THOMAS FRIEDMAN wrote a very American column on the eve of July 4th, though the subject was Israel and Egypt. The election of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi as president of Egypt, he wrote, "could actually be the beginning of a real peace between the Israeli and the Egyptian peoples, instead of what we’ve had: a cold, formal peace between Israel and a single Egyptian pharaoh. But, for that to be the case, both sides will have to change some deeply ingrained behaviors, and fast." This is a fine American idea, the proposition that bitter, longstanding national feuds could be resolved if the participants would simply change their deeply ingrained behaviours, much as we could all be trim if we simply started running five miles every morning, and could all be rich if we simply adopted the seven habits of highly successful people.

But it's hard enough for individuals to change their deeply ingrained behaviours. As a rule of thumb, groups of people as large as nations are never capable of changing deeply ingrained behaviours, or not fast, anyway. Why is Mr Friedman bothering to hypothesise that this could happen? Perhaps because he doesn't want to write a bitterly negative column. Mr Friedman's point is that Israel must accept the reality that Arab countries will inevitably move towards democracy, and that democracy will mean more power for Islamists. Israel's longstanding preference for cutting deals with corrupt authoritarian rulers, over the heads of their people, has reinforced anti-Israel sentiment among Arab publics. But Israelis are unlikely to accept any message blaming them for the fact that most Arabs hate them, in part because they rightly think most Arabs will continue to hate them regardless of what policies they pursue. Had Mr Friedman written a column simply critiquing this Israeli tendency, he would have alienated Israeli and pro-Israeli readers. To retain influence as a commentator on the Israeli scene, as Jeffrey Goldberg has observed in criticising Peter Beinart, you have to refrain from an outsider's full-throated condemnation, and instead "figur(e) out what buttons you would have to push to get this particular prime minister and this government to do the things you’d want." Maybe by giving an implausible positive spin to his column, Mr Friedman is trying to ensure that Israelis are still able to hear what he's saying.

What he's saying is actually rather insightful. It isn't his own insight, though; he's borrowed it from Leon Wieseltier. In a piece in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz last month, Mr Wieseltier suggested that Israeli anxiety at the prospect of Arab democracy was linked to the age-old preference of Jewish diaspora communities for "vertical alliances" with sovereigns over "horizontal alliances" with surrounding communities.

The support and protection of kings and princes, of popes and bishops, have been preferred to a reliance upon the local population. The Jews were reluctant to trust their neighbors for their safety. Instead they sought a direct relationship with the highest authority and the most central power. Illustrations of this political strategy abound in all the periods of Jewish history. A great jurist in 13th-century Spain, for example, declared that dina de'malkhuta dina, "the law of the king is law," but dina de'ummta lav dina hu, "the law of the people is not law." And this suspicion of the surrounding population survived into the modern era in the Jewish enthusiasm for the nation-state, which seemed to offer protection from the indecencies of society.

Mr Wieseltier is right that the preference of a threatened minority for a vertical relationship with a sovereign, rather than the more menacing horizontal relationships with more numerous local popular majorities, has carried over into contemporary Israeli political attitudes. One might also note the relevance to Israel's attitude towards America, which it cultivates assiduously in the hope that the global hegemon can protect it when other countries turn against it. That unipolar dependency is just as dangerous to Israel, in the long run, as is its reliance on diplomatic relations with Arab dictators.

This dependency on the favour of the sovereign is hardly an exclusively Jewish phenomenon; it's common to many minority communities. Blacks in America have long depended on the protection of the federal government against racist local majorities and governments. Chinese communities in Southeast Asia depended on the protection of colonial European governors against indigenous populations prone to rioting against them. Gays and Muslims have sought protection at the EU level from repression at the hands of local majorities and governments. And, of course, the native inhabitants of the British colonies in America turned for protection to the British authorities when they were threatened by the depredations of land-hungry settlers. The crown's decree barring settlers from intruding on Indian lands past the Allegheny Mountains in 1764, and its habit of interceding on behalf of the Indians when settlers ignored the decree, furnished a major cause of resentment for the colonists. We can see the legacy in a little-remarked line in the list of grievances against King George III which the Continental Congress adopted on July 4th, 1776:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

The Cherokee saw the events leading up to their conflicts with local settlers in 1776, after those settlers had expelled the regional superintendant of Indian affairs and begun settling disputed territory in eastern Kentucky, rather differently. No doubt, had the settlers and the Indians both been willing to change some of their deeply ingrained behaviours, their conflicts could have been resolved more amicably, and without resort to scalping and genocide. But that tends not to be the way things go between peoples with bitter, longstanding feuds. Happy belated Independence Day!