Couples Counseling
Statecraft and sentiment in the US-Israel conversation.
The discourse on US-Israel ties has lately been thick with talk of “divorce.” It comes in three variants. In the first, the word is used in discussions about the alliance writ large. In the second – a subset of the first – Americans raising the possibility of divorce happen to be Jewish. In the third, divorce describes ties between Israel and American Jews specifically. President Trump managed to conflate all three last year: he reportedly warned Prime Minister Netanyahu, during a phone call on which Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were also listening, of an impending “divorce” on the grounds that “everybody” in America, including “all the Jews… even the two Jews on this call,” were “sick of” the Israeli leader.
Notwithstanding Trump’s experiment in fusion, there are important differences between these three variants. Given the increasingly heated debate surrounding the relationship, unpacking them might help to lower the temperature enough to clarify terms and why parts of the argument feel more emotionally laden than others.
To debate the benefits and burdens of an alliance between the United States and Israel — whether you are doing so from Washington or Jerusalem — is essentially to take up questions of statecraft, and ones that have been discussed since even before there was a state to argue about. In this context, rhetorical references to marriage and divorce are actually not new. One of the earliest I could find is in a 1984 article in Conflict Quarterly titled “Sources of Tension Between Israel and the United States,” in which the Israeli scholar Efraim Inbar concluded, despite strains in the relationship stemming from post-1973 developments in the region and broader dynamics related to the Cold War, “Neither the United States nor Israel is interested in an international divorce.” Samuel Lewis, who served as US ambassador to Israel from 1977 to 1985, famously described the relationship as existing “like a Catholic marriage of old: you can love each other, yell at each other, disagree with each other, even leave each other for a period of time, but you do not get a divorce.” It seems, then, that until recently references to divorce between these two countries were used by and large to downplay its likelihood or rule it out as an option for American policy.
In the last few years, divorce has become a more popular metaphor, only now it is usually invoked to warn of or advocate for the severance of ties which Ambassador Lewis seemed convinced (and committed to seeing) would never come to pass. It is not always clear from the recent commentary what such a divorce would actually look like in practice, but it likely means to threaten drastic reduction – if not elimination – of US military assistance, fewer American vetoes shielding Israel from hostile resolutions at the UN Security Council, and, in the most extreme scenarios, imposition of economic sanctions. Of these, a major shift in the aid architecture seems most probable in the near term, and in Israel the policy debate largely acknowledges that such a change is coming.
None of this minimizes what a real divorce could entail for Israel, and in some respects for America too. Nor should we underestimate the emotional impact such an outcome would have on many Israelis and Americans. But contemplating decoupling as a matter of interest-driven statecraft is simply what sovereign countries sometimes do. It is the price of doing business for a regular nation-state, and painful and dramatic as it may be for the aggrieved parties, there is nothing unique to Israel about this strand of the debate. Just ask the members of NATO, and other US allies such as South Korea and Japan, which have faced the prospect of rupture throughout Trump’s tenure — and historically, too.
What about the second variant, when American policymakers, pundits, and public intellectuals invoking divorce in the debate over the bilateral relationship are Jewish? Here I think we are still mostly in boilerplate foreign policy territory, but two traces of something emotional seep in.
The first trace is on the American side. I won’t over-generalize, but it is reasonable to assume that at least some American Jews who are active in government or who regularly participate in policy debates on Israel (to say nothing of those contemplating a run for President), identify as Americans first – but also as Jews who feel some connection to Israel. For them all this is not simple. It is not a question of “dual loyalty,” as detractors and conspiracy theorists might erroneously allege. On the contrary, the emotional complexity I am highlighting stems from a deep love of America and enduring concern for America’s well-being, alongside (and compatible with) their connection to Israel. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be much to navigate emotionally.
The second trace is on the Israeli side. Having made Israel my home for the last decade, my sense is that for me and others like me there is often a tinge of disappointment, maybe even a slight feeling of betrayal, when we hear or read prominent American Jewish figures arguing that their country should seriously reconsider the relationship. Most Israelis intuitively understand that American Jews working on Israel policy do so to advance American interests above all, and that sometimes those interests won’t align fully with Israel’s. Still, something stirs in Israelis when the interlocutor pushing for divorce is Jewish – a stirring I suspect is largely absent when the filing party is not.
That stirring sharpens into something much more painful in the third variant, when divorce is invoked to describe, or prescribe, relations between Israel and American Jews specifically. The earliest such reference I could find was in Steven T. Rosenthal’s 2001 book, Irreconcilable Differences? The Waning of the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel, which described a communal disillusionment he traced back at least two decades. In the quarter-century since, the metaphor has been raised mostly, though not exclusively, from the American side. (Israeli journalists have occasionally reached for it too, but these remain the exceptions. One of Israel’s greatest novelists also used the imagery, in fiction and in one of his more political essays.)
To be clear, both sides have understandable grievances. There is obviously divergence over the Palestinian question, stemming mostly from vastly different lived experiences (and not, as some might assume, only from deep ideological differences). American Jews are also upset about restrictive Israeli policies toward non-Orthodox streams of Judaism. I understand why Jews who are inclined to express their solidarity with Israel sometimes feel puzzled, if not rejected, by policies and rhetoric that implicitly seem to call into question the very basis of that solidarity. Meanwhile, though, Israelis are frustrated by what can come across as American insensitivity to our unique security anxieties. Particularly since October 7, it has felt, sitting here in Israel, as though many (particularly younger) American Jews are either uninterested in what is happening to us or instinctively more sympathetic to a Palestinian population most of us are still convinced, based on rather abundant evidence, would prefer to see us dead. And somehow, paradoxically, it is largely the Americans who bring up divorce.
That asymmetry stings because for all the disagreements and arguments, talk of divorce comes while many Israelis have been assuming all along that we are siblings, or at least cousins. (There is polling data, for example, suggesting Israelis are roughly twice as likely as American Jews to characterize the other as siblings.) Marriage is entered by choice, and while most who marry assume it is a forever proposition, they also know they can leave should conditions become unbearable. The threat to file for divorce, then, signals that for the party issuing it, the relationship was never premised on a shared membership in and genuine “kinship” with, the Jewish People, but rather on a contractual agreement that, ironclad though it may have seemed at the outset, can always be shredded.
On the Israeli side, a sad consequence of this conditionality is that it narrows the space for airing of concerns and critiques about developments in Israel — and working out constructive responses together — with the implicit threat looming that our partner will read those flaws as grounds for divorce. It reduces the trust between us that is necessary to really hear and try to understand each side’s concerns. Peter Beinart has been going through a protracted divorce from Israel since at least 2019, and while those proceedings may have earned him friends in certain American circles (including Jewish ones), they have reduced to zero the incentive of Israelis (and many American Jews) to hear him out. Why entertain the views of someone who walked out on you? This is basic human psychology.
Evaluations of the US-Israel alliance will no doubt continue – as they will for many other alliances. In this realm of statecraft, Israel will need to approach the prospect of a changed relationship with America soberly and with strategic clarity about what it stands to lose and gain — not least because a clear-eyed assessment is what will enable it to steer the relationship as it evolves, rather than simply absorb whatever comes. That is a debate Israelis can and should be having in their own interest.
But when it comes to the conversation between Israeli and American Jews, we might start by acknowledging what relationship each side thought it was in — and then, as in most relationships worth keeping, looking first at what we might do to open a space for meeting in the middle and, hopefully, healing. Both sides would benefit from more counseling and less canceling.
