Here are the Three Sacred Commandments for Americans who shape the public conversation on Israel:<\/p>\n
1. For politicians, especially at the federal level: As soon as you say the word \u201cIsrael,\u201d you must also say the word \u201csecurity\u201d and promise that the United States will always, always, always be committed to Israel\u2019s security. If you occasionally label an action by the Israeli government \u201cunhelpful,\u201d you must immediately reaffirm the eternal U.S. commitment to Israel\u2019s security.<\/p>\n
2. For TV talking heads and op-ed pundits: If you criticize any policies or actions of the Israeli government, you must immediately add that Israel does, of course, have very real and serious security needs that have to be addressed.<\/p>\n
3. For journalists covering the Israel-Palestine conflict for major American news outlets: You must live in Jewish Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv and take only occasional day trips into the Occupied Territories. So your reporting must inevitably be slanted toward the perspective of the Jews you live among. And you must indicate in every report that Jewish Israeli life is dominated by anxiety about security.<\/p>\n
U.S. opinion-shapers have obeyed the Three Commandments scrupulously for decades. As a result, they\u2019ve created an indelible image of Israel as a deeply insecure nation. That image is a major, if often overlooked, factor that has shaped and continues to shape Washington\u2019s policies in the Middle East and especially the longstanding American tilt toward Israel.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s often said that the number one factor in that tilt is the power of the right-wing \u201cpro-Israel\u201d (more accurately, \u201cpro-Israeli-government\u201d) lobby. That lobby certainly is a skillful, well-oiled machine<\/a>. It uses every trick in the PR book to promote the myth of Israel as a brave little nation constantly forced to fight for its life against enemies all around who are eager to destroy it, a Jewish David withstanding the Arab Goliath. The lobby justifies everything Israel does to the Palestinians — military occupation, economic strangulation, expanding settlements, confiscating land, demolishing homes, imprisoning children — as perhaps unfortunate but absolutely necessary for Israel\u2019s self-defense.<\/p>\n No matter how slick any lobby is, however, it can\u2019t succeed without a substantial level of public support. (How powerful would the National Rifle Association be without the millions of Americans who truly love their guns?) Along with its other sources of power and influence, the right-wing Israel lobby needs a large majority of the U.S. public to believe in the myth of Israel\u2019s insecurity as the God\u2019s honest truth.<\/p>\n Ironically, that myth gets plenty of criticism and questioning in the Israeli press from writers like (to cite just some recent examples) Merav Michaeli<\/a> and Doron Rosenblum<\/a> in the liberal newspaper Haaretz<\/em>, and even Alon Ben-Meir<\/a> in the more conservative Jerusalem Post<\/em>. In the United States, though, the myth of insecurity is the taken-for-granted lens through which the public views everything about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Like the air we breathe, it\u2019s a view so pervasive that we hardly notice it.<\/p>\n Nor do we notice how reflexively most Americans accept the claim of self-defense as justification for everything Israel does, no matter how outrageous.\u00a0 That reflex goes far to explain why, in the latest Gallup poll matchup<\/a> (\u201cDo you sympathize more with Israel or the Palestinians?\u201d), Israel won by a nearly 4 to 1 margin.\u00a0 And the pro-Israeli sentiment just keeps growing<\/a>.<\/p>\n Our politicians, pundits, and correspondents breathe the same air in the same unthinking fashion, and so they hesitate to put much pressure on Israel to change its ways. As it happens, without such pressure, no Israeli government is likely to make the compromises needed for a just and lasting peace in the region.\u00a0 Instead, Israel will keep up its attacks on Gaza<\/a>.\u00a0 In addition, if the Palestinians declare themselves an independent state come September, as many reports indicate<\/a> might happen, Israel will feel free to quash that state by any means necessary<\/a> — but only if Washington goes on giving it the old wink and nod.<\/p>\n If American attitudes and so policies are ever to change, one necessary (though not in itself sufficient) step is to confront and debunk the myth of Israel\u2019s insecurity.<\/p>\n Three Myths in One<\/strong><\/p>\n Israel actually promotes three separate myths of insecurity, although its PR machine weaves them into a single tightly knit fabric. To grasp the reality behind it, the three strands have to be teased apart and examined separately.<\/p>\n Myth Number 1: Israel\u2019s existence is threatened by the ever-present possibility of military attack.<\/em> In fact, there\u2019s no chance that any of Israel\u2019s neighbors will start a war to wipe out Israel. They know their history. Despite its size, ever since its war of independence in 1948, the Israeli military has been a better equipped, better trained, more effective, and in virtually every case a successful fighting force.