Is the United States or Israel the greatest country in the world? You might expect a Trump administration official to unhesitatingly pick America — but you’d be wrong. In an interview with an Israeli outlet, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce described the United States as “the greatest country on Earth” before pausing to correct herself: “…next to Israel.”

The interview, which aired a month ago, only began to circulate on US social media amid the recent American and Israeli strikes on Iran before they were curtailed by the 45th President’s ceasefire announcement last night. Nevertheless, this has prompted even die-hard conservatives to question the optics of cleaving so closely to Israel.

It’s one thing to be pro-Israel, to support the right of the Jewish people to a safe and sovereign state in their ancestral home. It’s quite another thing to express, as an American, such a total and absolute sense of identification with another state. This goes so far as suggesting that one’s own country is second best behind the Jewish state, which is the meaning of the “next to” idiom: My wife is just wonderful, y’know? Right up there with her hot best friend.

Bruce didn’t reply to my request for comment by deadline. Her rhetorical slip-up can shed light on why it was that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made such a big gamble in attacking the Islamic Republic while negotiations between Washington and Tehran were still underway.

Yet the time when Israel could take sentiments like Bruce’s for granted in Washington might be coming to an end. Last year, 46% of American adults under age 30 viewed Israel positively, according to Pew polling, a 17-percentage-point drop from five years earlier. RealClear polling from the spring found that “the biggest increases in unfavourable views” toward Israel “came from 18- to 49-year-old Republicans, who went from 35% unfavourable to 50%.”

A kind of near-total identification with the Jewish state and its cause is increasingly limited to Republicans over the age of 50, per RealClear. That describes people like Bruce or Sen. Ted Cruz, who in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson used the word “we” when talking about attacking Iran — before the United States had directly intervened in the conflict.

As Aris Roussinos has noted, youth alienation with Israel — on the Left and the Right — will sooner or later make itself felt in the policy sphere. Already, many of the younger GOP professionals rising up through the Defense Department ranks reject evangelical-inflicted subjection to Israel.

On Zoomer media — a dopamine-fuelled kaleidoscope of podcasts, reels, and tweets — this Right-wing scepticism bleeds into a refusal to “die for Israel” and sometimes outright anti-Semitism. Yet among younger foreign-policy elites, the growing alienation doesn’t necessarily translate into overt hostility towards Israel. Rather, they simply see it as just another country with its own agenda and interests which sometimes align with America’s and sometimes don’t.

If anything, it’s bizarre statements such as Bruce’s that are likely to widen the generational gap over Israel. After all, it is a universal tendency of sons and daughters to question, if not shatter, the idols and certainties of parents. Going forward, Israeli maximalism is likely to crash against this rising tide, to the benefit not just of the United States, but likely also the Jewish state itself.

---

Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

---