Why America should stand with Israel — but not too close

Thanks to Israel, Jeb Bush is learning one of the most important lessons of presidential politics: America stands with Israel — but not too close. If you can't master the art of walking that line, partisans of every stripe will turn against you.

In recent keynote remarks delivered before J Street, a prominent left-leaning organization focused on Middle East policy, a distinguished member of the Bush foreign policy team, former Secretary of State James Baker, stumbled badly. Although his words were carefully chosen, the inside baseball of D.C. foreign policy threatened to turn a minor upset into a major problem for Jeb.

"It seems to me Israel's future absent a two-state solution could be very difficult at best," he said. "I fear Israel risks losing either its Jewish character or its democratic character as long as it occupies those Arab lands."

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That set off hawks' alarm bells. As The Washington Free Beacon noted, Baker's words "echoed" those of White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who told J Streeters earlier that day that "further isolation" would likely result from an "occupation that has lasted more than 50 years."

So began a predictable dance. Through a spokesperson, Bush swiftly put space between himself and Baker's remarks. A few days later, National Review published a throaty denunciation, authored by Bush himself, of President Obama's increasingly hostile stance toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Bush is also sensitive to being tarred with his brother's neoconservative reputation in the general election. Although American support for Israel remains high — around 70 percent view the country favorably — the partisan divide has become very acute, as a recent Gallup poll revealed. Since last year, over 80 percent of Republicans sympathize more with Israel than with Palestinians. But the percentage of Democrats who take the same view dropped 10 percentage points this year alone, to less than half.

Increasingly, America's Israel policy is an issue capable of mobilizing opposition and driving voters to the polls. And Bush, whose reputation hinges on big domestic reforms aimed at the mainstream, doesn't want to fight a national campaign framed around his relative weakness in foreign policy, an area where he combines inexperience with the albatross of his brother's legacy.

The challenge is that no leading figure has leveled with the American people about why our relationship with Israel is so unusual. Speaking with frankness on the issue requires a degree of mature care — and an atmosphere of adult forbearance — that are all too often simply absent in national politics.

If we had both, what would such a dialogue look like?

The U.S. and Israel are burdened with geopolitical predicaments that are superficially similar. For many Americans, Israel's predicament is reminiscent of our own. Both countries have attracted enmity for their unabashed use of military might to protect their political and moral values, as well as the intimate relationship between the two countries.

On closer inspection, however, important differences emerge. These differences do not undermine the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel, but they do condition and constrain it.

Very much unlike America, for instance, Israel is a nation-state created in Europe's image. Its small size, ethnic character, and intimate bond between religion and politics are straight out of Hobbes' Leviathan. Obviously, Israel's level of democracy would be inimical to Hobbes. But it's important to recall that Hobbes looked directly to Moses and the Israelites to describe what kind of government was necessary to preserve peace and unity in modern times. If a people lacked a clear, united political and religious identity, Hobbes reasoned, nothing could hold them together.

The very debate surrounding Israeli settlements and the "two-state solution" underscores the Europeanness of Israel's predicament. The core of that debate concerns a potent fear that Israel as we know it would cease to exist if a "one-state solution" that diminishes its Jewish identity is applied. Unless Israel remains unified under the aegis of the Jewish State, the whole enterprise will collapse. In a world of nation-states, the only way to solve the problem of religious identity and political authority is to bind the two together.

In America, our national identity is almost completely different. Americans founded a political culture that had radically broken from the European idea of what a nation-state had to be. Our union was different; not just different, exceptional. And it made our political identity exceptional, too. So long as we stayed true to it, we could tolerate an unprecedented, almost unimaginable level of racial, religious, and political diversity — without fearing, as Hobbes and his ilk feared, that our country would disintegrate into internecine war.

That is one important reason why America's destiny did not mirror Europe's. We did not split apart into a rat's nest of warring states. We did not get stuck in a cycle of political violence fueled by ethno-national enmity. And we did not have to bristle with arms out of terror.

To put it bluntly, America is unlike Europe in pretty much the same ways it is unlike Israel. And just as we know we stand with our European allies — but not too close — the same goes for Israel, for the same kinds of reasons, in the same way.

Even this is onerous to some critics, of course. They are disgusted that it is even possible for Israel, so much like the bad old nation-states of Europe, to exist in that way. They see it as an unjust and repellant atavism, one that must be replaced with a peaceful, pluralistic, multicultural democracy on the new European model — or, implicitly, America's own. But the peaceful European model was the consequence of complete exhaustion and destruction following the world's two most terrible wars. And Israel cannot just start being like America. No Old World country can.

This ought to result in an attitude of care and forbearance toward Israel — aid and friendship mixed with quiet thankfulness that its burden is not our own. Unfortunately, in America, it's easy to view others through the lens of our favorite abstract principles. In Israel, at any rate, the Israeli predicament is not an abstraction. That's why Benjamin Netanyahu won re-election, and that's why politicians like Netanyahu aren't going anywhere anytime soon. For Bush as much as any responsible American leader, the task is to accept that — and to use skilled statecraft not to be drawn too deeply into the punishing pattern of European politics still playing out in the Middle East.