The US-Israeli Alliance, Beyond Blood and Soil

Eric Cantor, token Jewish Republican, was naturally a featured speaker at Christians United for Israel’s big event yesterday. He offered the view that while “reaching out to the Muslim world” is all well and good we need to make sure that “as Americans that our policies be firmly grounded in the beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which this country was founded.” It’s not totally clear to me what this means beyond Cantor trying to build Jewish-Christian solidarity on a solid foundation of anti-Muslim sentiment, but Jon Chait thinks we should understand it as meaning something more particular, namely that “he wants the United States to treat Israel the way Russia treats Serbia — an ally based on common cultural heritage.”

Chait further comments:

It’s also perfectly nuts. The basis of the U.S.-Israel alliance is, and should continue to be, Israel’s democratic character and desire to live in peace, in contrast to the eliminationist intentions of its neighbors. Cantor is saying that Israel deserves America’s support merely because of its Jewish quality. So if, say, Israel were to become a fascistic state bent on the destruction of its neighbors*, then the case for the U.S.-Israel alliance would be no less strong, because of a shared religious heritage. It’s a rancid, illiberal, primitive way of thinking about foreign policy.

*Yes, left-wingers, I know you think this is already the case. Take your comments to Stephen Walt’s blog.

The footnote gives us a caricatured view of a liberal critique of the U.S.-Israeli status quo. But surely we can admit that there’s some middle ground between “a fascistic state bent on the destruction of its neighbors” and a state with a “democratic character” possessed of a “desire to live in peace.” The Bibi Netanyahu administration does not appear to have any interest in destroying Egypt or Syria or Jordan or Lebanon but it also doesn’t appear to have any interest in living in peace with the Palestinians. Nor does it even have any interest in ceasing to expropriate Palestinian land. And while certainly not a fascistic state, it is a state where in the West Bank the level of rights one has is determined by whether one is Jewish or not.

Americans, especially liberal American Jews, have tended to gloss over that situation noting that Israel is operating from a position of some duress. What’s more, the fact that Israel exercises sovereignty over a population of millions of non-citizens is deemed to be a temporary situation rather than an integral characteristic of the Israeli state. This, however, is where the question of the settlement freeze really comes into play. The more settlements grow and expand, and the more the Israeli government characterizes any limits on settlement expansion as an intolerable violation of settler rights, the more the situation in the West Bank ceases to look temporary. And when viewed as a non-temporary situation, the idea of a patch of territory in which citizenship is differentiated by ethnicity, with segregated roads and walled-off townships and differential access to water looks less-and-less like a democracy.