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At a time when so many books are being written, and so many of them are so long, the reader of any book is entitled to ask why it had to be written at all and, if the book absolutely had to exist, why it couldn’t have been shorter.
That is particularly true when it comes to books about the U.S.-Israel relationship. There are few subjects in American foreign policy that get as much attention as the relationship between the world’s only Jewish state and the global superpower. Professors and students offer teach-ins and hold demonstrations on university campuses; pastors, rabbis, and imams speak about it from the pulpits; politicians make speeches; candidates get questioned on Middle East policy during election debates; think tanks issue voluminous reports; foundations sponsor a never-ending deluge of roundtables and panel discussions; journalists report and talking heads debate. Enough books on this subject have been published to fill a respectable library; do we really need another one?
I believe we do. One hates to belabor the obvious, but American diplomacy in the Middle East in recent decades has neither been wreathed in glory nor crowned with success. War in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, an ill-considered “humanitarian” Libyan intervention that led to years of chaos, a generation of failure for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, helplessness in the face of Iran’s drive for regional hegemony, failure to prevent a malignant Russia from reentering the Middle East: Americans and the peoples of the Middle East alike deserve better.
When we look at the intense national debate over Middle East policy and, especially, over our policy toward Israel, the discussion is often angry, accusatory, and simplistic. One thinks of the lines from The Dunciad in which Alexander Pope attacks an untalented poet of the day by comparing his poetry to bad beer:
Flow, Welsted, flow! like thine inspirer, beer,
Tho’ stale, not ripe, tho’ thin, yet never clear;
So sweetly mawkish, and so smoothly dull;
Heady, not strong; o’erflowing, tho’ not full.[1]
Sweetly mawkish and smoothly dull is not, unfortunately, a bad description of a large portion of a national Middle East policy conversation that is often emotionally dense but intellectually thin. Proponents of a close U.S.-Israel relationship use phrases like “the only democracy in the Middle East” more as slogans than as serious arguments, and they often presuppose an identity of interests between the United States and the Jewish state that, to me, sometimes seems to represent wishful fantasy more than rigorous thought. Some of the critics of the relationship are much worse, resorting to overheated, under-thought-out polemics about a shadowy, all-powerful “Israel lobby,” a perspective that owes more to antisemitic stereotypes than to disciplined policy analysis.
The “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians was central to the foreign policy of every American president from George H. W. Bush to Donald Trump. But for all the obsessive attention that the peace process sometimes receives, few Americans understand how politically difficult and morally complex the seemingly simple goal of a peace agreement actually is, or why so prolonged and so indefatigable a series of American efforts should have produced so much more process than peace. Never in American history have so many presidents of so many points of view expended so much effort and political capital on a single objective—and never has so signal a failure in American foreign policy led to so little meaningful reflection and change.
There might have been a time when the United States could afford to fritter its political and economic resources away on vanity projects in the region. But at a time of growing international competition overseas and political polarization at home, the United States must think more wisely and act more deliberately, in the Middle East as elsewhere. That won’t happen unless more Americans understand the real history of their relationship with the Jewish state, the cultural and political importance of the Jewish national movement known as Zionism in American life, and the relationship of our Israel policy to American strategy worldwide.
With these thoughts in mind, and concerned about the way both sides of the Israel debate resort to efforts to “cancel” their opponents—to block speakers, harass people on social media, deprive academics of their posts, and otherwise limit free discussion of an important and complex question—I set about what I originally thought would be the simple task of writing a short, clarifying book about the nature and sources of American sympathy for the Zionist movement and the Jewish state. Among other things, I hoped that this book would discredit the antisemitic legend that falsely attributes American support for Israel to the machinations of a secretive and all-powerful Jewish lobby.
That was the plan more than a decade ago when I started the research for The Arc of a Covenant. But two things happened that disrupted my plan. The first was that writing this book turned into a significantly greater challenge than I expected. The conventional narratives about the relationship were often off base and sometimes flat wrong. To get the story straight I was going to have to take on both pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist legends that have obscured the historical record.
