and furthermore

Richard Just, writing in the Globe and Mail, gets to the core of what so irritates Walt and Mearsheimer that they’ve mounted a campaign to denounce it as a conspiracy—America’s natural sympathy for Israel:

Israel appeals to different Americans in different ways, including some theological ones that are obviously absurd, not to mention offensive. But at root, most Americans like Israel for two reasons: first, because they sense correctly that, whatever the country’s imperfections, the moral claim of Jewish statehood is fundamentally just; and second, because, in ways large and small, in ways salutary and occasionally troubling, Israeli society accentuates, even exaggerates, the traits Americans most admire in themselves. We take pride in our vibrant democracy; Israel’s democracy is more than vibrant, it is spirited and contentious to the point of near-dysfunction. The U.S. psyche was strongly influenced by the frontier; Israel is nothing but frontier, and its national psyche has been defined by it. Americans like to think of themselves as tough; Israelis - well, you know.

Groups that support Israel skillfully exploit these similarities. On my 2004 trip, in order to be shown that Israel, like the United States, is a vibrant democracy, we spent a lot of time talking to politicians with competing viewpoints. To show us that Israel, like the United States, is a frontier society, we spent time on various borders. To show us that Israelis are tough, we did tough-seeming things, such as ride around in an armoured vehicle.

Some of this was heavy-handed, and some of the affinities Israel sought to exploit struck me as less appealing than others. For instance, the conservatives on my trip, all men, were quite taken with the frontier machismo of Israeli culture, a mentality to which my own reaction is much more complicated.

But whatever the merits of these various affinities, the point is that it doesn’t take a lot of trickery to sell Israel to Americans. In Israel, Americans see a country whose underlying rationale is just and whose instincts, aspirations and even foibles overlap more than a little with their own. They also understand what Mearsheimer and Walt ludicrously deny: that the threats to Israel’s existence have always been real, and remain so. [e.a.]

Indeed.