THE ARC OF A COVENANT

A veteran foreign policy scholar explores the ups and downs in the complex friendship between the U.S. and Israel.

“There are few subjects in American foreign policy that get as much attention as the relationship between the world’s only Jewish state and the global superpower,” writes Mead, author of God and Gold and Special Providence, among other trenchant works on the far-reaching tentacles of American foreign policy. Even so, much of that literature is biased and wrongheaded. In the complicated business of foreign policy, writes the author, “even experts go badly wrong, and history is full of examples in which very serious and thoughtful people have fundamentally mistaken the nature of the forces with which they were trying to deal.” So it is with Israel, a nation resolute in insisting that it be allowed to live on its own terms even while being closely shepherded by the U.S. In Mead’s view, the idea that Jews somehow secretly control the U.S. government and media, to say nothing of its finances, is not worth discussing. Far more important is the seemingly intractable issue of political balance in the always-volatile region, with American political leaders so often favoring close ties with authoritarian Arab states even as dollars-and-cents–minded policymakers have had to negotiate ways to “ensure the security of the oil producers…so that no single power had the ability to interrupt the oil flow.” A nuclear Israel has complicated that already tangled state of affairs even as an aggressive settler regime under Benjamin Netanyahu has further destabilized regional relations. Writing fluently and with a depth born of decades of study, Mead urges that Israelis and Palestinians work harder to achieve ever elusive peace in the region, holding that “the creation of a Palestinian state will move both sides closer to a mutually acceptable accommodation.”

An essential contribution to the literature of politics and diplomacy in the Middle East.