Why the Tablet Line on Aid to Israel is Wrong

Cutting aid doesn't really change very much

There has been some progress on the Republican side when it comes to fixing America’s broken foreign policy, it must be admitted. Republicans are increasingly willing to threaten to end military assistance and other forms of aid, and have been more willing to flex war-powers arguments, pointing out that most of what we do in the Middle East is only legal under a highly tortured understanding of the Constitution.

Where that leaves us with respect to Israel is Republicans may be helpful in checkmating the Biden administration in its support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza: if they refuse to authorize more aid, and condemn U.S. strikes on the Houthis as illegal, that’s a fair amount of pressure.

In other words there are Republicans who are willing to say, “this is not our problem.” What’s missing is a Republican voice who is willing to say it is our problem, and we need to rein Israel in. There needs to be some tolerance for, in other words, treating Israel like a disobedient vassal, because that’s what they are.

Last year there has been increasing willingness to question U.S. aid to Israel, even from unlikely quarters like Tablet magazine and Nick Kristof. Tablet ran an interesting symposium, in which its own writers called for cutting it, and Dennis Ross, Ted Cruz, and Ritchie Torres took the opposite point of view.

One must admit that, given the choice between aid that is never used as leverage, which is the case today, and no aid at all, the latter is perhaps preferable on penny-pinching grounds. And one suspects that the Israeli right simply does not want the prospect of aid ever being used as leverage, so they are willing to forego the cash before it becomes a significant public argument.

But the fact is, the U.S. and Israel are tied together in too many other ways, at the level of tech infrastructure (the Oracle facility), information sharing (the NSA pipeline), government contracts, demographic flows, lots of other things, for aid to really change the situation one way or another. With or without aid, it would be necessary to leverage Israel.

Money isn’t really all that important. The spyware presents the possibility of more or less conjuring it from thin air. We are very much through the looking glass when it comes to some of this stuff. If we were to cut aid to Israel, and claim plausible deniability when they behave badly, that doesn’t really strike me as the sort of thing the rest of the world is going to buy at this point.

It’s not out of the question that historians come to view the Iraq War, and America’s involvement in Syria and various other places, as “Bibi’s wars.” They had virtually nothing to do with American security, a lot to do with improving Israel’s position in the Middle East, and they are consistent with Israeli strategic planning going back decades, if you look at Oded Yinon and the Clean Break memo.

To quote “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” published in 1920:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

At least the Europeans got some good literature out of the fratricidal bloodbath of World War I. We spent trillions failing to reconstruct two Middle Eastern countries, and all we got was Lee Greenwood songs, Ibram Kendi and fentanyl. Spare me your Toby Keith eulogies.

To continue down this path is to invite exhaustion and continuing to defend the indefensible. What’s more, Israel’s activities within the United States are increasingly targeting the children of the American civil service. It is not simply that Israel is a strategic liability, though it is—they are starting to become a threat themselves. Much of what they do here is illegal, and they are deeply involved with Russia and organized crime.

This is a very deep and complex problem, deeper than even the intractable Israel-Palestine negotiations. When Biden was elected, lots of people said the serious people were back. I certainly don’t see it in a public way, and too many are still committed to a failed foreign policy vision.

It’s a sad indictment of our class of foreign policy “experts” that not one has been willing to say the obvious: that no pivot to Asia can happen unless the U.S. is willing to put Israel in a little box. Maybe the Israelis would hurt them too, but that’s no excuse for a lack of courage from these people.