For a nation that receives $3.1 billion in U.S. military aid per annum, Israel seldom answers to our national interest. In the most poignant, contemporary example, the American foreign policy establishment has concluded that an Israeli decision to attack Iran will be fully autonomous, made with or without our preapproval.
Furthermore, Pentagon analysts predict that Israel will inform the United States of its intentions only a few hours before striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. In a recent Department of Defense war simulation, several officials elaborated on this forecast, asserting that an attack conducted in this style would cause Iran to view the United States as a complicit aggressor, leading to an anti-American retaliation, followed by a U.S. land invasion of the Zagros Mountains. While the benefits of American involvement in a massive geopolitical conflagration are a matter of debate, there can be little doubt that the dynamics of the U.S.-Israel relationship are flawed. After all, when one nation receives nearly a quarter of its military budget from a foreign benefactor, the donor has at least the right to confer with its beneficiary before both countries are plunged into war.
A student of history, however, should not be surprised by the current predicament: Israel’s conduct provides layer upon layer of historical precedent for this form of myopic behavior. In one early, rare case of a senior U.S. diplomat complaining to Congress of Israel’s parochial foreign policy, Henry Kissinger predicted that Israel’s failure to make token territorial concessions in the West Bank following the Yom Kippur War would likely drag the United States into a massive conflict over the tense, Cold War turf of the Levant. The secretary of state’s predictions would prove overly alarmist, but Israeli policy would continue to periodically contradict our own over the next thirty-eight years. Within a decade, during the tense 1981 border standoff between Israel and the Lebanese PLO, President Reagan begged Prime Minister Menachem Begin to refrain from invading southern Lebanon. Israel again spurned our appeals, and the obdurate, unauthorized occupation that followed succeeded only in kindling the origins of Hezbollah and deepening the neocolonial suspicions that galvanize the anti-American, anti-Semitic elements of the Arab world today.
I have cherry-picked two instances of Israeli obstinacy, and I concede that as a participatory, pro-democratic, anti-Ba’athist nation in the Middle East, the general current of Israeli foreign policy is usually aligned with that of our own. Still, actions of a beneficiary that run counter to the American interest should be met with negative incentives, and aid should always be dispensed with conditions attached. Not only were these principles violated in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, but U.S. military aid to Israel grew in the 1970s and exploded in the 1980s without so much as a hiccup.
Many commentators argue that before 1989, there was some sense in this softball form of international relations. During the Cold War, when the global balance of power was cleaved between the communist and capitalist blocs, scolding both Israel and its Soviet-aligned neighbors would have smacked of contradiction. But this Cold War-centered analysis crumbles when one notices that the pattern of Israel failing to answer to our national interest has continued well after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Just two years ago, for instance, when the Israeli government thumbed its nose at Joe Biden by announcing the construction of 1,600 of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem during one of the vice president’s visits, the U.S.-Israel relationship suffered a brief bout of rhetorical tension. However, there was nothing to speak of in terms of lasting consequences: U.S. military aid jumped by $220 million in 2011, and again by $100 million in 2012.
Just as we gave Israel this de facto blank check in East Jerusalem, and earlier in the West Bank and Lebanon, we have done so with respect to Iran as well. High ranking regional Pentagon officials have characterized the Israeli government as “uncontrollable” and “unpredictable,” and as the previously mentioned war simulation has illustrated, if conflict comes, it will likely be at Israel’s whim. As in nearly all post-1956 cases, we have taken no steps to create a sense of restraint within the Israeli foreign policy establishment. On the contrary, recent months have been marked by the approval of an additional $600 million for a piece of the Israeli defense infrastructure that the Knesset itself scrapped in 2010, as well as by a statement by President Obama to Netanyahu that he “will always have Israel’s back.”
Our support, however, must be more conditional than the president’s comment would suggest. For once, we must only have “Israel’s back,” if Israel has ours, and we must make clear that if Israel decides that it can take drastic action without so much as conferring with us, there will be some form of negative consequence. Otherwise, we may once again find that our funding of Israel undercuts our own nation’s decision-making process, while facilitating yet another overzealous foreign crusade.