Manifest Destiny: Acceptable For the United States, But Apparently Not For Israel
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/opinion/israel-netanyahu-democrats-us.html?searchResultPosition=1
This editorial really got me angry.
Jon Finer was a deputy national security adviser in the Biden Administration. He wrote this op-ed in The New York Times on line (OCT 23) and in the print edition (OCT 26). The gist is simple. In his opinion, the United States Congress, should it become majority Democrat, should alter the country’s relationship with Israel regardless of who becomes the next Israeli prime minister.
Here’s why, he wrote:
“Israelis across the political spectrum may be deeply divided about Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership and integrity, but they broadly support his policies.”
He then goes on to write:
“Americans are moving in the other direction: 60 percent expressed negative views of Israel in a recent poll; 80 percent of Democrats did.”
If I am to understand the position Mr. Finer thinks the U.S. should take, he believes that our government should be more punitive in our dealings with Israel until the Israeli government does whatever the Democrats think Israel ought to do. I guess the behavioral modification pressure Trump is unwilling to use with Russia, the Congress should use with Israel.
In other words, he would advise you to alter your friendship with your college BFF roommate because he or she is dating someone of whom you do not approve. If Finer were around 150 years ago, he would have advised the young America to stay put on the east coast and stop stealing land from the Indians, let alone take covered wagons across the fruited plain to California to discover gold and Hollywood.
I fully understand that many Americans, especially those under 30, do not like what Israel is doing in Gaza. I don’t like what Israel is doing in Gaza. But what I really don’t like is the fact that Israel even has to consider doing what it is doing in Gaza it at all.
The Palestinian Arabs could have had their state in 2000, but Arafat walked away from a deal that would have given him over 90% of what he wanted. Instead, he took to killing Jews in the Second Intifada.
Israel gave up all claims to Gaza and fostered free elections in 2005. Jewish settlers in Gaza were uprooted and made to leave. The Arabs of Gaza chose Hamas to lead its government. There have been no elections since then about 20 years ago and all Hamas is interested in is terror, killing Jews, and taking all the land “from the river to the sea.”
Israel has been attacked from the east and the west by Palestinian Arabs many, many times. October 7 is just the latest, but it is the worst. When you combine the repeated threat to Jewish lives from Arab incursions, the fact that the Arabs, like the American Indians before them, were defeated in battle along with the repeated Arab refusals to make a deal for their own country let alone elect responsible leaders, you cannot blame the Israeli right, especially the very religious Israeli right, for believing that God promised Moses all of Israel, including Judea (the southern West Bank—Hebron and Bethlehem) and Samaria (the northern West Bank–Nablus), and it is Israel’s manifest destiny to make it all part of Israel.
Now imagine a bunch of college kids from Oxford in England protesting the United States for taking Indian land in the 1800s and you have the current situation that exists between Israel and the United States on college campuses. No matter who wins the Israeli election and gets to form a government, this situation will remain unchanged. Democrats want Israel to change its behavior toward people who have pledged to kill them. Israelis will ask, “what are you nuts?”
Should the Democrats take control of either the House, the Senate, or both, this will not change anything, nor should the Dems believe that they can change anything. If the Democrats want to cut off foreign aid to Israel, they can try. I suspect Mr. Trump will have none of that, but it may well be an issue in the 2028 election. Forcing Israel to buy weapons with its own money seems fine by me. The next time the United States wants to go to war with Iran, maybe Israel will say no. Not likely, but who knows?
Israel is now a relatively mature democracy. What was once a small country of little economic or military significance begun by Ashkenazi Jews escaping the Holocaust is still a small country, but now one of the strongest fighting machines in the world, with miles of tech companies between Tel-Aviv and Haifa, a flourishing pharmaceutical industry, and a population full of innovators. Israel is still “the Start-Up Nation” (Dan Senor and Saul Singer, 2009).
If Mr. Finer thinks the United States would be better off being less close to Israel because the young and liberal want Israel to stop killing the Gazan Arabs who elected Hamas who then killed more Jews in any one day since the Holocaust, and are incapable of running anything in the West Bank larger than a falafel stand either, fine. Israel will go it alone as the Jewish people have throughout history.
But the world should stop kidding itself. Israelis don’t think the West Bank is either disputed or occupied. Many think the West Bank is Israel. Until and unless the Palestinian Arabs find leadership that pledges to recognize the Jewish state of Israel and stop trying to kill Jews and stop trying to return to land they lost in a war, the Israeli people will not relent.
Most Israelis may well not want to give back any of the West Bank. I know very few Americans willing to give back South Dakota.
Now do I think that the United States has not fulfilled its responsibility to the American Indians? I do. Do I think that Israel needs to make sure that Arabs are neither persecuted nor killed by settlers? I do. But, do I think that any Israeli government can responsibly allow another Arab state to be established on its border. I do not.
I have come to a place where I do not favor a two-state or one-state solution. I will change my mind when the Arabs stop trying to kill my people and spend more time trying to find responsible leaders for their own people in the West Bank and Gaza. They surely have not yet for 78 years.
