WHEN THE American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) holds its annual spring meeting in Washington, DC, the organization takes elaborate measures to present a portrait of overwhelming political clout. Huge video screens featuring footage on Israel’s geopolitical perils, thousands of attendees, rousing speeches, a steady stream of Democratic and Republican politicians proclaiming their undying fealty to Israel—all are meant to suggest an irrepressible organization on a roll. This year, as in previous ones, Iran was the dominant topic. “Words alone will not stop Iran,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the conference by satellite. “Sanctions alone will not stop Iran.” He then admonished his American audience: “Sanctions must be coupled with a clear and credible military threat if diplomacy and sanctions fail.” At the same time, Senator John McCain excoriated the Obama administration for not being sufficiently friendly toward the Jewish state, while Vice President Joe Biden sought to assuage lingering unease about the administration’s stance by declaring that Obama is “not bluffing” when he threatens Iran with military action to forestall its nuclear-weapons development.

But, as AIPAC once again tried ostentatiously to display its influence, distant drumbeats raised new questions about America’s relationship with the Jewish state—and whether AIPAC’s influence is perhaps not always exercised strictly in Israel’s or America’s interest. Washington’s local metro system displayed ads, sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace and the Avaaz advocacy group, that featured various ordinary American Jews denouncing AIPAC as antithetical to peace and not speaking for them. Although such protests by left-wing Jewish organizations may have only slight influence, they reflect a broader reality: Israel’s image seems to be under challenge as never before, in Europe as well as in America.

A number of incidents suggest a cultural shift is emerging that could presage a reexamination of the nature of America’s political ties to Israel. This shift is rooted in a mounting perception that Israel cannot be exempted from culpability for its current predicament; that it is isolating itself from its neighbors in ways that are problematic for itself and for its one staunch ally, America; that its robust and illegal expansion of settlements—including in East Jerusalem, where more than five hundred thousand Israelis live—is inimical to any chance of peace; that its recent initiative to segregate Israelis and Palestinians on separate buses represents just another step toward colonization; and that it must strike out on a new course or risk becoming an international pariah. President Obama did not really deviate from this position during his recent visit to Israel in March. Obama made it clear that America supports Israel, and he brokered renewed diplomatic ties between Israel and Turkey. But he also emphasized that it is up to Israelis themselves to take back their country from the retrograde forces that are driving it into the abyss. Obama even went on to take a swipe at Netanyahu and his coterie: “Political leaders will not take risks if the people do not demand that they do. You must want to create the change that you want to see. Ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things.” Essentially, Obama was telling Israelis to perform an end run around their own government—to view the conflict not just from their own perspective but also that of the Palestinians.

Obama’s remarks were impassioned, friendly and moving. Their import could not be clearer. He offered both promise and admonition. And in uttering obvious truths, Obama exemplified a broader phenomenon—namely, the crumbling of a longtime taboo in America on criticizing Israel. Glenn Greenwald, writing as a Salon columnist a few years ago, put it starkly when he referred to the “mainstreaming” of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s depiction of a powerful Israel lobby that is undermining American foreign policy. The University of Chicago’s Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Walt—both “considered A-list scholars,” according to NPR—were excoriated in the media in 2006 when they published in the London Review of Books (after the Atlantic, which initially commissioned the piece, declined to publish it) their now-famous article suggesting that the United States frequently subordinates its own interests to the wishes of Israel, in part because of “the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby.” The duo expanded their argument into a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the following year.

Their scholarship unleashed a concerted effort on the part of many academics and journalists to portray the two professors as lurking outside the confines of respectable thought. Johns Hopkins University professor Eliot Cohen flatly labeled the article “anti-Semitic” and a reflection of “bigotry,” while Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz declared Walt and Mearsheimer to be conspiracy theorists as well as anti-Semites. Words such as “smelly,” “nutty” and “oddly amateurish” were bandied about. The aim was to marginalize the authors. The truth is that Walt and Mearsheimer’s book, as a 2007 National Interest symposium noted, did suffer from some serious flaws, including a failure to appreciate that it is possible to side with Israel without being pressured by an Israel lobby. Further, the authors elide any Palestinian responsibility for the failure of the peace process.

