Late last week, Vice President JD Vance expressed frustration with Israel, accusing Israeli cabinet ministers of “very personally attacking” President Trump instead of simply criticizing the memorandum of understanding he negotiated with Iran. Around the same time, President Trump asserted that without America there would be no Israel.
Within hours, Ambassador Mike Huckabee offered a different frame – one that moved beyond the immediate dispute and spoke in civilizational terms, pointing to something older and deeper than politics.
That contrast matters. It reveals fundamentally different ways of understanding not only the current disagreement, but the history beneath it.
Start with Vance’s claim. Which ministers? What statements? When were they made? No quotations were provided – because there were no “personal attacks.” What is really taking place is a policy dispute over whether the administration’s approach to Iran represents a significant – and potentially dangerous – departure from positions long associated with Donald Trump and many of his allies.
That debate may be right or wrong. But it is substantive, and it is being conducted openly.
Calling it “personal attacks” does something else entirely. It shifts the conversation away from the substance and into tone – replacing argument with insinuation.
A similar flattening of reality appears in the claim that without America there would be no Israel.
There is no question that the United States has played a central role in Israel’s security. American military assistance has strengthened Israel’s defensive capabilities. Diplomatic support has often blunted hostile moves at the United Nations. Intelligence cooperation flows both ways and remains deeply consequential.
Israelis understand this. They have never denied it.
But acknowledgment does not confer authorship, and gratitude is not the same as subordination.
The modern state of Israel’s history tells a different story. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was France – not the United States – that served as Israel’s primary arms supplier. More importantly, the wars that determined Israel’s survival were fought by Israelis themselves. In 1948, 1967, and 1973; in Lebanon; and in the war that began on October 7, Israeli soldiers carried the burden of combat, and Israeli society absorbed its costs. Families buried their dead. Reservists left their lives behind.
The risks were borne first and foremost by Israelis.
Compare that to other American alliances. U.S. forces helped liberate France in World War II, stood at the front lines in Western Europe during the Cold War, restored Kuwait’s sovereignty in 1991, and fought in Korea and the Philippines.
No comparable chapter exists in Israel’s story.
That absence does not weaken the alliance – it defines it. Israel has never been an American protectorate sustained by U.S. troops. It is a sovereign ally whose survival has depended primarily on its own resilience and sacrifice.
And the relationship has never been one-sided.
For decades, Washington encouraged deep integration between Israel’s defense sector and the American military-industrial base. When Israel’s domestic capabilities expanded – most notably with the Lavi fighter project – the United States intervened to steer development toward alignment with American systems. The reasoning was straightforward: Israel’s innovation and battlefield experience were assets the United States wanted integrated into its strategic orbit.
That dynamic has only intensified over time.
Israeli missile defense innovation helped produce systems like Arrow and David’s Sling. Israeli intelligence is widely utilized across the American national security community. Advances in cyber defense, unmanned systems, counterterrorism, and battlefield medicine often emerge in Israel before being adapted in the United States. In civilian life – from water technology and agriculture to artificial intelligence – the same pattern holds.
Even the frequently cited $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military assistance largely returns to the American economy, supporting domestic manufacturers and supply chains. Congress has sustained that arrangement across administrations because it serves American interests as well as Israel’s.
So, the language of dependency doesn’t just miss the mark — it misunderstands the relationship entirely.
This is where Huckabee’s framing becomes more instructive. If the U.S.-Israel bond cannot be explained by aid, weapons, or diplomacy alone, what accounts for its durability?
Part of the answer is shared interests.
But part of it runs deeper.
The American founding drew from many sources – classical antiquity, English constitutional history, Enlightenment thought. Yet woven into the fabric of revolutionary America was another influence: the Hebrew Bible.
For many of the Founders and their contemporaries, it was not only a religious text, but a political one. Revolutionary sermons invoked the Exodus as a model of liberation. Hebrew was studied at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. John Adams spoke admiringly of Jewish history and governance, and Benjamin Franklin drew on biblical imagery when reflecting on national identity.
The influence went beyond symbolism. The idea that law stands above rulers, that political authority is constrained by moral obligation, and that rights derive from a higher source all entered American political culture through multiple channels – including the Jewish biblical tradition. The Jewish covenantal idea – that both leaders and citizens are bound by obligations they cannot simply rewrite – left a particularly deep imprint.
None of this means that the Constitution emerged directly from the Hebrew Bible. It did not. Its structure owes far more to Montesquieu, English precedent, and Enlightenment thinkers. The American system was a synthesis.
But Jerusalem was part of that synthesis. It helped shape the moral vocabulary that made the American experiment conceivable.
That history does not resolve today’s disagreements over Iran – and it shouldn’t. Democracies argue. Allies argue. Serious governments debate questions of war and peace openly.
What they should not do is replace argument with caricature.
When unnamed Israeli officials are accused of “personal attacks” without evidence, serious debate is replaced with insinuation. When Israel’s existence is casually attributed to the United States, history is reduced to a slogan.
The U.S.-Israel alliance has endured not because one nation owns the other, but because both benefit – and because both, at some level, recognize its deeper roots.
The United States has contributed enormously to Israel’s security, and Israelis know it. But recognizing an alliance is not the same as surrendering ownership of history.
Israel was not created by America. The Jewish state was established before the United States became its principal ally, and it survived its most precarious decades largely through the sacrifices of its own people and the support of Jews worldwide.
More fundamentally, the entire framing runs in the wrong direction.
The United States did not create the civilization that produced America. The Founders inherited ideas from Athens and Rome, from London and the Enlightenment. But they also inherited ideas articulated at Sinai and carried forward through Jerusalem – ideas about law, morality, covenant, accountability, and limits on power.
Those ideas helped shape the foundation of the American experiment.
Which is why the language of ownership is so misplaced. America is not modern Israel’s creator, and Israel is not America’s dependent. The two nations have influenced one another and benefited from one another, but the deepest roots of that relationship predate them both.
There will be disagreements – over Iran, over strategy, over policy. That is inevitable.
But rewriting history to win those arguments is not.
Because the truth is not that America gave birth to Jerusalem.
It is that without Jerusalem, America itself would be almost unrecognizable.
Micha Danzig served in the Israeli Army and is a former police officer with the NYPD. He is currently an attorney and is very active with numerous Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, including Stand With Us and the FIDF, and is a national board member of Herut North America.
