Conservatism and the U.S.-Israel Relationship
Either it changes dramatically or in a controlled way
In the crack-up over the last week, a lot of the older generation of conservative commentators have a lot to say about Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, because they have never and do not want to think about the details of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and they do not want to think about how their own acquiescence to carte blanche for Israel implicates that older generation in creating conditions that have led to an ethnic cleansing.
Amidst this, the new revelations about Jeffrey Epstein make it much harder to fudge and say he was middlemanning between the U.S. and Israel, an impression that might be able to sustain the belief that he was acting on behalf of the U.S. government. It looks more like, during the Obama administration, he was pushing the Israeli line over and against the administration. It’s true that in the emails with Ehud Barak, Barak is looking to Epstein for direction, and that’s the major point in case for the idea that he was some sort of deep state asset.
On the other hand, Barak is from the Israeli faction that might have been pushed toward getting behind Obama’s Iran deal, and Epstein made no attempt to do that as far as we can tell. In fact, he says in one of the emails that he thinks Congress should authorize bombing Iran. That means he was part of the vast Israeli influence operation, using chiefly the Republican Party, to scotch the Iran deal, the basic framework of which President Trump has had to adopt pieces of out of necessity.
A bunch of liberal types, the old Reaganite writers, and Rod Dreher, have been talking about the increase in antisemitism, but also saying the old strategies of gatekeeping aren’t likely to work in this instance. That’s correct, good work, you’ve done the bare minimum of trying to understand the situation. You’re paid to write, you want a cookie?
One of the touchstone ideas of intellectual conservatism, which comes from Edmund Burke, is not a resistance to all change, but the awareness that, when change must come, it should come gradually and with due consideration of what good and old things ought to be protected in the course of that. Burke was, after all, a Whig—for him much is negotiable.
It seems like this is a good time to apply that kind of thinking to the U.S.-Israel relationship, doesn’t it? Because if you don’t, it’s going to get worse. Change is going to happen. The question is whether that change is going to be chaotic or managed and incremental.
Here’s why the old guard is discredited on these issues: The credibility of the Reaganoids has a lot to do with protecting the security of Americans—this is what they said they would do, and by and large they did it. Today, however, by that standard, they are discredited because their immoderation with respect to the U.S.-Israel relationship has produced a threat to the security and livelihoods of millions of Americans. Uh oh!
The same companies displacing Palestinians in the West Bank are displacing Americans all across the South:
Whether they stay or get priced out, these tenants are also linked to a multinational conglomerate that profits from the displacement of people on the other side of the world. That’s because American Landmark is almost entirely owned by Elco, one of Israel’s largest corporations. For years, Elco, via its Electra Super Brand, has done extensive business in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli settlements drive many thousands of Palestinians from their homes and are considered illegal under international law.
The electorate is simply not going to tolerate the kind of lawfare, blacklisting, exploitation, and straightforward extortion of the taxpayer the lobby engages in after the war in Gaza. The answer to that should be, let’s treat Israel like a normal country instead: apply the same laws governing foreign influence that we do for any other country, apply extant laws governing arms transfers, prosecute organized and financial crime, and so on. This is not a radical program, and I happen to think it’s probably in Israel’s own best interest at this point. But doesn’t it strike you as odd that none of our esteemed think tank fellows are able to say so? The reason they can’t is it would embarrass them to admit how much they’ve failed to notice.
Another reason none of them do is if they did, the Israelis would come for their nuts. Everybody knows that. What’s happening with the young people is they can see the kind of persecution, often illegal, that the Israelis engage in, and take on the defensive solidarity that anyone would in the face of foreign persecution. Either the people in charge call balls and strikes with this stuff, or it gets worse.
In theory one could be the most ardent Christian Zionist, you could believe that when Itamar Ben-Gvir ascends the Temple Mount to cut that red heifer’s throat, Jesus himself will come riding in on billowing clouds in fiery and righteous vengeance; you could believe the kind of crazy stuff Douglass Murray says, on the verge of tears, if there was no Israel there’d be no point to Western Civilization; you could even believe people in 1950 used the term “Judeo-Christian,” and still think it might be prudent to treat Israel like a normal country. Could you all just grow up, please?
Remember Abraham Davenport: “therefore, with all reverence, I would say, / Let God do His work, we will see to ours.” I don’t give a shit if you believe any of this stupid nonsense, but it’s no excuse for failing as badly as nearly all of our putative conservative leaders have when it comes to these issues.