\u00a0 It clearly remains the strongest military power<\/a> in the Middle East.<\/p>\n According to the authoritative volume, <\/em>The Military Balance 2011<\/em><\/a>, Israel still maintains a decisive edge over any of its neighbors. While the Israeli government constantly sounds alarms about imagined Iranian nuclear weapons — though its intelligence services now suggest Iran won\u2019t have even one before 2015 at the earliest<\/a> — Israel remains the region\u2019s only nuclear power for the foreseeable future.\u00a0 It possesses up to 200 nukes, in addition to \u201ca significant number\u201d of precision-guided 1,000 kg conventional bombs.<\/p>\n To deliver its most powerful weapons, Israel can rely on its 100 land-based missile launchers, 200 aircraft armed with cruise missiles, and (according to \u201crepeated press reports\u201d) cruise-missile-armed submarines.\u00a0 The subs are key, of course, since they ensure that no future blow delivered to Israel would ever lack payback.<\/p>\n Israel spends far more on its military than any of the neighbors it claims to fear, largely because it gets more military aid from the U.S. than any other Mideast nation — $3 billion<\/a> a year is the official figure, although no one is likely to know the full amount.<\/p>\n The Obama administration has continued a long tradition of guaranteeing Israel\u2019s massive military superiority in the region. Israel will, for example, be the first foreign country to get the U.S.\u2019s most advanced fighter jet, the F-35 joint strike fighter.\u00a0 In fact, Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently complained that 20 of the promised planes aren\u2019t enough, though he admitted<\/a> that his country \u201cfaces no imminent threat\u201d that would justify upping the numbers. Israel is also beginning to deploy its Iron Dome<\/a> mobile air-defense system, with the U.S. funding at least half its cost.<\/p>\n In sum, none of the nations that Israel casts as a threat to its very existence can pose an existential military danger. Of course, that doesn\u2019t mean all Jewish Israelis are safe from harm, which brings us to…<\/p>\n Myth Number 2: The personal safety of every Jewish Israeli is threatened daily by the possibility of violent attack.<\/em> In fact, according to Israeli government statistics, since the beginning of 2009 only one Israeli civilian (and two non-Israelis) have been killed<\/a> by politically motivated attacks inside the green line (Israel\u2019s pre-1967 border). \u00a0Israelis who live inside that line go about their daily lives virtually free<\/a> from such worry.<\/p>\n As a result, the insecurity myth has come to focus on rockets — the real ones launched from Gaza and the imaginary ones that supposedly could be launched from a future Palestinian state in the West Bank. Purveyors of the insecurity myth, including the American media, portray such rocket attacks as bolts from the blue, with no other motive than an irrational desire to kill and maim innocent Jews. As it happens, most of the rockets from Gaza have been fired in response<\/a> to Israeli attacks that often broke ceasefires declared by the Palestinians.<\/p>\n Those rockets are part of an ongoing war in which each side uses the best weapons it has. The Palestinians, of course, have access to none of the high-tech Israeli guidance systems.\u00a0 Their weaponry tends to be crude and often homemade.\u00a0 They shoot their rockets, most of them unguided, and let them fall where they may (which means the vast majority harm no one).<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s weapons actually do far more harm. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza that began at the end of 2008, killed far more civilians<\/a> than all the rockets Palestinians have ever launched at Israel. Despite (or perhaps because of) its grievous losses, the Hamas government in Gaza has generally tried to minimize<\/a> the rocket fire. When Hamas calls for all factions in Gaza to observe a ceasefire, however, the Israelis often ramp up<\/a> their attacks.<\/p>\n Jewish civilians do run some risk when they live in the West Bank settlements. In the most recent horrific incident, a Jewish family of five was slaughtered at the Itamar settlement.\u00a0 In response, Israeli Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon showed clearly<\/a> how the deaths of individual settlers are woven into the myth of Israel\u2019s \u201cexistential insecurity.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThis murder,\u201d he declared, \u201creminds everyone that the struggle and conflict is not about Israel\u2019s borders or about independence of a repressed nation but a struggle for our existence.\u201d<\/p>\n The logic of the myth goes back to the premise of the earliest Zionists: All gentiles are implacably and eternally anti-semitic. By this logic, any attack on one Jew, no matter how random, becomes evidence that all Jews are permanently threatened with extinction.<\/p>\n Most Zionists have been unable to see that once they founded a state committed to regional military superiority, they were bound to be on the receiving as well as the giving end of acts of war. It is the absence of peace far more than the presence of anti-semitism that renders Israelis who live near Gaza or in the West Bank insecure.