Dear America, Israel is not your puppet.
Many Americans effectively think that the Jewish state is their 51st state and, therefore, Americans are free to impose whatever they want on Israel — no questions asked. Thanks, but no thanks.
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Current events this week were highlighted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the last minute, ordering Defense Minister Yoav Gallant not to travel to the U.S. for highly anticipated meetings with his counterpart, Lloyd Austin.
Gallant’s trip is supposed to deal with the scope and substance of Israel’s likely retaliatory strike against Iran in response to last week’s Iranian missile attack on the Jewish state, the second one in six months. Like the previous attack in April, the U.S. and three other armies — the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan — helped Israel successfully defend itself against Iran’s 181 ballistic missiles.
U.S. President Joe Biden did not speak to Netanyahu after Iran’s latest attack, and reportedly, the two had not spoken since August. The reason behind the disconnect is not a secret; it is a result of their hemorrhaging relationship. Since the beginning of the year-long war, the Americans have been communicating mostly through Gallant as their primary channel instead of dealing directly with Netanyahu.
According to the upcoming book, “War,” written by renowned journalist Bob Woodward, Biden called Netanyahu a “f*cking liar” after IDF troops went into the consequential Gazan city of Rafah, and yelled at the premier after an Israeli strike took out a top Hezbollah commander.
“That son of a b*tch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy,” said Biden privately, according to Woodward. “He’s a bad f*cking guy!”
I am not necessarily here to defend Netanyahu, but I am here to call out the pure hypocrisy of Joe Biden, a politician for 52 years who could also, in all fairness, be assigned labels such as “a f*cking liar” and “a bad f*cking guy.”
I could easily make the argument — as controversial as it might sound to some biased ears — that the Biden-led West, at least to some extent, provoked Vladimir Putin to launch Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I could make the argument that Biden has intentionally helped his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business ventures, especially his work for a Ukrainian energy company. And I could make the argument that Biden, his team, and his media cronies deliberately deceived the American people for over a year about his age-related ineptitude to effectively serve as U.S. president for a second term.
But these arguments are not entirely relevant. What matters is that both Biden and Netanyahu (and countless other politicians) are neither “great guys” nor honesty brokers. I have little patience for people who hold others to standards they do not themselves meet. And I have even less patience for folks who defend one politician over another, under the blanket of identity politics, even though both are guilty of similar offenses.
If we are to have an honest conversation, the issue here is not one of perceived good (Biden) versus perceived bad (Netanyahu). Instead, the issue is that many Americans have long viewed their country’s relationship with Israel. In effect, Americans think that the Jewish state is their 51st state and, therefore, Americans are free to impose whatever they want on Israel, no questions asked.
This mentality dates back to 1967, when America started seriously treating the Jewish state as an ally only after the Israelis’ impressive victory in the Six-Day War against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan — all of which aimed to annihilate the Jews in their indigenous homeland.
“Israel did not grow strong because it had an American alliance. It acquired an American alliance because it had grown strong,” wrote Walter Russell Mead, a Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York.1
As the end of the British mandate in Palestine approached around the mid-1940s, the decision to recognize the Jewish state remained contentious in America, with significant disagreement between then-U.S. President Harry Truman, his domestic and campaign adviser, Clark Clifford, and both the State Department and Defense Department.
In 1947, the United Nations partitioned the land in British-era Palestine between its Jews and Arabs, leading the Zionists to declare independence one year later. President Truman cautiously recognized the Jewish state, but rapidly changing geopolitical circumstances across the Middle East led U.S. policy to focus on supporting Arab states’ independence; aiding the development of oil-producing countries; halting Soviet influence from gaining a foothold in Greece, Turkey, and Iran; and preventing an arms race in the region.
In the 1950s, the U.S. provided Israel with moderate amounts of economic aid, mostly as loans for basic foodstuffs. France became Israel’s main arms supplier at this time and equipped the Jewish state with advanced military equipment and technology — leading to a 1963 high-stakes battle of wills between the U.S. and Israel over the Jewish state’s nuclear program.
The tensions were invisible to the publics of both countries, and only a few senior officials were aware of the severity of the situation. Former Israel Air Force commander Major General Dan Tolkowsky seriously entertained the fear that U.S. President John F. Kennedy might send airborne troops to Dimona, the home of Israel’s nuclear complex.
Then, in 1973, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made an offer to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s emissary: returning the Sinai Peninsula (captured by Israel in the Six-Day War six years prior) to Egyptian control and an Israeli withdrawal from all of Sinai, except for some strategic points.
