The American ‘Passionate Attachment’ to Israel

A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions—by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained—and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.

Can there be any doubt that the United States displays such a passionate attachment towards Israel? We guarantee Israel a “Qualitative Military Edge” over its neighbors by statute, notwithstanding that Israel is the superpower of the Middle East. We obtusely refuse officially to acknowledge and detail Israel’s nuclear arsenal, although we do so for every other nuclear state: Pakistan, India, North Korea, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom. What can be said in Israel’s Knesset is verboten in America’s corridors of power! 

Why does the secrecy matter? If we knew and debated the magnitude of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, we would be less hysterically inclined to impute to Iran’s nuclear ambitions an offensive as opposed to a defensive intent. Iran might rationally believe that without a nuclear capability or weapon the United States would invade seeking regime change as in Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Venezuela in 2026. Nations have long memories. Iran remembers the CIA’s overthrow of the popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 on behalf of the much reviled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

Iran may also recall the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine relinquished the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal to become a non-nuclearized state. In exchange, Russia, the U.S., and the UK pledged to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and existing borders. The pledges were not worth a continental. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and invaded the remainder of Ukraine in February 2022.

Dozens of Members of Congress display Israeli flags in or outside their offices. The United States provides Israel with approximately $3.8 billion in annual military and missile defense aid as part of a 10-year memorandum of understanding running from 2019 to 2028, although Israel’s military arsenal eclipses those of its neighbors by orders of magnitude. The United States squints at the obligation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as underscored in James Bamford’s book Spyfail. We supply weapons to Israel to aid and abet its genocide in Gaza against Palestinians and Israeli wars of aggression against Iran and Lebanon. In a February interview with Tucker Carlson, United States Ambassador Mike Huckabee pontificated that Israel has a “biblical right” to land stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, arguing that “it would be fine if they took it all.” The precedents lie around like a loaded weapon ready for use by China to justify invading Taiwan, which could provoke the United States to respond with nuclear weapons.

Israel predictably places its interests above the interests of the United States. Think of the superspy Jonathan Pollard. Think of the attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 Six-Day War, which killed 34 Americans and injured hundreds. Think of Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2002 testimony before Congress importuning for a United States invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein (who was claimed certainly to possess nuclear weapons) to sound the death knell for despotism in the region. Wasn’t Netanyahu thinking what would be best for Israel and not the United States?

Our ongoing war against Iran in partnership with Israel was egged on by Israel. Iran has never been an existential or material imminent threat to United States sovereignty. Aren’t we fighting a proxy war for Israel? 

Let us end our misplaced love affair with Israel informed by the unstarry-eyed diplomacy of British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”