Our American Israel 0 INTRODUCTION

===
CONTENTS

0 Introduction
1 Lands of Refuge
2 Founding Israel in America
3 Invincible Victim
4 “Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past”
5 The Future Holocaust
6 Apocalypse Soon
7 Homeland Insecurities
8 Conclusion
9 NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
===

INTRODUCTION..  

 

IN 2009, President Barack Obama delivered a historic speech in Cairo, Egypt, where he reached out to Arabs and Mus- 

lims to repair some of the damage inflicted by the war on terror. At the same time that he was seeking common ground with the Arab 

world, however, Obama made a familiar and long-standing claim: “America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is 

unbreakable.”¹ 

Obama’s statement was an affirmation that American presidents have routinely voiced since John F. Kennedy spoke of the “special 

relationship” between the United States and Israel in 1962. In Cairo, Obama’s reiteration of this sentiment was clearly strategic. He had 

just pointed to the conflict between Israel and Palestine as a major source of tension between the Arab world and the United States. Ad- 

dressing the human suffering on both sides, he needed to reassure Israel and its American supporters that this balance would not tip 

the scales against his primary allegiance. He was telling his audience something they already knew well, that the relationship with Israel 

took precedence over that with the Arab world, and in some way set its parameters. Obama’s statement tapped into a vast reservoir of 

narratives and images, emotions and beliefs about America’s special kinship with Israel. This bond, he said, “is based upon cultural 

and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”² 

Both proponents and critics have long understood the partnership between the United States and Israel as an exception to the norms 

of international alliances. The United States has given more monetary aid to Israel than to any other nation and has committed itself to 

maintaining Israel’s military edge in the region. In December 2016, the Obama administration agreed to a record $38 billion package of 

military aid over ten years. Diplomatically as well, the relationship is in a category of its own: the United States has protected Israel from 

international criticism, most notably by casting many vetoes on its behalf in the Security Council of the United Nations.³ 

The fact that this political relationship is expressed as an “unbreakable bond” implies an affiliation beyond the realm of statecraft. As 

much a future pledge as a historical description, the phrase has a ring of consecration, like a marriage. A “bond” connotes both identi- 

fication and obligation. “Unbreakable” conveys an aura of timelessness and immutability, a bedrock connection that transcends the va- 

garies of political alliances. 

This book aims to recover the strangeness of an affinity that has come to be seen as self-evident. In 1945, it was not inevitable that a 

global superpower emerging victorious from World War II would come to identify with a small state for Jewish refugees, refugees who 

at that time were still being turned away from the United States. How did Zionism, a European movement to establish a homeland for a 

particular ethnoreligious group, come to resonate with citizens of a nation based on the foundation, or at least the aspiration, of civic 

equality amid ethnic diversity? How was the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East translated into a narrative that reflected cher- 

ished American tales of national origins? How, in other words, did so many come to feel that the bond between the United States and 

Israel was historically inevitable, morally right, and a matter of common sense? 

Our American Israel is the story of popular perceptions of Israel and of the ways Americans have understood this special relationship. 

It starts at the end of World War II, with debates about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and concludes with the war on 

terror, when the United States adopted a distinctively Israeli conception of homeland security. The political relationship between the two 

nations has always been entangled with powerful myths about their kinship and heritage, their suffering and salvation. During the sev- 

enty years since Israel’s founding, certain themes have taken on the stature of hallowed beliefs: that the kinship is rooted in a common 

biblical heritage and shared political values, that the Holocaust created a legacy of unique moral obligations, and that the two countries 

face threats from common enemies. 

The process by which these beliefs developed mythic status and tenacious appeal is a dynamic one. They were created, contested, 

and transformed over time through metaphors, analogies, and symbols that shaped popular views of political realities and imparted 

emotional meaning and moral value to political policy. The belief that America is an “exceptional” nation of moral force and military 

power underwrote and strengthened its special bond with Israel. The United States would protect and secure Israel, a moral community 

of both concentration camp survivors and heroic warriors. At the same time, Israel was seen as unique in its own right—a state that is 

both vulnerable and indomitable, an invincible victim. 