But Walt and Mearsheimer’s blunt account did have one big virtue, which was to shatter the carapace of unanimity around the question of examining Israel’s conduct. As Greenwald observed, the Mearsheimer/Walt thesis has moved from the margins of respectability to become a matter of acceptable contention within the country’s intellectual mainstream. The Atlantic, for example, ran a laudatory profile of Mearsheimer and his realist philosophy by the prolific author Robert D. Kaplan early in 2012. Around the same time came Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism, an anguished meditation on the state of Israel by a self-described Zionist and former editor of the New Republic, until lately a bulwark of reflexive defenses of Israel. Beinart decried leading American Jewish organizations and their elderly funders for propagating a willful blindness to the country’s palpable shortcomings, which, in turn, was prompting younger and more liberal Jews to become disaffected or indifferent to its fate. The book had a potent influence on the mounting debate.

NOW WE are seeing another phenomenon that reflects the ongoing erosion in Israel’s standing in the American cultural consciousness. Gal Beckerman notes in the Forward that the mainstreaming of Mearsheimer and Walt “has continued apace and now, I’m afraid, we are seeing the pop-culturizing” of the professors’ viewpoint. Beckerman points to this year’s Oscars ceremony, where an animated teddy bear named Ted explained to actor Mark Wahlberg that Jews were all-powerful in Hollywood and that the way to move up was to announce: “I was born Theodore Shapiro and I would like to donate money to Israel and continue to work in Hollywood forever. Thank you. I am Jewish.”

A cruder dig emerged after the confirmation hearing of Chuck Hagel before the Senate Armed Services Committee for secretary of defense. The harsh treatment meted out to the former senator, much of it concentrated on his alleged lack of sufficient support for Israel, prompted Saturday Night Live to create a skit that ended up on YouTube(after the network show aired without it). It has McCain asking Hagel, “You get an urgent call from the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who truly is one of the greatest men of this or any age. And he says to you, ‘It is vital to Israel’s security that you go on national television that night and perform oral sex on a donkey.’ Would you do that for Israel?”

This clip struck some as disturbing, even disgusting. But it was remarkable that a mainstream television program of parody humor would produce a clip so dismissive of the sensibilities of Israel’s American supporters. Still, it captured an element of the mounting absurdity of the debate over America’s—and, by extension, the Obama administration’s—ties to Israel. Nothing did more to illustrate the peculiar nature of that debate than the Hagel hearing. It demonstrated that an element of hysteria increasingly is attaching itself to the self-appointed defenders of Israel and that their fervent attempts to paint any mild dissent from prevailing orthodoxy as heresy reflects weakness more than strength.

At first it didn’t look that way. When Hagel arrived on Capitol Hill for his confirmation hearing, he could have been forgiven for thinking that his ordeal bore some resemblance to the infamous “Cadaver Synod” that took place in medieval Rome in 897. There the corpse of Pope Formosus, who had died a few months earlier, was placed in a chair and posthumously accused by a screaming Pope Stephen VI—intent on shoring up his own claims to power—of having committed perjury, while a trembling deacon tried to defend the dead pope’s reputation. The verdict was a foregone conclusion: Formosus was posthumously declared guilty and his papacy null and void. The decaying corpse was flung into the Tiber.

Of course, Hagel was alive and breathing during his hearing. But he barely won confirmation, and his experience before his former Senate colleagues seemed more like an inquisition about alleged past errors of judgment than a judicious inquiry into America’s foreign-policy choices. There was little discussion of how Hagel might guide the Pentagon as America withdraws from Afghanistan and faces terrorist threats and a rising China.

