There’s a certain mythology that surrounds Israel in American political life: the plucky democracy in the Middle East, the indispensable ally, the partner that shares both values and interests. It is a mythology repeated in speeches, policy papers, and Sunday talk shows with ritual fervor. But peel back the layers, and a more troubling portrait emerges—one of a state that, like all states, pursues its own survival above all else, even when it means wounding or deceiving its supposed allies.
The USS Liberty: A Forgotten Tragedy
On June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli jets and torpedo boats descended upon the USS Liberty, a U.S. Navy intelligence ship sailing in international waters off the Sinai Peninsula. The attack was ferocious and prolonged: rockets, cannon fire, napalm, and finally torpedoes. When it ended, 34 American servicemen were dead, another 171 wounded, and the ship itself a mangled ruin.
Israel quickly apologized, insisting it had mistaken the Liberty for an Egyptian vessel. The U.S. Navy conducted an inquiry; the State Department accepted the explanation. Officially, the matter was closed. Yet survivors have never accepted the “fog of war” defense. They point out that the ship was flying a large American flag, that its profile was distinct, and that Israeli reconnaissance planes had been circling it for hours before the attack. Former officials, from Admiral Thomas Moorer to National Security Agency staffers, have suggested the assault was deliberate.
The truth may never be fully known. What is certain is that the incident has been quietly shuffled out of American historical memory. Rarely taught, rarely mentioned, it lingers mostly in veterans’ groups and in obscure congressional hearings. An ally killed Americans in broad daylight, and Washington’s political class decided the strategic relationship mattered more than the truth.
Friends Who Spy
The Liberty is not an isolated case. Nearly two decades later, the United States was again betrayed by its ally. In 1985, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy, was caught passing a mountain of classified material to Israel. He wasn’t pilfering scraps. Pollard handed over tens of thousands of documents, some detailing America’s global intelligence networks and methods. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger called the damage “beyond comprehension.”
Israel denied responsibility at first, then admitted it, then spent decades lobbying for Pollard’s release. When he finally walked free in 2015, he was greeted in Israel not as a criminal but as a hero. The message was unmistakable: American security could be sacrificed if Israeli interests demanded it.
Selling Secrets to Rivals
The Pollard case might have been survivable as a one-off—an aberration. But Israel has repeatedly leveraged its access to U.S. technology in ways that cut against American interests. In the 1990s, Israel sought to sell China the Phalcon airborne early-warning system, incorporating U.S. technology. Washington blocked the deal, but only after a bitter clash. Similar controversies flared over Israeli sales of missile and drone components derived from American systems.
The pattern was hard to miss: America provided the weapons and technology, Israel repurposed them for its own advantage, even if that meant arming a strategic rival like China.
A False Flag in Cairo
The roots of this behavior run deeper. In 1954, Israeli military intelligence launched Operation Susannah in Egypt. The mission was simple and cynical: bomb American and British cultural sites, blame Egyptian nationalists, and thereby poison Cairo’s relations with the West. The plot failed, several operatives were caught, and the scandal, known as the Lavon Affair, shook Israel’s government. But the lesson was stark. Even in its early years, Israel was willing to risk American lives and prestige to secure its own position in the region.
The Strategic Bargain
None of this should surprise us. Nations act to preserve themselves. They lie, cheat, and spy when they must. But what makes the U.S.–Israel relationship peculiar is the pretense of purity, the insistence that the bond is unbreakable, the interests perfectly aligned. They are not.
Israel’s security depends on American largesse; America’s Middle East strategy is distorted by the need to accommodate Israeli priorities. When those interests diverge, it is Washington that bends. The USS Liberty attack, buried to avoid embarrassment. Espionage, tolerated for fear of political backlash. Billions in aid, flowing year after year, even as Israel pursues policies that complicate American diplomacy and inflame regional conflict.
Memory and Amnesia
The attack on the Liberty remains one of the starkest examples of what happens when myth collides with reality. Thirty-four Americans died at the hands of a supposed ally, and their story was half-erased to protect the “special relationship.” Add to that the Pollard affair, the technology transfers to China, the Lavon bombs in Cairo, and a pattern emerges.
Israel’s duplicity is not an aberration. It is a strategy: self-preservation at all costs, even when the cost is American blood, secrets, and trust. And America’s duplicity is its own: the willingness to look away, to excuse, to forget, in the name of a friendship that often serves only one side.
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