A Special Relationship in Danger

Individuals have friends; nations have special relationships. The term is as close as the cool and stilted vocabulary of political science comes to sentimentality. It refers to a handful of international ties that depend on some combination of cultural kinship, geopolitical advantage, mutual defense and, above all, shared values and ideals.

Americans can take pride in their nation’s friendships. Britain is not just a former colonial motherland but also the home of a certain strain of civility that Americans admire. Canada is more than just a giant neighbor; it is also a good neighbor, and its hardiness appeals to America’s nostalgia for its own frontier days. Japan’s emergence as an economic superpower is more than just a testament to the U.S.’s benevolence as a victor in war and a partner in peace; it is the result of hard work, ingenuity and entrepreneurship, qualities that Americans esteem.

Not incidentally, Britain, Canada and Japan are all ruled by their own people. The Philippines, a former U.S. colony and longtime beneficiary of American goodwill, was consigned, informally at least, to a kind of probationary status during Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship; the “People * Power” revolution and the triumph of Corazon Aquino, however flawed and fragile, have been a reminder that democracy is a sine qua non for a special relationship with the U.S.

How ironic, then, that the workings of democracy in Israel last week should jeopardize what has for 40 years been the most extraordinary and at the same time the most problematic of all the U.S.’s special relationships.

A Likud government would be committed to a goal to which the U.S. is, and should be, opposed: permanent occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River, which Israel seized in 1967.

Modern Israel was born in 1948 as a result of a territorial compromise, the partition of historical Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Yitzhak Shamir was one of a minority of Zionist extremists who refused to accept the compromise and have always believed that the West Bank should be part of the Jewish state of Israel.

Now the defiance and revanchism of what was once a fringe faction of Israeli politics may become the official policy of the Israeli government. That could render impossible what was already immensely difficult: an updating of the original territorial compromise to accommodate Israel’s legitimate security needs while preserving the principle that Palestinians are entitled to live under Arab rule.

The Likud is determined to solidify Israeli control over some 1.7 million mostly Muslim Arabs. The Palestinians would continue to be governed by authorities they understandably regard as occupiers and oppressors. Democratic rule of second-class citizens is a contradiction in terms.

That circumstance has been barely tolerable to many Israelis (and many friends of Israel in the U.S. and elsewhere) under conditions they conceded were undesirable and hoped would be temporary. But Shamir is saying Israel’s claim to the West Bank is unending and historically just. That is why the outcome of last week’s election may pose not only a huge obstacle to diplomacy but also a threat to the political and humanitarian values that Israel and the U.S. have long shared — and therefore to the essence of a very special relationship.