Discussing the U.S.-Israeli relationship on a radio talk show recently, I discovered that Americans are misinformed about their country’s ties to the Jewish state. One listener, taking it for granted that Israel maintains a formal military alliance with Washington, speculated that since “the Americans established Israel after the Holocaust, maybe we can set it up now in Florida.” But contrary to this misconception, the relationship between the two countries has never been grounded in strong geostrategic roots; it reflects the sentiments and interests of powerful American groups.

Israeli politicians, unlike their counterparts in Washington, recognize this reality. They will never romanticize the U.S.-Israel connection unless they are discussing it with American visitors. Similarly, much of the analysis of the relationship in the Israeli media is concerned almost exclusively with its utilitarian aspects: Will Washington back Israeli policy? Will the U.S. Congress increase aid to Israel? Is the new American president “pro-Israeli?” Ha’aretz recently convened a panel of experts to follow the 2008 U.S. presidential race and issue occasional reports on “who is the best presidential candidate for Israel.” (The winner in the last poll was Rudy Giuliani.)

In short, Israelis are the ultimate realpolitik buffs when it comes to their relationship with Washington. The notion that the U.S. and Israel are allied together in the cause of spreading democracy in the Middle East and worldwide would be scoffed at by Israeli pundits. After all, their government has been strengthening its military ties with China despite U.S. opposition. Israelis are not “pro-American” because of their commitment to Jeffersonian values—the Jewish state has yet to adopt a constitution—but because they concluded that their interests and those of the U.S. are compatible now. But they see this “special relationship” not as marriage but as an affair. And like any affair, it could end.

Indeed, there was a time when Israelis were pro-Soviet and pro-French. In 1948, Stalin’s Soviet Union was the most enthusiastic supporter of establishing Israel, which it hoped would be a leading anti-imperialist post in the Middle East, while Secretary of State George Marshall pressed Harry Truman not to recognize the new state, warning that it could harm America’s position in the region. Hence Moscow recognized Israel immediately after the state was proclaimed and provided it with arms, while it took the Americans more than a year to grant de jure recognition to Israel, on which they imposed an arms embargo. At the height of the In-Russia-With-Love mood in Israel, the expectation was that the new state would remain neutral in the evolving Cold War.

Then Israel had its French kiss. It was France that served as Israel’s main source of arms in the 1950s and early 1960s and helped it develop its nuclear arsenal. Israel was embracing then a European orientation and forming close ties with an emerging Franco-German bloc to help resist U.S. pressure to end its nuclear program. The Israeli alliance with France reached a peak in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez campaign during which the two conspired (with Britain and against U.S. wishes) to oust Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Their interests were seen to be compatible as the French tried to suppress the Nasser-backed struggle for independence in Algeria. But after Charles de Gaulle’s decision to grant independence to Algeria, the relationship between Israel and France cooled; they soured after Israel rejected the aging French leader’s advice not to attack Egypt in 1967.

It was only after Israel’s 1967 victory over Egypt, a Soviet ally, that the intellectual predecessors of today’s neoconservatives started popularizing the idea of Israel as an American “strategic asset” in the Middle East. Similarly, neoconservatives in the Reagan administration argued that Israel should become America’s leading ally in the region during the renewed Cold War tensions, while depicting the Palestine Liberation Organization as a Soviet stooge. But even as Israel and the U.S. were strengthening their ties, there was recognition in both governments of the strategic constraints on their relationship. America could not maintain its position in the Middle East without establishing a presence in the Arab world, while Israel’s friendship with America could not substitute for the acceptance of Israel by its Arab neighbors. Washington’s efforts to bring about Middle East peace were part of a strategy to advance U.S. and Israeli interests.

Indeed, Washington’s ability to play the role of an honest broker between Israel and Egypt (and Syria) after the 1973 Middle East War was only made possible when Richard Nixon re-established diplomatic ties with Cairo, co-opting it into the pro-American camp. It was the even-handed U.S. role that made it possible for Jimmy Carter to mediate the historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1979 and for George H.W. Bush to launch a round of Israeli-Arab negotiations after the Gulf War in 1991 that resulted in the peace accords between Israel and the PLO and Jordan. Hence, from an Israeli perspective that regards peace with the Arabs as a top national interest, the pressure by Nixon, Carter, and Bush to withdraw from occupied Arab territories in exchange for peace reflected a genuinely pro-Israeli direction of U.S. policy since the agreements with Egypt, the Palestinians, and Jordan advanced the Jewish state’s long-term strategic interests. But if you were listening to the proponents of Greater Israel in Jerusalem and Washington, Nixon, Carter, and Bush were the enemies of Jewish people.

