A Realist Look at Israel

We have forestalled a normal patron-client relationship for too long, and that's what brought us here

If you talk to smart people in tech these days, many of them are predicting an explosion of anti-Semitism in the next few years. I’m going to sketch out why, and what needs to be done to forestall it. It’s not at all clear things will be brought under control. It could get very bad.

The big-picture truth is that, because America has never been able to enforce a normal patron-client relationship with Israel, Israel has been drifting into the Chinese-Russian camp. This article in FP is as good as any other. The logic of the Sino-Israeli relationship is like that line from Fiddler on the Roof, “God bless and keep the czar, far away from us!” China looks like that kindly, faraway czar, to some Israelis. The CCP certainly doesn’t care one whit about the occupation.

If this situation drifts too far, it poses risks to American Jews. If you think anti-Semitism is bad now, wait till you see what happens if Israel becomes a Chinese client. A lot of things that seem like fringe positions today will come into the mainstream: BDS will have to be considered. Major pro-Israel organizations will have to register under FARA. This drift risks rendering every Zionist a proxy of America’s chief geopolitical rival. To the extent that this drives emigration to Israel, the Israeli right is perfectly happy with that.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been touting this direction for years. In 2017 he called Israel a “perfect junior partner” to the Chinese. Even the Trump administration occasionally was at odds with Israel over their links to China—Mike Pompeo, as staunch a supporter of Israel as you will ever find, warned the Israelis about this problem repeatedly in his visit there.

Israel’s domestic politics have been very weird and chaotic, but one way of looking at the governments of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid is they were fingers in the dam, preventing this drift. With Bibi back, the situation has changed. You’re seeing ex-IDF personnel and defense ministry civilians pop up and warn about these dangers too, and note Bibi’s vagueness about all this. A lot of Israelis want to do the right thing.

American conservatives are unable to be clear about any of this, because of the power of the Likud network, and the fact that many conservative publications are indirectly funded with Chinese money (we’ll cover that later). You won’t see any discussion of this in the papers. But their silence and loyalty to Netanyahu is throwing good people in Israel under the bus. For now, I’ve left the conservative media, I won’t be party to this. The stakes are much too high.

The problem exists in the mainstream media too. The mother of Maggie Haberman, the most prominent reporter covering the Trump administration at the New York Times, was a lobbyist for Worldwide Likud, and her father covered Bibi in a pretty friendly way.

What needs to happen from an American perspective, but probably won’t, is this: The administration needs to coerce Israel into a normal client relationship, and the Israel lobby in the United States needs to let him. Israel must be forced to choose the West, so American Jews are not forced to choose the East. And the Likud network in the United States probably needs to be checked.

The line that these right-wing pro-Israel people use is that they are helping us manage the U.S.-China relationship, which is another way of saying they’re acting as middlemen, to considerable financial benefit. They will say they are sharing intelligence, which means they are sharing what intelligence it’s in their interest to share. I’m afraid none of this can be taken on faith at this point. That arrangement is no longer tenable.

So that’s the big picture, as I see it. Let’s talk a little about how this state of affairs applies in Washington. With neoconservatism discredited and chaos in the House, there is a vacuum of foreign policy thinking on the right at the moment. It matters a great deal who moves in to fill it, and how it’s funded.

The National Interest, home of realist foreign policy thinking in Washington, is cutting its print edition. They are reportedly having money problems. I’m told Jacob Heilbrunn tried to sell it to the Atlantic Council, which might generously be called a hail-mary. Whether their cardinal sin was being too friendly to Russia in general or introducing Jared Kushner to the Russians, it’s hard to tell.

The new patron of realist thinking in Washington is poised to be David Sacks, a South African-born PayPal mafia guy. I find it unlikely that any realist project he funds would lay out the kind of case I have done above, because he appears to be a player himself in some of the dynamics I’m talking about. He defends Bibi’s closeness with the Russians, and one of the projects he funded is Bird, a means to dump Chinese scooters into our urban environment.

Sinews of War @nervusbelli

Bird, it should be noted, just funnels Chinese scooters into the US. First Xiaomi Corporation scooters, then Segway scooters, Segway having been brought out by Ninebot Inc. of Beijing, funded by Xiaomi and Sequoia.

techwewant.comWho Makes BIRD and Lime scooters?We’re taking a look at BIRD, Lime and JUMP scooters to answer the question: who makes these scooters and where can you buy one?

A lot of these Silicon Valley projects, addictive technologies and stupid baubles like the scooters, the Chinese are quite happy to have us distracted with. Realism is all well and good, but it has to be applied in the American interest.