United States—Israel: Political Alliance

The book presents the United States–Israel alliance not chiefly as a history of diplomatic decisions, but as a revealing conjunction of opposed principles. Israel, described as an ethnic state organized around inherited tradition, stands for continuity and particular identity; the United States stands for the non-All, in which fixed traditional bonds are dissolved. Their alliance is therefore read as a structural relation in which the apparent opposition between tradition and fluidity becomes part of the same arrangement.

Two Principles in One Alliance

The contrast is not simply between two countries with different political characteristics. The passage treats Israel as an emblem of a social order sustained by tradition, while the United States figures as a society in which established ties are loosened. The alliance brings these principles into a single relation without resolving their opposition: one side marks the persistence of particular belonging, the other the dissolution of fixed links.

Particular Identity and the Global Economy

This interpretation rests on a broader claim about the global order. Particular identities are not necessarily erased by participation in the global economy; they can be maintained alongside it. The result is not a choice between universal economic integration and inherited identity, but a system in which the two coexist. The United States–Israel alliance becomes an example of that coexistence, with tradition neither simply defeated by modernity nor left untouched by it.

Israel as the United States’ Intimate Reference

The passage gives this relation a psychoanalytic formulation: Israel functions as the objet petit a of the United States’ Big Other. In this account, Israel is an intimate remainder of tradition within the social order associated with the United States. It supplies a mythic point of reference for a society characterized as a chaotic non-All, even as the two are presented as embodying opposed principles. The alliance thus does not abolish the tension between them; it makes that tension structurally useful.

Scope of the Interpretation

The argument concerns the symbolic and ideological meaning assigned to the alliance, not its specific diplomatic terms or a sequence of policy decisions. Its emphasis is on how a universalizing social order can retain a particular, tradition-bearing point of reference within itself. Read this way, the alliance is significant because it unsettles a simple opposition between inherited identity and modern social dissolution: each principle appears in the other’s orbit, and their coexistence helps organize the book’s account of contemporary society.