Why It's in the U.S. Interest to Support Israel—But Not Ukraine | Opinion

A fight over funding for foreign wars is pitting President Biden's commitment to sending aid to both Ukraine and Israel against an increasingly anti-war Republican cohort that wishes to support just Israel. That faction, led by new House Speaker Mike Johnson, managed to get a bill passed in the House approving $14 billion for Israel's war against Hamas but no more funding for Ukraine's fight against Russia.

The effort to untie the two wars will likely not survive in the Senate; it's not just Democratic senators who agree with the President's assessment that "the assault on Israel echoes nearly 20 months of war, tragedy, and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine." But the President is wrong.

In fact, the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are not similar but quite different, both in their strategic significance and morality. Neither speaker Johnson nor GOP Ukraine war skeptics have done a good job of explaining why, but their instincts are sound.

For the United States, Ukraine is almost entirely a war of choice instigated in large part by reckless American policy. The United States had no need to financially and symbolically intervene in Ukraine's domestic struggles in favor of the most anti-Russian faction, as the it did under President Barack Obama during the Maidan insurrection. Russia, no longer as weak as it was in the 1990s, had begun to complain vociferously of U.S. meddling, until in 2014, it took over Crimea. As de facto military cooperation between NATO and Ukraine intensified even further under President Biden, Russia's objections become ever more shrill—only to be famously ignored.

Russia's invasion and the horrifically brutal war which has ensued for 20 months was thus entirely predictable and entirely unnecessary.

Just for a minute imagine if an elected Mexican president was replaced in an anti-American coup supported by China, and then the new regime sought a military alliance with China. Washington would react in very much the same way Moscow did.

There are other ways we could have behaved to support Ukraine without poking the Russian bear. The United States could well have said to Ukraine, "We wish you well but you are the guarantors of your own liberty." Ukraine would have made the necessary concessions to geography, and hundreds of thousands of young men, Ukrainian and Russian, would not now be dead or maimed.

Had we done so, Russia, which has had its own bitter experiences with Islamic terrorism, would not feel credibly that the United States is committed to regime change in Moscow, and thus would not feel compelled to oppose the United States every place it can, most notably in the Middle East and Far East.

The Ukraine war is almost entirely a case of the United States—or more particularly, the narrow group of American elites which benefit from NATO expansion—going abroad looking for trouble and getting it.

But while the Ukraine war wouldn't exist without reckless American intervention, the Mideast is obviously more complicated. My views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are shaped in part by two visits I made with Churches for Mideast Peace, in 2006 and 2011. For many years, I've been critical of Israel's policies on the West Bank and the way that a certain pro-Israel enthusiasm has shaped U.S. foreign policy in the region more broadly. Both Israelis and Palestinians have reasonable claim to the lands of the expired Palestine mandate. Rather than any notion of abstract justice, the current situation is explained by the fact that Israel has long been the more militarily effective party.

But I like many Republicans and other right-leaning intellectuals throughout the West are also influenced by something else in supporting Israel. It's not Christian Zionism, said to be vastly influential in the American South and Heartland. It is a sense that Israel is part of whatever remains of the West's common civilization. The United States in particular but to some extent France and Germany and England, too, have been shaped by Jewish artists and intellectuals. We have Freud and his followers and Marx and his and countless brilliant Jewish novelists and Hollywood. One might roll one's eyes at the extent of this contribution, or decry some of its consequences, but it is a big part of what America is, and to deny it is to somehow deny one's own national culture.

Israel is part of the West, which is part of its difficulty in the Mideast but is also part of the reason that, when push comes to shove, most Americans will support it.

October 7 was such an instance. Hamas is self-professedly a genocidal terrorist organization and makes no effort to hide it. It is not clear whether Israel knows how to effectively eliminate it, or whether it has the will to wage urban warfare in tunnels. What is clear is that any country must react in an extremely forceful way to any group that wantonly murdered 1,400 of its citizens, mostly unarmed civilians. It's not obvious what Israel needs to do to "reestablish deterrence" as the phrase goes, but it seems quite plausible it would be military action that is widely perceived as disproportional and brutal. Any self-respecting country would react the same way, to the extent it had the means.

I concur with Matthew Yglesias's observation that Israel is waging a just war in Gaza and an unjust war of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank. If the United States is to remain involved in the region, from which there seems no escape, it will have to begin the tedious work of supporting reasonable Israelis (and marginalizing the anti-Arab zealots) just as it needs to separate Hamas from the Palestinians who are ready to seek accommodation with Israel.

I don't know whether this can done, but the effort is necessary.

No doubt, President Biden will get the funds he has requested for both Ukraine and Israel; there is no safer bet in Washington than that requests for increased military funding will be honored. But don't mistake this for reason.

Israel and Ukraine are not part of the same struggle "against evil." Russia has reacted as any self-respecting power would to a rival seeking to build military bases on its border. Israel is reacting the way any normal country would to the brutal mass murder of its citizens. Washington policy makers should understand that.

Scott McConnell is a founding editor of The American Conservative.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.