To make matters worse, the more I learned, the clearer it became that the attitudes and ideas that shape American perceptions of Zionism and the state of Israel are deeply rooted and widely dispersed in American history and culture. From the colonial era forward, the American approach to the place of Jews in American society, while never free from antisemitism, was subtly but critically different from that of the European Enlightenment. Long before the modern Zionist movement appeared among Jews, non-Jewish Americans for both religious and secular reasons found themselves looking toward the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East as an important signpost on the road to a better world.
I also found that some of the most important developments in the story are incomprehensible without a grounding in the political and cultural context of past times. American support for the Balfour Declaration, for example, the British commitment to create a “national home” for the Jews in the lands of the Bible after World War I, cannot be understood without taking into account the political forces that were leading Americans to cut immigration by 90 percent while supporting “self-determination” for ethnic groups across Europe. Zionism itself can’t be understood without some background in the history of the rise of national movements in the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires that once dominated Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. I was either going to have to give up the Israel book project, or steel myself for a deeper dive and a longer book than I originally expected.
Meanwhile, during the years in which I was slowly coming to appreciate the difficulty of this task I had so rashly taken on, American society and American foreign policy were hurtling into crisis. As Russia and China stepped up their challenge to the American-led “liberal world order” abroad, Americans were losing faith in their national institutions at home and, weary of endless wars in far-off lands, American public opinion questioned the country’s ambitiously globalist post–Cold War strategy. Increasingly it looked as though some of America’s central assumptions about international politics in the twenty-first century were fundamentally flawed. The focus of American foreign policy was in any case moving from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. Did it still make sense, I found myself asking, to focus on a parochial subject like the U.S.-Israel relationship in such dangerous times?
What kept me plugging away was my growing realization that the very problems that made the book so hard to write brought me to the heart of the challenges facing a divided America in the Age of Trump. The wide-ranging survey of the relationship between American domestic politics and our foreign policy that the Israel story required would help Americans gain perspective on the foreign and domestic policy challenges that have tested us so severely in recent years.
Rather than fighting the complexity of my subject, I decided to embrace it. I would follow the thread to the heart of the labyrinth. If the story took me to Theodor Herzl’s meetings with Kaiser Wilhelm II in Constantinople and Jerusalem, I would follow it there. If the story led into the politics of nineteenth-century human rights movements, if it led to a study of the religious and secular roots of the unique American approach to the integration of Jewish immigrants, if it challenged the pious legends that the American Jewish community produced about its role in the emergence of Israel, I would pursue it.
To write about the American relationship with the Jewish state and the Jewish people is to sketch a portrait of the American spirit at work in the world. That, at any rate, is what I came to believe and what I have tried to do in these pages.
Writing this book has forced me to think much more systematically and deeply about international affairs. My own engagement with American foreign policy began in childhood. I was ten years old at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when newspaper headlines spoke of imminent war and our schools conducted air raid drills to protect us from nuclear bombs. In the fifth grade, my friends and I used to argue about whether our hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was on the Soviet target list for destruction. The playground consensus was that yes, we would be hit early, because the NASA astronauts used the University of North Carolina Planetarium for training. There was, we agreed, no way that the Soviet leaders would leave such an important asset untouched. We did not, by the way, think this was a gloomy forecast. We knew that the lucky ones in a nuclear war would be the ones who died first.
Six decades later, I am as transfixed by the spectacle of American foreign policy as I was during that historic October. For one thing, it matters: American foreign policy remains of supreme importance for the well-being and even the survival of the American people and of humanity itself. Beyond that, it is interesting; few areas of study can match the sheer intellectual challenge of a subject that requires its students to engage with an almost infinite variety of disciplines and perspectives. American culture, economics and the history of economic institutions and policies, religion and religious movements, technological change and its impact on human societies, political ideologies and political history, social movements and intergroup relations, immigration, the histories of foreign countries—these are only some of the subjects to which the study of American foreign policy leads. Any serious student in this genre should travel widely in the United States and abroad, immerse herself in diplomatic history, grapple with issues of strategy and war, and gain some knowledge of practical affairs.
This study is so complex and so far-reaching that nobody ever comes to the end of it. Great foreign policy figures like Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and George Kennan were still learning and still making discoveries and new connections well into their eighties and nineties. The subject is a mountain whose summit can never be reached, but the higher one ascends, the more comprehensive and far-reaching the views.
