Most Americans still think of Israel as the “little country that could” – what Israelis call their “startup nation.” Some fondly recall the kibbutzim or the old Labor governments, liberal-ish but not really all that liberal and certainly not democratic — at least for those in Arab villages inside and outside Israel’s borders. But since the 1967 war Israel has moved quite far to the right and has had a succession of right-wing governments. Over the years the U.S. has pumped over $150 billion into its economy, dedicated, at least in part, to maintaining a ethno-religious state many liken to South African Apartheid.
The 37th government of Israel, formed at the very end of 2022 and led by Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and Netanyahu, is the most right-wing of all time. It’s so extreme that Israel’s apologists now have an almost impossible job of defending the nation’s illiberal and openly racist policies. Liberal Israelis are alarmed by authoritarianism now directed against them and by religious extremism that now seeks to marginalize them. 28% are considering leaving the country. Tech companies (many of which are registered in Delaware) and some physicians are relocating. Both Smotrich and Ben Gvir openly call for murdering and expelling Palestinians. A settler now under arrest for murder in a pogrom on a Palestinian village once worked for an extremist Member of the Knesset who praises him as a hero.
All this is so over-the-top that a completely different response is required from the United States. And when I say “over the top” I mean: what’s happening today exceeds the routine mistreatment and deprivation of human rights that Israel has inflicted for 75 years on a population almost its own size — realities the U.S. ignores as it dishonestly claims to support a “Two-State Solution” — now impossible because of the colonization of the West Bank by over 650,000 settlers.
As enablers of Israel’s occupation and illegal settlements, U.S. administrations have complained unconvincingly that they have no real leverage with Israel. But the United States has always had both carrots and sticks. “Tough love” for Israel does not necessarily mean dismantling US-Israel military cooperation or slapping sanctions on a state that is arguably doing some of the same things to Palestinians that Russia is doing to Ukrainians. It could involve stopping the annual billions in subsidies (which even progressive Israelis are calling for). It might entail altering diplomatic status or pulling our embassy out of a colonized Jerusalem. It might be voting in the UN Security Council for or against resolutions condemning mistreatment of Palestinians on the basis of desired policy choices by Israel. Or it might take the form of rewarding Israel with economic deals (particularly in the tech, energy, and security sectors) when – and not until – Israel fully withdraws from the West Bank. That is, if the U.S. really wants to see a Two State Solution.
Speaking of economic development, a current focus for both Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu is making the Saudi-Israeli deal a reality. It’s to the personal political advantage of both to make the deal happen. Netanyahu is fighting to regain control of a coalition in which he’s now in the minority, and to stay out of jail on corruption charges. Biden is trying to score points with the American Right and Center. Supporting this effort, Hakeem Jeffries was in Israel recently with the Israeli lobby group AIPAC, which has been spending a lot of PAC money on attacking Democrats. Jeffries’ goal was apparently to send a message to an American Right that loves ethno-religious nationalism: Biden hasn’t given up on Israel. In fact, there’s a never-ending procession of Democratic supplicants arriving in Israel on either AIPAC or state and city-funded junkets. This week it was New York’s Democratic mayor Eric Adams seeking an audience with Netanyahu.
Instead of all this slavish ass kissing, Democrats ought to be exerting pressure to save what’s left of Israeli democracy and preserve the Two State option they claim to support – not endorsing an extremist government led by a prime minister about to be indicted, who was just presented with a plan from his coalition partners to put a million settlers in the West Bank.
For Netanyahu, who recently had a pacemaker implanted and has poured the last of his political, if not physical, capital into a government built out of the old Kach movement (at one time declared a terrorist organization and banned from Israeli politics), a Saudi-Israeli deal could be part of his legacy — that is, if it’s not tarnished by a prison sentence for corruption.
Liberal and Progressive — and even some not-so-liberal — Israelis are begging the U.S. to show some tough love for Israel. Organizations like ACRI (the Association for Civil Rights in Israel), the Israel Policy Forum, Partners for Progressive Israel, even the right-of-center Shalom Hartman Institute, and US Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Americans for Peace Now are concerned about the judicial coup now underway, which is intended to remove Supreme Court impediments to “unreasonable” actions by an extremist government. If the judicial coup succeeds, it will be the death of what is left of “democracy” in Israel proper (though neither democracy nor legal redress have ever existed in the West Bank or Gaza).
But that doesn’t faze Biden or Jeffries one bit. They’re playing to a right-wing or right-of-center electorate accustomed to displays of affection for “our unbreakable bond” with a nation whose ethno-supremacist dynamics are precisely like our own. And when the President invokes jingoist American exceptionalist rhetoric, calls for God’s blessings on the nation, and cheer-leads religious-ethnic supremacy elsewhere, it looks an awful lot like the “Lite” version of the Christian Nationalism that suffuses GOP politics. What ever happened to universal human rights and real democracy?
Neither Israel nor the U.S. has ever truly had a democracy for all of its people. In both cases the design of our democracies has privileged one group at the expense of deeply harming another. And now, because both designs were so deeply flawed right from the beginning — because neither even pretends to be a real democracy — they’re not even working for the privileged.
I am working on another piece on the “startup nation.” In the meantime there are some excellent books and online resources for readers and people who follow podcasts.
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