As the US-Israel relationship is questioned, its ‘shared fictions’ remain strong

Earlier this week, there was a somewhat odd moment of insecurity in the usually harmonious U.S.-Israeli relationship.

On Wednesday afternoon, Axios’ Middle East correspondent in Washington felt the need to tweet that a White House National Security Council spokesperson told him that “There is no talk of some kind of formal reassessment’ of relations with the Israeli government.” 

At around the same time, Israeli President Isaac Herzog was telling reporters that the relationship between the United States and Israel is “above and beyond any and all disagreements” and that the “alliance between Israel and the United States is unbreakable and irreplaceable.”

Why did both American and Israeli officials feel the need to so staunchly reaffirm the U.S.-Israel relationship at this moment? The answer was found in the opinion pages of the New York Times. 

In his column Tuesday, Times pundit Thomas Friedman published a piece titled, “The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun.” That’s what caused the tumult.

It’s not a very good piece. It gets plenty wrong, is poorly written, and has some truly horrifying points, but that’s separate from the effect that the piece — or, more precisely, the headline — had in both Washington and Jerusalem. 

There’s really no reason it should have shaken things up so much. The piece was purely speculative and made no claim to any insider knowledge. Friedman was just offering his take on what’s happening now. But in both the U.S. and Israel, Friedman is widely read, and even when he doesn’t base his writing on inside knowledge (something he has a lot less of these days than he used to), many of Israel’s supporters still pay attention.

Reassessment without consequences

The idea that a “reassessment” might be taking place is overblown. Despite Israel severely damaging its own standing in the eyes of many of its liberal supporters with its “judicial reform” that seeks to disempower its own judicial system, the White House, State Department, and Congress have all remained steadfast in their support. Indeed, as Friedman indirectly notes, that support remains in place despite Israel’s increasingly insulting and arrogant behavior, even relative to its usual hubris, toward the Biden administration. And, while we have come to expect utter indifference to Israeli assaults and killings of Palestinians, there has been growing discomfort among liberal Democrats over Israel’s increasing aggression in the West Bank.

Friedman’s concern over a possible reassessment by the U.S. stems from a few things. President Joe Biden has pointedly refused to arrange a visit to Washington for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The outgoing Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, who has exceeded all diplomatic propriety in his concern for Israeli interests during his term, has talked about working to prevent Israel from “going off the rails.” And, to really set off the alarm bells, Biden himself, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria, made the self-evident statement that this was the “most extreme” Israeli government in history. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the most extreme of the extremists in the Knesset, said in response that Biden “needs to realize that we are no longer a star on the American flag.”

It’s easy to understand why Friedman might talk of a “reassessment,” and there is some merit to his thinking. Both Biden and his Secretary of State have, throughout their careers, shown a deep attachment to Israel and a cruel indifference to the well-being, the lives, and the very humanity of Palestinians. Yet even they are being sorely tested by Israel right now, as are many Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, who have defended Israel on the basis of liberal values of democracy, the rule of law, and equal rights. These have, of course, always been illusory platforms on which to stand, but in the past, Israel always did just enough, often just cosmetically or rhetorically, for the overwhelming majority of people who don’t follow this issue closely to believe that Israel was basically a flawed democracy.

That charade is over. Israel no longer maintains that pretense and those who remain in passionate lock-step with it do not try to make that case. They simply argue that Palestinians deserve what they get, Israel is entitled to behave this way, and if you disagree, you simply hate Jews. A quick look at the responses on Twitter to me or anyone else advocating for Palestinian rights, let alone any actual Palestinians, makes this clear. 

Much has rightly been made of the Gallup poll in March that showed a marked shift in Democratic sympathies, which now leaned distinctly toward the Palestinians for the first time. But it’s more than just the polls. Israel’s draconian treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza, Jenin, and in Jerusalem has been on full display over the past year more widely than ever. It only makes sense that Tom Friedman would conclude that the Biden administration is reassessing the terms of its relationship with Israel.