The student of American foreign policy must also engage with some of the most basic questions about the meaning and direction of life. American foreign policy must be shaped to some extent by our beliefs and intuitions about human nature, our ideas about the meaning if any of the historical process, and the ultimate values that for some take the form of religious belief and for others form the ideological foundations of their sense of identity and purpose.
It is more difficult than it looks to bring one’s deepest convictions into effective foreign policy. Most of those who have sought to turn international relations into a form of religious or ethical mission have been disappointed in the results. This is often because they fail to think the thing through. To act with real moral effect in the world of foreign policy, it is not enough to understand one’s own convictions and the ethical guidance they provide. One must also seek to understand how other people from different religious and philosophical backgrounds understand the world, how those beliefs shape the way others see the world and provide a filter through which they analyze events, and how they seek to translate their beliefs into policy. One will then need to study how these conflicting moral visions interact with unyielding realities and less elevated motives in surprising and sometimes explosive ways, and how the international system in which all these forces collide is more mysterious, more dangerous, and more unpredictable still.
“A statesman cannot create anything himself,” said Otto von Bismarck. “He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.”[2] Discerning the steps of God in the rush of world events is not easy; history teaches that many world leaders have listened in vain.
Yet difficult as it is to bring our religious and ethical convictions to bear in American foreign policy, some understanding of and sympathy for the worlds of religion and spiritual hunger remains indispensable for serious policymaking. It is not just that a subject like the Jewish state with its inevitable religious associations brings these questions to the fore. In a world of nuclear weapons, people everywhere come to foreign policy questions and questions of peace and war conscious that, at the extreme, such questions potentially involve the survival of the human race. Periodically other issues erupt into foreign policy debates in which, potentially, the future of the human race is at stake: extreme climate change, the consequences for disaster inherent in the development of technologies like cyberwar software, genetic modification, and artificial intelligence. Foreign policy in our time cannot exclude the consideration of existential threats to human civilization and survival, and debates over foreign policy often lead into or proceed from debates over what human beings should do to preserve our species and even our planet.
The extreme stakes in the world of international politics make it more necessary to think clearly about foreign policy, but they also make that clear thought more difficult. Our emotional responses to the potential for world-ending conflicts and apocalyptic disasters built into international relations today—responses that range from panic to denial—can affect the ability of both elites and mass opinion in the United States and abroad to assess distressing realities in a cool and balanced way.
There have been few moments in the last sixty years as tension-filled as the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in recent years it has become apparent that, after a long period in which global tensions appeared to be easing, the world is drifting steadily into more danger. Since the attacks of 9/11 the international scene has continued to darken; today we worry not only about the threat of terror attacks, but about possible conflicts among the great powers. Problems like climate change add to the challenges and difficulties with which the feeble tools of diplomacy must cope. Just as the twentieth century saw the challenge of foreign policy become more difficult and more consequential for the United States than it had been in the nineteenth, so the tasks of foreign policy in the twenty-first century look to be more difficult and more consequential still. In this often frightening world, Americans are going to have to study foreign policy again, and external events are likely to play an increasing role in our domestic political contests and debates.
Israel policy will inevitably play a role in the debates that lie ahead. Israel occupies a unique place in American foreign policy because it occupies a unique, and uniquely charged, place in the American mind. The U.S.-Israel relationship is not and never has been the most important relationship in American foreign policy. Israel is neither America’s most important ally nor its most valuable trading partner. But the idea that the Jews would return to the lands of the Bible and build a state there touches on some of the most powerful themes and cherished hopes of American religion and culture. America’s long immersion in biblical Christianity and in a theory of progress that both secular and religious Americans have built on those foundations has given the Jewish people and the Jewish state a distinctive place in American historical consciousness and political thought. The state of Israel is a speck on the map of the world; it occupies a continent in the American mind.
That continent is terrain that any serious student of American politics and culture needs to explore for reasons that include, but go well beyond, the study of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The ideas that have shaped Americans’ approach to first the idea and then the reality of the Jewish state are ideas that play an immense and often underappreciated role in virtually every aspect of our domestic life. Debates about Israel policy in the United States often have more to do with debates over American identity, the direction of world politics, and the place that the United States should aspire to occupy in world history than about anything that real-world Israelis and Palestinians may happen to be doing at any particular time.
