Is Israel Safe in U.S. Embrace? : The Smaller Nation Would Be Victim of Too Close an Alliance

The U.S. government has in the last few days been trying to cool the war of nerves going on between Israel and Syria, an affair that has looked dangerously like becoming a real war risking involvement by the United States.

Washington has accounts to settle with Syria, but prefers to act on its own initiative, not Israel’s. The affair demonstrates the danger that exists in the new relationship being forged--to insufficient public discussion on either side--between the United States and Israel. It is a relationship in which the risks to Israel are even larger than those to the United States.

Today, in both Israel and the United States, a considerable number of people have come to think that the interests of the two countries are virtually identical. The Soviet threat and the Arab threat are taken as parallel--indeed, as convergent.

Americans who once were indifferent to Middle Eastern issues have found themselves swept into the consequences of revolutionary events in Palestine, Iran and Lebanon. They have found Israel’s support and sympathy welcome, at a time when other allies criticize American policies and much of the non-Western world is hostile to the United States and to its views.

Congress’ overwhelming opposition to arms sales to Saudi Arabia and its hostility to the Reagan Administration’s effort to keep up a constructive relationship with the conservative Arab powers clearly reflects popular resentments felt, and suppressed, ever since the 1973 oil boycott and price rise.

One result of this is a developing association between the United States and Israel that goes much beyond any alliance the United States now has with any other country, or indeed that exists elsewhere between any two sovereign nations.

Congress two years ago legislated a free trade zone for Israel and the United States which, within six years, will make the two countries into a single industrial and marketing entity. Together with Israel’s increasing reliance on the dollar as its unit of exchange, its dependence upon U.S. subsidies (presently at a level of $1,200 annually for each person in Israel), and the influence of unofficial as well as official Americans on its economic policy, this means Israel is well on the way to becoming an appendage of the U.S. economy.

Many Israelis think that this will make Israel a high-technology society, stimulated by U.S. investment. Former Ambassador Dean Brown, head of the Middle East Institute in Washington, thinks that it could just as well make Israel a low-technology supplier of low-wage goods to the American market--a kind of Middle Eastern Puerto Rico.

Enthusiasts for the new relationship say that its ultimate aim is a “full-fledged diplomatic and military alliance” between the two countries. That is what the head of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the principal pro-Israel lobby in the United States, has said. In fact, an even closer relationship is implied.

There is serious reason to question whether such an association represents a sound goal. No two countries have identical interests in economic affairs. They cannot have identical security interests. Israel’s hostility to the Soviet Union derives fundamentally from Moscow’s support for the Arab cause. America’s present hostility to the Arabs originates in the perception of the Arabs as allied to an expansion of Soviet influence. These do not add up to the same thing.

Israel is a regional power, a Mediterranean state; the United States is a Pacific as well as Atlantic power. Israel is a religious state, one in which the cultural origins of the majority of the Jewish population soon will be Oriental rather than European. Its Arab population, including the people of the territories occupied after the Six-Day War, will at a foreseeable point in the relatively near future become the majority in the country, a development that will call into question either the identity of Israel as a Jewish state or as a democratic state.

One must expect eventual resentment in Israel that the great Zionist social experiment, and the ingathering of the Diaspora, should end with Israel’s becoming an appendage of a capitalist, hedonist, deeply secular and materialistic, American society. There will certainly be resentment if Israelis come to perceive themselves as providing military enforcement for specifically American policies--that Israel has become a janizary state.

Americans have less reason for apprehension. The evidence of history is that the foreign policies and enthusiasms of large democracies change without much respect for what has gone before. A major power can afford inconstancy. It can afford to go lightly into such a relationship because it can terminate it with equal casualness. Israel enjoys no equivalent advantage.

Israel needs American friendship, but not a link whose intensity and intimacy are themselves provocations to an eventual repudiation. The United States can afford not to be serious. Israel, one thinks, cannot.