Anti-Americanism in Israel growing

[Michael K.]

http://forward.com/news/israel/216074/what-do-israelis-think-about-americans-start-with/

What Do Israelis Think About Americans? Start With Disdain.

Naomi Zeveloff March 8, 2015

Though Israel is a famously fractious society, Israelis tend to agree on one thing: Their strongest supporters are an inherently dupable people.

"Most Israelis think Americans are pro-Israel and we can sell them anything, especially mud from the Dead Sea," said David Lifshitz, the lead writer for the Israeli comedy show "Eretz Nehederet," or "Wonderful Land."

"Or — just regular mud with a 'Dead Sea' sticker on it."

But it's not just American tourists whom many Israelis see as guileless. American foreign policy is held up to similar scrutiny here, even as Israel receives billions of dollars in foreign aid from the United States each year.

"Americans are perceived to be naive, especially when it comes to the Middle East," said Uri Dromi, who served as a spokesman for the Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres governments. "It is a bad neighborhood and it seems like they just don't realize it."

The naivete Israelis perceive in Americans is not just something they believe only Israel's adversaries exploit; Israelis believe they can do so, too — and do. In a secretly recorded video of a 2001 discussion with a group of terror victims in the Ofra settlement in the Israeli occupied West Bank, now-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out this widely held perception.

"I know what America is," Netanyahu, told the settlers. "America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction."

On political hiatus at the time after an election defeat, the once and future Israeli leader was responding to a skeptical settler who asked how he would respond to the global condemnation that could be anticipated if he were, as he proposed, to launch a "large scale" attack on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to counter the second intifada.

"They will not bother us," he said of the Americans. "Let's suppose they [the Bush administration] will say something. So they say it — so what? Eighty per cent of the Americans support us. It's absurd! We have such [great] support there! And we say... what shall we do with this [support]?"

The paradox that Israelis rely on — and expect — American support and yet don't trust American judgment on Middle Eastern affairs helps explain the recent U.S.-Israel dustup in Washington. On March 3, that clash reached its climax when Netanyahu appeared before a joint meeting of Congress to warn the assembled lawmakers against their own president's negotiations, together with other countries, with Iran ahead of a possible deal on that country's nuclear program.

Israelis were split on the value of Netanyahu's trip to Washington, which was widely seen as a play to the prime minister's right-wing base before the March 17 election. But most Israelis were in agreement about their premier's message. About three-quarters of Israelis "don't trust Obama to be a reliable ally and to deal effectively with the Iranian nuclear threat" said Eytan Gilboa, a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

That opinion was evident on the Israeli street the day of Netanyahu's speech to Congress, despite all the administration's measures on behalf of Israel's security that Netanyahu took pains to laud.

"Obama is very hostile against Israel," said Effi Hasut, a 50-year-old hairdresser who was smoking on the patio outside his salon in downtown Jerusalem. "He tried to please the Arab world at our expense. He doesn't understand them."

Of course, Israelis themselves have been much more than just spectators in the region, with a massive impact of their own. But according to Mintz, whose new book, "The Polythink Syndrome," deals with recent U.S. policy in the Middle East, Israelis are skeptical of American intentions — except when it comes to supporting them. "[Israelis] are appreciative of the strong and solid relationship, with the U.S. But they also caution against subsequent moves of the U.S. in the region because they don't think those are successful or led to good outcomes," he said.

Yet there's another reason that Israelis don't trust Americans, and that has to do with a wider, powerful strain of mistrust in Israeli society.

"Israelis grow up with the expression of 'never be a freier,' i.e., a push-over or loser, someone who can be taken for a ride," Ari Ben Zeev wrote in his 2001 book "The Xenophobe's Guide to the Israelis."

"This omnipresent need 'not to be a freier' can be traced to 2,000 years of being a struggling minority and also to the Middle Eastern neighborhood rule that everything is negotiable."

Some Israelis think of American tourists and American immigrants in particular as freiers. In a 1998 study of American Jewish immigrants to Israel, by Linda-Renee Bloch, one interviewee said he felt that Israelis saw him as having made the ultimate freier move by moving to Israel in the first place. In their eyes he fell for Israel's "sales pitch" and traded the relative ease of American life for Israeli instability.

An American might respond with the saying "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me," and observe that this outlook, with deep roots in the American psyche, rebuts the Israeli stereotype of Americans as ever-trusting.

But for many Israelis, the question is, why trust anyone even once?

Amnon Cavari, a political scientist with IDC Herzliya. "I don't think that Arabs are liars, but a lot of Israelis think so. They say, 'They never mean what they say.'"

This deeply held cynicism flies in the face of American statecraft, Dromi said. "There is something admirable in the American approach to the world. It is a sense of decency, and you expect your partners and your opponents to be fair," he said. "If they tell you something, they must be telling you the truth; they are going to keep their word."