Diplomatic historians have researched the strategic alliance between the United States and Israel in the international arena, scholars 

of Jewish history have studied the importance of Israel to the lives of American Jews, and political scientists have examined how the 

domestic Israel lobby influences geopolitical strategy. However, it is in the wider crucible of American culture that the diverse meanings 

of the “special relationship” have been forged, disputed, and remade. Looking at popular narratives about Israel, and the ways in which 

different individuals and groups have understood America’s relationship with the Jewish state, can reveal the making of this special rela- 

tionship. From a diverse array of representations and cultural expressions, patterns coalesced to form a broad consensus about Amer- 

ica’s attachment to Israel, a consensus that came to seem like common sense. The cultural alchemy that transformed the story of Israel 

from a particular tale about a specific ethnic state into one that resonates with the American nation as a whole has, in turn, shaped polit- 

ical discourse in America.⁴ 

Cultural perceptions, to be sure, do not dictate policies. They do, however, create a perceptual field in interaction with those policies 

and political ideas from which a consensus emerges about the unbreakable bond between the two nations. Cultural artifacts—whether a 

novel, film, newspaper article, or museum—do not work by imposing a singular and monolithic meaning on the relationship between 

the two nations. But they are effective precisely because they are capacious, inviting different meanings from diverse perspectives while 

effectively ruling out others. 

The special relationship has never been just about the United States and Israel. It has included the Palestinian people from the start, 

even in mainstream narratives that have denied their existence, or popular images that have made them invisible to the American eye. 

Dominant narratives that identify Israelis with Americans have always been contested by counternarratives from both inside and outside 

the United States. The most popular American story of the founding of Israel is modeled on the American revolution as an anticolonial 

war of independence against the British, as told in the novel and film Exodus. A counternarrative endorses a Palestinian perspective that 

views the founding of the State of Israel as a colonial project bolstered by Western imperial powers. In the 1940s, American debates 

about the establishment of a Jewish state revolved around these conflicting interpretations, as did debates in the 1970s about Israel’s 

occupation of territories captured in the Six-Day War. Indeed, conflicts over narratives about the founding of Israel as being an example 

of either colonialism or anticolonialism have reemerged with different emphases in every decade. 

Parallel histories of settler colonialism expressed in biblical narratives of exceptionalism have formed the basis of American identi- 

fication with Israel. Both nations have generated powerful myths of providential origins, drawing on the Old Testament notion of a cho- 

sen people destined by God to take possession of the Promised Land and blessed with a special mission to the world. Both nations 

were initially founded by colonists from Europe who displaced indigenous people, appropriating and transforming their land in the 

process of creating a new nation of immigrants. Both nations celebrate their anticolonial origins as a struggle for independence against 

the British Empire, and disavow their own histories of conquest. 

The providential narrative has made the special relationship seem inevitable, as though it primed Christian Americans to embrace Is- 

rael long before the founding of either nation-state. In reality, it took many changes in twentieth-century America—the emergence of the 

idea of the Judeo-Christian tradition, post-Holocaust theology, and the politicization of evangelical Christians—to generate new stories 

and forge modern bonds between American Christianity and the Jewish state.⁵ 

Similarly, parallel conditions of settler colonialism did not alone create an American identification with Zionist pioneers. This identi- 

fication came about through the development of the myth of the frontier, which found its apotheosis in the Hollywood Western, a genre 

that shaped how Americans viewed the founding of Israel. By the second half of the twentieth century the United States had become an 

imperial power itself. Stories of Israel mirroring American development arose in the context of the modern struggle for power in the 

Middle East, and the concurrent global movement toward decolonization.⁶ 

The phrase “our American Israel” comes from a Puritan expression of colonial American exceptionalism. In 1799, Abiel Abbot, a 

Massachusetts minister, preached a Thanksgiving sermon titled “Traits of Resemblance in the People of the United States of America to 

Ancient Israel.” The sermon starts by noting common usage at the time: “It has been often remarked that the people of the United 

States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence, ‘OUR AMERICAN ISRAEL,’ is a term fre- 

quently used; and common consent allows it apt and proper.”⁷ This parallel with biblical Israel conferred an exceptional identity on the 

United States right from the start. 

After World War II, similar parallels again made the modern state of Israel appear exceptional in American eyes. The phrase “our 

American Israel” originally used the biblical nation metaphorically to refer to the United States, yet the possessive construction also ex- 

presses how Americans have made Israel their own. This process in the twentieth century involved projection—of desires, fears, fan- 

tasies—onto the modern state of Israel. It also entailed concrete exchanges and intimate interactions fueled by the circulation of indi- 

viduals and institutions between the two countries. This combination of identification, projection, and possession has contributed 

abundantly to ideas of American national identity, and to support for Israel as well. 