If anything, the hearing seemed to echo many of the accusations leveled at Hagel by neoconservative entities such as the Emergency Committee for Israel, which took out a full-page New York Times ad to paint him as viciously anti-Israel. At the hearing, McCain blasted away at Hagel for his impassioned opposition to the Iraq War and the 2007 troop surge, as well as his denunciation of George W. Bush as the worst president since Herbert Hoover. Ted Cruz of Texas suggested, in the absence of any evidence, that Hagel might have accepted speaking fees from North Korea or terrorist organizations. This didn’t even rise to the level of speculation; it was character assassination pure and simple. In this bill of indictment, no issue loomed larger than Hagel’s stance toward Israel, which, the Washington Post reported, was mentioned no fewer than 178 times in the space of a single day, while Iran got 169 mentions. Meanwhile, Afghanistan, where America is fighting a war that Hagel now has to oversee, was mentioned all of thirty-eight times. During this welter of questions, Hagel might have wondered if he was being considered for the post of ambassador to Israel rather than the defense secretary of a country at war.

Hagel remained on his best behavior, rather like the dead pope Formosus, delivering anodyne responses that were deemed weak and faltering even by his supporters among Democratic senators intent on saving President Obama from a humiliating political defeat. But what if Hagel had responded more imaginatively and offered answers closer to the truth? It’s interesting to speculate on the fallout if he had told the assembled senators something like the following:

“I appreciate your concern about the state of Israel, which is a valuable ally of America. Israel’s security is paramount to America for both strategic and moral reasons. It is threatened by hostile terrorist groups and states, and I can assure you that I have never doubted that Iran and other Middle Eastern states wish it ill. But at the same time, I am not being nominated as secretary of defense to deal exclusively with Israel, which, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, is our twenty-fourth-largest trading party. Nor do we have a mutual-defense treaty with Israel—which, as you know, possesses its own substantial nuclear deterrent and is, moreover, the only country in the region that possesses such weapons. In the context of the Middle East region, Israel enjoys superpower status. I would add that, just as it is important for us to maintain close security ties with Israel, it is also imperative for us to promote a peace process between Palestinians and Israelis that will ease tensions more broadly in the region. Finally, let me say it would be strategically unwise for the United States to devote so much attention to Israel that we neglect our relations with China, Russia, India and other important regional powers. Our prosperity and security depend upon fortifying our relations with a number of countries around the globe rather than predominantly with any single country, even Israel, as this hearing may have suggested. Indeed, our national interests encompass more than the Middle East, a region that may well become less significant relative to other areas of the globe as America becomes increasingly energy independent and new challenges present themselves in Eurasia and the Far East.”

Had Hagel said something along these lines, it certainly would have destroyed his nomination. His detractors would have interpreted such a view as reflecting a thinly veiled hostility to the Jewish state, and it would have provided an opening to muster sufficient opposition to thwart his confirmation. But might the country be approaching a day when it is, in fact, possible to say something along these lines without being vilified or disqualified from high office?

Despite the invective hurled at Hagel, he weathered the hearing and was confirmed. At the same time, former senator John Kerry has become secretary of state. With these two men in the Obama cabinet, the road to bombing Iran faces a new roadblock. Neither man has displayed much enthusiasm for enmeshing America in yet another Middle Eastern war. A good case can be made, as commentator M. J. Rosenberg has suggested, that Obama subtly outfoxed his detractors and adversaries, including Netanyahu, by naming Hagel to the defense post. At a minimum, he signaled that he continues to favor diplomacy over bellicosity—a stance far different from the position espoused consistently by Netanyahu. Beyond that, he challenged the hard-line pro-Israel forces to go after his Pentagon nominee. When some did, they lost.

INDEED, IT seems increasingly clear that Netanyahu miscalculated in his effort to undermine Obama during his first term and throughout his reelection campaign. He relied on a phalanx of Senate and House Republicans to brand as heretical any deviation from reflexive support for his intransigent approach to the Middle East and the Palestinians. Further, he took the audacious step of all but endorsing Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in last year’s presidential election. This was considered by many in both countries to be an untoward intervention in American domestic politics by a foreign leader.

