their moral components can be said to have been resurrected in the Anglo-Saxon sytem (at least from Coke’s time?).
Yes, I see — that’s what I expected. In your post you made it sound like your friend was stumped — something that he and others could see. That’s what stumped means. The truth is that you just weren’t convinced. That makes more sense. Perhaps you should re-write that sentence.
The cost of “worsened relations with our allies in the Arab and Muslim world” doesn’t bother me in the least. These aren’t the kind of people we want to have as close friends. Allies? — fine but we don’t need to cozy up to them — they stink if they are obsessed about a small state in the middle of desert whose one fault is that they make the countries around them feel stupid and backward.
As I said in an earlier post about this subject: Michael Medved claims that 100 years ago 25% of the middle east was non-Muslim. Now, because of the pigs who have run those countries there are less than 2%. The only, the single state which has gone against those odds is Israel, a beacon of freedom and light amidst a cess pool of low lifes (at least the rulers).
He was wrong. Net out the negatives and positives:
Negatives:
Costs money – but a lot of aid has to be spent on US products or services. It’s almost a self-subsidy.
Links the US to the colonisation and occupation of an Arab nation in the perception of the Middle East and much of the Third World/Muslim World. Till they get robust democracy this has limited impact.
Undercuts US advocacy of democracy and self-determination. How much currency does that have outside of the choir?
Positives
Israel is an unsinkable battleship.
Allows the US, by proxy, to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean, Levant and Egypt.
Israel is a completely dependable partner because is it so dependent on the US. In fact the more settlements, the more dependent.
Conclusion: as things stand now, it’s a structurally great deal for the US.
That’s the most convincing argument I’ve heard thus far.
Why not?
Read the comment — why is it hard to understand? Plain English, clear as a bell.
#51 SoS
The modern democratic values, etc., derive from the ancient ones.
And the ancient ones that — in their modern garb, in the US and Israel — make our lives and our jurisprudence tolerable, humane, and Godly are the ones transmitted via Jerusalem, not Athens.
Even in the realm of mundane civil cases and the political/legal thinking that underlay their mechanics, a lot of what came out of Rome was societally (because economically and in citizenship-rights terms) self-defeating.
(To riff on Talleyrand’s famous remark, the Roman governance/jurisprudential system was not merely morally problematic — it blundered in the practical as well.)
Richard Bernstein illuminates this in “The Birth of Plenty.”
It took two millennia for an exceptional, and new, country — the US — to rectify such systemically problematic mishegas by bringing forth the polity we know and love from Lincoln’s immortal depiction at Gettysburg.
And funnily enough, Jews who came to the US either from parts of Europe where “emancipation” wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, or from parts of Europe veiled in dark tyranny, found that that American polity accorded immensely with their values.
Not Greek, not Roman, not Christendom’s — *their* values.
I will take issue with this. It’s true that it’s pretty much a subsidy for US defense contractors, but that would still be the case if the aid money were given instead to our own DoD. The major difference would be in deployability. If need be, American fighter aircraft can be sent to operate in defense of Israel, but they can also be used wherever else we may need them. In contrast, IDF fighters bought with aid money are almost certainly not going to come to our aid in the event that we face hostilities in the East China Sea.