WaPo | Nowadays, Marshall would be called a foreign-policy realist. He argued
that the United States was risking its position and prestige in the
Middle East just to placate a domestic lobby. He further insisted that
the beneficiary of Truman’s Palestine policy would be the Soviet Union.
To put it succinctly, Truman took the side of a tiny people with no oil
against a plenteous people with lots of it.
Nothing
much has changed since then. Israel now has some offshore energy, but
it’s hardly an emerging Saudi Arabia. It still is loathed by its
neighbors and, to complicate matters, it persists in a settlements
policy that the United States opposes
and much of the world abhors. Nonetheless, Americans by and large
support Israel, and Washington, even under the supposedly cool Barack
Obama, maintains a very special relationship with it. That, now, is in danger.
But
the fault line in the U.S.-Israel relationship is hardly the current
clash of personalities. Instead, it’s that the relationship is based
mainly on affection. Americans like Israel. They like its democratic
values and they like its spunky underdogness. Conservative Christians
like Israel for reasons having to do with religious dogma but they, too,
have come to admire it for its secular values. Still, none of this is
based on self-interest — the underpinning of a successful foreign
policy. In power politics, it’s usually not enough to be liked. A nation
has to be considered essential. Israel may be beloved, but for American
security, it is not essential.
The fact is that the United States does not need
Israel. Our special relationship was not forged, as it was with Great
Britain, in two world wars, not to mention a common language and, in
significant respects, culture. It is based on warmth, emotion, shared
values — and, not to be dismissed, a potent domestic lobby. But these
ties are eroding. Support for Israel remains strong, but where once it
was universal, it has increasingly drifted from left to right. In the
liberal community, hostility toward Israel is unmistakable. Some of it
is openly expressed, some of it merely whispered.
Netanyahu has made matters worse. He has tethered Israel to the Republican Party.
He was criticized for seeming to prefer Mitt Romney to Obama in 2012
and now has been enlisted to speak to Congress in a partisan effort by
the Republican House speaker
to embarrass the president. In doing so, he dissed an American
president who happens to be black, hardly a way to shore up support in
the African American community. (Many African American members of Congress say they will boycott the speech.)
Netanyahu has started — or exacerbated — a process in which support for
Israel may become not just a partisan issue, but a liberal-conservative
one.
