Israel-America Relationship In Crisis!
One outcome of October 7 has been the wake-up call regarding the true fragility of the U.S.-Israel special relationship. Like a marriage made in heaven, when the love goes, the recriminations begin, and all Hell breaks loose, exposing the limits of a marriage of convenience.
The United States is currently reformulating its relationship with the Jewish State, with the Biden-Harris administration about to lay down some Red Lines that they will insist Israel must not cross in order to maintain American largess. The Americans are gambling on Israel, succumbing to the bedrock case of national survival, which will establish the emotional tone of the doctrine of needs, and this tone would then be applied to Israel’s political sovereignty and military independence of action.
The critical point about Israel and America’s needs is that they are a way of discriminating between conflicting interests. In the United States, its interests often seem contradictory to its security needs. Currently, Israel’s needs are simple and one-dimensional survival writ large. Under Bidens Presidency, America desires something very different from what they, in fact, want. With this in mind, Israel cannot afford to miscalculate. Israel’s leaders surely understand that America’s use of Red lines in the near future is a device that serves to obscure the conflict in Gaza and the social-political changes that would result from American self-interest taking precedence over Israel’s self-interest in the region. These Red Lines, if rejected by Israel, would, in effect, paint the Jewish State with a moral defect, a lack of compassion, pity, and sympathy for the Arab nationalist murderers of Gaza. The logical fallacy of this way of thinking consists of jumping from the horror of October 7 to the ideologically perceived horror of Gaza. If one accepts this line of thought, we have accepted the vice of the negative definition.
These definitions tend to be highly elastic and often inscrutable, simultaneously moral and morally evasive. It evades the cold, hard facts by ignoring the Arab nationalist agenda of repeating the slaughter that took place on October 7. The nations of the world would tie Israel’s hands behind its back by saddling it with irrelevant moral baggage that no other country has been called to act on in the face of defending its population from annihilation. They employ words like needs, basic needs, human needs, and social needs, where no particular need is involved. In actuality, the use of ”need” by these ideological warriors is a virtual index of the propaganda war now taking place in social media, mainstream media, places of higher learning and political parties of all persuasions. These outlets have given rapid enfranchisement of large and, at times, inarticulate masses of people with little experience of political life while a small set of people have established themselves as experts in the moral pronouncements against the Jewish State while ignoring all the shortcomings of the Arab nationalist street.
How Israel responds to this crisis of confidence in the Israel-America relationship will shape the future of the region and, ultimately, that of Israel.
