Israel is America's 51st state
And it's Red
A friend asked how it is that the perception of Israel has changed so much. It used to be that one could count on Americans to appreciate Israel as sharing our interests and our values in a Middle East that is otherwise autocratic and hostile to the United States.
The answer might perhaps be found in this paragraph from William Voegeli.
[Ruy] Teixeira, for example, pleads with his fellow Democrats to embrace “liberal nationalism” since the party is presently “on the wrong side of something that’s quite popular: patriotism and love of country.” (He writes for a Substack newsletter titled The Liberal Patriot.) In a recent essay Teixeira quotes others who share his alarm about the party’s increasingly explicit anti-Americanism. “The most flamboyantly anti-American rhetoric of 60s radicals is now more or less conventional wisdom among many progressives,” wrote Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Center. “America, the land of white supremacy and structural racism and patriarchy, the perpetrator of indigenous displacement and genocide, the world’s biggest polluter, and so on.” Lindsey cites a 2022 Gallup poll, which found that a bare majority of Democrats were either “extremely” (26%) or “very” (26%) proud to be American. The corresponding figures for Republicans were 58% and 26%. Similarly, the “general conceit among today’s progressives is that America was founded on racism, that it has never faced up to this fact, and that the most important task for combatting American racism is to force the nation to face up to that ‘history,’” as the liberal economist and journalist Noah Smith has written. “Even if it loses them elections, progressives seem prepared to go down fighting for the idea that America needs to educate its young people about its fundamentally White supremacist character.”
What I would suggest is that the hatred of Israel is derivative of this hatred of America.
In the same issue of the Claremont Review of Books that Voegeli’s essay appears, Christopher Caldwell writes (paywalled),
It must be demoralizing for the Left. Under the influence of both religiosity and constant war, Israel is becoming the most right-wing advanced society on the planet. Recent polls, asking Israelis whom they’d prefer among American presidential candidates, had Donald Trump leading Joe Biden by 14 percentage points. Israel grows steadily more attractive, as a place to move to, for those Jews who understand their religion and their peoplehood in a conservative way. It is the red state of world Jewry.
My emphasis.
There are many Jews, both in Israel and in the United States, who are not happy about this. They want their old Israel back: the Israel of the 20th century, with the spirit of the kibbutz, with Labor Party figures like Abba Eban, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin representing Israel on the world stage, with faith in the “peace process.” But 20th-century Israel is not coming back in the foreseeable future.
The short answer to my friend’s question is that to progressives, Israel represents what they hate about America. It represents the oppression of a marginalized group, in this case the Palestinians.
If the social justice activists had their way, they would turn upside-down what they see as the oppression hierarchy in America. Blacks and other minorities would be on top, and whites would be on the bottom.
When such activists turn to Israel, they see another power hierarchy that must be overturned. To them, the way to correct a grave historical injustice is to put the Palestinians on top.
The social justice activists will code as right wing anyone who stands up for America as a land of opportunity and meritocracy rather than as a land of oppression. Israel’s diplomats and supporters cannot win with the social justice crowd. Instead, they should just go ahead and own a belief in the goodness of America and western values.
Israel can act like it’s America’s 51st state. A red one.
I believe Hannania makes this point when comparing the left’s fixation with Palestinians’ plight and general ignorance of the Uyghurs’ plight. Since Israel is an avatar of the West, Palestinians hold a special place. Since China is not, the Uyghurs are just some random group in Asia.
For at least 40 years the global left has conceived as Israel as being next in line after Rhodesia and South Africa (and all the other decolonization efforts) and indeed even since it became clear to be working in Africa the progressives have been explicit about using the same anti-apartheid-era-South Africa 'playbook' pressure-ratchets against Israel to grind it down over time and get the Jews to capitulate to the Arabs the same way that the white South African regime did (you can judge for yourself how well that went and continues to go.) Before he was President Obama articulated this exact strategic approach though this was not widely reported for some reason.
The point it, Israel isn't the 51st state, every other country in the world is the 51st through ~250th states, and some place or heretical group or subculture is always the current year most wanted thorn in the side, and then when that's smashed it only means it's time to cross it off as another notch in the arc of history's belt and move down to the next target on the list that never ends. Every knee should bow. This is what Hazony was getting at with his notion of ideological 'Imperialism'. To the progressives in terms of judgment there aren't 50 or 250 states but just one world state with borders that will be swept away in the fullness of time, or in the alternative, 8 billion+ states of the atomic individuals who likewise all face such judgement.