Israel, America, and the Projection of the Good
If the United States represents the first durable constitutional order built around natural rights, consent of the governed, divided power, and ordered liberty, then Israel represents one of the most important tests of whether those values can survive outside their original Western geography.
Israel is not America. It is a Jewish state, born from Jewish history, Jewish memory, Jewish exile, Jewish return, and Jewish survival. But Israel is also a constitutional democracy, a parliamentary republic, a technologically advanced society, a nation of intense public argument, and a strategic partner of the United States in one of the most volatile regions of the world.1
The Middle East has long been shaped by empire, tribe, sect, monarchy, religious authoritarianism, military dictatorship, ideological revolution, and foreign intervention. In that region, Israel is a small country with a large civilizational meaning. Its value to the United States is not merely military or intelligence-based. Its value is moral and philosophical. Israel is a partner capable of projecting the core values of the American constitutional order into a region where many regimes and movements reject those values in practice: religious liberty, equality before the law, free inquiry, democratic contestation, technological progress, civil society, and the right of a people to defend itself.
Within a tiny population, Israel contains secular Jews, traditional Jews, religious Zionists, Haredi communities, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouins, Russian-speaking immigrants, Ethiopian Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Arabic-speaking citizens, Hebrew revivalists, socialists, capitalists, libertarians, nationalists, peace activists, military hawks, religious conservatives, secular liberals, and every shade of argument in between. Its politics are often noisy, fragmented, frustrating, and unstable. But this is what free societies look like when people are permitted to disagree.2
Dictatorships appear orderly because dissent is suppressed. Theocracies appear unified because doctrine is enforced. Tribal states appear cohesive because loyalty is inherited. Free societies appear chaotic because citizens argue openly about the good.
Israel’s internal conflict is therefore not proof that Israel lacks shared values. It is proof that Israel possesses the central shared value of a free society: the right to argue over ultimate questions without abolishing the society itself.
The United States was not built on ethnic uniformity. It was built on constitutional principles strong enough to contain religious, regional, economic, ethnic, and philosophical diversity. Israel, though much smaller and more endangered, performs a similar task in the Middle East. It maintains a Jewish national identity while also sustaining democratic institutions, minority citizenship, religious pluralism, an independent judiciary, a free press, universities, scientific life, entrepreneurial culture, and open political conflict.
Twelver Shiite belief, as private religious doctrine, is not itself the problem. Religious communities may hold messianic expectations while living peacefully within civil society. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other traditions all contain eschatological (“end times”) elements. The issue is not private belief in divine redemption. The issue is what happens when eschatology is constitutionalized into state power.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not merely a Muslim-majority state. It is a revolutionary state that constitutionalizes Twelver Shiism and the rule of the jurist. In its governing theory, ultimate political authority does not rest in the consent of the governed. It rests in clerical guardianship during the occultation of the Hidden Imam. That structure is fundamentally at odds with the American constitutional order.3
American constitutionalism begins with distrust of concentrated power. The Iranian revolutionary model begins with sacralized authority.
American constitutionalism protects conscience from the state. The Iranian revolutionary model subordinates public life to a religious-political mission.
American constitutionalism divides power because human beings are decadent, ambitious, and dangerous when unchecked. The Iranian revolutionary model concentrates decisive authority in a Supreme Leader who stands above ordinary electoral politics.
American constitutionalism treats law as a framework for protecting natural rights. The Iranian revolutionary model treats law as an instrument for preserving an ideological religious order.
American constitutionalism assumes that legitimacy comes from the people. The Iranian revolutionary model assumes that legitimacy descends through religious guardianship.
This distinction matters because ideas about ultimate authority determine the shape of political life. If sovereignty belongs to the people, then government must justify itself to citizens. If sovereignty belongs to a clerical revolutionary mission, then citizens must justify themselves to the guardians of that mission. The first system produces liberty, accountability, reform, and pluralism. The second tends toward censorship, repression, ideological policing, and permanent conflict with societies that refuse submission to its worldview.4
Israel helps the United States contain the dark side of human nature in a region where destructive ideologies can become armies, militias, terror networks, missile programs, nuclear ambitions, and proxy wars. Israel’s intelligence, missile defense, cyber capability, military innovation, and willingness to confront threats directly make it an indispensable partner in the defense of Western interests. But the deeper point is that Israel defends more than territory. It defends the proposition that a free people may live, build, worship, argue, invent, trade, and govern themselves without surrendering to theocratic absolutism, imperial nostalgia, or jihadist nihilism.
Israel projects American values not by becoming American, but by proving that those values are not ethnically American. Rule of law, human dignity, democratic accountability, free enterprise, scientific inquiry, religious liberty, and national self-defense can take Jewish form, Hebrew form, Middle Eastern form. They are not the property of one nation. They are civilizational achievements capable of incarnation in different cultures.
This is where “American values” and “Western values” overlap but are not identical.
Western values are older and broader. They include the Hebrew prophetic demand for justice, the Greek commitment to reason, the Roman idea of law, the Christian doctrine of the moral worth of the person, the English tradition of limited government, the Reformation emphasis on conscience, the Enlightenment confidence in reason, and the long European struggle to restrain monarchy, church, aristocracy, and mob.
America took the Western tradition and gave it a working political machine: natural rights, consent of the governed, written constitutional limits, separation of powers, federalism, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, private property, civilian government, and the peaceful transfer of power. Western values are the civilizational river. American values are the engineered channel that made the river politically durable.5
Israel belongs to this same civilizational family, but with a distinctive Jewish source code. Its Declaration speaks in the language of Jewish restoration, freedom, justice, peace, equality, and protection of holy places. Its public life is shaped by Hebrew memory, biblical language, democratic practice, scientific modernity, and relentless argument. It is both ancient and modern, particular and universal, Jewish and democratic.
That is why Israel is so hated by the enemies of the West.
The hatred is not only about borders. It is not only about settlements, refugees, Gaza, Jerusalem, or competing national claims, serious as those issues are. The deeper hatred is directed at what Israel represents: a non-submissive Jewish state, militarily competent, technologically advanced, democratic, allied with America, and unwilling to disappear. Israel is a standing refutation of the idea that the Middle East must belong to autocrats, clerics, monarchs, militias, and messianic revolutionaries.
The good is not weakness. The good is not appeasement. The good is not pretending that all regimes are morally equivalent. The good is life, liberty, truth, human dignity, and the defense of civilization against those who would destroy it.
