Israel, a small country surrounded by adversaries and locked
in conflict with the Palestinians, depends absolutely on US diplomatic and
military support. By giving it, the United States safeguards Israel and wields
significant leverage over its actions.
اضافة اعلان
That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. For decades, it was
true: Israeli leaders and voters alike treated Washington as essential to their
country’s survival.
But that dependence may be ending. While Israel still
benefits greatly from US assistance, security experts and political analysts
say that the country has quietly cultivated, and may have achieved, effective
autonomy from the United States.
“We’re seeing much more Israeli independence,” said Vipin
Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist who has
studied Israeli strategy.
Israel no longer needs US security guarantees to protect it
from neighboring states, with which it has mostly made peace. Nor does it see
itself as needing American mediation in the Palestinian conflict, which
Israelis largely find bearable and support maintaining as it is.
Once reliant on US arms transfers,
Israel now produces many
of its most essential weapons domestically. It has become more self-sufficient
diplomatically as well, cultivating allies independent of Washington. Even
culturally, Israelis are less sensitive to US approval — and put less pressure
on their leaders to maintain good standing in Washington.
And while US aid to Israel remains high in absolute terms,
Israel’s decades-long economic boom has left the country less and less reliant.
In 1981, US aid was equivalent to almost 10 percent of Israel’s economy. In
2020, at nearly $4 billion, it was closer to 1 percent.
Washington underscored its own declining relevance to the
conflict last week, calling for a ceasefire only after an Egyptian-brokered
agreement was nearing completion, and which Israeli leaders said they agreed to
because they had completed their military objectives in a ten-day conflict with
Gaza. Secretary of State
Antony Blinken is visiting the region this week,
although he said he does not intend to restart formal Israeli-Palestinian peace
talks.
The change comes just as a faction of Democrats and
left-wing activists, outraged over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and
bombing of Gaza, are challenging Washington’s long-held consensus on Israel.
Yet significant, if shrinking, numbers of Americans express
support for Israel, and Democratic politicians have resisted their voters’
growing support for the Palestinians.
The United States still has leverage, as it does with every
country where it provides arms and diplomatic support. Indeed, former president
Donald Trump’s unalloyed embrace of the Israeli government demonstrated that
Israel still benefits from the relationship. But American leverage may be
declining past the point at which Israel is able and willing to do as it
wishes, bipartisan consensus or not.
Steps toward self-sufficiency
When Americans think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
many still picture the period known as the Second Intifada, when Israeli tanks
crashed through Palestinian towns and Palestinian bombs detonated in Israeli
cafes and buses.
But that was 15 years ago. Since then, Israel has
reengineered the conflict in ways that Israeli voters and leaders largely find
bearable.
Violence against Israelis in the occupied West Bank is rarer
and lower-level, rarer still in Israel proper. Although fighting has erupted
several times between Israel and Gaza-based groups, Israeli forces have
succeeded in pushing the burden overwhelmingly on Gazans. Conflict deaths, once
3-to-1 Palestinian-to-Israeli, are now closer to 20-to-1.
At the same time, Israeli disaffection with the peace
process has left many feeling that periodic fighting is the least bad option.
The occupation, though a crushing and ever-present force for Palestinians, is,
on most days and for most Jewish Israelis, ignorable.
“Israelis have become increasingly comfortable with this
approach,” said Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, a research fellow at the Forum for
Regional Thinking, an Israeli think tank. “That’s a cost that they are willing
to accept.”
It’s a status quo that Israel can maintain with little
outside help. In past years, its most important military tools were US-made
warplanes and other high-end gear, which required signoff from Congress and the
White House.
Now, it relies on missile defense technology that is made
and maintained largely at home — a feat that hints at the tenacity of Israel’s
drive for self-sufficiency.
“If you had told me five years ago,” said Narang, the MIT
scholar, “that the Israelis would have a layered missile defense system against
short-range rockets and short-range ballistic missiles, and it was going to be
90 percent effective, I would have said, ‘I would love what you’re smoking.’”