Of course, that has not always been the American approach. President Ronald Reagan's visceral distrust of the Russians led him to adopt the Russians' own proverb "Trust, but verify" as the cornerstone of his negotiations with the Soviet Union. But with this principle in hand, he did, in fact, reach successful nuclear arms agreements with America's foremost global adversary in talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

And of course, in the case of Iran, America acted covertly with Britain to oust that country's troubled but democratically elected government and reinstall the Shah of Iran as ruler in 1953.

Still, many Israelis fundamentally disagree with what they take to be the American approach, especially when it comes to the Iranians. "Most Israelis will tell you they are bluffing and all they want to do is gain time, and then they are going to spit in our face," said Dromi.

The fact that Israelis see their benefactor as overly credulous also breeds resentment in some corners of Israeli society. In recent years, some right-wing Israelis and their supporters have been increasingly vocal about the idea that Israeli self-determination is put at risk when America picks up the defense tab.

"I think, generally, we need to free ourselves from it," Naftali Bennett, chair of the Jewish Home party, told The Jewish Press in 2013. "We have to do it responsibly since I'm not aware of all aspects of the budget. I don't want to say, 'Let's just give it up,' but our situation today is very different from what it was 20 or 30 years ago."

According to Dromi, for most Israelis, there is in the end an understanding of their country's current reality, for better or for worse: "If you wake an Israeli in the middle of the night and say, 'Who is your best friend in the whole world?' they will say the United States of America."

In his March 3 speech, however, Netanyahu warned that Israel would "stand alone" if it had to. "We are no longer scattered among the nations, powerless to defend ourselves," he told the U.S. lawmakers. "This is why, as prime minister of Israel, I can promise you one more thing: Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand."

In many ways, this image of Israel as the Jewish bunker flies in the face of much of what the original Labor Zionists declared they were trying to achieve in reconstructing Jewish life in a nation-state — not just in terms of security, but also psychologically.

Yitzhak Rabin, perhaps the last classical Labor Zionist leader of Israel, sought to convince both his own people and the broader world that Jews had left behind the ghetto mentality that Labor Zionists felt infected Jewish consciousness in Europe over many centuries. "Israel," he declared in his first speech to the Knesset on becoming prime minister in 1992, "is no longer a people that dwells alone."

But back at the hair salon, Hasut was with Bennett.

"If I depend on your support, I should do what you tell me to," he said. "The Israeli government doesn't need the support that America gives them. Why do they take the money? Why can't they just say: 'We don't need this money. Don't tell us what to do. We are already a country for many years. We can be independent.'?"

Will Israel be able to fend for itself in such circumstances?

"Of course," he said. "So maybe we won't have F16s."

https://www.quora.com/What-would-have-to-happen-to-dramatically-increase-anti-American-sentiment-in-Israel?share=1

What would have to happen to dramatically increase anti-American sentiment in Israel?

Nothing - the majority of Israelis are already with anti-American government sentiment thanks to Barak Obama administration.

Just for anecdotal evidence from the Israeli pop-culture, here is the dialog from Israeli TV Series "Polishuk" Episode 7 "Baseball beat" (seek to 28:55) [1,2,3] - satire about Israeli politics.





US Ambassador in Israel threatens Israeli minister with the baseball beat and says:
- Now repeat after me:
"United States of America is as big as an elephant,
strong as an elephant
and as rich as Sheldon Edelson."
- Edelson, Edelson, Edelson ...
- Now repeat after me:
"Israel is as small as a fly,
weak as a fly
and as poor as a church mouse."
- Mouse, mouse, mouse, ...
- And your Ambassador will return today to Washington.
...
- Now, do you like baseball?
- Yes, yes, yes, ...
- Show him the special beat
- [rolling his eyes]
- If you don't believe me, you can always ask Bibi


[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2592...
[2] http://www.mako.co.il/tv-polishuk
[3] Episode 7 - "Baseball beat" http://www.mako.co.il/mako-vod-k...
Written 14 Dec 2014 •

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/america-hates-russia-is-israel-next/

America Hates Russia. Is Israel Next?

August 17, 2015, 10:24 am

Back in the Old Country, the SWAT Teams are busy as ever, manipulating Americans into what their overseers currently want them to believe. One group holds that it's no longer sufficient for Americans to regard Russia (and Russians) with the traditional post-Cold War mixture of pity and scorn. Russia must now be decreed the world's leading threat to peace.

The government has said so.

Cui bono?

The Pentagon, obviously. Plussing-up against a nation-state threat, however nonexistent, might shake loose a few additional shekels. Anti-Putin forces also stand to benefit, as do America's all-purpose Voices of Conscience on their sempiternal quests for unearned moral stature.

And of course, the more we worry about Russia, the more lies we hear, the less room we have in our brain boxes for consideration of more benignly-intentioned peoples, such as Iran and globally metastasizing Islamism.

