Ray Close, a former CIA analyst, wrote the following letter to a foreign-policy list maintained by a Princeton scholar yesterday. Close gave me permission to publish [emphases mine]:
For a large number of sophisticated Israelis, particularly those who feel the deepest affinity with America — either by family relationships, education, political or business associations of one kind or another — I think there is another latent existential threat. It is the deep anxiety, based on gradually evolving rational analysis, that Israel will eventually (not immediately, but within a generation) become much less important to the United States than it is (or appears to be) today; that the American people and the US Government will jointly come to a realization that Israel is not, after all, biologically attached to America by a permanent umbilical cord; that we are not subscribers to an identical set of cultural and ethical and religious mores; that the US is not critically dependent on Israel's support in opposing some monster vaguely defined as Islamofascism; that Israel will not serve eternally as America's mentor and counselor in our joint efforts to preserve the American value system in a region dominated by an evil and alien culture; that Israel is not an American aircraft carrier that protects US strategic interests in the whole region; that Israel is not the final line of defence against the threat of nuclear attack by dangerously unstable governments bent on destruction of Homeland America.
I think this deep dread, never articulated, contains a closely related anxiety: that increasing numbers of upper-class American-oriented Israelis, despairing finally of ever enjoying a peaceful and secure lifestyle for themselves and their descendants in a homogeneous Jewish society, will abandon their fading Zionist dreams and emigrate to the United States, where they don't have to worry about those goddamn A-rabs, and where the age-old bugaboo of anti-Semitism is no longer a factor in any American Jew's life. If I were an Israeli, THAT would be my nightmare —- the realization that Israel, instead of thriving as a virtual Western Power or fifty-first state of the USA, is fated inexorably to evolve into a small, beleaguered ethnic enclave at the eastern end of the Mediterranean — surrounded by hostile neighbors, prevented from continued expansion, no longer inspired by a vibrant ideology or sustained and reinvigorated by constant infusions of new immigrants, divided by contentious and incompatible political minority factions, threatened by an exploding and politically awakening Israeli Arab population insistent on their civil rights, and challenged by a major segment of Jewish society whom they regard as selfish, arrogant religious fanatics — with whom they share no cultural affinity and very few social values.
I think one could argue that this somber vision of the future might develop more rapidly than I have pictured above. What if the present recession results in a major reduction of charitable donations from American Jews? What if the average American taxpayer asks himself why he should continue to vote for billions of dollars of aid to a small foreign country that has no plausible claim to automatic charity? What if American and Israeli concepts of how to deal with local and international security threats continue to diverge, to the point where public criticism of Israel actions such as the recent Gaza invasion becomes generally accepted in the U.S? What if Israel, in a desperate effort to dramatize its relevance to the United States, and to restore its image as a champion of America's strategic interests, were to take some foolish action (such as attacking Iran) that plunged the United States into another unnecessary war, and were seen to have radically exacerbated the world financial crisis? In those not-farfetched circumstances, I can see Israel suddenly being recognized as a strategic liability to the United States rather than an asset — an evaluation that many Americans, especially military, academic and diplomatic experts in Middle East affairs, would already subscribe to even today.
I can think of many other such developments that in the period immediately ahead could accelerate the erosion of that "special relationship" with America on which Israel's military, political, economic and spiritual prosperity and survival heavily depend. Existential threat? You betcha, as they say in Alaska.
Ray Close
Phil Weiss: Wonderful statement. They say "you betcha" in the midwest too. Benny Morris said we attacked Gaza because we felt our illegitimacy growing in the eyes of the world. Mearsheimer has focused on the reverse aliyah problem: Jews leaving Israel for the U.S. It's huge. Notice the great sadness in this note. The instability of the Israeli dream of itself, and of the American dream of Israel, has become a crisis through the election of a minority here even as Israelis elevate a racist, and through the post-Iraq awareness in the U.S. that we have been sold an ideological bill of goods by neocons with dual-loyalty issues. The most prescient thing in this note may be Close's feeling that it will all happen fast, not slow. It's like Mike Campbell's answer on how he went bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises: "Gradually.. then suddenly." I believe that will describe the American awakening here. Our politics are just too dynamic and impatient.