Now, with Obama ensconced in the White House for another four years, it seems inevitable that the president will hold a stronger hand in his dealings with Netanyahu. The Israeli leader may want to consider carefully any decision to repeat his May 2011 effort to humiliate Obama and teach him a lesson by lecturing him in a televised Oval Office conversation about the precariousness of Israel’s security, then continuing the tutorial in a pointed address to a joint session of Congress. The reelected president may be less inclined to tolerate that again.

But it isn’t likely that Netanyahu, who narrowly won another term, will abandon his goals or his effort to enlist America in his country’s strategic cause. Indeed, he seems to be going into overdrive in an effort to push the Obama administration to endorse a military strike on Tehran. Reflecting this sentiment, AIPAC is pushing for the designation of Israel as a “major strategic ally” of the United States—a designation no other country enjoys and one that could serve as a kind of carte blanche resolution potentially embroiling Washington in wars it may wish to avoid. This rush to codify the relationship between the two countries also is based on a calculation that America may be drifting away from involvement in foreign conflicts.

Indeed, AIPAC itself is starting to acknowledge with some alarm this apparent American war-weariness. At its recent Washington conference, AIPAC president Michael Kassen deplored what he described as the “growing allure of isolationism” in America, which is another way of saying that Israel, among other nations, may command less deference and interest among a new and younger generation of legislators. He lamented that “important roles on congressional committees vital to the U.S.-Israel relationship are increasingly held by individuals with little foreign policy experience.”

Kassen’s apprehensions are not misplaced. The conservative backing of Israel has been based on what might be called the GOP’s new Southern strategy—an alliance of convenience forged between two improbable partners: neoconservatives and the Christian Right. But as the influence of Southern conservatives dwindles, this is likely to become a very shaky base. Moreover, as America changes demographically, its relation with Israel may become less cozy, reverting to something closer to the two countries’ traditional state. It may be that in basing his relations with America so heavily on neoconservative influence, Netanyahu has misjudged the state of play in U.S. politics.

Indeed, the relationship between the two countries may have reached its high-water mark. Even if it has, there can be no doubt that the strategic partnership between America and Israel is not under threat and will remain rock solid. The two countries share too many common interests for it to be severed. But that doesn’t mean the relationship can’t take on a different shape and tone. The Netanyahu strategy dates to the George W. Bush era, when the neoconservatives held sway over the administration and congressional Republicans. These hard-line advocates saw Israel and the United States as facing similar threats—menaced by Islamic terrorists, unable to rely upon allies and required to act unilaterally. But this approach now appears dubious. As Francis Fukuyama cogently observed in these pages when first breaking with the neocons in 2004, Israel may be a small state that has difficulty attracting allies (though under Netanyahu it has also been repelling them). But why should the United States, a great power, want to follow suit?

DESPITE THE pious asseverations of mutual interests that resound in the halls of Congress whenever Netanyahu visits Washington, it has not always been so. When Israel was founded, the Soviet Union was one of its biggest backers. The Soviets saw a potential ally in the socialist Jewish state, and one of its Eastern European satellites, Czechoslovakia, funneled weaponry to Jewish resistance fighters battling the British for independence. In Washington, by contrast, the Truman administration was riven by disputes over whether to recognize Israel. Truman, who years later declared “I am Cyrus,” a reference to the Persian king who freed the Jews from Babylon, was unflinching in his support for Israel. Most of his advisers were not. According to Clark Clifford in his memoir (coauthored with Richard Holbrooke), Secretary of State George C. Marshall

firmly opposed American recognition of the new Jewish state; I did not. Marshall’s opposition was shared by almost every member of the brilliant and now-legendary group of men, later referred to as “the Wise Men,” who were then in the process of creating a postwar foreign policy that would endure for more than forty years. The opposition in-cluded the respected Undersecretary of State, Robert Lovett; his prede-cessor, Dean Acheson; the number-three man in the State Department, Charles Bohlen; the brilliant chief of the Policy Planning Staff, George F. Kennan; the dynamic and driven Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal; and a man with whom I would disagree again twenty years later when we served together in the Cabinet, Dean Rusk, then the Director of the Office of United Nations Affairs.