Abbot’s eighteenth-century sermon grounded the unstable identity of the new American nation-state in the known typology of the 

biblical Israel. The sermon helped to constitute the new nation as an “imagined community.”⁸ The word “our” conveyed a sense of na- 

tional belonging to the community of white Protestant settlers, now citizens of the new nation, in part by excluding outsiders from the 

circle of possession. It not only distinguished the United States from “any other nation on the globe” but also effaced the memory of 

the Native communities that had been exterminated by warfare, disease, commerce, and agriculture to make way for the divinely chosen 

nation. 

Viewing America in the mirror of Israel has continued to efface such memories of the settler colonial past. Yet “our American Israel” 

today has many more connotations: Israel can be seen through American eyes as a model of liberation from persecution, an imperial 

proxy doing the bidding of a superpower, a unifying object of affection, or the exclusive possession of a particular group. Israel has 

embodied multiple and conflicting meanings for diverse groups of Americans, and divergent interpretations have clashed during the 

ongoing process of creating and maintaining a special relationship between the United States and Israel. 

The idea of American exceptionalism may seem ill fitting for the particular ethnoreligious identity of a Jewish state. Exceptionalism in- 

volves two components: that the United States is uniquely different from all other nations, and that, paradoxically, it also serves as a 

universal model for all other nations to emulate. Israel is a kind of exception that proves the rule of American exceptionalism. In the 

early decades of Israeli statehood, journalists and promotional material depicted the new nation as a successful replica of America—an 

even shinier, more robust model. It was a country built by idealistic pioneers, a haven for the persecuted, a nation of immigrants, a 

paragon of modernization. Israel’s emulation of the United States confirmed its exemplary qualities. Americans projected onto Israel re- 

demptive images of their own power in the world. This affinity has idealized the exercise of military force through narratives of rescue: 

rallying to support the besieged underdog, preventing the recurrence of genocide through humanitarian intervention, launching a war 

on terror to save the world from apocalypse. 

Americans and Israelis alike have attributed universal meanings to Israel’s founding as transcending nationalist aspirations, as a bea- 

con to the world, a model of regeneration, an exemplar of anticolonialism. For liberals in the aftermath of World War II, Israel’s U.N.- 

sponsored birth fulfilled internationalist ideals. Eleanor Roosevelt believed that Israel’s “model state” had the potential “to promote an 

international New Deal.”⁹ In the 1958 novel Exodus, Leon Uris wrote of Israel’s founding as “an epic in the history of man” and quoted 

from the 1948 Declaration of the State of Israel that the Jews had returned to their original homeland, where they had “created cultural 

values of national and universal significance.”¹⁰ The oft-repeated claim that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East” not only 

mirrors American values, but also renders Israel both unique and exemplary among its neighbors. 

Israeli exceptionalism has its own tensions, which cannot be collapsed into a mirror of America. At the heart of Zionism was a 

conflict between the search for normalcy and the desire for uniqueness. A nation-state would end the persecuted status of Jews as out- 

casts, by making them just like other nations. Nonetheless Israel was bequeathed with a uniquely moral and uniquely vulnerable legacy 

from the history of Jewish suffering. This tension would take many forms from different political perspectives in debates about Israel in 

the United States, as to whether Israel would be held to a higher standard than other nations or would be exempted from international 

norms. 

Key to the American understanding of Israeli uniqueness is a belief in its exceptional suffering. The paradox of vulnerability and in- 

vincibility has framed many different views of Israel, even as they have changed over time. Israelis have appeared simultaneously as 

innocent victims and triumphant soldiers, and Israel as both threatened with extermination and saved by its superior strength of arms. 

A long-standing image of Israel’s uniquely humane army stemmed from popular narratives of reluctant warriors intrepidly seizing vic- 

tory from the jaws of annihilation. Existentially imperiled by potential extermination, Israel’s only option for survival was military preem- 

inence, a logic that has explained the perpetual state of war forced on a peace-loving people. 

The representation of America’s special relationship with Israel has undergone major shifts from 1945 to the present: from the Amer- 

icanization of Israel to the Israelization of America; from the admiration of Israel as a mirror of America’s idealized self-image to emula- 

tion of Israel as a model for fighting America’s worst nightmares. The figure of Israel as the invincible victim reflects this shift in chang- 

ing narrative forms—from the heroic to the apocalyptic. Heroic narratives follow a progressive momentum in which the protagonist is 

the plucky underdog who fights against all odds to overcome adversity. At the end, he defeats the enemy with ingenuity and an in- 

domitable spirit. This structure underlay the many popular stories that formed an American liberal consensus about Israel through the 

1960s. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, many Americans romanticized Israel’s way of making war as a humane and muscular alter- 

native to the American approach, which had led to the quagmire in Vietnam. As these progressive images were challenged throughout 

the world, Israel began to appear less as a replica of America’s past than an augury of possible futures. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 

1982 precipitated a crisis in mainstream liberal views of Israel and shattered this heroic narrative of the invincible victim. 

