The Necessity of the U.S.-Israel Alliance
The growing MAGA division misunderstands the Jewish state’s benefit to U.S. interests.
By Josh Hammer, Newsweek senior editor-at-large and author of the new book, Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West
Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff’s nuclear negotiations in Oman with the Iranian regime last weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return trip to the White House last week, and the continuing social media fallout from podcast king Joe Rogan’s recent Israel-related on-air debate all point toward one conclusion: America’s Middle East policy—and U.S.-Israel relations in particular—are taking up an outsize share of the national conversation. Perhaps, that is providential, as Jews celebrate Passover and Christians celebrate Holy Week. Or perhaps it is circumstantial—Israel, after all, has become a lightning rod issue.
That status also now affects the entire American political spectrum. Anyone paying attention to politics in the last few years has likely noticed that the State of Israel—and, by extension, U.S.-Israel relations—has become a hotly contested issue within certain pockets of the American Right. Israel long ago became a contested issue on the American Left, and despite historical bipartisan support for the Jewish state, recent Gallup polling suggests that Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinian Arabs than Israel by a whopping 59%-21% margin. That’s pretty depressing for those who place a premium on our relationship with the sole, dependable, Western-aligned state in the volatile Middle East. But left-wing support for Israel, at this point, may well be a lost cause. The perhaps more worrisome trend is therefore the rise of a boisterous anti-Israel contingent within the MAGA-aligned right-of-center.
That MAGA-aligned, anti-Israel contingent may still be numerically small, but it is ascendant in its clout. It finds a home among certain highly popular podcasters, such as Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens. Sometimes, this anti-Israelism morphs into unequivocal anti-Semitism—such as Owens’s promotion of the infamous medieval blood libel and Carlson’s platforming of a series of guests who harbor a clear and palpable resentment toward the Jewish people. When one peddles the infamous anti-Semitic canard that Jews murder Christians to use their blood in rituals, as Owens did, or “just asks questions” in response to a warmly welcomed Nazi apologist guest’s outrageous distortion of the Holocaust, as Carlson did, it’s no longer to be just merely “anti-Israel.”
But even strictly limiting our focus to foreign policy, the ascendant strand of right-wing anti-Israelism is baseless—and out of step with the president’s “America First”-style realism to boot. A close U.S.-Israel relationship directly advances the American national interest in a troubled part of the world in a stabilizing, Western-aligned, cost-effective, and high “ROI” (return on investment) manner. The New Right should categorically reject the rising tide of anti-Israelism.
Some leading MAGA-aligned anti-Israelists make a habit of arguing that Republican support for Israel today is a mere vestige of a bygone Bush-era neoconservatism. But as I argue in my new book, Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West, this is fake history. The George W. Bush administration—while the high watermark for democracy-exporting American neoconservatism—was not even particularly pro-Israel. And that, frankly, makes sense: if one obsesses over nation-building, then it is logical that the most ambitious “nation”-building project of them all—that of the Palestinian Arabs in Ramallah—will be front and center. Accordingly, Bush administration neocons focused on a “two-state solution” until their final days in power.
By contrast, it is the architect of America First, Donald Trump, who has repeatedly proven himself, through word and deed, to be the most pro-Israel president in the history of the modern Jewish state. What is it, then, that President Trump understands about this particular issue that so many of his nominal “America First” allies fail to see? What is it about Trump’s interpretation and implementation of a paradigm of foreign policy realism—predicated, as realism necessarily is, on a sober view of the geopolitical stage and a singular prioritization of the tangible national interest—that places such a premium on U.S.-Israel relations?
Like any good contemporary foreign policy realist, Trump begins with two related premises: first, resource scarcity exists, and so America must carefully manage, prioritize, and triage its military resources on the world stage; and second, the People’s Republic of China and its regnant Communist Party represent the biggest civilizational threat to the United States this century. At the same time, America also has very real interests in the Middle East: we want to contain the metastasis of murderous jihadism and the Iranian regime’s terror exports, we want to ensure the freedom of navigation on crucial international waterways such as the Red Sea, and we want to ensure that the holy sites in the Holy Land are safe and sound.
The relevant question for the statesman is: how can the United States best secure its interests in the Middle East while simultaneously freeing itself to redeploy many of its assets to the Indo-Pacific in response to the Chinese threat, as our national interest demands? The answer is simple: the United States must embolden and empower its Middle East allies to secure and safeguard their own region in a way that redounds to both of our national interests. And while some of the more moderate Arab countries share some interests with the U.S.—namely, the more moderate Sunni Gulf Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who oppose a nuclear Iran—there is only one country in the Middle East that overwhelmingly shares America’s own myriad interests: Israel.
