[The White House will not cut aid to Israel or stop cooperation
overnight, but the day America treats Israel like any other country is
nearer than we think.]
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THE WANING DAYS OF THE ‘SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP’  
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Meron Rapoport
July 20, 2023
972 Magazine [[link removed]]

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_ The White House will not cut aid to Israel or stop cooperation
overnight, but the day America treats Israel like any other country is
nearer than we think. _

President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attend a
dinner at the Prime Minister's Residence in Jerusalem, March 9, 2010.,
Miriam Alster/Flash90

 

Writing in Haaretz last week, Israeli security journalist Amos
Harel reported
[[link removed]] that,
at least in practice, the United States and Iran already have an
unwritten agreement regarding the latter’s nuclear question.
According to him, Iran will freeze its uranium enrichment, and in
return the United States will allow the release of billions of dollars
in Iranian assets across several countries, after the money was frozen
as part of American sanctions. Israel, wrote Harel, has a fundamental
role to play in the deal: do not disturb.

This short instruction — which we have heard often from reports
about Washington’s relations with Iran and other Middle Eastern
countries — might help explain a recent column by New York Times
commentator Thomas Friedman, in which he claims that the White House
has begun to “reassess”
[[link removed]] its
relations with Israel. Days after the column was published, and after
Biden met with President Isaac Herzog, Biden summoned the journalist
to the White House and told him
[[link removed]] that
the Netanyahu government’s plans for judicial overhaul
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irreparably damage the countries’ “special relationship.”

Those who have become accustomed to headlines about the “strategic
alliance” between Israel and the United States, and that Israel is
the U.S.’s most important ally in the Middle East (if not the world)
should, at least ostensibly, be puzzled by Friedman’s recent
columns. If this alliance is so important to the U.S. government, how
is it willing to reconsider it over the judicial overhaul? Or is it
possible that Israel is not at all a strategic asset, but rather the
exact opposite: a burden that must be kept at bay so as not interfere
with American strategic moves in the region?

This theory is grounded in historical reality. When the United States
organized an international coalition against Iraq after Saddam Hussein
occupied Kuwait in 1991, it made every effort to keep Israel out, as
it was clear that an Israeli presence would prevent Arab countries
from joining. Things got to the point that even when Saddam fired
missiles at Israel to provoke it to join the war, the Bush Sr.
administration pressured Israel not to interfere, just as Biden is
doing today with Iran.

A U.S. soldier speaks to Israeli soldiers during a joint exercise in
north Tel Aviv, October 24, 2012. (Yossi Zeliger/Flash90)

The United States entered the Second Iraq War without a strong
international coalition, but even in this situation, it did not ask
Israel to provide military support. The assistance, if anything, went
the other way. In 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu, then in the Knesset
opposition, spoke before Congress and guaranteed
[[link removed]] U.S.
lawmakers that “overthrowing Saddam will have enormous positive
reverberations on the region.” In other words, that the American
occupation of Iraq would help Israel, without Israel contributing to
another occupation beyond its own. 

One of the more famous clichés is that Israel effectively serves as
an American base and aircraft carrier in the Middle East. But the
truth is that the United States has placed its military bases in Saudi
Arabia and Qatar — not in Israel — and likely not by accident. In
fact, aside from providing intelligence and diplomatic support, it is
hard to think of an American military campaign in the Middle East that
Israel actively participated in.

In most cases, rather, help went in the opposite direction, with
Washington mobilizing its money and influence to help Israel: from the
1979 peace agreement with Egypt, which the U.S. effectively
“financed” through annual military aid to Egypt, to the
recent Abraham Accords
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which the U.S. also facilitated by agreeing to sell advanced military
aircraft to the United Arab Emirates or through the recognition of
Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara.

This does not mean that the United States does not profit from its
relationship with Israel. Israel still serves as a laboratory for
testing weapons
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technologies
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the U.S., among many countries, greatly benefit from. Moreover, most
of the $3.8 billion sent to Israel every year is used for purchasing
American arms.

SHARED VALUES OF YESTERDAY

Still, the explanation for the U.S.-Israel “special relationship”
cannot be found only in the realms of strategy or military
maneuvering. They are based, first and foremost, on the perception of
what is commonly called “shared values.” Some of this derives from
the Israel lobby, which bases much of its strength on the political
power of the American Jewish community, and some from Christian
Zionism
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which has existed in the United States since the 19th century and
remains a potent force in evangelical circles today. 

But beyond that, the fact that Israel is described as “the only
democracy in the Middle East” has a decisive weight in this sense of
kinship. Israel is seen as a beacon of liberal Western values amid an
oppressive and religious Middle East; it is a narrative that sets
apart Israel from America’s more blatantly authoritarian, yet no
less central, allies in the region, and as such it must be protected
and aided in every possible way. Most of this support is not
necessarily related to military aid: from pressuring
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Arabia to enter the Abraham Accords to vetoing UN Security Council
resolutions, the political field remains the arena in which U.S.
alignment is most essential to Israel.

Therefore, when the Biden administration reportedly whispers to Thomas
Friedman about a “reassessment,” it means a reevaluation of
Israel’s virtue as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” not
because of its strategic asset.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman delivers his address after
receiving an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
June 3 2007. (Rebecca Zeffert/Flash90)

Of course, to anyone who knows the Israeli occupation, and the myriad
ways in which it has dispossessed and discriminated
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Palestinians since 1948, the reference to Israel as a democracy sounds
ridiculous — vacuous words that try to cover up a violent, cruel
reality. But what is suddenly undermining Washington’s perception of
Israel as a democratic paradise in a jungle of backwardness?

