The New Herodians

In its increasingly tense encounter with the American empire, the modern State of Israel finds itself confronted with an ancient choice: whether to continue as an independent state or whether to become a fractured Levantine client of a great power, governed by a Herodian faction. Rooted in the geography of the region and also in the historical experience of the Jewish people, the choice of how Israel positions itself now is likely to have extreme consequences for the future of the first Jewish state in over two millennia.

The choice of Israel’s elites, as expressed through a month of street demonstrations and an ongoing media campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his proposed judicial reforms, is clear. Their strategy is to position themselves as a modern-day version of the Herodians, the famous allies of Rome whose preeminent king, Herod the Great, built the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem as well as the great fortress of Masada. Renowned during his lifetime and even 2,000 years after his death as a master builder, Herod not only ruled over the largest Jewish kingdom since the Iron Age, but managed to insinuate his relatives into the corridors of imperial power. Herod’s grandson was educated in Rome in the circles of imperial princes who befriended him, and his great-granddaughter Berenice was the lover of the future emperor of Rome—a liaison that, if consummated in marriage, might have fused Judaism and Rome at a much earlier juncture in history, and with what could have only been a very different effect, than Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.

Yet for the Jews, the reign of Herod and his family was but a way station on the path to disaster, culminating in the destruction of Herod’s Temple along with all vestiges of Jewish national independence for the next two millennia. It didn’t take long following Herod’s death for Judea to come under direct Roman rule as a province. Unrest would commence within a generation. By the time of his great-grandson, the destruction of the Jewish kingdom that Herod once ruled was so complete that the Jews became the world’s reigning metaphor for a stateless people, and the rise of Zionism, 19 centuries later, appeared to many, Jews and Christians alike, as nothing less than a modern-day miracle.

The Herodian pitch for Roman backing against their internal foes was not only not unique to their faction, but also in no way a particularly Jewish fault. The habit of local factions seeking external intervention defines the fractured societies of the Levant—Lebanon and Syria, as well as the stateless Kurds and Palestinians—who are unlikely ever to be sovereign. Such internally splintered polities have been the Levant’s structural characteristic going back for millennia, resulting from and contributing to its historical standing as “the crossroads of Empire”—i.e., a battleground for the armies of more stable and successful cultures.

Since its rebirth as a modern state, Israel has stood as an anomaly in the Levant: a cohesive and militarily powerful nation-state in a region where stability is hard to find. To ensure its independence, Israel became a nuclear power—attaining a destructive capability that only a few advanced states possess, and which would appear to serve as a potent hedge against conventional attack. According to some estimates, Israel now possesses either the fourth- or the fifth-most-powerful military in the world.

Yet far from utilizing Israel’s military strength to protect its own interests, which is the normal purpose of the imperial-client relationship, the ruling faction of the American empire has been working hard for the past decade toward an arrangement that recognizes and guarantees nuclear status for the hostile revisionist state in the east: Iran. Impeding Israel from taking action to prevent that outcome, which would establish Iran as a regional hegemon, has been the primary driver of the empire’s posture toward the Jewish state for the past decade—a posture that has hardened once again over the past few months. U.S. backing for the street demonstrations in Israel can therefore be understood within the wider scope of U.S. regional policy, whose cornerstone is the pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran.

Yet inviting the U.S. to participate in Israel’s internal politics has been a key part of the Israeli elite’s strategy to win their own battles at home. The Herodian faction’s leaders moved to mobilize support from American Jewish organizations as a prelude to requesting intervention by the empire against the country’s elected leader and his government—a move that in the domestic politics of a more stable country would be strictly off-limits. Israel’s new Herodians adopted the imperial lexicon to describe their fight—“shared values” and “safeguarding democracy against the rise of authoritarianism,” and so on—as a gesture of loyalty to the empire’s ruling faction. The messaging to other Israelis was transparent: We are the faction favored by the empire.

Indeed, the American empire soon stepped in to publicly back the Herodians, broadcasting the imperial dictum that demanded the Israeli government secure “consensus” before proceeding with its proposed legislation to reform its judiciary. Visiting American imperial officials likewise began meeting with the Herodians on par with the government, underscoring the need for the elected government to reach “consensus” with the imperially favored faction, and to do so under an aegis approved by the empire.

Washington presented its active role in internal Israeli politics as a benevolent answer to the petitions of the Israeli public. “I really think that most Israelis do not want America to stay out of their business,” U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides asserted in response to an Israeli minister who criticized his meddling. Sure enough, footage subsequently emerged of demonstrators gratefully welcoming imperial intervention and demanding more of it. A political cartoon disseminated in one of the Herodian faction’s local mouthpieces portrayed the U.S. president in a crowd control vehicle, emblazoned with the American flag, flushing the governing coalition away. While the cartoon may have been wishful thinking, there is no question that the demonstrations by the minority gained considerable strength from the fact that they had secured American backing—making it much more difficult for the elected Israeli government to push back.

As pressure mounted, the democratically elected prime minister eventually balked, suspending his government’s legislation while retaining a defense minister who had openly defied him, showing who actually ran the country. President Biden paraded the humiliation of the undesirable Israeli leader, publicly admonishing him to “walk away” from his own legislation, for he “cannot continue down this road.”