US-Israel Rift Undermining Some Long-Standing Taboos

Published on Monday, March 15, 2010 by Salon.comby Glenn Greenwald

The rather extraordinary dust-up between the U.S. and Israel has, among other benefits, shined a light on two of the most taboo yet self-evidently true propositions:   (1) our joined-at-the-hip relationship with Israel is a significant cause of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, fuels attacks on Americans, and entails a very high price for the U.S. on multiple levels; and (2) many American neoconservatives have their political beliefs shaped by allegiance to Israel.

As for the first:  not only did Joe Biden tell Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel’s actions are endangering U.S. troops in the region, but — more important — as Foreign Policy‘s Mark Perry reports, both Adm. Mike Mullen and Gen. David Petraeus within the last couple of months stressed the same causal connection to Obama officials:  “Israel’s intransigence could cost American lives.”  It’s rather difficult to maintain the fiction that only fringe Israel-haters see the connection between our support for Israel and Muslim hatred toward the U.S. when two of America’s most respected military officials are making that case explicitly.  Moreover, the Mullen/Petraeus alarm is almost certainly what accounts for the Obama administration’s sudden (and commendable) willingness to so publicly oppose Israel.  As Perry says:  “There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers — and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the U.S. military.”  

As for the second point:  I’ve previously noted the glaring contradiction among neoconservatives, whereby they simultaneously (a) tell American Jewish voters to vote Republican because the GOP is better for Israel and (b) insist that it’s anti-Semitic to point out that neoconservatives are guided by their allegiance to Israel when forming their political beliefs about U.S. policy.  Obviously, anyone who does (a) is, by logical necessity, endorsing the very premise in (b) which they want (when it suits them) to label anti-Semitic.  Neoconservatives constantly make political appeals to Jewish voters expressly grounded in the premise that American Jews are guided by allegiance to Israel (vote Republican because it’s better for Israel), yet then scream “anti-Semite” at anyone who points this out.  When faced with this glaring contradiction, their typical response — as illustratively voiced by Commentary‘s Jennifer Rubin, after she argued in a 2008 Jerusalem Post column that American Jews should vote against Obama because he’d be bad for Israel — is to deny that “that the interests of the U.S. and Israel are antithetical” and insist that “support for Israel in no way requires sacrificing one’s concerns for America’s interests.”  In other words:  to advocate for Israel is to advocate for the U.S. because they’re interests are indistinguishable.

Yet here we have a major split between the U.S. and Israel, with key American military and political leaders explaining that the opposite is true:  that Israeli actions are directly harming U.S. interests and jeopardizing American lives.  And what is the reflexive, unambiguous response of virtually every American Israel-centric neocon?  To side with Israel over the U.S.  AIPAC, the ADL, Elliott Abrams, AIPAC-loyal Democrats in the House, Marty Peretz, Commentary, etc. etc. all quickly castigated the U.S. Government and defended Israel, notwithstanding the dangers to Americans posed by Israeli conduct and the massive price paid by the U.S. in so many ways for this relationship (by contrast, J Street called the administration’s anger towards Israel both “understandable and appropriate”).  There’s nothing wrong with taking Israel’s side per se — one is and should be free to criticize one’s own government in its foreign policy — but incidents like this make it increasingly futile to try to suppress what is glaringly visible:  that (as is true for numerous groups in the U.S.) a significant segment of the neoconservative Right (which includes some evangelical Christians and some American Jews) are guided in their political advocacy by their emotional, religious, and cultural attachment to another country, and want U.S. policy shaped in order to advance that devotion.

On a related note:  there has been a long-standing effort to equate those who make this observation with anti-Israeli hatred or even anti-Semitism.  Two widely-cited reports did exactly that with regard to me recently:  this pseudo-scholarly report from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and this post on the blog of the American Jewish Committee, both of which hurl all sorts of ugly though trite accusations at me for daring to suggest that some American Jews are guided in their political advocacy by allegiance to Israel.  I’ll just note that the author of both “reports” is someone named Adam Levick, who — with extreme, unintended irony — lists this as his biography on his Twitter account:

I’m an American who just made Aliyah (moved to Israel), and love America and my new country.

If you’re going to try to render unspeakable the observation that some American neocons are devoted to Israel, it’s probably best to have the crusade led by someone with a different biography.  As I’ve said many times, there’s nothing wrong per se with harboring cultural affections for other countries — many individuals in the culturally diverse U.S. do — but stridently denying what is so obviously true, and smearing those who point it out, does more than anything else to make something innocuous seem nefarious.

Finally, the reason Israel engages in this conduct is because it believes (with good reason) that U.S. officials will never (and cannot) take any real action against it, and the Obama administration — as reflected by the excellent questions posed yesterday to David Axelrod by ABC News‘ Jake Tapper — at this point still seems far from ready to do so.  Still, there’s no denying that the very public condemnation of Israel by the Obama administration is unprecedented at least over the last two decades, will produce benefits on its own (including sentiments like this and this being increasingly expressed even among those Obama supporters who don’t typically speak out about this issue), and will subject Obama officials to serious political pressure and attacks, from which they ought to be defended.  It’s true that none of this will ultimately matter unless the administration is willing to back this up with meaningful action — i.e., serious threats to change policy — but this last week was an important and substantial first step toward that vital goal.

Many of the issues I write most about here — from civil liberties erosions and radical, lawless National Security State policies to the wars that justify them — have their roots in our involvement in the Middle East, and our self-destructive, blind support for Israel actions is a major (though not the only or even primary) factor in all of that.  It’s impossible to care about the former without wanting to do something substantial about the latter.

© 2010 Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.