But Sadat was already determined to go to war, declaring that Egypt is prepared to “sacrifice a million Egyptian soldiers” to recover its lost territory.2 In the week leading up to the Jews’ holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the Egyptian army staged a week-long training exercise adjacent to the Suez Canal. Movements of Syrian troops towards the border were also detected, as were the cancellation of leaves and a call-up of reserves in the Syrian army.
On the morning of Yom Kippur 1973, Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and IDF Chief David Elazar held a meeting. Elazar argued in favor of a preemptive attack against Syria, but Kissinger and then-U.S. President Richard Nixon had been aggressively warning Meir that she must not be responsible for initiating a Middle East war. According to Kissinger, had Israel struck first, it would not have received “so much as a nail.”3
Later that day, the Arab coalition launched a joint attack against Israel, resulting in heavy Israeli losses. Ultimately the Jewish state rebounded and emerged victorious in yet another genocidal war aimed at the Jews.
These are just some of the many examples of America trying to dictate any and all terms to Israel, including this week, when it was reported that Israel surprised the U.S. by assassinating Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah late last month. Since the Israelis did not coordinate with the White House ahead of time, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin directly confronted Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in an after-the-fact phone call, with Lloyd bluntly asking: “Excuse me, what did you say?!” after Gallant told him about the operation.4
Later that day, during a second phone call between the two, Austin asked Gallant if Israel was ready to defend itself on its own, since the U.S. did not have time to deploy its forces to deflect a potential immediate reprisal by Hezbollah, according to the report.
You are honestly telling me that after a full year of war against Israel (one of America’s greatest allies in a very important region), the U.S. does not already have its forces in the region deployed and ready for reprisal attacks, regardless of a high-profile assassination attempt? What nonsense.
Again, the issue here is not what the news reported, but that Israel did not in effect ask permission from the U.S. to carry out this assassination. And it seems pretty obvious why Israel kept its cards close until after the successful assassination attempt: because the Israelis knew that the U.S. would try to veto it, or at least talk Israel into postponement.
Just look at how the U.S. is managing Israel’s much-needed retaliation to the 181 ballistic missiles that Iran fired at it last week. America and most Western countries recognize Israel’s right to defend itself, but at the same time, they are strongly seeking to limit the extent to which Israel will exercise its right of response, while insisting that it not attack the nuclear facilities or facilities Iran’s oil — while sending senior military and diplomatic officials to Israel to ensure that they do not dare to act while they are visiting.
“De facto, we see a prolonged delay in Israel’s response that threatens our security,” wrote Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.5 “Every day that passes without a response, Israel’s casus belli (Latin for “justification for war”) gets weaker and weaker. When Israel acts, the world will hardly remember why. In the United States, the image of Iranian missiles flying towards Tel Aviv will be blurred by the discourse on cities destroyed by hurricanes and the latest developments in the presidential race. A part of the public and a large part of the press will criticize Israel for needlessly escalating the conflict in the Middle East, raising the price of fuel and trying drag the U.S. into an all-out regional war.”
“Besides avoiding further friction with the White House,” added Oren, “what profit does Israel have from waiting in response? Perhaps an urgent national interest such as the future and existence of the only Jewish state in the world?”
Indeed, this is how virtually the entire Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran war has unfolded. First the Americans tried to dissuade Israel from a ground incursion into Gaza following the Hamas-led massacres and kidnappings on October 7th, delaying the Israeli response for almost a month. Then they practically forced Israel to fight Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza with two hands behind its back, both implicitly and explicitly blaming the Israelis time and again for the “humanitarian crisis” in the Strip that — even if it is an actual crisis — lies at the doorstep of Hamas and Hamas alone.
Then the Americans tried to keep Israel out of the aforementioned Rafah, the southern Gaza city that connects the Strip with Egypt and the chief conduit for the Strip’s terror groups to smuggle in weapons — and potentially smuggle out hostages, including American hostages. Then the Americans tried to hold back Israel from justifiably going after Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, after the terrorist organization joined the war, unprovoked, exactly one day after Iran started this war via its other proxy, Hamas.
Judging by these actions, you would think that Iran and its proxies are America’s staunch allies and Israel its adversary. After all, one of Israel’s main TV networks reported earlier this week that the U.S. and Arab states have launched covert talks with Iran for a comprehensive ceasefire aimed at calming all seven war fronts at once.
