Politics & Power Quote by George Ball

Ball’s line is less a casual observation than a deliberate attempt to launder a contested stance into the register of common sense. By pairing “pro-Israeli bias” with “and rightly so,” he performs a neat rhetorical pivot: he admits partiality (a word that should raise alarms in diplomacy) and then preemptively moralizes it. The move signals confidence that his audience shares a baseline set of sympathies and that those sympathies don’t need to be defended in detail. The argument isn’t built; it’s asserted as a civic instinct.

The subtext is about domestic politics as much as foreign policy. Ball is implicitly naming an American consensus shaped by Cold War alignments, cultural affinity, Holocaust memory, and the growing organizational muscle of pro-Israel advocacy. “Most Americans” functions as a pressure tactic: dissent is recast as marginal, even suspect, while alignment is framed as mainstream and ethically validated. It’s a soft form of discipline, smoothing over the gap between national interest, moral obligation, and political habit.

Context matters because Ball, a high-level Democratic official who famously warned against deeper U.S. entanglement in Vietnam, wasn’t naive about how Washington manufactures inevitabilities. Here, he points to a bias not as a flaw to correct but as a premise to build on. The line reveals the quiet bargain in much U.S. Middle East policy: start from Israel’s legitimacy and security as axioms, then treat everything else as a complication to be managed, negotiated, or postponed.