David Bernstein

Jonathan Keeperman (@L0m3z) gave a speech at the Nat Con conference, and I posted a crude reaction to it. He asked me politely if I would explain myself. Here is my response: Jonathan, thank you for your gracious response to my rather ungracious characterization of your speech. I appreciate your civility. Let me explain what provoked my reaction. I agree with your central premise. Today's political climate calls on us to justify the American-Israeli alliance in terms of American national interests. But after calling for a hardheaded accounting of costs and benefits, you never actually perform one. Instead, you offer a selective account of the grievances that some American nationalists harbor toward Israel and its supporters. At several points, you toggle almost imperceptibly between describing those grievances impartially to validating them, without acknowledging the toggle. You came to Jerusalem while the United States and Israel were engaged in a war against Iran. American and Israeli forces have fought alongside one another on an extraordinary scale. Both countries have committed military power and made great sacrifices in a struggle against a common enemy. Yet you barely acknowledge the war, let alone consider what it reveals about the value of the alliance. Surely that experience belongs at the center of any serious discussion of what America gains from Israel. There is also a question of elementary respect. You came to a country at war to explain why Americans are growing weary of its demands on their attention and resources. You found time to discuss the immigration preferences of liberal American Jews and the political sins of the ADL, but not the soldiers fighting, the lives being lost, or the sacrifices being made in a common struggle. Whatever your intentions, that is a failure to recognize the gravity of the occasion. And it is inseparable from the larger failure of your analysis. You tell us that Israel receives $3.8 billion annually in American assistance. But what does the United States receive in return? What is the value of Israeli intelligence, military power, technological innovation, and cooperation against common adversaries? What role does Israel play in America's competition with Iran, China, and Russia? What would it cost the United States to replace the capabilities and regional influence that the alliance provides? These questions are the beginning of the prudential calculation you call for but never undertake. More importantly, what would happen if Washington weakened the relationship to the point that Israel concluded it could no longer rely on the United States? No sane Israeli wants that outcome. But national survival may force Israel to contemplate it in the coming years. Israel would not simply disappear as a strategic actor. It would become a more independent one, making decisions about war, peace, deterrence, and relations with other powers with less regard for American preferences. American support does not give Washington control over Israeli decisions, but it does help keep Israeli military power integrated into an American-led regional order. That is an asset with considerable strategic value. If Israel became a de facto free agent, Washington might save money and escape some immediate obligations, but it would also surrender influence over one of the most formidable military powers in the Middle East. And Israel would not be operating in a vacuum. China and Russia would have opportunities to exploit the resulting realignment. Iran would have opportunities of its own. The regional order would change, and not necessarily to America's advantage. Perhaps you believe this would be a good bargain. But you never consider the possibility, much less calculate its costs. You call for realism while leaving the most consequential strategic questions unexamined. Your treatment of the American right is similarly selective. You emphasize the growing skepticism of younger conservatives, but you never mention that Donald Trump, the dominant figure in the nationalist movement you describe, has taken American military cooperation with Israel to unprecedented levels. Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, and brokered the Abraham Accords. In his second term, he went much further, committing American military power to a joint war against Iran. How does his record fit your account of national conservatism? Why does the behavior of the nationalist president receive less attention than the attitudes of young nationalists? Is Trump an anomaly? Does he misunderstand the movement he leads? Or might his support for Israel reflect a nationalist assessment of American interests fundamentally different from the one you describe? These questions are indispensable to your argument. Yet you don't address them. I am also troubled by your treatment of antisemitism. You correctly observe that accusations of antisemitism no longer carry the political force they once did. But the declining effectiveness of an accusation tells us nothing about the reality or seriousness of the phenomenon it describes. There has been a conspicuous resurgence of antisemitic rhetoric in parts of the American right. Influential voices have promoted the idea that American foreign policy is controlled by Jews or manipulated on Israel's behalf. Such claims encourage Americans to interpret strategic decisions through theories of sinister manipulation rather than through an examination of American interests. Antisemitism, therefore, is not simply a problem for Jews. It is a problem for American national security, political judgment, and national cohesion. It also offers opportunities to foreign adversaries seeking to weaken the United States from within. Yet in a speech devoted to explaining declining support for Israel on the right, you give remarkably little attention to the role that antisemitic agitation has played in producing that decline. Instead, you place considerable responsibility on Israel's American defenders. You blame neoconservatives for opposing Trump, liberal Jews for supporting immigration, and even the ADL for antagonizing populists. Your reference to the ADL is particularly strange. What do the immigration preferences of liberal American Jews have to do with the strategic value of America's alliance with Israel? The ADL is an American Jewish organization, not an arm of the Israeli government. American Jews are predominantly liberal. They disagree with national conservatives on many domestic questions. So what? Even if every criticism you make of the ADL were justified, what do they have to do with the value of Israel as an American ally? Nothing, unless one assumes that Israel bears responsibility for the political behavior of American Jews. That is precisely the kind of collective attribution that ought to be examined critically, not casually incorporated into an explanation of why Americans are turning against Israel. The same problem appears in your treatment of America's wars in the Middle East. You say they are closely associated with Israeli interests. Associated by whom? Which wars? Which interests? And how accurately does that association explain actual American decisions? You leave those questions unanswered. Instead, you point to deeply tendentious interpretations of American foreign policy -- ones often advanced by antisemites such as Tucker Carlson -- as though they were established facts. Arguments frequently employed by Israel's worst antagonists enter your speech disguised as an objective description of American attitudes. This brings me to a broader problem with your method. You present yourself as a relatively detached observer of Israel and an informed observer of the American right. But throughout the speech, you alternate between describing the attitudes of nationalists and adopting their explanations for those attitudes. Reporting that some conservatives blame Israel for America's Middle Eastern wars is one thing. Treating that blame as an adequate explanation of their alienation is another. Political attitudes do not develop in a vacuum. Personalities, institutions, and campaigns of persuasion shape them. Yet your account assigns considerable agency to Israel's defenders, whose conduct supposedly alienated the nationalist right, while giving remarkably little attention to the people on the right actively encouraging hostility toward Israel and Jews based on the most vile lies. You thus present the consequences of an ideological struggle as though they were an impersonal historical development to which Israelis must accommodate themselves. Finally, there is something peculiar about the posture of the speech itself. You begin by explaining that Israel has never occupied a central place in your thinking and that you make no claim to expertise about it. Fair enough. But you then proceed to deliver sweeping judgments about the future of the alliance and the political adjustments Israelis must make. There is nothing wrong with an outsider offering uncomfortable observations. But the authority of those observations depends on their accuracy, not on the speaker's professed detachment. You conclude by imagining an Israel that Americans "do not have to think about." But the Middle East will not cease to matter to the United States simply because Americans grow tired of thinking about Israel. Iran will not abandon its ambitions. China and Russia will not relinquish their interests. And Israel's enemies will not stop threatening it because American voters would prefer to concentrate on domestic affairs. The question is whether America is better positioned to manage those challenges with Israel as a close ally or with Israel acting increasingly on its own. That is the prudential question you say would should address. It is also the question your speech conspicuously avoids. I don't know you. I have no basis for judging your intentions. I accept that you may regard your speech as a candid warning delivered in good faith. But whatever your intentions, its effect is to give a veneer of dispassionate analysis to a series of highly dubious claims about Israel, Jews, and American foreign policy. That is what I objected to. And it is why I reacted so strongly.