<\/p>\n However, according to the myth, it\u2019s not only physical violence that threatens Israel\u2019s existence. In the last two years, right-wing Israelis and their supporters in the U.S. have learned to lie awake at night worrying about another threat…<\/p>\n Myth Number 3: Israel\u2019s existence is threatened by worldwide efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state.<\/em> Early in 2010, Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin told the Knesset<\/a>, Israel\u2019s parliament, that the country was not \u201csuffering from terror or from an immediate military threat\u201d — only to warn of a new peril: \u201cThe Palestinian Authority is encouraging the international arena to challenge Israel\u2019s legitimacy.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201cdelegitimization\u201d alarm was first sounded<\/a> by an influential Israeli think tank and then spread like wildfire through the nation\u2019s political and media ranks.<\/p>\n There are shreds of truth in it. There have always been people who saw the Jewish state, imposed on indigenous Palestinians, as illegitimate. Until recently, however, Israelis seemed to pay them little heed. Now, they are deemed an \u201cexistential threat,\u201d as Yadlin explained, only because the old claims of \u201cexistential threat\u201d via violence have grown unbelievable even to the Israeli military (though not to the government\u2019s American supporters).<\/p>\n It\u2019s also true that challenges to Israel\u2019s legitimacy are growing rapidly around the world and that the specter of becoming a \u201cpariah state\u201d does pose a danger.\u00a0 The head of that think tank got it half-right when he warned that Israel\u2019s \u201csurvival and prosperity\u201d depend on its relations with the world, \u201call of which rely on its legitimacy.\u201d Survival? No. After all, being a pariah state doesn\u2019t have to be existence threatening, as North Korea and Burma have proved.<\/p>\n But prosperity? That\u2019s at least possible. When the Israelis complain about \u201cdelegitimization,\u201d they focus most on the boycott\/divestment\/sanctions (BDS) movement<\/a>, which aims not to eliminate the state of Israel, but to use economic pressure to end Israel\u2019s occupation and economic strangulation of Palestinian lands. (Nor is there any real evidence to back up the charge<\/a> that this is some vast conspiracy coordinated by the Palestinian Authority.)<\/p>\n Were Israel to start behaving by accepted international moral norms, the BDS movement would fade from the scene quickly enough, ending the crisis of \u201cdelegitimization\u201d — just as the rockets from Gaza might well cease. But here\u2019s the reality of this moment: The only genuine threat to Israel\u2019s security comes from its own oppressive policies, which are the fuel propelling the BDS movement.<\/p>\n So far, however, \u201ceffects on the Israeli economy are marginal,\u201d according to<\/a> a popular Israeli newspaper. The BDS campaign, it reports, \u201chas been far more damaging when it comes to the negative image that it spreads.\u201d A growing number of foreign governments are criticizing Israel, and some already recognize<\/a> an actual Palestinian state. In diplomatic terms, Israel\u2019s legitimacy rests on the good will of its sole dependable ally, the United States.<\/p>\n More than any military need, that political need offers the U.S. powerful leverage in moving toward a settlement of the Israeli\/Palestinian crisis. The triple-stranded myth of Israel\u2019s insecurity, however, makes the use of such leverage virtually impossible for Washington.\u00a0 Israel\u2019s president put<\/a> his country\u2019s needs plainly in March 2010: “[Israel] must forge good relations with other countries, primarily the United States, so as to guarantee political support in a time of need.\u201d So far, the U.S. has continued to offer its strong support, even though President Obama knows<\/a>, as he recently told American Jewish leaders, that \u201cIsrael is the stronger party here, militarily, culturally, and politically. And Israel needs to create the context for [peace] to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n But what if the American public knew the facts that Obama acknowledged? What if every solemn reference to Israel\u2019s \u201csecurity needs\u201d were greeted not with nodding heads, but with the eye-rolling skepticism it deserves? What if Israel\u2019s endless excesses and excuses — its claims that the occupation of the West Bank and the economic strangulation of Gaza are necessary \u201cfor the sake of security\u201d — were regularly scoffed at by most Americans?<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to imagine the Obama administration, or any American administration, keeping up a pro-Israel tilt in the face of such public scorn.<\/p>\n ________________________<\/p>\n Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writings on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. <\/em>on his blog<\/em><\/a>. To catch Timothy MacBain\u2019s latest TomCast audio interview in which Chernus discusses what to make of American attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians, click\u00a0here<\/a>, or download it to your iPod\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n