At a time when Americans are fundamentally divided over the meaning of their heritage and the future of their country’s role in the world, understanding the “Israel factor” in American life has become more important than ever. This is not just a foreign policy story, a story about Jews, or a story about American history; it is a story about American values, America’s role in the world, American identity, and about the fight between conflicting visions of America now dominating our politics. Dispensing with bad theories—like the idea that a cabal of American Jews controls America’s Israel policy—is important, but this book is less about dispelling some rancid urban legends about American Jews than about examining some of America’s deepest and most contested values at a time of great social change.
This will not be a book of policy proposals or of policy advocacy. I did not write it to advance my personal views about Middle East peace or to establish myself as a moral arbiter subjecting Israelis and Palestinians alike to the cool and balanced judgment of my keen, all-seeing eye. I am not going to use these pages to evangelize for my pet ideas about peacemaking, or to draw lines in the sand to divide the Holy Land between its inhabitants. That said, I have views, and I am not seeking credibility by pretending to an indifference that I do not feel. I am glad that the State of Israel exists, though I regret the tragedy that befell the Palestinian people as a result, and I hope someday to visit a free Palestinian state. Overall, I believe that the alliance between the United States and Israel serves American interests well, although Americans need to remember that Israel is a separate state whose interests are not always the same as ours, and as circumstances change the interests of both countries could develop in ways that make the alliance less useful. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, I have long believed that a two-state solution in which both peoples can shape their own futures through the exercise of self-determination is the approach that best reconciles the interests of the two parties with American interests and principles. There is nothing new about this idea; in one form or another it has been on the table for generations, and it was the basis for the United Nations decision in 1947 to partition British Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Stating this goal is easy; implementing it has eluded generations of diplomats. This book does not attempt to find the magic, conflict-ending formula that so many past leaders have sought in vain.
I share the concerns of those who fear that the two-state solution is becoming less feasible, but the “one-state solution” of Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully together in a single country seems even less realistic. A one-state solution would require what today is an unimaginable degree of reconciliation between the two peoples.
Having visited Palestinian refugee camps from Gaza to Damascus and beyond and spoken with Palestinian leaders and ordinary people, I am clear that the Palestinians are a people whose tragic history deserves a compassionate and constructive response. It is unjust that Palestinians living on the West Bank do not control their own future. While the United States cannot give the Palestinians a state, I hope we can help them build one. Ending the occupation with the establishment of an independent Palestine would, under the right conditions, be good for both peoples. Even if full peace isn’t possible, it is in the interest of the United States to seek ways in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security, to reduce the injustice occupation inevitably entails, and to find methods to make this ongoing dispute less of a blistering sore in international relations.
Getting It Wrong
There are many reasons why so much of the American debate over the U.S.-Israel relationship produces more heat than light, but the most common and widespread problem is easy to identify: American foreign policy debates often contain a strong moralistic component, and debates over Israel policy are no exception.
Proponents and critics of the U.S.-Israel alliance often agree that the question of American policy toward Israel is primarily a moral one, though they disagree on who is more moral. One side criticizes the morality of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and argues that American policy should uphold the human rights of a people struggling under occupation, denied a state of their own, and suffering from the loss of their homes and possessions. The other side points to the suffering of the Jewish people, their right to self-determination, and the long record of terrorism and intransigence among Arab opponents of Israel to claim that the moral balance tilts toward the Jewish state rather than away from it. Both sides make some important points, but as a student of foreign policy I find the tendency to reduce a complicated practical question to a question of moral accounting unhelpful. Morality has a vital and irreducible place in foreign policy, but the relationship of the morality of American foreign policy overall to the rights and wrongs of any specific dispute is much more complicated than many advocates of either the Palestinian or the Israeli causes acknowledge.
