Israel Is Not Our Ally

by Bernard M. Smith

October 19, 2023

It is more critical now than ever that we teach our kids and grandkids the importance of our alliance with the State of Israel. They are our most important strategic ally — and they are a dear friend to the United States of America. If we fail to educate our children of Israel’s importance, we risk raising a generation that sees no need to protect our most important strategic ally. Americans must always understand the significance of this land that God has promised to the Israelites; they must respect the Jewish people and the State of Israel; and they must always be on the side of freedom and good, never on the side of terrorism and evil.

Protecting the Promised Land by Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD)

It is very difficult to be an American Republican. I, for one, will definitely not be teaching my children of Israel’s “importance”; instead, I will teach my children that Israel is not an ally of America and that Jews are not the friends of non-Jews.

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Recently, Middle Eastern violence and warfare flared up again. After suffering its worst Palestinian violence after Hamas fighters broke out of the Gaza prison and massacred hundreds upon hundreds of Israeli citizens and kidnapped at least a hundred more on October 7, 2023, Israel has pounded the densely populated Gaza territory for the last few days. Obviously, the violence directed at non-combatants is atrocious and I am one degree separated from Israeli families who are dealing with the losses of their loved ones — or their loved ones’ loved ones. No matter what I say below — and this is not a matter of virtue signaling, I do not condone indiscriminate targeting of civilian men, women, and children. For a gentile, I know more Israelis than the average American — by a longshot. My views are not directed at them as much as they are directed at their country, which is an international menace. Moreover, this is no defense of Islam. I have a very dim view of the Islamic world and Islam itself. It is an ugly and pathological religion that confines its adherents in a glorification of violence against the non-Muslim. That I want to see international law, which itself is a creation of European values, vindicated has little to do with the fact that the victims of Israel’s failure to abide by it are Muslims.

To be sure, I do not wish to overstate what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. Everyday throughout the world, civilians are subject to political violence. It is a terrible thing, but that what happened in Israel is fresh in our minds — as if it is the only place on the planet where such violence happened — is because we have been literally bombarded with non-stop coverage in what can only be described as victim pornography. That doesn’t minimize the horror of what happened in southern Israel that day, but when the editorial choices of what we see and read are dictated by people who want us to focus singularly on Israeli victims, we see that our obtuseness towards political violence in, for example, Armenia or Nigeria is not so much a defect in us as it is a consequence of what we are shown or not shown.* * * *

In the United States, we hear repeatedly and stereophonically that Israel is “our greatest ally and friend.” We hear it in unanimous bipartisan fashion, and we never hear it challenged. Of course, to challenge it, even obliquely, is to be susceptible to the charge of antisemitism, which, in the United States, is no walk in the park. Setting aside antisemitic conspiracy theories, if a realpolitik truism is that you are ruled by those who you cannot criticize, then there can be little doubt that we are ruled by Jews and their gentile enablers. This is a statement of fact — whether I agree with it or not is irrelevant. We live in a country that punishes dissent from this orthodoxy.

Political axioms are powerful things — for the average American, certain principles are assumed. How they became assumed, or why they are assumed at all, is never questioned once the axiom becomes a fixture of American life. In that sense, we are a very dull people, but I am not sure we are much different than any other political community, now or historically. The reality is that it takes courage, intelligence, and, most importantly, imagination to question political axioms — to see the world without the mental crutch they provide. It takes moxie to imagine a world in which those axioms were returned to the arena of discourse to see how, if at all, they would fare in the marketplace of political ideas. America’s reflexive and unqualified support of Israel falls squarely within this axiomatic paradigm. The ugly reality hiding in plain sight of this political axiom is that Israel is not merely not “our greatest ally,” our support of Israel directly contravenes the interests of Americans the world over and contradicts the most basic Anglo-American values we hold. Not only should we not support Israel — militarily, economically, or culturally — we ought to treat it as a political pariah. We are very far from doing that, but Israel has become the international monster it is precisely because of the unqualified support from of the United States. Take that away and Israel is in enormous — even existential — trouble. To understand that is to know why Israel’s supporters are as fanatic as they are — a hole in the dike of American support, no matter how seemingly trivial, is something that must be struck hard by Jewish berserkers because the whole house of cards could fall, and they know it.

But let us return to the political axiom of Israel’s status as “our greatest ally.” Let us probe that just a little. Setting aside all other considerations, an alliance between countries is typically driven by three foreign policy factors: reciprocal benefits, cultural/civilizational harmony and symmetrical values, and economic considerations. At the threshold of any alliance between states lies the proposition that each benefit from the relationship — and that benefit must be predicated upon some mutuality. In normal functioning foreign policy, the concept of quid pro quo is a given. The mutuality between countries needed is tied to the civilizational harmony that exists between them; so, the United Kingdom and United States are natural allies because of the shared history and culture between them. For us, more broadly, Western Europe and the United States share a civilization, which makes an alliance not so much a consideration but an outcome of that shared civilization. In fact, that shared civilization is what makes the similarity of values so predominant. At least historically, we valued the rule of law, relative democracy, freedoms of press, association, and religion — and in each of these political values, the United States and Western Europe were largely inline — so much so that we never needed to negotiate these values in order to strike an alliance. To be sure, I am not defending the Enlightenment civilization without qualification that has grown up over the last three or four centuries but only observing that Americans generally share certain political values with their Western European counterparts as a matter of course. The same is true of Islamic countries and their values, and the same is true of Latin American or East Asian countries and their values. Finally, in addition to securing peaceful relations, economic considerations drive foreign policy — trade and economic development are drivers of whom we see as friends and allies. As will be discussed, none of these considerations favor America’s special relationship — financial, military, and diplomatic — with Israel.

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