Presuming that Israel is in fact an American ally, one would logically conclude that the U.S. should allow the Israelis to finish the job against Hamas and Hezbollah, which would significantly benefit the Middle East.
But no, the Biden Administration is not interested in doing what is best for its “friends” in the Middle East — namely Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain — all of which are the most aligned with Western interests in the region. Instead, Biden is more interested in handing the antisemitic, genocidal, jihadist Iranian regime a victory by tentatively allowing Israel to bludgeon its proxy terror groups, but not defeat them, ultimately leaving them intact.
Why might this be the reality?
Because the Biden Administration understands that, if this war continues until the highly contested U.S. presidential election next month, it will not bode well for the chances of Biden’s Democrats and current Vice President Kamala Harris, who is vying to be Biden’s successor. And yet, according to Biden, Netanyahu “[gives] a damn only about himself.”6 Again, the hypocrisy is pungent.
Another interpretation is that America fancies weak allies (including, but not limited, to Israel) — so that only the U.S. can be dominant. But it seems to me that a country is only as dominant as the strength of its allies. Let’s recall that the U.S. has not won a war since the 1940s, so the Americans might want to rethink their doctrine of broadcasting dominance while deliberately diminishing their allies.
Regardless, many Americans do not enjoy the practice of looking inward and admitting their faults, preferring the blame game instead. In Israel’s case, that oftentimes means heavily targeting Netanyahu and his Right-wing government. The leftist Biden Administration and the largely Left-wing mainstream media and social media in the U.S. have convinced a large swath of Americans that Israel’s Right-wing nature is inherently flawed and dishonorable — a classic ploy of identity politics at its worst.
Since the late 1970s, Israel has predominantly been run by Right-wing governments, elected democratically by an increasingly Right-wing society, which is neither a good nor bad thing. It simply reflects the reality of living in the hostile and volatile Middle East, which is dominated by crazed autocrats, theocrats, and jihadist terror groups.
Of course, Israel is the region’s only democracy. But it is also a product of its own environment; the nonstop genocidal attacks inflicted on Israel by a multitude of Arab countries and Palestinian terrorists, decade after decade, have understandably hardened many Israelis’ hearts, pushing them to more center-Right and Right-wing viewpoints — especially on subjects like defense and national security. I am one of these Israelis and I make absolutely no apologies about it.
American society has a lot of positive traits, but it seems to me that many Americans (and perhaps many others in different countries) conflate Right-wing politics in the U.S. with Right-wing politics in Israel. This high propensity for intellectual laziness blinds them from realizing that Israel presents a unique form of Right-wing politics which differs in several critical aspects from Right-wing movements in other countries, particularly those across the West.
However, many Americans are too pompous to overcome their identity politics and intellectual laziness — exacerbated by an ever-increasing avalanche of U.S. media outlets, politicians, celebrities, and social media influencers desperate for more content off which to profit from their uncritical thinking audiences.
Just last week, the longstanding high-profile American TV network CBS hosted on one of its programs an author of a new book which featured a one-sided tirade against Israel. After the CBS journalist interviewing the author rightfully questioned his odious claims about the Jewish state, an internal meeting at CBS reportedly featured a welcomed debate about whether it is “fair to talk about whether Israel should exist at all.” There are some people at CBS who think that “Israel’s existence as a state should be part of fair conversation,” according to one CBS source.7
It is difficult to imagine American journalists having that conversation about any other country, but it is also unsurprising. Many Americans essentially think that they own Israel, often citing the roughly $4 billion in annual military aid that the U.S. provides to the Jewish state.
Shortly before he left office, U.S. President Barack Obama signed this historically large aid package, committing $38 billion to Israel over a decade starting in 2018. The Memorandum of Understanding capped the efforts of an Obama Administration that had spent the previous eight years downgrading the U.S.-Israeli alliance to the point of spying on pro-Israel members of Congress.
After all the reasonable resentment surrounding the Obama-led nuclear deal with Iran, the landmark aid agreement silenced Obama’s critics by “proving” that he was in fact a staunch supporter of Israel, even as he was gifting Iran with a future nuclear bomb — which the Iranians would presumably use to fulfill their threats to “wipe the Zionist entity off the map.”
In reality, the Memorandum of Understanding advanced Obama’s goal of appeasing Israel’s fears while limiting future Israeli actions to correspond with a new American strategic architecture where the interests of traditional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia would be “balanced” with those of their mortal enemy, Iran.
