There are alliances of convenience and there are alliances of conviction. The relationship between the United States and Israel is the second kind and has been since the moment Harry Truman recognized the new state on May 14, 1948, eleven minutes after Israel declared its independence - over the strenuous objection of his own State Department, which was worried about Arab oil and regional stability and all the usual considerations that diplomats use to argue against doing the right thing. Truman recognized Israel anyway because it was right. Because a people who had just watched a third of their number exterminated in the most documented genocide in human history deserved a home and deserved a state and deserved the backing of the most powerful democracy on earth. That founding moral clarity has never left the alliance, despite seventy-six years of diplomatic complexity, policy disagreement and the relentless pressure of international opinion that has spent those same decades trying to delegitimize a nation that has a better claim to its land than almost any state in the modern world. The alliance endures because the foundation is sound. The arguments against it are not.

What the Alliance Actually Is

The U.S.-Israel relationship is the most thoroughly documented, most institutionally deep and most strategically productive bilateral alliance the United States maintains in the Middle East. Israel is the only stable democracy in a region that has produced virtually none. It is the only country in the region with a free press, an independent judiciary, a genuinely competitive electoral system and the rule of law - however imperfect any of those institutions are in practice, which is the standard we apply to every democracy including our own. American and Israeli intelligence services have cooperated to defeat threats that would otherwise have reached American soil. American and Israeli military research has produced technologies that equip the United States Armed Forces as well as the Israel Defense Forces. The Arrow and Iron Dome missile defense systems, developed jointly, represent some of the most sophisticated defensive technology in the world. Israeli intelligence on Iranian nuclear and missile programs has been among the most accurate and most consequential available to American policymakers. This is not a charity relationship. It is a partnership of mutual benefit between two countries that share both interests and values in ways that no other bilateral relationship in the region approaches.

The values alignment is real and should not be taken for granted. Israel was founded by people who had lived under totalitarianism and understood at a cellular level what it costs. Its Declaration of Independence explicitly commits to complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants regardless of religion, race or sex - a commitment made in 1948 that predates the American civil rights legislation of 1964. Arab citizens of Israel serve in the Knesset, on the Supreme Court and in senior military and government positions. That does not mean Israeli democracy is without flaw or that the treatment of Palestinians has no legitimate dimensions of criticism. It means that the country the critics are describing as uniquely illegitimate is the most liberal state in its region by any measurable standard. That is a fact, not a talking point, and it does not disappear because it is inconvenient for the narrative.

The History the Critics Skip

The standard critique of the alliance presents the Middle East conflict as the story of a powerful state oppressing a stateless people, with the United States enabling the oppression. That frame requires omitting most of the history. The Arab states surrounding Israel rejected the 1947 UN partition plan that would have created both an Israeli and a Palestinian state and then attacked the new nation the day it declared independence. They were repelled. In 1967 Egypt, Jordan and Syria massed forces on Israel's borders with stated genocidal intent and were defeated in six days. In 1973 Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack on Yom Kippur - the holiest day of the Jewish calendar - and were repelled again. In 2000 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat a state encompassing approximately 95 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza. Arafat rejected it and launched the Second Intifada. In 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, removing every Israeli settler and every Israeli soldier. Hamas won elections in 2006 and has governed Gaza as a terrorist state since 2007, diverting international aid into tunnel networks and missile stockpiles and launching attacks on Israeli civilians that culminated in the October 7, 2023 massacre.

October 7 killed approximately 1,200 Israelis - the largest single-day massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. It included the deliberate murder of civilians, the rape and mutilation of women, the killing of infants and the taking of over 250 hostages. Hamas did not hide its intentions or disguise its methods. It broadcast them. Its founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews globally - not the Israeli government, not Israeli military forces, every Jew everywhere. That is the entity whose cause the progressive critics of the U.S.-Israel alliance are, wittingly or not, advancing when they demand that America end its support for Israel's right to defend itself. That is the context the humanitarian framing is designed to obscure.

The Soft-Shoe Antisemitism Problem

There is a version of the "end the alliance" argument that is made in good faith by people who genuinely believe the United States should apply consistent standards to all of its relationships and that those standards should include human rights performance. That argument deserves engagement. The United States has relationships with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Pakistan that raise legitimate questions about the consistency of American values in foreign policy, and nobody who raises those questions is being antisemitic. The question is why Israel is the only country whose existence is treated as the problem rather than its policies, why Israel is the only democracy expected to negotiate with organizations that have sworn to destroy it, and why the elimination of the U.S.-Israel alliance is proposed by people who have not proposed eliminating any other alliance with any country whose human rights record is significantly worse.

When the argument crosses from policy criticism into delegitimization - when the claim is not that Israel's conduct in Gaza is subject to the same laws of war that apply to every other belligerent but that Israel has no right to exist, no right to defend itself and no right to the support of its allies - it has left the territory of policy analysis and entered something older and uglier. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of antisemitism specifically identifies the denial of the Jewish people's right to self-determination and the application of double standards by requiring of Israel behavior not expected of any other democratic nation as manifestations of contemporary antisemitism. That is not a censorship mechanism. It is a description of a pattern. People who hold Israel to standards applied to no other country while calling themselves friends of justice are not being precise. They are being selective in ways that have a name.

Friends Do Not Abandon Friends

The United States has not always agreed with every Israeli government's policies. Reagan withheld F-16 deliveries after the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. Bush 41 froze loan guarantees over settlement activity. Obama had sustained tension with Netanyahu's government over the Iran deal and settlement construction. None of those administrations proposed ending the alliance. All of them understood that disagreement between allies is normal and productive and that the alternative - abandoning a democratic ally in a hostile region because the relationship is politically inconvenient - would tell every other ally watching exactly how much American commitments are worth. Taiwan is watching. South Korea is watching. The Baltic states are watching. Every country that has built its security around the credibility of American partnership is watching what the United States does with its most exposed and most scrutinized ally.

Israel has survived because it has fought for its survival, because its people have refused the fate that its neighbors have repeatedly promised them and because the United States has stood with it through the worst moments. That standing together is not blind support. It is not immunity from criticism. It is the basic proposition that democratic allies do not get abandoned when the going gets hard and the global opinion polls turn ugly. The critics who demand the alliance be ended have not explained what Israel is supposed to do when the alternative is the annihilation its enemies have promised. The silence on that question is telling.

My Bottom Line

The U.S.-Israel alliance is one of the most strategically productive, most values-aligned and most morally grounded relationships the United States maintains anywhere in the world. It is grounded in shared democratic values, mutual security interests, decades of joint research and intelligence cooperation, and a foundational moral commitment to ensuring that the people who survived the Holocaust would have a secure home that the world's democracies would defend. Criticism of specific Israeli policies is legitimate and has been offered by every American president who has dealt with the relationship. The demand that the alliance itself be ended is a different proposition. It asks the United States to abandon its most reliable democratic partner in the world's most volatile region, to tell Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran that their strategy of making Israel too costly to support has worked and to signal to every other ally that American partnership has a breaking point determined by how loudly the enemies of the ally can make the noise.

That is not a foreign policy position. That is a capitulation dressed in the language of conscience. Americans are not obligated to pretend it is something else.

Israel is not perfect. No country is. But it is a democracy, an ally and a friend. The people arguing that friendship with Israel is the problem have not explained why no other friendship produces the same moral urgency in them. That asymmetry is the tell.