The United States has shown staunch support for Israel since its birth as a state. But that was before it decided to decimate the Palestinian territories.
Donald Trump meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his Mar-a-Lago estate, 26 July 2024, in Palm Beach, Florida during the U.S. presidential campaign. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
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At the height of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, Israel was seen as a crucial U.S. ally.
In 1982, Alexander Haig, U.S. Secretary of State during the administration of President Ronald Reagan said this: “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier and is located in a critical region for American national security.”
Washington saw Israel as an asset worth funding with economic aid and military arms, from fighter jets and artillery rounds to sophisticated missiles.
But the logic that prompted the aircraft carrier parallel no longer applies. Israel has become the Middle East’s nuclear-armed regional superpower. Still, over the decades that the United States maintained this special relationship, few in the establishment wondered aloud whether the vaunted asset could turn into a strategic liability.
The expected nomination by President-elect Donald Trump of a former state governor to be the next U.S. ambassador to Israel hints at a new chapter in U.S. policy.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is on record saying that he doesn’t believe that Israel is occupying the West Bank, that instead, the Israeli settlements that much of the world considers illegal is land Israel has a biblical right to.
This cheers far-right members of the Israeli government who seek to annex the West Bank, part of which is under Palestinian control.
Control over land
Israel gained control over much of the West Bank after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War but ceded part of it as a result of the Oslo Accords in 1993, an agreement that allowed for self-governance of areas of the West Bank and Gaza.
U.S. support for Israel goes back much further than that. U.S. President Joseph Biden reiterated that in a October 2023 visit to Tel Aviv. He arrived 11 days after a massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis by Hamas militants — a nationalist and Islamist movement backed by Iran and devoted to the destruction of the Jewish state — carried out across the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.
The attackers kidnapped 254 people and took them to Gaza, holding them in the complex tunnel system built under its cities. More than 100 remain in captivity.
Biden emphasized the strength of the relationship between the two nations. “Seventy-five years ago, just 11 minutes after its founding, President Harry S. Truman and the United States of America became the first nation to recognize Israel,” Biden said. “We have stood by your side ever since, and we’re going to stand by your side now.”
U.S. officials from both sides of the country’s deep political divides routinely talk of an unbreakable bond between the two countries and an “unconditional support” for Israel.
Is support unshakeable?
This unconditional support has come in two forms. Militarily, the United States has supplied a steady flow of weapons. Diplomatically, the U.S. has so far vetoed 46 Security Council resolutions at the United Nations critical of Israel.
Israel has needed that support to survive. Shortly after Truman’s recognition of the Israeli state, war broke out between Israel and Arab forces from Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Israel prevailed, driving an estimated 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes in territory Israel claimed as its land.
U.S. recognition of the new state marked the beginning of a unique relationship. The nascent state, 806,000 mostly Jewish people at the time, over the years grew into the largest recipient of military and economic assistance from the American superpower.
That aid has been running at around $3.8 billion a year and comes complete with a U.S. commitment, enshrined in legislation, to give Israel a “qualitative military edge.” It is defined as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat for any individual state or coalition of states or from non-state actors.”
Israel’s military might has been on full display with a ferocious response to the 7 October 2023 massacre. The Israeli response, described as “collective punishment” by U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, has turned Gaza into a wasteland. More than 44,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed. Israel has destroyed almost all hospitals, levelled around 75% of all buildings and throttled food deliveries to such an extent that international aid groups fear widespread famine.
Israel angers the world.
Heart-wrenching videos of large crowds of children and their mothers, holding up food bowls in front of charity organisations have caused global outrage — and helped to prompt the world’s top war crimes trial, the International Criminal Court (ICC), to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity.
The ICC warrants accused the two of having used “starvation as a weapon of warfare” by holding back humanitarian aid and intentionally targeting civilians in Israel’s 13-month campaign against Hamas. Neither Israel nor the United States are members of the ICC. Israel disputes its jurisdiction.
Close on the heels of the ICC warrants came stinging criticism from former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon, a highly-decorated established member of Israel’s security establishment, who commanded the Israeli Defence Force during the 2014 war in Gaza, the longest conflict between the two sides until the present war.
