A response to Steve Spiegel’s NCIS piece: "Context is everything"

Steven Spiegel's otherwise thoughtful understanding of the American-Israeli dynamic at work in the television series "NCIS" misses the forest for the trees.  (IPF Blog, What NCIS tells us about Obama and Netanyahu and NCIS & Obama/ Netanyahu Revisited: Mysteries & Mayhem).

From a literary vantage point, the close though complex working relationship between American and Israeli intelligence agencies is the 21^st century equivalent of the ties between U.S. and British intelligence after World War II and throughout the Cold War.  The best literary reflection of this can be found in the novels of John Le Carre.  The situation in which we now find ourselves with respect to parts, at least, of the Muslim world, provides the "Cold War" context.  In the 21^st century, the Israelis are the "cousins."

All the old debates about what to do about the Soviet Union have found their way into the current debate: containment, appeasement, détente, roll back.  Like the Western Europeans, Israel is on the front line of this international conflict.  NATO was formed as a response to the fear of an attack by Soviet tanks across the north German plain.  It was American power that sustained NATO but it would have been the German civilian population to first face the crushing blow of Soviet power.  Israel suffers from the same kind of immediacy, proximity to the front and fear for its civilian population.  For all its mishugas, it is a western style democracy.  The ensuing closeness belies attacks on US policy in the Middle East as a manipulation by minorities and displays the broad principles that form the ties that bind.  What is good for Israel, and what US policy should be, are legitimate foci of debate.  But context is everything.