The contents of a meeting between former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) and United States Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) leaked last week in connection to Israel’s upcoming election.
Menendez, a high-ranking Senate Democrat and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, reportedly warned Netanyahu that forming a government with the Religious Zionist party, led by Betzalel Smotrich, would hinder relations between Israel and the United States.
Despite this meeting occurring months ago, the story was only leaked just a month before Israel’s upcoming November 1 election.
Menendez, among President Joe Biden’s closest allies in congress, likely orchestrated the leak to scare Israelis with the prospect of a US-Israel relations fray from voting for Smotrich’s list or Netanyahu’s Likud in favor of candidates more amenable to American interests in the region.
Uncle Sam clearly feels it has a stake in Israel’s future significant enough to continuously interfere with our elections. Menendez’s leak is hardly Washington’s first or more egregious foray into internal Israeli politics. Other examples include Donald Trump’s 2019 employment of Avigdor Lieberman to block a government without Benny Gantz and repeatedly force new elections, Barack Obama’s deployment of funds and advisors to unsuccessfully remove Netanyahu from office 2015, Bill Clinton’s similar active support for Shimon Peres’s 1996 and Ehud Barak’s 1999 campaigns, and George H.W. Bush’s coup against Yitzḥak Shamir in 1992.
The reason for so much time, money, and effort behind US control over Israel lies in its three principal material objectives – to establish influence over Jerusalem’s policy decisions, detach the Israeli public from its unique identity (through preventing the application of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and aggressively spreading Western cultural among the country’s population), and to fully transform the Jewish state into an American vassal state.
These objectives are interdependent as establishing control over Israeli policymaking by assisting in the installation of a cooperative leadership and creating material pressures for compliance is necessary to prevent Israel from populating the West Bank with Jews and integrating it into sovereign Israel. Ultimately, Uncle Sam seeks to use its control over Israeli leaders and Israel’s alienation from its historical and cultural roots to maintain Israel as a cooperative vassal state for US economic and geo-political interests.
Along with their repeated election interferences, Washington’s qualitative military edge program serves as a twin pillar in its control over Israel. When the United States was forced to change its ambivalent tone on Israel and adapt to its newfound power and bravado following the 1967 Six Day War, President Lyndon B. Johnson developed the QME program.
In conjunction with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, the Johnson administration promised to provide Israel with the weapons necessary to have a qualitative military edge over its neighbors. In return, Israel would show deference to Washington’s wishes for how these weapons should be used, essentially giving the Americans an outsized influence over Israeli defense policy. This influence was exercised in 1973 when Richard Nixon’s administration first prevented an Israeli preemptive strike against Syria and Egypt and then forced Jerusalem to cede all territories won in the Yom Kippur War.
This pattern also repeated itself in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s interferences in the First Lebanon War, and in each of the Gaza Wars since the 2005 disengagement forced on Israel by President George W Bush. It’s no coincidence that Israel has not conclusively won a war since it traded military readiness and operational independence for American weapons and assistance.
The main objective of these means of control is to prevent Israel from fully growing into our true selves, key component of which would mean extending full Israeli sovereignty to the Samaria and Judea regions that constitute the cradle of Jewish civilization. The division of our land has been an American objective since even before Israel won our independence from British rule. The 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, UN General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947, the 1949 Armistice Agreement, UN Resolution 242 in 1967, the 1988 Schultz Plan, the 1991 Madrid Conference, the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995, the Hebron Protocol in 1997 and Wye River Memorandum in 1998, Camp David II in 2000, the 2001 Mitchell Report and 2002 Bush Roadmap, the 2005 Sharam el-Sheikh Summit, the 2007 Annapolis Conference, the Obama and Kerry peace talks, Trump’s Deal of the Century, all American projects to remove Judea and Samaria from Israel forever.
When other solutions that would integrate these regions into Israel and give full rights to Palestinian residents are discussed, like Prime Minister Menaḥem Begin’s plan, they are routinely rejected by Washington.
Israel at root represents an alternative to the United States. Washington’s understanding of its role on the world stage, like that of the entire West that it leads, is based on supersessionist doctrine, that Israel was once the main character of history and the moral/political arbiter of global justice, but they have since passed the mantle. Christendom has for centuries oppressed the Jewish people to further this lie, that the Jews have been relegated to the margins of history, and it has penetrated deep into the psyche of Western civilization.
The Jewish people’s full resurgence in modern times can be understood (and is understood by the people of Israel) as the ultimate repudiation to this lie that Israel has been or can be succeeded. Washington’s attempts to block Israel’s full reconnection with its identity, land, worldview, and place in the world is a desperate subconscious cry against the obvious trajectory of history; it is a bitter clinging to a fantasy of permanent global hegemony that requires interpreting the establishment of the State of Israel not as the national rebirth and return to history of the ancient Israelites but rather as a bomb shelter for persecuted Jews under US protection. Uncle Sam has effectively sought to steal Israel’s identity as the paragon of global justice (despite not being able t successfully play this role, the US-led West continues trying to obstruct Israel in reclaiming our identity and rightful place on the world stage).
This is the ultimate objective. Authentic Judaic culture is problematic for the West. The United States, which currently uses Israel as an outpost of American power and a sweatshop for research and design (with US companies paying Israeli workers a fraction of what they would pay American workers), requires Israel to exist as a compliant vassal. Features of Israel’s Jewish identity like Shabbat, which stops production for a seventh of the year must go. Things like kashrut, which prevent the American food industry from cheaply dumping their processed dirge on Israeli shores, must go. National identity, which blocks the rampant extraction of resources, relocations of jobs, and the tornado-flow of human capital to cheapen labor, must go.
To transform Israel into a cooperative, soulless vassal, the United States needs to strip Israel of its deeper national character. This is why Washington consistently seeks to interfere in Israel’s internal political arena – in order to ensure a pro-West political leadership, prevent the annexation of the Samaria and Judea regions, dilute Israel’s uniquely Jewish identity, and keep Israel functioning as an outpost for empire.
