Statecraft and sentiment in the US-Israel conversation.

The discourse on US-Israel ties has lately been thick with talk of “divorce.” It comes in three variants. In the first, the word is used in discussions about the alliance writ large. In the second – a subset of the first – Americans raising the possibility of divorce happen to be Jewish. In the third, divorce describes ties between Israel and American Jews specifically. President Trump managed to conflate all three last year: he reportedly warned Prime Minister Netanyahu, during a phone call on which Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were also listening, of an impending “divorce” on the grounds that “everybody” in America, including “all the Jews… even the two Jews on this call,” were “sick of” the Israeli leader.

Notwithstanding Trump’s experiment in fusion, there are important differences between these three variants. Given the increasingly heated debate surrounding the relationship, unpacking them might help to lower the temperature enough to clarify terms and why parts of the argument feel more emotionally laden than others.

To debate the benefits and burdens of an alliance between the United States and Israel — whether you are doing so from Washington or Jerusalem — is essentially to take up questions of statecraft, and ones that have been discussed since even before there was a state to argue about. In this context, rhetorical references to marriage and divorce are actually not new. One of the earliest I could find is in a 1984 article in Conflict Quarterly titled “Sources of Tension Between Israel and the United States,” in which the Israeli scholar Efraim Inbar concluded, despite strains in the relationship stemming from post-1973 developments in the region and broader dynamics related to the Cold War, “Neither the United States nor Israel is interested in an international divorce.” Samuel Lewis, who served as US ambassador to Israel from 1977 to 1985, famously described the relationship as existing “like a Catholic marriage of old: you can love each other, yell at each other, disagree with each other, even leave each other for a period of time, but you do not get a divorce.” It seems, then, that until recently references to divorce between these two countries were used by and large to downplay its likelihood or rule it out as an option for American policy.

In the last few years, divorce has become a more popular metaphor, only now it is usually........

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