In several Israeli television and radio interviews, Yaalon accused the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of pushing a campaign to “occupy, annex and ethnically cleanse” part of northern Gaza, scene of the fiercest fighting and worst destruction over the past 13 months. The military denied the ethnic cleansing charges.
Just four days after Yaalon’s accusation, one of the world’s most prominent human rights organisations, Amnesty International, issued a 296-page report detailing a wealth of military and political actions it said were aimed at destroying the population.
“Amnesty International concludes that following October 7, 2023, Israel has committed and is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” the report said. The Israeli Foreign Ministry dismissed Amnesty International as a “deplorable and fanatical organization” whose report was “false and based on lies.”
The dilemma in Washington, D.C.
Back in the United States, the Biden administration has shied away from direct comment on mounting criticism of the way Israel is conducting its war in Gaza, which has included episodes one might describe as a schizophrenic policy.
On several occasions, the United States reacted to a total embargo on Gaza that halted food deliveries by airdropping food supplies while American bombs ripped apart entire neighbourhoods.
Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard wrote in Foreign Policy in March 2024 that the contradictions in U.S. policy would be comical if the results weren’t so disturbing. “Washington is airdropping food to displaced and hungry residents of Gaza while at the same time supplying the military armaments that have forced them to flee and put them at risk of starvation,” he wrote.
In another attempt to circumvent difficulties of delivering humanitarian supplies, the U.S. built a floating pier solid enough to carry trucks shipped in from Cyprus. Strong winds and high waves ended that experiment.
Will mounting outrage over the war in Gaza have an impact on the “special relationship” and the rock solid report Biden promised in Tel Aviv? There is reason for skepticism.
Ignoring calls for a ceasefire
Weapons supplies have continued, on two occasions bypassing Congress, and the Netanyahu government has shrugged off calls for a ceasefire and demonstrable efforts to limit civilian casualties. Suggestions to that effect from high-ranking officials, including U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin have done little to change the course of events.
In November, the 100-seat U.S. Senate roundly rejected three resolutions to block a range of offensive weapons from being shipped to Israel. The resolutions were backed by 16 Democratic senators led by Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.
That vote highlighted decades of broad support for Israel which was viewed in its first decades as an island of democracy and Western values in a sea of hostile Arabs, most of them leaning towards Moscow in the 1947 to 1989 Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Now, some prominent members of the foreign policy establishment do wonder. “The U.S.-Israel Relationship No Longer Makes sense,” said the headline over an analysis in Foreign Policy, a magazine followed by experts.
An analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute described Israel as a strategic liability and asserted that the special relationship “does not benefit Washington and is endangering U.S. interests across the globe.”
Can the United States be blamed?
In many parts of the world, the United States is seen as an accomplice in the carnage in Gaza.
Across the United States, that has driven thousands of mostly young Americans into the street in demonstrations against U.S. policy. The protests brought into focus a sharp generational divide on the conflict, according to surveys showing that young Americans are far more likely than older Americans to express sympathy for Palestinians.
“It is the deepest shift [of attitudes] in a short period that I’ve seen,” said Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland who has studied American sentiment on the Israeli-Palestine conflict for decades. The political right in the United States, however, tends to equate empathy for Palestinian suffering with backing for Hamas.
While Trump has portrayed himself as Israel’s greatest friend, he has said the horrifying images from Gaza were “bad PR” and harming the country.
Will Trump change the special relationship relationship? Unlikely. It’s a safe bet that he will make it even more special when he takes office on 20 January 2025.
Questions to consider:
- What was the 1967 Arab-Israeli War about and who started it?
- What is the biggest lever the United States has to influence Israeli actions?
- If you were the U.S. ambassador to Israel what would you say to the Israeli government?
Bernd Debusmann began his international career with Reuters in his native Germany and then moved to postings in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the United States. For years, he covered mostly conflict and war and reported from more than 100 countries. He was shot twice in the course of his work: once covering a night battle in the center of Beirut and once in an assassination attempt prompted by his reporting on Syria. He now writes from Washington on international affairs.
