February 08, 2025
Nasser Kandil
• America’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s strength, security, defense, funding, armament, and immunity from prosecution has remained unchanged for decades. However, Israel was once strong enough to tolerate and even require an America that could disagree with it and maintain some level of distinction. Israel’s power allowed Washington to formally oppose settlement expansion in the West Bank and criticise the Judaisation of East Jerusalem under the guise of rejecting unilateral measures – so long as the U.S. continued its financial and military support, refrained from punishing Tel Aviv, and shielded it from accountability, particularly within international institutions. These criticisms were never meant to alter Israeli policy but rather served as a diplomatic tool to preserve U.S. leverage. They allowed Washington to maintain its pretense of being a neutral mediator while sustaining the so-called Arab moderation that dominates official Arab policy. This moderation painted the U.S. as a friend of the Arabs and an honest broker between them and Israel while portraying resistance as an obstacle to securing American pressure on Israel to accept the Arab Peace Initiative or its main provisions.
• What President Donald Trump did and said was not fundamentally different from what President Joe Biden has done and said during the al-Aqsa Flood war – both acted without concern for Arab reactions and without regard for the fate of the Palestinian faction that tied its survival to negotiations and American initiatives. This faction willingly became a security tool for hunting down resistance fighters, believing this would prove its loyalty to the negotiation path. However, the wars Israel has waged against resistance movements in Lebanon and Palestine, especially over the past quarter century, have eroded its power and inflicted structural damage on its sources of strength. The rise of far-right factions is merely a symptom of this decline, as the Israeli military has repeatedly failed to eliminate resistance movements in the north and south. The latest war, the longest, most difficult, and most intense in Israel’s history, reaffirmed this reality. Despite the immense losses suffered by Palestinians and Lebanese – both civilians and fighters – Israel has been unable to solidify its occupation, enforce mass displacement, or crush the resistance. Instead, it has found itself compelled to sign agreements that enshrine withdrawal, guarantee the return of displaced people, and overlook the continued presence of resistance arms.
• As a result, the notion of a two-state solution and the call to halt settlements – once tools for dividing Arabs and Palestinians between negotiation advocates and resistance supporters, pushing this divide to the point of violent internal conflict – have transformed into existential threats for Israel. Even the mere mention of a Palestinian state, no matter how symbolic, has become unacceptable, even when accompanied by normalisation with Saudi Arabia. After Israel’s military and state institutions lost credibility in the discourse of war, it sought refuge in ideological zealots who consider the West Bank and East Jerusalem the heart of the biblical “Promised Land”, non-negotiable and beyond compromise. The delicate balance between these ideological settlers, the military-security establishment, and secular Israeli society has become contingent on Washington abandoning any pretense of distinction from Israel and discarding the two-state solution.
• With the dream of “Greater Israel” shattered by the failure to maintain occupation and mass displacement, with “Mighty Israel” undone by its inability to eradicate resistance movements, and with “Glorious Israel” collapsing under the weight of its image as a brutal and savage entity in the West, “Lesser Israel” has become its last refuge, with the West Bank as its heart. As the army and settlers failed to protect Israel, direct American intervention became necessary – through assassinations, major security strikes against resistance forces, the deployment of missile batteries, the interception of Iranian retaliatory strikes, and military operations in the Red Sea on Israel’s behalf. The illusion of distinction between Washington and Tel Aviv has now fully crumbled, making every Israeli position immediately adoptable in Washington without scrutiny.
• This complete alignment, born from Israel’s existential predicament, means that for an Arab to hold an American identity internationally, they must embrace an Israeli identity regionally. They must cheer for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the annexation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and the resettlement of displaced Gazans in Egypt – followed inevitably by the resettlement of displaced West Bank Palestinians in Jordan, and eventually the permanent displacement of Palestinians from the territories occupied in 1948 to Lebanon, alongside the refugees already residing there. The past approach – where one could claim to stand under the Arab umbrella, support the Arab Peace Initiative and the Palestinian Authority, oppose resistance movements on strategic grounds, and advocate diplomacy as the only viable path, no longer holds. Today, the choice is stark: remain silent, or openly declare oneself an Israeli, endorsing the slaughter and displacement of one’s own people while accepting subjugation to the one undisputed master of the region – Israel.