During the 1980s, apocalyptic narratives started to supplant and reformulate heroic ones, as discourse about Israel took on a height- 

ened moralistic and religious tenor. Apocalyptic narratives took a range of forms, many of which have continued into the twenty-first 

century, including those that told of the threat of a second Holocaust, and those that told of Israel’s central role during the Second 

Coming and the end days. 

After September 11, 2001, Israel’s experience of terrorism offered Americans a ready-made vocabulary for articulating their own sense 

of unprecedented trauma. During the Cold War, the paradox of vulnerability and invincibility had already implicitly informed American 

perceptions of threats to national security. The paradox became even more resonant after 9/11, when the United States looked to Israel 

as a model for fighting the war on terror. Recasting the United States in Israel’s image as existentially threatened joined the nations to 

each other as innocent victims of evil forces and bestowed moral righteousness on their pursuit of indomitability. 

Many of these narratives and images that circulated in popular and political culture have been deployed by groups with the overt pur- 

pose of influencing U.S. policy toward Israel. More often, these narratives displayed how the story of Israel could become a generic 

story of relevance to all Americans, not just American Jews or Zionists. Indeed, other minorities and ethnic groups, such as African 

Americans, Irish Americans, and Cuban Americans, have also lobbied around foreign policy issues in South Africa, Ireland, and Cuba, 

all of which achieved wide political and emotional significance that captured the national imagination at particular historical and polit- 

ical junctures. In the case of Israel, however, what might have been the foreign policy concerns of a particular ethnic group came to 

have long-term symbolic associations with American national mythology. Israel became as much a domestic as a foreign issue. 

The cultural work of American Jews played a major part in the development of this association. As novelists, filmmakers, journalists, 

intellectuals, and museum curators, they have at times been more effective than formal lobbyists in communicating their passions and 

ambivalences to a broader public and in shaping the way a diverse swath of Americans have made Israel their own. The American Jews 

discussed here were not professional advocates for Israel, nor did they identify with Israel as their major life work. Rather, they were cul- 

tural mediators who interwove their visions of Israel with compelling myths or critiques of America, and who translated their attach- 

ments or disillusionments with particular ethnic meanings into universal idioms. 

In seeking to explain the strength and longevity of the myth of the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel, it is easy 

to portray both countries as more homogeneous and less diverse than they are in reality. Indeed, that is in part an effect of the myth, 

which not only views Israel in an idealized mirror, but also projects idealized visions of American nationhood onto the image of Israel. 

Examining the exclusive relationship between the United States and Israel risks reproducing the myth of the exceptional relationship. 

Many cultural narratives and images of Israel are not unique to the United States but have been shared and elaborated in other nations 

that have divergent and overlapping histories in their relationship to Israel and to the United States. There are other ways to tell this 

story. One way would be to focus on the domestic history of the shifting alliances and divisions among different groups of Americans 

in relation to Israel and Palestine. Another way would be to understand how and when U.S. views of Israel dovetailed and diverged from 

those of other nations in different international alliances and configurations. But that is not the task here. 

In his 1799 sermon, Abbot confirmed a way of speaking about the new nation that was already circulating in the public sphere. It was 

a matter of “common consent,” he remarked, that the term “our American Israel” was an “apt and proper” one. This book explores the 

creation of “common consent” over the last seventy years about the “apt and proper” ways of speaking about Israel in the United States. 

