What Do Israelis Think About Americans? Start With Disdain.<\/a><\/p>\n By Naomi Zeveloff, March 8, 2015<\/p>\n Though Israel is a famously fractious society, Israelis tend to agree on one thing: Their strongest supporters are an inherently dupable people. If you are a Christian, it would make sense to me that you would put Christians and Christianity first. If you are a Muslim, I would expect you to put Islam first. If you strongly identify as Jewish, it just … Continue reading
\n\u201cMost Israelis think Americans are pro-Israel and we can sell them anything, especially mud from the Dead Sea,\u201d said David Lifshitz, the lead writer for the Israeli comedy show \u201cEretz Nehederet,\u201d or \u201cWonderful Land.\u201d
\n\u201cOr \u2014 just regular mud with a \u2018Dead Sea\u2019 sticker on it.\u201d
\nBut it\u2019s not just American tourists whom many Israelis see as guileless. American foreign policy is held up to similar scrutiny here, even as Israel receives billions of dollars in foreign aid from the United States each year.
\n\u201cAmericans are perceived to be naive, especially when it comes to the Middle East,\u201d said Uri Dromi, who served as a spokesman for the Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres governments. \u201cIt is a bad neighborhood and it seems like they just don\u2019t realize it.\u201d
\nThe naivete Israelis perceive in Americans is not just something they believe only Israel\u2019s adversaries exploit; Israelis believe they can do so, too \u2014 and do. In a secretly recorded video of a 2001 discussion with a group of terror victims in the Ofra settlement in the Israeli occupied West Bank, now-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out this widely held perception.
\n\u201cI know what America is,\u201d Netanyahu, told the settlers . \u201cAmerica is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction.\u201d
\nOn political hiatus at the time after an election defeat, the once and future Israeli leader was responding to a skeptical settler who asked how he would respond to the global condemnation that could be anticipated if he were, as he proposed, to launch a \u201clarge scale\u201d attack on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to counter the second intifada.
\n\u201cThey will not bother us,\u201d he said of the Americans. \u201cLet\u2019s suppose they [the Bush administration] will say something. So they say it \u2014 so what? Eighty per cent of the Americans support us. It\u2019s absurd! We have such [great] support there! And we say\u2026 what shall we do with this [support]?\u201d
\nThe paradox that Israelis rely on \u2014 and expect \u2014 American support and yet don\u2019t trust American judgment on Middle Eastern affairs helps explain the recent U.S.-Israel dustup in Washington. On March 3, that clash reached its climax when Netanyahu appeared before a joint meeting of Congress to warn the assembled lawmakers against their own president\u2019s negotiations, together with other countries, with Iran ahead of a possible deal on that country\u2019s nuclear program.
\nIsraelis were split on the value of Netanyahu\u2019s trip to Washington, which was widely seen as a play to the prime minister\u2019s right-wing base before the March 17 election. But most Israelis were in agreement about their premier\u2019s message. About three-quarters of Israelis \u201cdon\u2019t trust Obama to be a reliable ally and to deal effectively with the Iranian nuclear threat\u201d said Eytan Gilboa, a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
\nThat opinion was evident on the Israeli street the day of Netanyahu\u2019s speech to Congress, despite all the administration\u2019s measures on behalf of Israel\u2019s security that Netanyahu took pains to laud.
\n\u201cObama is very hostile against Israel,\u201d said Effi Hasut, a 50-year-old hairdresser who was smoking on the patio outside his salon in downtown Jerusalem. \u201cHe tried to please the Arab world at our expense. He doesn\u2019t understand them.\u201d
\nPart of the reason Israelis think Americans just don\u2019t get the Middle East, said Alex Mintz, a political psychologist at IDC Herzliya, is that they consider themselves close front-row observers of American foreign policy in the region. And they have watched the Middle East grow more violent and unstable in recent years, he said.
\nOf course, Israelis themselves have been much more than just spectators in the region, with a massive impact of their own. But according to Mintz, whose new book, \u201cThe Polythink Syndrome,\u201d deals with recent U.S. policy in the Middle East, Israelis are skeptical of American intentions \u2014 except when it comes to supporting them. \u201c[Israelis] are appreciative of the strong and solid relationship, with the U.S. But they also caution against subsequent moves of the U.S. in the region because they don\u2019t think those are successful or led to good outcomes,\u201d he said.
\nYet there\u2019s another reason that Israelis don\u2019t trust Americans, and that has to do with a wider, powerful strain of mistrust in Israeli society.
\n\u201cIsraelis grow up with the expression of \u2018never be a freier,\u2019 i.e., a push-over or loser, someone who can be taken for a ride,\u201d Ari Ben Zeev wrote in his 2001 book \u201cThe Xenophobe\u2019s Guide to the Israelis.\u201d \u201cThis omnipresent need \u2018not to be a freier\u2019 can be traced to 2,000 years of being a struggling minority and also to the Middle Eastern neighborhood rule that everything is negotiable.\u201d
\nSome Israelis think of American tourists and American immigrants in particular as freiers. In a 1998 study of American Jewish immigrants to Israel, by Linda-Renee Bloch, one interviewee said he felt that Israelis saw him as having made the ultimate freier move by moving to Israel in the first place. In their eyes he fell for Israel\u2019s \u201csales pitch\u201d and traded the relative ease of American life for Israeli instability.
\nAn American might respond with the saying \u201cFool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,\u201d and observe that this outlook, with deep roots in the American psyche, rebuts the Israeli stereotype of Americans as ever-trusting.
\nBut for many Israelis, the question is, why trust anyone even once?
\n![\"dead-sea-mud-1428664075\"](\"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/dead-sea-mud-1428664075-300x167.jpg\")
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