Israel Seeks Other Global Friends Besides U.S.

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

While Israel’s relationship with the United States has come under strain, especially over the past year, its ties with Russia keep improving.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent visit to Russia in June was his third since last September. “Russia is a global power and our relations are getting closer,” remarked Netanyahu on the eve of his Moscow visit.

Putin spoke of the “humanitarian ties” that bind Russia and Israel. “We place great importance on our relationship with Israel,” he stated.

Israel and Russia have common interests, from combating the influence of the Islamic State to pushing back the advances of Islamist extremists elsewhere in the Middle East. “We will be partners in the struggle against terrorism,” Putin declared.

While Moscow wants increased influence in the region, Jerusalem needs an alternative to the United States as a guarantor of its interests.

President Barack Obama’s narrow focus on Iran’s nuclear-weapons program to the exclusion of the many other threats Iran is posing makes it evident to Israel that it may need a power other than the United States to rely on.

Martin Kramer, a scholar at Shalem College in Jerusalem, suggested, in “Israel and the Post- American Middle East,” published in the July-August 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs, that Israelis are aware that a war-weary America is withdrawing from its longstanding involvement in the Middle East.

The disengagement began before Obama entered the White House, but he has accelerated it. “This conviction, far from paralyzing Israel, propels it to expand its options, diversify its relationships, and build its independent capabilities,” Kramer wrote.

Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Ramat Gan, Israel, concurs. “From his early days in power, President Barack Obama has pursued a grand strategy of retrenchment based on the belief that the Bush administration’s interventionist policies had severely damaged U.S. standing,” he asserted in “U.S. Mideast Retreat a Boon for Moscow and Tehran,” appearing in the Summer 2016 issue of the Middle East Quarterly.

Obama’s intent to reduce the U.S. presence in the Middle East, and the manner of his retreat, weakens Israel’s deterrence capability, according to Inbar. The new perception of the U.S. is that of “a vacillating ally.”

As a result, concludes Inbar, “the U.S. exit from the Middle East ironically increases Israel’s leeway to do as it sees fit. It is left with less of an obligation to weigh the consequences of its own actions on U.S. interests and personnel in the region.”

Hence Israel’s turn towards other great powers such as Russia; Moscow has influence with Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria, the three forces of greatest concern in Israeli security calculations.

Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to Russia and now a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, remarked that “what we are seeing is realpolitik in action.”

Netanyahu and Putin discussed security coordination between their respective militaries. As the Russians are now flying sorties over Syria on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime, they agreed to coordinate these in order to prevent unwitting Israeli or Russian casualties.

As Israeli journalist Ariel Bolstein of the Israel newspaper Hayom observed, “The relationship between Jerusalem and Moscow is blossoming like never before.”