Is America’s ‘special relationship’ with Israel coming to an end?

In the first part of our conversation, Nathan Goldwag and I discussed the need for a new space in our political discourse so that liberals and Democrats can learn to talk about Israel’s impact on American policy without sounding like conspiracy theorists. 

In the second part of our chat, the founder of Goldwag’s Journal on Civilization and I try to create more space for discussing the complexity of conspiracy theories, the growing discomfort within the Democratic base over America’s previously unconditional support for Israel, and how the political right is pushing antisemitism out of the margins and into society’s mainstream.

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The thing about conspiracy theories is that some conspiracies are real. “Chuck Schumer works for Israel” invokes the Jewish conspiracy against the United States. But “Benjamin Netanyahu pressured Trump into attacking Iran, thus triggering regional war” should not. How do people of good faith talk about this?

This is a very difficult question that I struggle with, as someone who has many criticisms of US Jewish communal leadership. 

Jewish diaspora organizations lobbying on behalf of their cousins overseas is nothing new, or particularly unusual, in American politics. To deny the existence of an “Israel lobby” is just silly — it is quite open and explicit about its existence, just like there are Saudi and Turkish and Emirati organizations lobbying for their home governments, just as Irish-Americans gave money to NORAID to fund the IRA during “The Troubles.” During the Pennsylvania senate campaign in 2022, John Fetterman campaigned on the grievances of the Greek Orthodox Church against Turkey to capitalize upon Mehmet Oz’s ties there.

But to say that this is normal doesn’t make it good either. 

The ADL or AIPAC may be just another NORAID, but my feelings on that reflect those of Stan Rogers — I don’t want to contribute my money to “fueling the engine of bloody cruel war/In my forefather’s land far away.” Unfortunately, while that debate within the Irish-American and Irish-Canadian communities was relatively insular, the discourse over the Israeli-American relationship is simply too prominent for its own good. 

I don’t think Jews have “dual loyalty” any more than anybody else does. But I do think we’re the victims of our own success in raising the salience of Israel from a minor ethnic political issue to a key national debate. By insisting that everybody take a side, we’ve made it impossible to ignore, and I frankly do put a lot of the blame for that on Jewish organizations lobbying for things like anti-Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions laws and adopting the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism and insisting on ironclad rhetorical and diplomatic support for Israeli apartheid. 

To be honest, I don’t think there’s a way to have this conversation publicly without at least tacitly encouraging antisemitism. 

More than anything, I wish this debate could be had within the Jewish community, without polarizing the whole country. To do that, we need to reduce the salience of Israel in US politics, and to do that, we need to end the “special relationship” with Israel.

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That seemed to be what Rahm Emanuel suggested. In an interview with Semafor, the centrist Democrat said Israel can no longer get “taxpayers to foot the bill” for its defense. He said Israel can buy weapons like other countries. “You don’t have special status,” he said. Is this a shift or is that just a matter of convenience for a man who wants to run for president?

I believe his shift is mostly a matter of convenience, but it's indicative of a shift within the electorate of the Democratic Party. 

For most of my life, "being pro-Israel" has been one of the key litmus tests of higher office. Even people who wanted to oppose the occupation, like J Street, tried to brand themselves as the "pro-Israel, pro-peace" group. They spent much of their time lobbying against the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement and other coercive measures aimed at pressuring Israel. 

But that's starting to change. It is increasingly impossible to ignore that a substantial faction of Democratic voters are deeply uncomfortable with – or at least ambivalent about – our relationship with Israel. The Block the Bombs Act, that would condition arms transfers, now has 62 cosponsors in the House.

It seems pretty obvious to me that maganites are becoming increasingly demoralized. They thought Trump was going to reveal the Jewish conspiracy by releasing the Epstein files. They thought he was going to stand against “Zionism.” Yet the Washington press corps, and some moderate Democrats, seem to think the schism is over gas prices. What’s the problem?

One of the defining features of the American postwar political consensus and mainstream media narrative is that ideas can be condemned, but only if “everybody” agrees that they’re wrong. 

Any major newspaper or TV network or political organization in the country will agree to condemn “racism” or “antisemitism,” and so those ideas are understood as being beyond the pale. Whereas plenty of conservatives will cheerfully agree to being Islamophobic or hating transgender people, and so publications like the Times and The Atlantic treat this as an important debate.

Unfortunately, the corollary to that is that because “everybody” agrees racism is wrong, if somebody important says something racist — well, he definitionally couldn’t have said it, because everybody agrees saying it would be wrong. So we’ve seen the proliferation of terms like “racially charged” as the fragile consensus of multiculturalism comes under attack, and people are too afraid to defend it openly. 

Perhaps nobody has explained this better than Ezra Klein after the murder of Charlie Kirk when he said: “Much of what I would describe as Kirk’s worst moments were standard-fare MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of that movement is the president of the United States. He is now in the White House, having won about half the country’s votes in the last election.”

To the pundits and thinkers who determine the narrative, that an idea is expressed openly by enough powerful people means that it definitionally cannot be beyond the pale. We’ve seen this happen steadily with the normalization of gutter racism and homophobia in recent years, as it became clear that many people would only oppose them if the consensus was universal. If the bigots could win, that must mean they were right. 

In many ways, the taboo against explicit antisemitism has lasted the longest in American politics, but I think we’re seeing that collapse too, and like every other past grievance now slouching its way towards Bethlehem to be born, the falconers sitting watch over our republic are going to ignore it until it’s too late.

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