The similarities between the United States and Israel include their shared Manifest Destiny.
One appears historical, the other current. In reality, they are conjoint and continuous, because the basis of their action is reason and progress.
Manifest means self-evident and clear. Destiny means fated and inevitable, often in the context of a divine calling, and is destined by God to create a dominion and spread a particular belief and culture.
That faith and culture in the United States were a manifestation of modernization based on human progress. The country began as a small, isolated settlement, just as Israel began, but it moved westward through Chicago, then the frontier, and finally to the Pacific.
The U.S. braved continuous resistance, violence, and controversy over its expansion, domestically, and by superior foreign powers.
Israel’s westward expansion is in many ways a fascinatingly similar phenomenon. The Mediterranean is its Pacific.
President Trump’s peace and economic development plan will likely be rejected by Hamas and its allies, now or later. Their resistance is telling because it demonstrates what the dividing line is defined by: modernization and technical growth, versus stagnation and failure.
The U.S.-Israel plan is also a manifestation of Western optimism, and a particular behavioral code that is responsible for the entire basis of modern industrial and economic life. It comes from a state of mind that can perceive science and technology as a manifestation of human capacity. Unlike other fundamentalist beliefs, its view of man’s purpose is rooted in progress.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is right that a two-state solution is impossible. But it is impossible because Israel’s foes are not merely determined to reject Israel as a state, but because that state embodies a larger modernism.
If you have any doubts, consider the impossibility of fundamentalism existing side-by-side in the U.S. Recent mass illegal immigration has already created, right here, a growing rupture in our basic society based in violence, hatred, anti-Americanism, antisemitism, hostility to Christianity, and a primitivism centered in permanent social division.
In this regard, both the United States and Israel embody a manifest destiny that is just beginning.
Matthew G. Andersson is a company founder and former aerospace CEO. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and has testified before the US Senate. He has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and has worked in Russia and eastern Europe in technology joint ventures. He is a jet command pilot and graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
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