The impact of Netanyahu's speech on American support for Israel

Israel's Moral Argument Is on the Line

Though he is remarkably frank and accurate in this piece, Richard Cohen is wrong here on two key historic points, and it is by no means true that no Jew gets these right.

First, Israel is not and was not a necessity for Jewish survival.

In 1948, the survival of the Jews and Jewish communities outside the United States was not at issue in the question of Palestine.

And second, Marshall's point, as summarized by Cohen, was good then and has been good ever since.

Nowadays, Marshall would be called a foreign-policy realist. 

He argued that the United States was risking its position and prestige in the Middle East just to placate a domestic lobby. 

He further insisted that the beneficiary of Truman's Palestine policy would be the Soviet Union. 

To put it succinctly, Truman took the side of a tiny people with no oil against a plenteous people with lots of it.

Pace Cohen, the presidential father of containment, a bad policy blundered into in Greece and Korea, got this wrong, too.

All the same, Cohen's central point about the US commitment to Israel is spot on.

America does not need Israel, and Israel is and has always been a drag on American interests both in the Middle East and globally.

And this worries our author.

Cohen thinks American support for Israel is in fact weakening and has been for some time, especially on the political left.

And he thinks Bibi's effort right now to use the Republican congress to dictate foreign policy to a Democratic president are helping accelerate that deterioration of its bipartisan footing outside American Jewry and the Christian Right.

That may be true, up to a point, but I think Cohen's concern that America might drop Israel altogether is not justified by anything observably happening in American politics today.

On the other hand, I think the American left underestimates the threat to Israel posed by Iranian nukes.

The rising power of Islamism in the region is, after all, a rise in power of people far more dangerous to Israel than the regimes the Islamists oppose and seek to replace.

And the decades of oil money flowing into the region have flowed disproportionately into enemy hands, as the Israelis must see it.

As I have noted on other occasions, the anti-nationalist policies that have driven decades of persistent leveling of the global economic playing field have enriched and strengthened - and will continue to enrich and strengthen - our enemies who, for the most part, are exactly the bad guys the patriotic press says they are.

The time may not quite be past when Israel could, virtually alone, defeat any conventional attack by its regional enemies, even combined.

But if not it soon will be.

And then Israel will have to rely for security if not on America, Europe, or the UN, then on its nuclear deterrent.

A deterrent that would be made less credible, though not wholly incredible, by an Iranian Bomb.

And that is what keeps Bibi up nights worrying.

As to the moral argument, perhaps it is true that with every passing year fewer Americans outside Jewry and Protestant Evangelicals accept the continuing moral relevance of the mythic divine land grant of Exodus, of the equally mythic Jewish conquest narrated in the OT, of the existence of a Jewish homeland in Palestine 2,000 years ago, of anti-Semitism in Europe or elsewhere, or of the Holocaust.

And as these recede into the background the historic facts of actual occupancy, actual possession, and the real existence of a built-up and working Muslim society in Palestine, the creation of their effort and the product of their lives, will seem to more people to validate the Palestinians' argument that justice and right were on their side, against the settlers they did not want to come and the new state of Israel whose creation and triumph only completed their dispossession.

In which case, I suppose, the Israelis and their sympathizers will have to make the counter-argument that that was then and this is now, and today actual occupancy, possession, and the work of human hands all speak for them, against any Muslim effort to dispossess the Jews or their state.

As I have said elsewhere, morality is bunk.

But without it and without God, neither we nor the famous Impartial Observer nor the best fellow in the world can decide conflicts of interests in no way engaging our own.

Whims apart, I suppose.