This week I found myself in Petah Tikva. Looking for a place to have lunch, I searched through a list of sushi restaurants in the area. Some of the country’s best sushi can be found in Tel Aviv and Herzliya. I settled on a place in nearby Ramat HaHayel. As I drove there, I was struck by the amount of new construction. It seemed that every street had new towers going up, new parks, and a long list of companies sprouting up to rent the emerging office space. The street level was eateries.
This is Israel after more than 1,000 days of a multi-front war. It’s a dynamic, rapidly growing country with a strong economy. Defense exports are at an all-time high. The defense budget is also burgeoning. If one reads the headlines, one might think everything is doom and gloom and lurching from crisis to crisis. No doubt, at the political level, and sometimes in international relations, things are lurching from crisis to crisis. However, the overall picture is positive.
This week Rahm Emanuel came to Israel. The former ambassador to Japan and former mayor of Chicago is a key figure in the US Democratic Party. He was US President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff from 2009 to 2010. He spoke at Tel Aviv University this week and wrote on X/Twitter that “Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government have led Israel into a dead end.”
Emanuel argued that Israel has received a kind of “blank check” of support from the US. This has “come without expectations, accountability, or consequences.”
This argument has been made before and sits at the crossroads of which policy works best in the US-Israel relationship. The discussion about the speech seems to be whether Israel needs more “tough love” or more unconditional love.
One might be forgiven for not recalling that, back in the era when Israel received essential US support from independence in 1948 through the Clinton years, the relationship was not often discussed in terms of unconditional support.
“The strongest alliances are built on honesty, shared values, and the willingness to tell each other hard truths. It's time for a fundamentally new approach to the US-Israel relationship - one that advances Israel's security, Palestinian’s right to self-determination, and the Arab world’s desire for regional stability,” Emanuel said.
Some of the reactions to this have argued that it’s not fair to Israel. Israel is under threat. Israel faces “genocidal Islamists.”
The fact is that this kind of reaction may exaggerate the danger. The genocidal Islamists, such as Hamas, were appeased by Israel for too long. The way they turned Gaza into a terror stronghold was tragically the result of bad policies enacted in Jerusalem. Policies enabled Hamas to grow after it illegally took over Gaza in 2007. Those who said Hamas was a threat before October 7 were dismissed. The 3D chess policy of enabling cash to go to Hamas and letting it wage numerous wars every year so that the conflict could be “managed” led to disaster.
Hamas appeasement forced Israel to evacuate its communities
The appeasement of Hamas, which was a choice in Jerusalem, was also part of a broader policy that tolerated Hezbollah growing into a major threat. After the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel had to evacuate communities around Gaza and also in northern Israel. This was unprecedented.
Israel was so concerned that it couldn’t wage a two-front war and protect its people that it had to evacuate more than 100 communities, including the cities of Sderot and Kiryat Shmona. Israel had never done this before. In the era of David Ben-Gurion, Israel never evacuated civilians. Was Israel more safe and secure in 1953 than in 2023?
The Gaza border communities subjected to massacre on October 7 and then evacuated were mostly established in the 1950s, and they were carved out under threats. Many factors led Israel to have to evacuate people in 2023. Today’s tactics in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon are a result of those failures.
None of this is a result of Israel’s enemies being stronger; it is a result of Israel being stronger but underestimating the enemy. Strong countries, like strong companies or strong sports teams, learn from failure.
The challenge for Israel is often misunderstood today. Israel is not more vulnerable than in the 1950s. It is not more isolated and threatened. Israel has thrived from the 1950s to today, under different types of threats. The correct understanding of Emanuel’s speech is not to dismiss it, or claim that he doesn’t understand the threats Israel faces. The better response is that Israel is a very strong country today. It is growing, and its largest challenge is actually managing that strength.
The failure of October 7 was not about Israel being incapable of defeating Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran. It was about Israel being very capable, and yet hubris led to disaster.
This is a recurring pattern for strong and developing countries. Their main challenge is not adversaries but rather their own internal policies and choices about what kind of country they want to be.
It’s no surprise that Israel and Turkey appear to often be at loggerheads. Both countries are very strong and have a sense of identity and national ideology. In terms of their trajectory from being nationalist, secular countries with forms of socialism to becoming more religious and with pretensions to expand further, the countries have a lot in common.
This may lead to a clash, as some predict. If so, it would be due to failure to manage their strength and growth. This is the famous "Thucydides Trap" coined by political scientist Graham Allison. Athens and Sparta chose a path to war not because they were threatened or weak, but because they were strong and misjudged the future.
Israel’s real challenge is managing its strength, not its vulnerabilities
Israel’s problem is not really what will happen in US politics. Israel’s challenge is primarily how it will manage its own strength. Perceptions among some commentators that Israel is still in the 1950s, that it is surrounded and under some existential threat, are misplaced. In the two rounds of conflict with Iran, for instance, Israel achieved air superiority over Iran.
There is a perception that if the US-Israel relationship is not one of unconditional support, that somehow the alliance is at huge risk. In essence, that means that anyone transported back to the 1980s, when the Reagan or George H.W. Bush administrations were more critical but supportive of Israel, would conclude the relationship was very bad. This kind of expectation leads to all sorts of misplaced pessimism.
The US has already reduced the warmth it shows toward other allies. The expectation that Israel will receive either complete support or that there is an existential crisis creates an impossible burden on the relationship. A healthier understanding of the relationship would pose the question more in line with Israel’s strength and the fact that healthy alliances may also have disagreements.
A confident Israel that recognizes its strengths and the limitations of that strength will be more confident in its future ties with the US and other countries.
There is a tendency to view many of Israel’s friendships abroad as a zero-sum game. Either it's perfect, or it’s bad. This isn’t always the fault of Israel. Other countries have adopted domestic politics that lead to broad swings in policy. One party comes to power and supports Israel, another party comes to power and doesn’t.
This lurching back and forth isn’t ideal in foreign policy. It creates a lot of uncertainty. This kind of uncertainty seems built into discussions about what Emanuel’s speech says about the future of the Democratic Party and Israel ties in the US. A more reasonable discussion would note that Israel’s larger challenge is going to be managing its own strength and deciding what kind of country it wants to be. Does it want to be the dynamic economy on display in places like Ramat HaHayel, or does it want to be distracted by extremism that is ripping at the fabric of the state?