ANALYSIS
Extra Holiday Seating
Israel Needs To Rethink
Its Ties With The U.S.
It may be time to downplay the 'strategic'
alliance and re-make the case for shared
values.
JAMES D. BESSER
Washington Correspondent
W
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108
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1991
ith the second
round of Middle
East peace talks at
hand, the question has taken
on a new urgency: how does
Israel fit into the changing
strategic doctrines of the
United States?
Fifteen years ago, the
foundation for the
U.S.-Israeli alliance was
clear: American support for
the Jewish state was based
on the fact that Israel was
the only democracy in a re-
gion dominated by some of
the most repressive dictator-
ships in the world.
In the 1980s — by coin-
cidence and by design —
U.S. support for Israel was
woven tightly into the fabric
of Cold War geopolitics.
Pragmatic pro-Israel ac-
tivists saw the hardline
themes of the Reagan ad-
ministration as the perfect
basis for a new and stronger
formulation of the
U.S.-Israeli relationship.
At the same time, Israeli
leaders, who were never
comfortable with a vaguely-
defined notion of the moral
bonds between the two coun-
tries, pressed the idea that
Israel's primary value was
as a strategic outpost in this
country's confrontation with
the Soviet Union.
"The Israelis felt much
more confident in a relation-
ship that they felt was
founded fundamentally on
hard interests, as opposed to
soft interests like the Holo-
caust, the democratic and
moral connections," said
Marvin Feuerwerger, one of
the architects of the strate-
gic relationship concept and
now a senior fellow at the
Washington Institute for
Near East Policy. -
But the initial strategic
concept — that U.S. and
Israeli strategic interests
are fundamentally com-
plementary, and that
military cooperation bet-
ween the two countries
makes sense — was exag-
gerated by some proponents,
he suggested.
"The trouble with the
characterization has been
hyperbole on all sides," he
said. "People trumpeted
strategic cooperation for
more than it really was.
Don't get me wrong; I con-
sider it an important argu-
ment. But in the context of
U.S.-Israeli relations, it was
not as important as some of
the things on which the rela-
tionship has been historical-
ly based."
The nitty-gritty aspects of
the strategic relationship, he
said, are just as relevant to-
day as they were ten years
ago, when the Soviet Union
was the "evil empire."
Others agree. Henry
Siegman, executive director
of the American Jewish
Congress, said he has
"always argued that the
strategic argument was ex-
aggerated. I never believed
Israel was a critical strategic
fortress of the United States.
It was a -mistake to put so
Israel's friends
have to "switch
gears" and go back
to making the
moral case for
Israel.
much emphasis on this idea,
because political and strate-
gic factors change."
And change came with a
vengeance in 1990 and 1991,
when the sudden collapse of
the Iron Curtain changed all
of this country's geopolitical
calculations and created a
vacuum in U.S.-Israeli rela-
tions.
That vacuum is one reason
why the current administra-
tion is so willing to
challenge the Jerusalem
government on crucial ques-
tions involving Israel's role
in the Middle East peace
process.
"I think abandoning the
moral basis of the relation-
ship with Israel was a huge
mistake — even for those
who believed in the strategic
notion," said David Cohen,
co-director of the Center for
Israeli Peace and Security,
an arm of the Peace Now
movement in Israel.
Groups like the American
Israel Public Affairs Com-
mittee (AIPAC) made a con-
scious decision in the mid-
eighties to emphasize the
strategic arguments — and,
by implication, to focus less
attention on the moral con-
nections between the two