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After Israel recently announced plans for 1,600 new homes to be built in East Jerusalem, Palestinians got cold feet on renewed peace talks. With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington today, the Monitor offers a snapshot of a unique friendship.
What are the friendship’s roots?
Long before the 1948 rebirth of Israel, Puritans had lobbied the Dutch government to “transport Izraell’s sons and daughters ... to the Land promised their forefathers.”
That call was supported by US presidents from John Adams to Abraham Lincoln – and Americans themselves, writes historian Michael Oren in “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East.”
From Civil War officers who helped Egypt establish a modern army that later preserved its independence to missionaries who sought to free Muslims from a religion they saw as crushing “all independence of thought and action,” Americans long sought to bring to the region the ideals that today many see Israel as upholding.
Mr. Oren, who grew up in America and now serves as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, reportedly said recently that ties between the two countries are at a 30-year low.
What does Israel get out of it?
The most tangible benefits are guns and money. Annual US aid averages around $3 billion, most of which goes to weapons such as US fighter jets and components for Israeli tanks. The US also provides an annual subsidy for Israel’s defense industry, a benefit given to no other country. All this helps preserve Israel’s military advantage in the region.
“If the US were to limit the delivery of weapons, it would have a severe effect on the Israeli military capability,” says Gerald Steinberg, political science professor at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.
In addition, the US funds joint development of defense systems such as the Arrow II Missile interceptor. While Israel’s military is formidable in its own right, US support adds an extra deterrent to would-be attackers such as Iran.
US diplomatic support for Israel, such as its veto power at the United Nations, is also a strategic asset. Without such diplomatic backing, Israel would find itself often without any allies on the international stage.
What does the US get out of it?
During the cold war, Israel helped the US curb Soviet expansion. Their intelligence services worked closely, with Israel famously obtaining Nikita Khrush chev’s “de-Stalinization” speech in 1956.
But it was Israel’s stunning defeat of Soviet clients Egypt and Syria in the 1967 war that made the United States see its ally as a real military asset, says William Quandt, a former National Security Council member who helped broker Israel-Egypt peace under President Jimmy Carter. After the cold war, however, it became unclear what the “glue” was in the US-Israel relationship, he says.
Today, Israel has strong cultural, educational, and economic ties with the US. It provides missile technology and intelligence on counterterrorism and nuclear proliferation. But its agencies were just as much in the dark as the US (and Britain) about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. And while the two allies’ interests in fighting Islamist militants overlap, they are not uniform.
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