INTRODUCTION

IN 2009, President Barack Obama delivered a historic speech in Cairo, Egypt, where he reached out to Arabs and Muslims to repair some of the damage inflicted by the war on terror. At the same time that he was seeking common ground with the Arab world, however, Obama made a familiar and long-standing claim: America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable.¹

Obama’s statement was an affirmation that American presidents have routinely voiced since John F. Kennedy spoke of the special relationship between the United States and Israel in 1962. In Cairo, Obama’s reiteration of this sentiment was clearly strategic. He had just pointed to the conflict between Israel and Palestine as a major source of tension between the Arab world and the United States. Addressing the human suffering on both sides, he needed to reassure Israel and its American supporters that this balance would not tip the scales against his primary allegiance. He was telling his audience something they already knew well, that the relationship with Israel took precedence over that with the Arab world, and in some way set its parameters. Obama’s statement tapped into a vast reservoir of narratives and images, emotions and beliefs about America’s special kinship with Israel. This bond, he said, is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.²

Both proponents and critics have long understood the partnership between the United States and Israel as an exception to the norms of international alliances. The United States has given more monetary aid to Israel than to any other nation and has committed itself to maintaining Israel’s military edge in the region. In December 2016, the Obama administration agreed to a record $38 billion package of military aid over ten years. Diplomatically as well, the relationship is in a category of its own: the United States has protected Israel from international criticism, most notably by casting many vetoes on its behalf in the Security Council of the United Nations.³

The fact that this political relationship is expressed as an unbreakable bond implies an affiliation beyond the realm of statecraft. As much a future pledge as a historical description, the phrase has a ring of consecration, like a marriage. A bond connotes both identification and obligation. Unbreakable conveys an aura of timelessness and immutability, a bedrock connection that transcends the vagaries of political alliances.

This book aims to recover the strangeness of an affinity that has come to be seen as self-evident. In 1945, it was not inevitable that a global superpower emerging victorious from World War II would come to identify with a small state for Jewish refugees, refugees who at that time were still being turned away from the United States. How did Zionism, a European movement to establish a homeland for a particular ethnoreligious group, come to resonate with citizens of a nation based on the foundation, or at least the aspiration, of civic equality amid ethnic diversity? How was the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East translated into a narrative that reflected cherished American tales of national origins? How, in other words, did so many come to feel that the bond between the United States and Israel was historically inevitable, morally right, and a matter of common sense?

Our American Israel is the story of popular perceptions of Israel and of the ways Americans have understood this special relationship. It starts at the end of World War II, with debates about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and concludes with the war on terror, when the United States adopted a distinctively Israeli conception of homeland security. The political relationship between the two nations has always been entangled with powerful myths about their kinship and heritage, their suffering and salvation. During the seventy years since Israel’s founding, certain themes have taken on the stature of hallowed beliefs: that the kinship is rooted in a common biblical heritage and shared political values, that the Holocaust created a legacy of unique moral obligations, and that the two countries face threats from common enemies.

The process by which these beliefs developed mythic status and tenacious appeal is a dynamic one. They were created, contested, and transformed over time through metaphors, analogies, and symbols that shaped popular views of political realities and imparted emotional meaning and moral value to political policy. The belief that America is an exceptional nation of moral force and military power underwrote and strengthened its special bond with Israel. The United States would protect and secure Israel, a moral community of both concentration camp survivors and heroic warriors. At the same time, Israel was seen as unique in its own right—a state that is both vulnerable and indomitable, an invincible victim.

Diplomatic historians have researched the strategic alliance between the United States and Israel in the international arena, scholars of Jewish history have studied the importance of Israel to the lives of American Jews, and political scientists have examined how the domestic Israel lobby influences geopolitical strategy. However, it is in the wider crucible of American culture that the diverse meanings of the special relationship have been forged, disputed, and remade. Looking at popular narratives about Israel, and the ways in which different individuals and groups have understood America’s relationship with the Jewish state, can reveal the making of this special relationship. From a diverse array of representations and cultural expressions, patterns coalesced to form a broad consensus about America’s attachment to Israel, a consensus that came to seem like common sense. The cultural alchemy that transformed the story of Israel from a particular tale about a specific ethnic state into one that resonates with the American nation as a whole has, in turn, shaped political discourse in America.⁴

Cultural perceptions, to be sure, do not dictate policies. They do, however, create a perceptual field in interaction with those policies and political ideas from which a consensus emerges about the unbreakable bond between the two nations. Cultural artifacts—whether a novel, film, newspaper article, or museum—do not work by imposing a singular and monolithic meaning on the relationship between the two nations. But they are effective precisely because they are capacious, inviting different meanings from diverse perspectives while effectively ruling out others.

The special relationship has never been just about the United States and Israel. It has included the Palestinian people from the start, even in mainstream narratives that have denied their existence, or popular images that have made them invisible to the American eye. Dominant narratives that identify Israelis with Americans have always been contested by counternarratives from both inside and outside the United States. The most popular American story of the founding of Israel is modeled on the American revolution as an anticolonial

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