At the same time, a realist analysis of Israeli interests would have concluded that there was nothing pro-Israeli in the willingness of the Reagan administration to treat with benign neglect Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank, creating the conditions for the outbreak of the first Intifada, or in giving Israel a yellow light to invade Lebanon in 1982. Those U.S. policies reflected the agenda of Likud and its neoconservative partners, with their emphasis on propping up the “strategic asset” by placing the Palestinian issue on the backburner and punishing the “pro-Soviet” PLO. They resulted in the rise of Palestinian and Shi’ite terrorism aimed against both the Jewish state and the U.S. and damaged core Israeli and American interests.

The same kind of geostrategic paradox—an American administration that is tagged as “pro-Israeli” but whose policies damage the longstanding interests of the Jewish state—will be recalled as one of the legacies of George W. Bush. After 9/11, and against the backdrop of the second Intifada and the Iraq War, a new generation of neoconservatives succeeded in marketing to another White House the notion that the U.S. and Israel were now being brought together in a strategic alliance against “Islamo-Fascism.” This alliance would operate with America as sheriff and Israel as its deputy while Israeli-Palestinian peace is placed on the backburner. Bush and his advisers see America’s battle with Iraq and Israel’s battle with the Palestinians as part of the same war, according to Ha’aretz chief political analyst, Akiva Eldar. “They have actually suggested that Israel will help the United States to take over the Middle East,” Eldar said. “They were sitting in think tanks that believed that you don’t even try to appease or satisfy the Arabs, you reach peace by force which means you impose it [and] you don’t make concessions to people you don’t trust, and that puts them and Sharon in the same party.”

Consider the results of U.S. policies—the coming to power of radical Shi’ites in Baghdad and the strengthening influence of Iran and its allies; the radicalization of the Palestinians, the election of Hamas, and an environment less conducive for Arab-Israel peace; the growing isolation of the U.S. and Israel in the Middle East, in Europe, and around the world. Is it surprising that Israelis are asking: if we have a pro-Israeli administration in Washington, how would a anti-Israeli one look?

These Israeli sentiments have become more prevalent in the aftermath of the recent war in Lebanon in which the high costs of the Israeli-American “strategic alliance” became quite evident to both sides. Washington had given Israel a green light to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon as a way of punishing its patrons, Iran and Syria. But Israel proved to be more of a strategic burden than asset, hurting the interests of a pro-American government in Beirut and eroding what remains of U.S. credibility in the Middle East. “Hezbollah’s unprovoked attack on July 12 provided Israel the extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate its utility by making a major contribution to America’s war on terrorism,” wrote Charles Krauthammer, insisting that America “has been disappointed” by Israeli failure to defeat Hezbollah.

But if Americans have realized that Israel might not be a strategic asset, some Israelis have maintained that they are uninterested in playing that prescribed pro-U.S. role. After all, Israel, as Ha’aretz columnist Doron Rosenblum put it, “was not established in order to be a spearhead against global Islam, or in order to serve as an alert squad for the Western world.” But that is exactly the role that the neocons have assigned to Israel, which has led Daniel Levy, a former aide to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, to propose that “disentangling Israeli interests from the rubble of neocon ‘creative destruction’ in the Middle East has become an urgent challenge for Israeli policy-makers.” An America that seeks to reshape the region “through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel,” Levy wrote.

Moreover, the neoconservative paradigm is bound make Israel a modern-day crusader state, an outlet of a global power whose political, economic, and military headquarters are on the other side of the world. America’s commitment to the security of the Israeli province would always remain uncertain and fragile, reflecting changes in the balance of power in Washington and the shifting dynamics of U.S. politics.

Therefore, if Israel is limited in its ability to provide security services to the United States, American hegemony cannot make the Middle East safe for Israel. Perhaps it is not too late for the Israelis to figure out how to take a path that leads to peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians and their other neighbors in generations to come. A U.S. administration promoting that goal would be pursuing a policy that is both pro-American and pro-Israel and would find an ally in a realist Israeli leadership.

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Leon Hadar is a Cato Institute research fellow in foreign-policy studies and author, most recently, of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.