© Brendan Smialowski/AFP/GettyImagesUS military in honor cordon US Defense Department, Washington D.C.
The latest round of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians ended in the usual way: with a cease-fire that left Palestinians worse off and the core issues unaddressed. It also provided more evidence that the United States should no longer give Israel unconditional economic, military, and diplomatic support.
The benefits of this policy are zero, and the costs are high and rising. Instead of a special relationship, the United States and Israel need a normal one.
Once upon a time, a special relationship between the United States and Israel might have been justified on moral grounds. The creation of a Jewish state was seen as an appropriate response to centuries of violent antisemitism in the Christian West, including but hardly limited to the Holocaust. The moral case was compelling, however,
only if one ignored the consequences for Arabs who had lived in Palestine for many centuries
and if one believed Israel to be a country that shared basic U.S. values. Here too the picture was complicated.
Israel may have been "the only democracy in the Middle East," but it was not a liberal democracy like the United States, where all religions and races are supposed to have equal rights (however imperfectly that goal has been realized). Consistent with Zionism's core objectives, Israel privileged Jews over others
by conscious design.Today, however,
decades of brutal Israeli control have demolished the moral case for unconditional U.S. support. Israeli governments of all stripes have expanded settlements, denied Palestinians legitimate political rights, treated them as second-class citizens within Israel itself, and used Israel's superior military power to kill and terrorize residents of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon with near impunity. Given all this, it is not surprising
Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization
B'Tselem have recently issued well-documented and convincing reports describing these various policies
as a system of apartheid. The rightward drift of Israel's domestic politics and the
growing role of extremist parties in Israeli politics
have done further damage to Israel's image, including among many American Jews.
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