Be careful what you wish for
Tablet Magazine claimed in July 2023 that it really just wanted the U.S. to leave Israel alone. Well, isn't that happening now?
Back in July 2023, two editors at the neoconservative Tablet Magazine made a remarkable plea to cut U.S. military aid to Israel. They argued that such aid was actually a form of golden handcuffs, “in which Israel ends up sacrificing far more value in return for the nearly $4 billion it annually receives from Washington.” U.S. aid was a way of “bringing the snarling Israeli attack dog to heel,” the authors complained, particularly against Iran.
I responded in Responsible Statecraft with a challenge:
Washington could stay out of a war by explicitly distancing itself from Israel’s actions. The U.S. president could take the podium and declare: “U.S. forces will neither hinder nor help an Israeli attack on Iran, in any way. If American lives are threatened by any country, we will strike back hard. Otherwise, this fight is not our fight. Best wishes to Israel and God bless America.”
President Donald Trump now appears to be doing just that, in almost exactly those words. “I didn’t stop them. But I didn’t make it comfortable for them because I think we can make a deal without the attack,” Trump told Time Magazine in April, speaking about a potential Israeli attack on Iran. Although he has not even pretended to restrain Israel against Palestinians, he has begun to take the U.S. out of any regional conflict, signing a separate peace with the Houthi government in Yemen.
Surely the editorial staff of Tablet Magazine is overjoyed that Trump is finally cutting Israel loose from the tyranny of U.S. patronage. Israel is now free to “offer the highest bidder” its “considerable advantages,” as the editors wrote, and deal with the Palestinian issue without Americans “treating the Jewish state as a moral allegory.” They must be celebrating and egging on the Trump administration’s “America First” turn on the Middle East, right?
Right?
Instead, Tablet seems to be in denial. Last week, it published a rambling conspiracy theory tract asking whether the reports of Trump’s turn on Israel are actually an astroturf campaign by “lifelong Democrats, Koch-network operatives, Iran lobbyists, and Qatar PR representatives.” It insisted that the Washington Post reporting on former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz — the Post reported that he was fired for planning a U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran behind Trump’s back — just “didn’t make sense.”
Liel Leibovitz, the first author of the July 2023 article, hasn’t commented publicly on the latest developments in the Trump camp. His coauthor, Jacob Siegel, obliquely complained about it, tweeting that America Firster talk show host Tucker Carlson “has made Mau Mauing the Jews a full time sport for an influential segment of the American right.” (The Mau Mau uprising was an infamously brutal rebellion against British rule in Kenya.)
Of course, I had predicted exactly this kind of reaction in my Responsible Statecraft article. Should the President actually declare a policy of non-interference in Middle Eastern conflicts:
The pro-Israel movement would probably wave the bloody shirt, declaring the U.S. president a traitor. (Siegel and Leibovitz themselves sneer at the idea of a world where the “interests of traditional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia would be ‘balanced’ with those of their mortal enemy, Iran.”) And cutting Israel loose to fight its own fight would indeed break from the “non-negotiable commitment to Israel’s security” that the past few U.S. presidents have promised.
As I wrote at the time, Leibovitz and Siegel really just wanted to “make a tactical retreat, giving up aid in order to secure other forms of U.S. backing.” U.S. military aid to Israel had become too much of a political lightening rod. Having to argue for a blank check to a foreign army, at a time when the Left was souring on military spending and the Right was souring on foreign aid, put the pro-Israel movement on uncomfortable ground.
Besides, there were bigger prizes on the horizon. The Biden administration was planning for a U.S.-Saudi-Israeli megadeal that would leave Palestinians (or any other independent-minded Arabs) in the dustbin of history, and on a separate track, for a U.S.-Israeli war against Iran under the pretext of stopping nuclear weapons proliferation. None of us knew at the time that Hamas was planning to bring the Palestinian nation screaming back into history with a Mau Mau style uprising of its own.
The ensuing bloodbath shattered the illusions that the pro-Israel movement needed in U.S. politics. Liberals had told themselves that genocidal Israeli rhetoric was all bluster, and Israel would come around to a sustainable (if not exactly just) arrangement with Palestinians in the end. Conservatives had told themselves that Israel really would “police their region of the world” independently, taking the burden off of Americans.
Instead, Israel threw gasoline on the regional fire and asked the United States to play firefighter. American troops were asked to fight for Israel in multiple theaters more directly and blatantly than they had before. On Gaza itself, the Israeli government took an all-or-nothing bet on ethnic cleansing, refusing to plan for a solution except for the physical removal of the Palestinian population; of course, getting any state to actually take Palestinians in would require heavy U.S. lifting.
Once those the policy questions were put on the table, support for Israel rapidly fell to a minority position among Americans. Tablet can try to obfuscate for its readers all it wants, but the general public understands pretty well what the U.S. government is being asked to do, what the stakes are for Americans, and whether they want to be a part of it. Surprisingly, support for Israel has also dropped rapidly among Republicans under the age of 50.
Rather than a stopgap of pro-Israel sentiment among the youth, the young Right is starting to look like the Bad Cop to the Left’s Good Cop. While Democrats feared looking weak on terrorism or antisemitic — an accusation Tablet certainly liked to throw at polite liberals — young Republicans don’t care about being seen as either of those things. Some are actual, unabashed anti-Jewish racists.
After years of shadow boxing, the Tablet crowd is finally getting the enemy they wanted: a U.S. administration that sees Israel as an obstacle to American interests and whose support base increasingly blames it for America’s problems. And such an administration came from a faction of U.S. politics that Tablet considered friendly. No wonder the disbelief.