More recently, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren said that, when it comes to U.S. military aid to Israel, “American support cannot be a blank check” — reflecting an increasingly widespread viewpoint of the American Left. Warren is either irresponsibly mistaken or being deliberately manipulative in her claim that U.S. aid is offered as a “blank check.” And, if anything, Israel ends up sacrificing far more value in return for the nearly $4 billion it receives annually from Washington, D.C.
This is because almost all military aid to Israel consists of credits that go directly from the Pentagon to U.S. weapons manufacturers. In return, American payouts undermine Israel’s domestic defense industry, weaken its economy, and compromise the country’s autonomy — giving Washington veto power over everything from Israeli weapons sales, to diplomatic and military strategy.
As the costs to Israel of U.S. aid have skyrocketed over the past decade, the benefits of the relationship to the U.S. have only grown greater. Aid functions as a lucrative backdoor subsidy to U.S. arms makers, and provides Congress and the White House with a tool to leverage influence over a key strategic ally.
The Israeli military, ranked as the fourth-most powerful in the world, has become an adjunct to American power in a crucial region in which the U.S. has lost the appetite for and leverage in projecting military force. Israeli intelligence functions as America’s eyes and ears, not just in the Middle East, but also in other strategic arenas like Russia and Central Asia — and even parts of Latin America.
Truth be told, Israel has eliminated more terrorists on the U.S. most-wanted lists during the last few months than the U.S. has managed to neutralize in the last two decades.
With all this said, I can understand that, however the $38 billion military aid to Israel shakes out, Americans care where their hard-earned taxpayer money is going. Or at least this is what they claim — as they give Israel disproportionate attention, fury, and criticism while conveniently ignoring the other thousands of line items in the U.S. federal budget. There is a term for this: It is called “selective outrage.”
I, then, have to wonder if there is something deeply antisemitic in many Americans’ thoughts and opinions about Israel, if not in intention then in outcome. And this goes for many American Jews as well, who are unknowingly victims of a well-established phenomenon called “internalized antisemitism.” (Look it up if you have never heard of it.)
You see, prior to the State of Israel’s formation in 1948, societies of all kinds imposed their malicious wills on the Jews, both implicitly and explicitly. But since 1948, we Jews have rightfully regained our strength in this world and no longer need to tolerate antisemitic demands.
Some people in the world, no less in America, have not received this memo. They think that the Jewish state can be pushed around as if it is merely a U.S. proxy. Not so. Israel is, pound for pound, the strongest country on this planet. That the Jews were able to pull this off in less than 100 years, after facing annihilation in the Holocaust, is a testament to the Jewish People — and perhaps uncomfortable for so-called world powers.
But something changed for us Jews in 1948, a sentiment perfectly encapsulated by then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The year was 1982 and a young senator named Joe Biden levied a threat of cutting off U.S. aid to Israel. Begin, in the U.S. Congress’ building, unabashedly replied to Biden:
“Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country.”
“We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
Mead, Walter Russell. “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.” Knopf. 2022.
Morris, Benny. “Righteous Victims.” New York: Vintage Books. 2001.
“Three years too late, Golda Meir understood how war could have been avoided.” Times of Israel.
“U.S. Frustrated by Israel’s Reluctance to Share Iran Retaliation Plans.” The Wall Street Journal.
“שאלת התקיפה באיראן: חיבוק הדוב האמריקני.” Ynet News.
“U.S. Frustrated by Israel’s Reluctance to Share Iran Retaliation Plans.” The Wall Street Journal.
“The Fallout at CBS Continues.” The Free Press.
You say many Americans in this piece and it is of course true because the Democratic Party consists of many Americans. But many more Americans stand with Israel, support Israel and appreciate Israel. This iincluded the vast majority of elected Republicans.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, I have never heard these words so well presented. I have been saying words parallel but not with with such clarity and honesty.
Too much of the world has the attitude that Jewish lives don't matter. So what, they say, some more Jews died at the hands of the terrorists. But let the Jews do the killing and all we hear is oh those poor Arab people. If those "poor Arab people" would stop killing us we would not have to continually fight. Not just to defend ourselves, which we have every right to do, but to keep our borders. If any other country in the world were under such attacks they would not hesitate to annihilate said country without apologizing with no condemnation from anyone. But because it is us, because it is those Jews we are expected to act differently. Today's Jews is not the Jew who walked into the gas chamber. Today's Jew is proud, smart, a fierce fighter and is not going to take any crap from anybody. You want a piece of us, then be prepared to lose some body parts of your own. Never again.