The “ROI”-maximizing American realist move, therefore, is to embolden Israel to take care of its threats—which, the vast majority of the time, are our threats too. Think of it as a baton hand-off in a long-distance relay race, with the United States essentially handing off the baton to Israel to better patrol and secure—on our joint behalf—its particularly rambunctious and Islamism-ridden corner of the globe.
This approach is exactly what President Trump did during his first term—and what he has done in the early stages of his second term. He has routinely emboldened Israel, viewing tight-knit U.S.-Israel relations as redounding to the U.S. national interest. Time and again, he has been proven correct. During Trump’s first term, the result of his myriad pro-Israel policies was neither war nor the much-dreaded eruption of the proverbial “Arab street,” but unprecedented regional stability and the four historical Arab-Israeli peace deals that together comprised the Abraham Accords. As I wrote four years ago, “The [Abraham Accords] normalization deals … laid the foundation for what a truly hard-headed, nonsectarian regional containment of the Islamic Republic of Iran can, and should, look like.”
It is easy for Americans to discount or outright dismiss the grave danger that would be posed by a nuclear Iran. The national legislature of the Islamic Republic chants “death to America” on a daily basis. As a college student who was raised in Tehran told me last summer at a conference, moreover, the Islamic Republic’s version of the “pledge of allegiance” enforced upon pupils in their state schools is a solemn vow to do everything the pupil can to destroy the “little Satan” of Israel and the “big Satan” of the United States.
The Iranian regime doesn’t just issue baseless taunts—it also acts. Iran and its proxies have American blood on their hands from attacks dating back decades—a cycle repeated just last year in the tragedy at Tower 22 military base in Jordan. Iran demonstrated last year that its conventional missiles are capable of hitting virtually anywhere in the Middle East; with an ICBM, everywhere from Western Europe to America’s East Coast would be in their crosshairs. A wise American foreign policy wouldn’t countenance such a future.
The obvious pro-America “man on the spot” deterrence against the Iranian mullocracy is the Western-aligned Middle East alliance anchored by the State of Israel. Indeed, recent history makes clear what an emboldened Israel can do to not only advance its national interest but to promote the safety and security of America and the broader West as well. Over the course of a few months in 2024, from July through September, Israel embarked on a righteous revenge campaign against some of the worst jihadists that have plagued it and the West for decades. We might think of the two-pronged culmination of this campaign as the assassinations of decades-long Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and Oct. 7, 2023 mastermind Yahya Sinwar in Rafah.
But before them, Israel eliminated two other leading jihadists (in this case, both affiliated with Hezbollah) who had murdered hundreds of Americans, Fuad Shukr and Ibrahim Aqil. Shukr and Aqil were, respectively, the masterminds of the twin 1983 Beirut bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks (which slaughtered 241 American service members) and the U.S. embassy (which killed 63 total people). For decades, the two terrorists had multimillion-dollar U.S. State Department bounties placed on their head. As part of the Bush- and Obama-era global war on terror, the United States regularly engaged in clandestine and under-the-radar operations against Iranian proxies, such as Hezbollah. Still, the two terrorists routinely evaded capture—until the Israel Defense Forces did America’s dirty work for us by taking them both out.
Prior to the landmark Abraham Accords and the actions of Israel in Trump’s first term, realist critics could have made a plausible, if inaccurate, case that the tight-knit U.S.-Israel relations were a net negative for the U.S. The Arab states’ oil embargo of the 1970s in response to America’s support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 crippled American consumers—at minimum, one could at least make the case with something approaching intellectual honesty. But those days, simply put, are over. Foreign policy realism demands the United States primarily focus on China. It follows that America’s European allies should take the lead when it comes to containing Russia, as the Trump administration has made clear. In the same way, America’s Middle East allies—namely, Israel—should take the lead when it comes to containing Iran and nonstate actor jihadism.
The often-bemoaned cost of doing so is, in fact, quite small. In truth, all America has to do is defend Israel at the United Nations and other hostile globalist tribunals, supply the occasional type of bespoke weaponry as needed on an ad hoc basis, and otherwise just get the heck out of the way and let Israel and the IDF do their thing. That’s it.
Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are all U.S. State Department-recognized Foreign Terrorist Organizations. They all wish Americans harm and, like their Iranian patrons, they act on that desire when they are capable of doing so. The United States has very real interests in keeping the Middle East as stable and secure as possible—while prioritizing the unique civilizational threat posed by Communist China. All of this strongly militates in favor of close-knit U.S.-Israel relations. Fortunately, President Trump understands all this. Would that all of his followers might do so as well.