On July 4, 2026, the United States turns 250 years old. There is a Jewish side to this two-and-a-half-century story that many people have yet to hear and a strategic and moral lesson embedded in that covenantal alliance.
John Adams, one of America’s founding fathers and the author of its Constitution, wrote that “the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation.”
Benjamin Franklin proposed that the Great Seal of the United States depict Moses parting the Red Sea. The Puritan founders understood their Atlantic crossing as a second Exodus, and the New World as the Promised Land.
America’s founding covenant – that a free people could govern itself under shared sacred law, and that individual dignity was God-given and inviolable – was a Hebrew idea long before it was an American one.
Zionist parallels
The parallel with Zionism is not merely rhetorical; it is structural.
The early Zionists, like the early settlers, were a persecuted people who carried their identity in a book, who understood their return to the land as redemptive, and who built free societies out of almost nothing against sustained, often murderous hostility.
This is what US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee pointed out in 2025: “We share a value system that is rooted deeply in a biblical understanding of a worldview that says that the individual is important. That is, in my mind, the very essence of Western civilization. And it is on that platform that both the United States and Israel are built.”
Those values – freedom of conscience, democratic debate, the rule of law, the dignity of the individual – have never gone uncontested. And the adversaries who contest them today are not new. They are the latest iteration of a strategic pattern that is now centuries old.
The recent nuclear negotiations between Washington and the Islamic Republic of Iran represent one of the most acute tests of that pattern – and of the US-Israel alliance itself.
A framework that might leave Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact has raised profound concerns in Jerusalem. An emboldened, nuclear-capable Iran would pose an existential threat not merely to Israel but to the entire regional order the United States has underwritten for decades.
Yet this tension, too, is not without precedent.
The alliance has known hills and valleys before. When Israel unilaterally destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in June 1981 – acting on its own strategic judgment over American objections, in what the Reagan administration initially condemned as a dangerous provocation – history vindicated Jerusalem.
When Israel struck Syria’s covert nuclear reactor in September 2007, moving without American agreement. Yet the results served both countries’ vital interests.
The September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the American homeland drove home, in blood, what Israel had long argued: that jihadist movements do not distinguish between their enemies and that the failure to confront them early exacts a catastrophic price.
In short, the covenant between Washington and Jerusalem has been tested, strained, and second-guessed in every generation, and it has overcome every challenge.
The moral, historical, and strategic foundations binding the two nations have proven themselves stronger – repeatedly and without exception – than the fiercest efforts of their common enemies to break them.
America’s enemies
In 1786, Jefferson and Adams met in London with the ambassador of Tripoli – today’s Libya – and asked why his state was attacking American ships that had done them no injury.
The answer was unambiguous: it was “founded on the Laws of their Prophet,” that non-Muslims were sinners, and that every fighter who died in battle was guaranteed paradise.
Jefferson sent the Marines. America’s first overseas war was fought against jihadist aggression rooted in an ideology that admitted no peaceful coexistence with sovereign non-Muslim power.
Two centuries later, the Soviet Union dressed the same hostility in Marxist-Leninist language. Moscow initially backed Israel’s establishment, calculating that Labor Zionist socialism would make Israel a Soviet proxy.
The miscalculation was swift. As Stalin’s antisemitic Doctors’ Plot purge and the suppression of Jewish emigration made plain, communist “equality” meant equality in subjugation.
The Soviets compensated by pioneering Zionology – pseudo-scholarship that recycled classical antisemitic tropes in revolutionary garb and drove the UN’s 1975 equation of Zionism with racism.
Meanwhile, Israeli agricultural and medical technology was quietly developing the Third World. The Soviet model offered dependency. The free model offered growth.
Islamist war
The Cold War is over, but the Islamist war intensifies. Today’s anti-Western axis of “resistance” – Iran, the jihadist networks it funds, and Qatar’s Muslim Brotherhood-aligned influence operations, together with China and Russia – prosecutes the same strategic campaign but virtually at the speed of light.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps finances, supplies, arms, and directs Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias in a regional jihad it frames in the apocalyptic language of Shia martyrdom: war to the death, never-ending until victory or paradise.
Qatar invests billions in Al Jazeera and its AJ+ social media arm, which targets Western youth with narratives designed to delegitimize American power and Israeli sovereignty.
Qatari sovereign wealth underwrites university curricula across the United States in which postcolonial ideology has displaced honest inquiry – and in which America’s founding story and Israel’s legitimacy are treated as the problem rather than the answer.
China and Russia have been documented running large-scale online influence campaigns in which antisemitism functions, as it always has, as a solvent applied to Western social cohesion.
The form shifts with each generation. The strategic purpose does not: to make free peoples doubt themselves enough to capitulate, causing their confidence to implode from within before defeating them from without.
Biblical covenant
This is precisely why the US-Israel alliance is far more than a diplomatic arrangement. It is a civilizational commitment. The same historic values that produced the American Declaration of Independence produced Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
The same capacity for self-correction that drove the Civil Rights Movement drives Israel’s raucous, contentious, fiercely free democracy.
The same free-market innovation that transformed America into the engine of global development also fashioned Israel as the world’s Start-Up Nation. These are not coincidences. They are consequences of shared civilizational foundations.
The 2020 Abraham Accords demonstrated what American and Israeli strength and innovation can produce when both are applied with confidence: Arab governments choosing development and normalcy over the rejectionism that had cost them generations.
That newly developed appetite – for trade, technology, security, and the freedom to build – is real and wide across the Middle East and beyond.
On America’s 250th birthday, the message from Jerusalem to Washington and back is clear: the biblical covenant holds, and the alliance is indispensable, while the adversaries of freedom – in Tehran, Doha, Beijing, and Moscow – are counting on the United States and Israel to lose their commitment to freedom, security, and prosperity.
These regimes have underestimated both nations before. The answer to that wager, as it was in 1776 and in 1948, can never be accommodation. It must always rest on strategic clarity and moral resolve.■
Dan Diker is president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (jcfa.org).