In this vein, the invitation to Israeli President Isaac Herzog to address a joint session of Congress is telling. With the buzz around the lack of any invitation to Netanyahu remaining in the air, Friedman’s description of this invitation was striking. “It is Biden’s way of signaling that his problem is not with the Israeli people but with Bibi’s extremist cabinet,” the pundit wrote.

The choice of words there was not random. U.S. presidents and diplomats have often argued that their quarrels are with the “government of” a particular country — Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia — and not with its people. Friedman, in choosing those words, implicitly illustrates a serious decline in Israel’s standing in Washington. 

But that’s where Friedman is exaggerating, and he himself even seems to realize it. He writes, “I am not talking about a reassessment of our military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, which remains strong and vital. I am talking about our basic diplomatic approach to an Israel that is unabashedly locking in a one-state solution: a Jewish state only, with the fate and rights of the Palestinians T.B.D.”

Of course, if aid to Israel and military and intelligence cooperation are not threatened, Israel is not apt to be too concerned. Even in the unlikely event that the United States diminishes its support for Israel at the United Nations, that would just mean that Israel would need to ignore more UN resolutions than it already does. 

A relationship built on ‘shared fictions’

Also telling is what Friedman sees as the divergence of U.S. and Israeli interests. The “shared interest” Friedman focuses on is, bizarrely, what he describes as “the shared fiction that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was only temporary and one day there could be a two-state solution with the 2.9 million Palestinians there.”

Israel, he says, is destroying that “shared fiction.” In truth, Israel has been undermining that fiction all along, from the day the occupation began 56 years ago. In more recent years, Israel has been aggressively shredding it, moving not just to quietly undermine a two-state solution, but to “crush” aspirations of a Palestinian state, as Netanyahu recently put it at a meeting of his cabinet.

But more importantly, that “shared fiction” is not a “shared interest,” it’s a very harmful conspiracy. Friedman does a great service here in his description of this as “a fiction,” because the fact that it is fiction is the very heart of the problem. 

The occupation was never temporary. Israel made a decision early on, as far back as the plans drawn up by then-Minister of Labor, and soon-to-be Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon in July 1967, to absorb parts or all of the West Bank. For 56 years, Israel has danced about, building settlements, strangling the Palestinian economy; confiscating Palestinian land; harassing, assaulting, and killing the Palestinian populace; and all the while working with the United States to maintain the fiction that it would one day withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. 

Israel maintained that fiction while it annexed East Jerusalem, while it annexed the Golan Heights, and when it worked with U.S. President George W. Bush to declare that it would never have to return to its internationally recognized borders as they existed before June 1967. It’s been a valuable fiction, supporting the strategy of increased dispossession of Palestinians and creeping annexation of the West Bank. Israel is displaying astounding recklessness and foolishness by tossing it away, and it’s easy to see how difficult that makes things for the United States. 

Friedman has all of that right, even if his wistful nostalgia for the “shared fiction” is morally reprehensible. But his conclusion that this is leading to a “reassessment” is off base. The invitation for Herzog to speak to a joint session of Congress is unprecedented in that it is an invitation for a figurehead head of state who is at odds with the leader of his own government. Yet, though it was issued by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, it was supported by the current House Speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy. That gives it a lot of congressional weight. 

Moreover, while Biden has made a few critical statements, the daily charade of White House and State Department spokespeople covering for one Israeli crime after another has proceeded unabated and Israel continues to face absolutely no material pressure from Washington to change its behavior. Meanwhile, Reps. Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman will continue to be called antisemitic for their decision, which they are thus far alone in (though it seems likely Rashida Tlaib and maybe a few others will join them), to boycott Herzog’s address. There seems little chance of a “reassessment” on Capitol Hill. 

Like the protesters objecting to Netanyahu’s efforts to destroy the Israeli judicial system, the only concerns being expressed by any branch of the U.S. government are based on concerns for Israel’s well-being and the maintenance of the “shared fiction” that there is any effort to end Israeli domination of the Palestinians. There remains a “shared value” between the U.S. and Israel that Palestinian lives are worth nothing and that Palestinians do not deserve basic rights. As long as that’s in place, there really isn’t anything to “reassess.”