A Response to Jack Lew

Ambassador Lew’s blog post reflects his deep commitment to, and concern for, Israel and the Israeli-American relationship (“How to Keep US-Israeli Relations from going off the cliff,” August 18). Unfortunately, it is also an exercise in nostalgia, for a period when Israel was content to rely on American support and funding for its security, and when deference to American interests at the expense of Israeli interests was assumed, by Israeli policymakers no less than American policymakers like Mr Lew. It also reflects nostalgia for hoary shibboleths of Mr. Lew’s wing of the Democratic party, particularly faith in diplomacy’s ability to overcome hard divergences of interest, such as those between Israel and its terrorist enemies, and a supercilious conviction that liberal American Jews know better than Israel when Israel should make “difficult political decisions.” This will no longer do.

Israel’s experiences since Oct. 7 have provided Israelis with many lessons, not least about American-Israeli relations. One of the most important is that Israel can no longer reliably base its security on “continued strategic cooperation with the United States.” Ever since President Obama signed JCPOA, Israelis have increasingly felt that this cooperation cannot be relied upon when and where it is most important. President Biden reinforced this conviction when, to appease domestic opinion in his own party, he subjected Israel to a human rights review – Israel, that fought a harsher but cleaner war in Gaza than the United States has done in any Middle Eastern country. It has been strengthened further by the United States’ inability, due both to the failure to maintain the US Navy’s ability to operate effectively in littoral conditions and to domestic American political constraints, to decisively defeat the Iranian regime – a failure that every nation in the Middle East has taken note of.

One of Israel’s most important long-term security goals is therefore to create conditions where the United States can no longer veto Israeli actions in defense of its vital security interests. Achieving this goal will be long, hard, expensive, and indispensible. One step in this direction, which Mr Lew ought to be aware of, is that the present Israeli government has decided that the current MOU will be the last in which the United States subsidizes Israeli security. The next MOU, if it is signed, will be based on full partnership in military technology research and an end to American aid. One hopes the next Israeli government will persist in this decision.

Mr Lew and other American policymakers need to realize that security independence is a goal that Israel shares, for different reasons and in different ways, with a long list of disappointed American allies: Germany, Poland, Ukraine, India, the Gulf states . . . . An American’s review of American policy over the last eighteen years, under three presidents, should be an occasion for introspection, not to mention the humility Mr Lew recommends to others. This common disappointment in America creates the basis for collaborations that Israel is hastening to exploit.

I am sure Mr Lew has nothing but criticism for President Trump’s futile attempts to negotiate an agreement with an Iranian regime that uses negotiation, not to resolve conflict but to play for time and rebuild its military power. For some reason he thinks that the role of negotiations in Hamas’ playbook is different. In both cases the hopes reposed in diplomacy are illogical, and Israel would not be justified in sharing them.

I pass over Mr Lew’s suggestions regarding how Israel should manage its relations with the corrupt and moribund Palestinian Authority, because these are indeed issues on which the next Israeli government may agree to humor Americans at the expense of Israeli interests. Only a small minority of Israeli voters believe in Mr Lew’s vision of “negotiations to reach a solution acceptable to both Israelis and Palestinians.” But these are secondary issues. Mr Lew seems to think that if the Israeli right no longer governs that the hard core of Israeli security policy toward Iran and its proxies will be different under the next government as opposed to this one. This is an illusion.

All this does not mean that Israel is seeking some kind of divorce from the United States, unless the United States so chooses. Israel has much to contribute to American interests and appreciates deeply America’s contributions to Israel’s interests. What Mr Lew demands of Israel in his essay is deference: Deference to an imperial American president whose policies cut across Israeli interests, deference to American policy conceptions which Israelis believe are fundamentally mistaken. Bilateral relations between two sovereign countries can never be maintained over the long term on such a basis. For better or for worse, history has left Mr Lew’s view of American-Israeli relations behind.