In sum, the WASP foreign-policy establishment was pretty much united in its rejection of close relations with Israel.

This approach was followed by the next administration under Dwight Eisenhower. His mantra was that America should be an honest broker in the Middle East, pursuing a strategy of being “above politics.” His approach was tested in the 1956 Suez crisis, when Great Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt on a pretext to recapture the Suez Canal from Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eisenhower forced all three powers to retreat. “I gave strict orders,” Eisenhower said, “to the State Department that they should inform Israel that we would handle our affairs exactly as though we didn’t have a Jew in America.” Given the makeup of the State Department, his admonition was hardly necessary. But his handling of Suez was, as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has observed recently, the genesis of the Eisenhower Doctrine, which offered direct American military assistance to Middle East nations threatened by Communist aggression. America was now an independent power in the Middle East.

But it wasn’t always easy to act as an interlocutor between the restive Arab states and Israel. A turning point arrived during the Kennedy administration, and it started America’s embrace of Israel. An early JFK effort to establish warm relations with Egypt’s Nasser proved fruitless. During Egypt’s invasion of Yemen in 1962, America intervened to safeguard Saudi Arabia from any Egyptian incursions. That’s when Israel began to look more attractive as an ally, though America harbored deep reservations about its attempt to develop nuclear weapons. According to historian Warren Bass in his book Support Any Friend, when Kennedy supplied Israel with Hawk missiles, it was, more or less, the start of a new special relationship. “What began with the Hawk in 1962,” writes Bass, “has become one of the most expensive and extensive military relationships of the postwar era, with a price tag in the billions of dollars and diplomatic consequences to match.” When Israel defeated the Arab coalition that sought to destroy it in 1967, American Jews were jubilant. Jerusalem was united. The West Bank was liberated. In short, the humiliation of 1956—Eisenhower’s diktat—had been reversed. Almost overnight, Labor prime minister Levi Eshkol approved what were euphemistically described as military defensive settlements in the West Bank.

Over the next decades the links between America and Israel steadily strengthened. Richard Nixon rescued Israel with arms shipments during the Yom Kippur War, primarily at the behest of his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, while Jimmy Carter brokered the 1978 Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel. Still, the U.S.-Israeli relationship was viewed in traditional terms—as one in which interests could diverge without undoing the alliance.

No one ever questioned the Reagan administration’s commitment to Israel, for example, but the country was not the recipient of any kind of diplomatic carte blanche. Through very strong entreaties, Reagan forced Likud prime minister Menachem Begin to cease the bombing of Lebanon in 1983. And, over strenuous objections from Israel, Reagan sold high-tech AWACS surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia. When the Senate sought to thwart the sale at AIPAC’s behest, Reagan personally and tirelessly lobbied senators to kill the blocking maneuver. He won.

Furthermore, multiple efforts were made to get Israel to curb its settlement drive in the occupied territories of the West Bank. It was during the George H. W. Bush administration, and in the aftermath of the Gulf War, that the last serious attempt took place. It failed. Then with the George W. Bush administration, Israel was given a degree of American support that it had never previously enjoyed. This was the golden age of the Likud-neocon partnership. The credulous Bush came under the spell of the neocons, who dazzled him with a ready-made plan for action to triumph over terrorism. He now had a mission to pursue, and he pursued it with zeal.

It is true that Bush was the first American president to call for the creation of a Palestinian state, but he voiced no criticisms of Israeli settlements and, indeed, may have embarked upon the Iraq War partly in the conviction—most notably championed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz—that the road to Middle East peace led through Baghdad, not the West Bank. Not until the end of his presidency did the sway of the neocons begin to abate. In Elliott Abrams’s new memoir of the Bush years, Tested by Zion, the former deputy national-security adviser and leading neocon hard-liner records his distress that, by July 2007, even the sainted Bush began to come around to the idea of a peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. That’s when Bush announced that he would convene an international meeting that fall of “representatives from nations that support a two-state solution, reject violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and commit to all previous agreements between the parties.” Bush’s tepid effort went nowhere.