So what has this to do with Israel?

Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps, maybe this. If Russia, a nation capable only of low-grade local mischief-making and deep into its own malaise, can be deemed a Global Threat to Peace, why not Israel, too? After all, you don't have to do anything in particular to earn the title. Just get in the way of, say, an Iranian "deal."

So Israeli intransigence now endangers . . . expect the SWAT Team broadcasts soon.

Would that it were so simple.

We come now to something that Israelis must understand about American history and its enduring patterns, something Mr. Netanyahu might want to consider as he goes pushily about opposing a disaster that has already irrevocably occurred, whether the "deal" is ever approved or not.

Back to the history books.

Woodrow Wilson had a problem. By 1917, his domestic presidency, though far from unproductive, was moribund; any future claim to historical greatness would come in foreign affairs. He would not take American into the Great War for normal reasons of state. He had to do it as a good Progressive, busting Kaiser Bill the way he'd longed to rack up America's Robber Barons. He would make the world safe for democracy, and be deified thereby.

Was America buying it?

Hard to tell. Historians work with what's visible to them. What's visible is a lot of over-torqued speechifying and erudite nonsense. But you can argue, I think persuasively, that American support for Wilsonian global idealism was three thousand miles wide and six inches deep. The joyous ease with which America turned upon it in the 1920s offers strong support. Idealism bereft of achievement had become embarrassment and, even worse . . . boring.

America wandered off.

FDR made no such mistakes. America was genuinely unified after Pearl Harbor, but it was a unity perhaps best expressed in the slogan of a popular poster:

This Time, Let's Finish the Job.

But what, beyond victory, was the Job? And how far did it extend into what was certain to be postwar turmoil? Military service was "for the duration plus six months." The duration of what? The American people had been asked to fight what was originally expected to be a ten-year war, with scant mention of what might follow. They won in four.

Now what?

In 1946, George Kennan, then America's chargé d'affaires in Moscow, was asked by DC to explain why the Soviets were behaving like, well, Soviets. He answered in "the Long Telegram," so-titled because it was long and sent telegraphically (telegrammatically?). This document became the basis of his 1947 briefly pseudonymous Foreign Affairs "X" article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which gave America and the world the concept of "containment."

Kennan got it far more right than wrong. Stalin may have been monstrous, but he was no Hitlerian psychopath, intent upon some Slavic Gotterdammerung. Soviet expansionism could be contained, patiently and without war, until the USSR morphed into something more human and amenable to the common life of the planet. It took a few decades longer than Mr. Kennan had anticipated, and came about in a thoroughly unanticipated way. But he knew whereof he recommended.

Containment, unfortunately, did not remain a purely anti-Soviet affair. By 1950, it had been promiscuously militarized and globalized — "A defeat anywhere is a defeat everywhere," as bright young policy-wonk Paul Nitze proclaimed in NSC-68. And thus began seven decades of American military and covert mucking-about on the planet, to decidedly mixed results.

But were the American people buying it?

To get at this, we quote in full the peroration of Mr. Kennan's "X" article:

"Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear."

Brave words. But containment, in reality, didn't ask a whole lot of the American people. They didn't have to do very much. Basically, just sit tight, go about your business, and let the professionals take care of it.

Future major wars were not expected. When they came about, time after time, the American people (all those SWAT Teams notwithstanding) less approved than gave the benefit of the doubt to their government. When the wars dragged on too long, or ceased to gratify, the American people lost interest and wandered off.

Are they losing interest now? Did they lose interest long ago?

Certainly a plausible explanation. And of course, losing interest means not having to bother to understand. That's for the SWAT Teams to provide.

In sum, America's stance in the world since 1917 might be viewed as a series of cycles: idealism versus cynicism, engagement versus disengagement, whatever. But there's another way to look at it. Time after time, the American people, clinging to their notions of "world leadership" but losing interest in whatever's going on . . . wander off.

Or perhaps Congressman Charlie Wilson put it best at the end of that fine movie, Charlie Wilson's War:

"America always f**** up the end-game."

And no one seems to care.

[yankeedoodle]

"Americans are perceived to be naive, especially when it comes to the Middle East," said Uri Dromi, who served as a spokesman for the Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres governments. "It is a bad neighborhood and it seems like they just don't realize it."
...
Some Israelis think of American tourists and American immigrants in particular as freiers. In a 1998 study of American Jewish immigrants to Israel, by Linda-Renee Bloch, one interviewee said he felt that Israelis saw him as having made the ultimate freier move by moving to Israel in the first place. In their eyes he fell for Israel's "sales pitch" and traded the relative ease of American life for Israeli instability. 

Stupid fuckers.  They knew it was a "bad neighborhood" - they tend to make people do bad things - but they moved in anyway.  If they can move in, they can just turn around and move out.