One reason is the presence of far-right politicians like Bezalel
Smotrich
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Ben Gvir
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top ministerial positions. In practice, the Biden administration could
continue reconciling the contradiction between Israel as an occupying,
settler state and its self definition as a “democracy,” pretending
that the occupation is a temporary bug rather than a feature, and that
Israel will return to being a “Jewish and democratic” state once
military rule over the Palestinians comes to an end.

Yet the behavior of Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and their allies — from
policies to establish new outposts, to accelerating the expansion of
existing settlements, to giving full backing to settler pogroms, to
proposed authoritarian laws — is causing the illusion to crumble. It
is near-impossible for anyone to pretend that there is any separation
between democratic Israel and occupying Israel, when the government is
clearly implementing Smotrich’s infamous “Decisive Plan
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with Finance Minister Bezalel
Smotrich during a cabinet meeting in the Prime Minister’s Office,
Jerusalem, June 18, 2023. (Amit Shabi/POOL)

The disregard for the deepening apartheid in the occupied territories
can also be explained by the fact that this oppression was applied
against Palestinian Arabs rather than, say, Europeans. With Israel
perceived, among both Republicans and Democrats, as the frontline
between the West and the East, between the First and the Third World,
between Judeo-Christian culture and Islam, it is easy for American
politicians to view the violence against the Palestinians as an
inevitable extension of the U.S.’s War on Terror, of which Netanyahu
was an early prophet.

THE NEW FAULT LINE

Now, however, it seems that the Biden administration views the
right’s judicial overhaul as an effort to eliminate Israeli
democracy from within — and as such, erasing what it considers the
central foundation of the relationship between the two countries.
Otherwise, it is difficult to explain the zeal with which both
President Biden and U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides
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spoken up to try to stop the overhaul, which is, on its face, an
internal Israeli matter.

The White House’s briefing
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Monday, on the heels of a phone conversation between Netanyahu and
Biden — according to which the American president “stressed the
importance of advancing [judicial reform] with the widest possible
consensus,” and that “democratic values have always been and must
remain the hallmark of the U.S.-Israel relationship” — only
reinforces this notion.

In other words, as long as Israel oppressed only Palestinians, it
would be possible to pretend that it was indeed “Jewish and
democratic.” As soon as Washington got the impression, whether
mistaken or justified, that Israel began to oppress its Jewish
citizens as well, as part of the “Western world,” the belief in
the “only democracy in the Middle East” begins to fall apart.

A billboard by anti-occupation group B’Tselem in Bethlehem, ahead of
the arrival of U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to the country, on
July 14, 2022. (Photo by Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90)

This does not mean that the Biden administration will cut aid to
Israel or stop security and intelligence cooperation overnight. But it
does mean that the day the United States treats Israel like any other
country in the world is nearer than we think. This may even mean
removing the diplomatic protection that it grants Israel in global
institutions, from the UN Security Council to the International
Criminal Court. For Israel, such a change could be just as damaging,
and perhaps more so, than cutting military aid.

If such a reassessment is indeed taking place, it is happening at a
moment in which more voices in the Israeli government are openly
stating that Israeli power should not be based on Western values, but
on the country’s own military and economic strength. Foreign
Minister Eli Cohen said this quite explicitly
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Arabia will establish relations with Israel because Israel is strong,
not because it is nice to the Palestinians.

When Netanyahu reportedly states
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without a few military squadrons, but not without a government,” he
is banging the same drum. The prime minister is ready to crush
Israel’s current elites, from the military to hi-tech sectors,
provided he can maintain his far-right government. This is an approach
not unlike Vladimir Putin in Russia or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in
Turkey: both have crushed the few democratic institutions that existed
in their country as well as the elites, deciding that they could rule
based on force alone. It’s not by chance that Erdoğan announced
that Netanyahu will soon visit Ankara, and will make a reciprocal
visit to Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald
Trump, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of
the UAE Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Abdullatif bin Rashid
Al-Zayani, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bahrain attend the Abraham
Accords Signing Ceremony at the White House in Washington D.C.,
September 15, 2020. (Avi Ohayon/GPO)

Should Donald Trump win the 2024 U.S. elections, his relationship with
Israel may be based more on power dynamics and immediate interests
than on “shared values” of liberal democracy. This is not
necessarily good for Netanyahu’s Israel. Interests can shift
quickly, as we have seen with the sudden rapprochement between Saudi
Arabia and Iran, or even with Trump’s embrace of North Korea’s Kim
Jong-il. “Shared values,” vague as the term is, forms a much more
stable basis for a relationship.

So while Biden has difficulty defending Israel as a Western-style
democracy, the Israeli government is saying out loud that the country
no longer needs a liberal democratic system to survive and thrive.
This is the new fault line, and this is precisely the arena in which
Biden’s reassessment may take place.

_A version of this article was also published in Hebrew on Local Call.
Read it here
[[link removed]]._

_[xxxxxx MODERATOR: READ MORE - ISRAEL'S ONE-STATE REALITY - IT'S
TIME TO GIVE UP ON THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION, MICHAEL BARNETT, NATHAN
BROWN, MARC LYNCH AND SHIBLEY TELHAMI, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, APRIL 14,
2023.]
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_MERON RAPOPORT is an editor at Local Call._

_Support journalism against apartheid. Become a member of +972
MAGAZINE. [[link removed]] We rely on YOUR
contribution to expose and resist injustice in Israel-Palestine._

* Israel
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* Palestine
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* United States
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* Joe Biden
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Abraham Accords
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* Aid to Israel
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