Although heavy US funding under president Barack Obama
helped stand up the system, it now operates at a relatively affordable $50,000
per interceptor.
Israel began working toward military autonomy in the 1990s.
Cool relations with the George H.W. Bush administration and perceived US
failure to stop Iraqi missiles from striking Israel convinced its leaders that
they could not count on American backing forever.
This belief deepened under subsequent presidents, whose
pressure to strike peace with the Palestinians has run increasingly counter to
Israeli preferences for maintaining control of the West Bank and tightly
blockading Gaza.
“The political calculus led to seeking independent
capabilities that are no longer vulnerable to US leverage and pressure,” Narang
said, adding that Israel has also sought independent intelligence gathering.
“It certainly appears they’ve been able to get to that point.”
The ‘other friends policy’
There is another existential threat from which Israel no
longer relies so heavily on US protection: international isolation.
Israel once sought acceptance from Western democracies,
which demanded that it meet democratic standards but bestowed legitimacy on a
country that otherwise had few friends.
Today, Israel faces a much warmer international climate.
“Anti-imperialist” powers that once challenged Israel have moved on. While
international attitudes toward it are mixed, and tend starkly negative in
Muslim-majority societies, Israel has cultivated ties in parts of Africa, Asia
and Latin America.
Even nearby Arab states; the so-called Abraham Accords,
brokered under Trump, saw Israel normalize ties with Bahrain and the United
Arab Emirates. Israel subsequently normalized ties with Morocco and reached a
diplomatic agreement with Sudan.
“We used to talk about a diplomatic tsunami that was on its
way. But it never materialized,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political
analyst and pollster.
Scheindlin runs an annual tracking poll asking Israelis to
rank national challenges. Security and the economy reliably come first. Foreign
relations are now near the very bottom.
Even as European diplomats warn of consequences that never
come and Democrats debate the future of the alliance, she said, Israelis view
their international standing as excellent.
On diplomacy, too, Israel has sought independence from the
Americans.
In the mid-2010s, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime
minister, all but directly campaigned against Obama’s reelection because of his
Middle East policies, sending relations plunging.
Since then, Netanyahu has cultivated a network of illiberal
democracies that, far from condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, treat
it as admirable: Brazil, Hungary, India and others.
Risking the consensus
One of the top jobs of any prime minister, it has long been
said in Israel, is safeguarding Washington’s bipartisan consensus in support of
the country.
So when Netanyahu aligned Israel with Republicans in the
mid-2010s, even haranguing Obama from the floor of Congress, he was expected to
pay a political cost at home.
But Obama and congressional Democrats did little to modulate
their support. Americans then elected Trump, who catered to Netanyahu more than
any previous president.
The episode instilled a “sense of impunity,” Scheindlin
said. “Israelis have learned that they can handle the heat, they can handle a
little bit of rocky relations.”
In a series of focus groups conducted since President Joe
Biden’s election, Scheindlin said she had found that Israelis no longer fear
reprisal from American politicians.
“People are just not that moved,” she said. “They’re like,
‘It’s America. Biden will be fine.’”
At the same time, many Israelis have lost interest in the
peace process. Most see it as doomed, polls show, and growing numbers consider
it a low priority, given a status quo that much of the Israeli public sees as
tolerable.
“That changes the nature of the relationship to the US,”
Mizrahi-Arnaud said.
Because Israeli leaders no longer feel domestic pressure to
engage in the peace process, which runs through Washington, they do not need to
persuade the Americans that they are seeking peace in good faith.
If anything, leaders face declining pressure to please the
Americans and rising demands to defy them with policies like expanding
settlements in the West Bank, even annexing it outright.
Israel is hardly the first small state to seek independence
from a great-power patron. But this case is unusual in one way: It was the
Americans who built up Israel’s military and diplomatic independence, eroding
their own influence.
Now, after nearly 50 years of not quite wielding that
leverage to bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it may soon be
gone for good, if it isn’t already.
“Israel feels that they can get away with more,” said
Mizrahi-Arnaud, adding, to underscore her point, “When exactly is the last time
that the United States pressured Israel?”
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