Steven A. Cook
In recent months, many of the U.S. headlines about the Middle East have come not from the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon or the Red Sea but from American university campuses. The pro-Palestinian protests that rocked UCLA, USC and Columbia (among others) have generated reams of commentary about free speech, antisemitism, violence and higher education. The focus on these issues, important as they are, has obscured a deeper and possibly more significant development: The relationship between the United States and Israel is changing.
Joe Biden is hardly the first president to describe America’s relationship with Israel as “special”; such phrasing has been a tradition since John F. Kennedy’s presidency. For many years, this language was uncontroversial because Israel was popular among Americans. That popularity translated into, among other things, decades of bipartisan congressional votes for generous U.S. military and economic assistance (the latter of which ended in 2007), as well as diplomatic support for Israel at the United Nations and beyond.
The U.S. consensus on Israel began to break down in the 2010s, however. Between 2008 and 2014, Israel and Hamas fought three wars, during which about 2,500 Palestinian civilians were killed and parts of Gaza’s infrastructure were destroyed — primarily with U.S.-supplied weaponry. During this period, Israel continued to construct settlements in the West Bank — apart from a brief pause after President Obama took office in 2009 — as well as infrastructure to support them. This de facto annexation seemed intended to preclude the establishment of a Palestinian state, which became an official goal of U.S. policy in 2002.
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