Does Israel Want to Be Saudi Arabia?

I have written repeatedly about why I think the United States can accept some degree of geopolitical embarrassment as the price of ending our war with Iran, without that embarrassment being an era-defining debacle or inflection point.

A different question, though, is whether this war will be remembered as an inflection point for Israel in its relationship with the United States.

For now, the war seems to have accelerated the broad anti-Israel shift in American public opinion, sharpest among Democrats but increasingly important among young Republicans as well, while also pushing critiques of Israel in a more radical direction — toward a deeper anti-Zionism, a more conspiratorial world picture and an assertion of moral equivalence between the Israeli government and Hamas.

I don’t share any of those radical critiques, but I still find myself participating in the larger shift. Because I thought the Gaza war became unjust and because I think the American war with Iran was a bad idea that wouldn’t have been embraced without strong encouragement from Benjamin Netanyahu, I am more personally skeptical of the American-Israeli relationship that at any point I can recall.

That skepticism puts me in a somewhat similar place to center-left Democrats like Matthew Yglesias, who has been having a running argument with pro-Israel writers about whether Israeli conduct matters much to the political trend described above, or whether the storm around Israel is an inevitable result of larger forces — left-wing identitarianism, right-wing nationalism, digital conditions — that have converged to make anti-Zionism bigger and bring antisemitism back.

It’s a complicated debate because Yglesias’s interlocutors are correct that much of the shift is overdetermined. On the left, even a liberal Zionism just doesn’t fit into the paradigms of contemporary progressivism, and Israel is both an exemplar of nationalist and religious values that left-wingers increasingly reject and a place where American progressives can project critiques of Manifest Destiny and “settler colonialism” that otherwise feel purely antiquarian.

On the right, “America first” nationalism was always going to have difficulty reconciling itself to special relationships in foreign policy, and antisemitism is a natural destination for some of the conspiratorial worldviews that migrated into conservatism or flourished under Donald Trump.

In general, digital conditions have made it clear that Jew hatred is really unique among hatreds, ever ancient and ever new, proliferating across political identities as soon as the taboo lifts.

Against this backdrop, it’s easy to see why emphasizing the importance of Israeli policy choices can feel a little bit naïve.

At the same time, as someone who feels that my own perspective really has been shaped by Israeli policy rather than the mob, I want to suggest that there is another force in play here, part of the legacy of Zionism and philosemitism rather than just a revolt against both.

Here let me quote the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, arguing with Yglesias and making points that are, I think, mostly true:

My point of disagreement with Matt is that these massive failures of the Israeli government are nevertheless woefully insufficient to explain the unique scale, duration and frenzy of the anti-Israel campaign. It’s simply unprecedented.

Even if you assume the absolute worst of Israel — literal genocide and the worst government imaginable — it wouldn’t be enough to explain it, for the simple reason that worse wars with much higher civilian death tolls carried out by allies of the West using Western weapons and pushed by much worse governments bent on carrying out actual genocides (cue the tiresome mob) never drew a tenth or a thousandth of this response.

… There something else at play here. Something unique to this conflict and the role it plays in Western and Muslim-world psychologies. Is it really a coincidence — asking for some friends — that this totally unique response happens to be landing on the Jews?

As I said, it’s not a coincidence because the rise of anti-Zionism and antisemitism are overdetermined forces. But it’s also not a coincidence because Americans have a fundamentally different relationship to Jews, Judaism, Zionism and Israel than to any of the “much worse governments” that Gur is referring to — Saudi Arabia and its war in Yemen is his prime example, but one could make a much longer list of authoritarian states whose war crimes pass without sufficient notice.

I say this as child of the 1990s, educated at the peak of World War II- and Holocaust-memorializing in American culture. What I was taught, what many Americans were taught, is that the story of the Jews, the history of antisemitism, the enormity of the Shoah and the foundation of Israel together form one of the central dramatic streams in Western history, with the Jewish experience in America linked to both the European and Israeli aspects of the story. This was not some incidental idea at the margins of my education; it was a central cultural teaching, as palpable in my high school English class as at the Academy Awards or the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C.

There was no equivalent teaching for any of the authoritarian nations with whom the United States enjoyed alliances of strategic convenience. Nobody taught me in depth about the Saudi experience or Pakistani history, nobody treated debates within Islamic or African civilization as central to Western or American history, nobody asked me to care deeply about peace processes in East Africa or Southeast Asia. There was sometimes interest in those areas, attempts to extend the locus of American concern to Burma or Darfur, but basically those stories were understood to be outside our own, whereas the story of the Jews and the story of Israel were fundamentally inside.

So part of the answer to Gur’s question — why do Westerners freak out in a unique way about Israel policy? — is connected to identification, not hostility, and to the feeling that Israel is part of our zone of identity and responsibility in a way that the Saudi monarchy is not.

That feeling, it turns out, can be a political liability for the Israeli government. There really is a sense in which Saudi Arabia gets away with more in American discourse than Israel, even as the House of Saud plays its own complex influencing role in our often-unsuccessful efforts to shape the Middle East. There are flares of anti-Saudi sentiment, certainly, but an expectation of Saudi Machiavellianism and ruthlessness is built into the American picture of the world, whereas ruthless behavior from Israeli doesn’t yield the same kind of Orientalist excuse.

So one interesting question for Israel’s advocates in the United States, in a period when some kind of renegotiation of the relationship seems inevitable, is whether they should actually want to occupy something more like Saudi Arabia’s position — with the relationship to the United States understood in more purely instrumental terms, and Israeli conduct consistently assessed through a more cynical lens?

I’m doubtful that such a transition is really possible, not least because so many dark impulses will continue swirling around Israel even if the feeling of American identification ebbs.

But I also don’t think that Israel’s supporters should want to give up on that identification. The 1990s aren’t coming back, Hitler and the Holocaust are receding, American Judaism and American Christianity are both changing. That’s all the more reason not to simply let go of a narrative that has bound the American story and the Jewish experience together.

As long as that binding lasts, though, Israel won’t be treated like a generic non-Western power and its policies will be judged on more intimate terms. And Zionism needs to take those judgments seriously, as an element of friendship and not just a sign of enmity.