“Nations don’t have friends; they only have interests.”-Charles de Gaulle
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”-Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle
The Biden Administration, with a foreign policy driven and directed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has tried fruitlessly to hide its transparently anti-Israel agenda in the Middle East – as it relates to Israel, Hamas, the future of Gaza, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Helen Keller – both blind and long dead – can see it. Those with an anorexic appetite for the truth, might not.
For the purposes of advancing a very simple but important discussion of Israel’s relationship with the United States, and how it has morphed over time to Israel’s detriment, let’s accept the following: most anthropologists, genealogists, and other social scientists – when factoring the various elements endemic to their own disciple – have ascribed a generation as averaging a lifespan of about twenty-five years.
As such, the modern State of Israel is now three generations old. Since its creation and throughout, the evidence is quite unequivocal in defining that relationship: a very positive connection of cooperation with the United States.
At its simplest level, we all understand why. The shared Judeo-Christian principles, coupled with a fidelity to a fundamental democratic foundation. Values and an ethos that is the cornerstone of Western civilization. The connection was more than symbiotic. It was natural – even when it was occasionally viewed by some American policy decision-makers as counterproductive in an oil-thirsty world. After all, as we learned two generations ago, civilized principles did not allow one to fuel the gas tank during an oil embargo.
And then – we have this thing called politics. Where core principles are devalued. Where moral relativism is redefined to allow this nonsensical notion that reasons that one man’s terrorist can indeed be another man’s freedom fighter. It allows the perversion of language and with it, the truth. And the disruption – and decay – of natural born allies.
When I began lecturing on Israel and Middle East affairs almost fifty years ago – they called it the “Middle East conflict” or the “Arab-Israeli conflict” – an academic-driven ‘value-free designation’ for the purposes of avoiding any assignment of blame, even when it ought to have been. Yes, despite the fact that anyone with an IQ and a pulse understood who the good guys were. They were the ones who were being threatened and attacked by the bad guys. We recall several attempts to commit politicide. In an oil-thirsty world. The mighty Arab adversary against the tiny Jewish State.
Historically, while the United States always had its share of anti-Israel antagonists – many who found a home at the US Department of State – the bonds that connected the two nations were the product of the aforementioned principles and a strong desire on the part of the Americans to curtail Soviet influence and dominance in the Middle East. The relationship worked well. For both parties. Judeo and Christian.
Two weeks following Israel’s swift and miraculous victory in the Six Day War in June 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson met with Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin at the Hollybush Summit in Glassboro, New Jersey – to discuss both Soviet-American relations and the conflict in the Middle East. We are told – with credible support of contemporaneous historians – that the puzzled Soviet asked the American president “why would the US support Israel even though there were over 80 million Arabs and only 2 million Israelis?” LBJ responded: “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
First generation
Understand – that during that first generation, the United States did not yet provide Israel with any military support of consequence – the first jets arriving only in 1968. Nonetheless, the US was undeniably pro-Israel. There was nothing “even-handed” about the American position; even when the Arabs petitioned the US to adopt a policy that was “more balanced.” The Israelis, of course, protested. “Even-handed” after all, was a bad thing.
The second generation:
With the next generation – following Israel’s 1967 victory and its subsequent defeat of its enemies in the 1973 Yom Kippur War – politics began to slowly take on greater significance. To Israel’s detriment. if one doesn't count survival, Israel was no longer seen as the beleaguered underdog, and the Arab oil embargo had become a valuable weapon of war, between wars.
Almost subliminally, the United States began to adopt more strongly the policy prescriptions of its own State Department. To Israel’s detriment. Undersecretary of State George Ball – notorious for his antipathy towards the Jewish State – penned his infamous “The Middle East: How to Save Israel in Spite Herself” in Foreign Affairs in April 1977. Although infrequently referenced publicly today, it is the de facto and time-honored position of the US State Department. Again, to Israel’s detriment. Yes, still today. Especially today.
Unlike the one that preceded it, that second generation was evidence of an American foreign policy that sought to be even-handed in the Middle East. While Israel protested.
The third generation
And then – the third generation. It began with a redefinition of the conflict – a corruption of language and a correlative bastardization of the narrative which saw the Arab war against Israel conveniently become the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mighty Israel against the poor beleaguered, and stateless, Palestinian Arabs. During those twenty-five years, the State Department moved unabashedly and quite brazenly to suggest, expect, and then demand, that Israel make concessions that would place Israel geo-strategically at great risk.
The State Department Arabists referred to Israel’s sacrifices as a compromise, a euphemism for the one-sided equation. The concessions were always tangible, territorial in nature, while the Arab quid pro quo was never intended to be more than some intangible promise to lessen hostilities with a remote hint of an eventual final solution recognizing the Jewish State. De facto, not de jure. The Arab Palestinians did not always agree with the promises made by the United States and were deceitfully satisfied making that point well known – for domestic consumption – in Arabic.
Oslo comes to mind. Israel, understandably, objected, and understandably, as expected by all, Israel was blamed for the many failed diplomatic initiatives that followed Oslo, I and II. And then, the inevitable. Israel actually petitioned the United States to be more even-handed in its approach to the conflict.
Note the sequence – from the first generation to the third. Israel rejecting any thought of the US being even-handed to Israel petitioning the Americans to, please – be even-handed. It was not Israel that had changed. It was American foreign policy – seeking to "save Israel in spite of herself."
Nothing had changed in the hostile Arab attitude to israel, the burning desire to wipe out the one tiny Jewish state in its ancestral homeland remained the same, but Israel had become strong, and therefore, in progressive lingo, was now the bad guy.
Post-October 7, whatever friendship the United States government pretended to display, its shelf life was certainly short. Biden gave a wonderful speech and provided weaponry, but Secretary of State Blinken tweeted a call for cease-fire (soon-deleted after dishonestly blaming a State Department underling) less than two days later, long before Israel even mobilized. Most didn’t want to notice. Edward Abbey once proffered: “Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.” Well, Israel needs to stop suffering the many delusions about the United States.
Today, as Israel enters the next generation – the one which will take Israel to its centennial anniversary in twenty-four years – the obvious is so obvious. The Arab war against Israel has already become the Muslim war against the Jews, a fact made crystal clear by Israel’s most dangerous enemy – the Islamic Republic of Iran. The world yawns while the United States sleeps in indifference.
Yes, nations don’t have friends; they only have interests. The United States – but to be more accurate, the Biden/Blinken Administration – despite the lip service that it provides Israel as it fights its war in Gaza, has exposed its own agenda. A seemingly incomprehensible refusal to confront Iran coupled with the demand that “the day after” become the first generation of a sovereign Palestinian state.
Nothing even-handed to consider. Even while Israel’s protests fall on deaf ears – muffled by the sounds of an ongoing war against the Jewish people – in the Middle East, on the streets of numerous Western cities, and too many academic institutions to count.
In 2010, Anthony Julius, a British lawyer, wrote in Trials of the Diaspora: “Israel is the only state in the world whose legitimacy is widely denied and whose destruction is publicly advocated and threatened: Israelis are the only citizens of a state whose indiscriminate murder is widely considered justifiable.” And those who do – just might get the United States to lobby aggressively to get a state of their own.
To be sure, Israel and the Jews have more ‘so-called’ friends than friends. And while the truth matters, it certainly isn’t self-evident.
Meir Jolovitz is a past national executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, and formerly associated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.