Israel-U.S. Relationship: Too Hot?

Israel: strategic asset or liability?

That was the topic for an on-the-record debate today at the Nixon Center between Chas Freeman and Robert Satloff. It seemed an ominous coincidence that today is also the 9th of Av, darkest day in the Jewish calendar, the anniversary of the sacking of the First Temple and Ferdinand and Isabella’s edict expelling the Jews from Spain.

As was, today was no catastrophe. It was however something of a disappointment. Freeman of course argued the case for Israel as a strategic liability. His case amounted to this:

* Aid to Israel costs US taxpayers money.
* Allowing Israeli firms to bid on US defense contracts costs US jobs.
* Terrorists sometimes cite Israel as a motive.
* Many Arab leaders complain about Israel to US leaders and diplomats.

As net assessments go, this is feeble stuff. To make his case, you’d think Freeman would want to debunk the usual arguments in favor of Israel’s strategic value.

Those arguments go roughly as follows:

First, as the patron of the region’s pre-eminent military power, the United States gains leverage and status. Arab states that cooperate with the United States (e.g. Egypt) get what they want from Israel. Arab states that do not cooperate (e.g. Syria) do not get. The US can deploy Israel’s power to rescue other US clients from enemies (as the Israelis rescued King Hussein of Jordan from the PLO in 1970) or to accomplish strategic missions that the US would rather not dirty its own hands with (the destruction of nuclear facilities in Iraq and Syria, the assassination of terrorist leaders).

Second, Israel is a huge source of information to the US – and the most valuable live-fire test laboratory for US military equipment and doctrine. One of the decisive moments of the Cold War, for example, occurred during the skies over Lebanon in 1982. During the Yom Kippur war of 1973, only 9 years previous, Soviet ground-to-air missiles had wrought havoc upon Israeli aircraft. This time, Syria scrambled its air force to meet Israeli planes: 150 against 150, the largest air battle of the jet age. In just a few minutes, the Israelis downed 86 Syrian craft, suffering no casualties of their own. Microelectronics had triumphed in the test of battle. Soviet histories generally credit this event as the shock that jolted the Soviet elite into realizing that it must try some kind of “perestroika” of its ossifying economic system.

Third: the demonstration effect of the superiority of Western ways in interstate competition. Israel in 1950 had an income per capita not very much higher than that of neighboring Syria. Today, Israel has a GDP per capita comparable to that of most European countries, and higher than that of Saudi Arabia. It has sustained democracy under military onslaught. It is a science and technology leader. The Arab world may not like Israel, but its success sends a powerful “If you can’t beat them, join them” message. And of course part of “joining them” is emulating Israel’s close relationship with the United States.

Maybe you’re not convinced. But that’s the case that an incisive strategic mind like Chas Freeman’s would, you imagine, know it had to refute. He hardly bothered.

Now I don’t want to give the idea that Freeman had nothing to say. He did, lots, much of it very harsh about Israeli democracy and culture. But given that he was billed as a hard-headed realist focused on strategic concerns, these complaints about Israel’s human rights record sounded very off-topic. Even if accurate, they hardly went to the issue of strategic value. I cannot imagine that Chas Freeman would accept complaints about Saudi Arabia’s moral defects as an argument for Saudi Arabia’s valuelessness to the United States.

But here was the real shocker. The last question of the lunch asked Freeman: Supposing everything he said were true, what would follow? Freeman’s advice: The US should make some portion of future economic aid to Israel conditional upon a cessation of settlement activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

I’ll confess: I was agog. That’s it? That’s IT? You arraign Israel as a succubus upon the American taxpayer, a cause of terrorism, a fomenter of hatred between the US and upwards of a billion Muslims … and your solution is to threaten to cut economic aid by some percentage? Freeman’s recommendations are so pathetically disproportionate to Freeman’s analysis as to raise one of two suspicions:

1) Freeman’s private recommendations are much more ferocious than his public recommendations, or

2) Freeman’s detraction of Israel is more in the nature of angry venting than considered analysis. Freeman’s friends and admirers always note two things about him: an incisive intelligence and a harsh mouth. Could it be that his disappointment over the failure of his nomination as chair of the National Intelligence Council has temporarily loosened an over-voluble mouth – without altogether quelling a superior brain that inwardly knows better?