So did Obama’s subsequent effort. He tried to follow in the footsteps of the elder Bush by insisting that Israeli settlements had to stop as a precondition for peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis. He was rebuffed by Israel amid stark criticism at home from Israel supporters. Netanyahu was hailed as a conquering hero, a new Winston Churchill, when he spoke at the May 2011 session of Congress. Since then, a cold peace has settled in not just between the Israelis and Palestinians but also between Netanyahu and Obama. Will it thaw in the wake of Obama’s March visit to Israel? As successful as Obama’s visit may have been in terms of reassuring Israelis about his enthusiasm for the Jewish state and in boosting his personal popularity, it seems unlikely that either the Israelis or Palestinians will engage in real compromise. Netanyahu may view his ability to stymie a peace process as a political victory for himself and a diplomatic one for his country. But in the long term it may be more of a victory for American lassitude born of frustration. And that can’t be good for Israel or its longtime leader. It’s conceivable that America’s interests in Israel’s fortunes could wane in coming years.

This is not to say that America will become antipathetic to Israel. Israel is not a luxury that America can no longer afford. It can and must invest in the relationship. But the relationship could evolve into a more clinical one, particularly if the Republican Party pursues the course advocated by Senator Rand Paul. Such a development, which appears possible, could spur the GOP toward a less interventionist foreign policy abroad and a greater willingness to trim military budgets. Paul himself is a persistent critic of foreign aid, a theme that is most uncomfortable for Israel, which receives some $3 billion a year from Washington.

THUS, THE longer Netanyahu waits to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians, the more precarious Israel’s position becomes. That’s because the biggest threat Israel faces is not external. It is not Iran, any more than it was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. It is the demographic and religious challenges that the country confronts internally. As Yuval Elizur and Lawrence Malkin outline in their new book, The War Within, the traditional aspiration to create a secular democracy along European lines is jeopardized by the haredim, or ultra-Orthodox. In their refusal to integrate into the wider society, the haredim rapidly are becoming something of an economic and cultural time bomb inside Israel. “If one-fifth or more of all pupils in Israel schools do not learn mathematics, English, and civics,” write Elizur and Malkin, “part of an entire generation will be dependent on handouts for the rest of their lives.” As Israel’s situation becomes more dire—manifest in the fact that it is now almost entirely surrounded by walls—the solutions that are being advanced to break the stalemate are becoming more radical. In 2003, the late, distinguished historian Tony Judt argued that it could become a binational state, which would entail the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish state. He said the country risked becoming a “belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-state.” Not surprisingly, this proposal evoked a furor in America, with Judt being dismissed widely by critics as a “self-hating Jew.”

Now Yehouda Shenhav, a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University, suggests in Beyond the Two-State Solution that Israel should become what is sometimes called a “consociational democracy.” He audaciously maintains that West Bank settlers are no more illegitimate than the Israelis who settled the country after 1948. The two-state solution, he says, is a bogus mythology cooked up by the Israeli Left. The only path is for everyone to live where he or she wants, Palestinian and Israeli alike.

This may sound far-fetched. But if Israel remains stymied in dealing with the Palestinians, even under a new and more moderate coalition led by Netanyahu, its predicament is likely to intensify. And the range of options for dealing with the country’s mounting problems is likely to expand toward more radical solutions.

That can’t be good for Israel’s standing in the world. Already Europe is talking about imposing sanctions on goods produced by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Turkey is indulging in anti-Semitic language. Egypt is led by the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Arab Spring could reach into the kingdom of Jordan. So does Israel really want to rely only on the United States, bereft of all other allies, for its security at a moment when Washington’s attentiveness to foreign affairs appears to be waning? Is that its best option in seeking protection from mounting threats abroad? Obama has it right: the chance for peace will not come from Israel’s stubborn leaders, but from ordinary Israelis who force their leaders to recognize that peace must be chanced.

Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.

Image: Pullquote: Does Israel really want to rely only on the United States, bereft of all other allies, for its security at a moment when Washington’s attentiveness to foreign affairs appears to be waning?Essay Types: Essay