The prime directive of American foreign policy since the start of the Cold War, which is to say since Israel became an independent state, has been to preserve the American way of life while preventing World War III. During the Cold War and beyond, the pursuit of this goal involved a wide range of economic, political, and military initiatives aimed at creating a world in which the United States and like-minded allies could flourish while managing relations with nuclear-armed great power rivals that avoided triggering the ultimate conflagration. In order to achieve these overarching goals, American presidents have made a number of decisions that were, to put it mildly, morally questionable. They have taken actions that many would call criminal, turned a blind eye to some terrible evils, and they have tolerated human rights abuses and wholesale looting by rulers who were prepared to support Washington’s agenda.
Sometimes from a pragmatic American perspective these morally compromised actions worked out for the best. Sometimes they did not. Foreign policy is hard, and the game of thrones doesn’t work like an academic examination where giving the right answers yields a perfect score. International life is more like a competitive sport in which even the greatest athletes commit fouls, make errors, and lose games. War excepted, the conduct of foreign policy is the most complex and dangerous activity that human beings undertake. In this field, even true genius cannot safeguard a policymaker from error. But while many argue differently, Americans have generally felt that even taking the sometimes appalling cost of our errors fully into account, the national effort to prevent global great power war while preserving the American way of life was both practically beneficial and morally right.
The rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute need to be viewed in perspective. Even if everything advocates for the Palestinians say about Israeli bad behavior and American complicity in it is true, there might be compelling reasons for the United States to look beyond these issues in the interest of its global peace policy. On the other hand, if everything that the most intense and impassioned Israeli nationalists say about the crimes and shortcomings of the Palestinians is true, it might still be necessary for the United States to overlook those crimes and shortcomings to achieve some other goal of more importance to the security of the United States or the peace of the world.
The rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are not irrelevant to American foreign policy, but they are not and cannot be determinative, either. Tibet has not driven America’s China policy; the Kurds have not driven our Turkey policy; rampant and vicious discrimination against Christian and other religious and sexual minorities across much of the Islamic world has not driven our Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian policy; the continued unfair treatment of the Romani people by some European states doesn’t drive our policy toward the European Union (EU). This is a hard truth, but an inescapable one: in the Middle East as elsewhere it is the prime directive, not the rankings of the world’s various peoples on a hypothetical Global Victimization Index, that must guide American policy. Our policy toward the rival parties should take note of the moral elements of the dispute, but it cannot be driven or defined by them.
There is another problem with using, or attempting to use, moral judgment as the decisive criterion for foreign policy choices: it is much easier and more common for human beings to feel strongly about moral issues than to judge wisely about them. In the 1940s and 1950s, for example, support for Israel in both the United States and Western Europe was a cause favored by the political left. For the progressives and social democrats of that era, the Jewish people were the most prominent victims of the fascist and obscurantist right. Antisemitism was the mark of Cain branding religious and political conservatives as, at heart, fascist sympathizers, and deep sympathy for the Jewish people was a mark of leftist virtue. Not only had the Jewish people suffered under the Nazis, the Jews had also accepted the 1947 U.N. vote to partition Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. The Arabs, on the other hand, had rejected the U.N. vote. Worse still, the leader of the Palestinians, the Grand Mufti, had been closely allied to Adolf Hitler and supported his campaign to exterminate the Jewish people.[3] Other Arab leaders were either royal puppets of the British (like the kings of Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan), whose opposition to Israel reflected British imperial interests as much as any Arab nationalist aspiration, or they were, as the left at the time saw things, bigoted Islamist clerics opposed to all forms of enlightenment and modernity. For twenty years liberals and progressives in the United States, and their allies in Europe, attacked the more pro-Arab American Republicans for cynically preferring Arab oil wealth to the cause of human rights and Israel.
In recent decades, the left has shifted to a different narrative, one in which Zionism is a form of European and American racism and neocolonialism. The Jews of Israel were no longer seen as desperate refugees from a Europe that sought to exterminate them, but as a vanguard of western domination. The dispossession of the Palestinians was the consequence of Israeli brutality in the war of independence, not of the Palestinian rejection of the U.N. partition plan. As Israeli politics have shifted away from the social democratic left toward a more nationalistic and pro-capitalist right since 1980, and as Israeli settlements in the West Bank have proliferated, the leftist critique of Israel has sharpened. By imposing an unjust occupation on the Palestinian territories, and by building Israeli settlements on Palestinian land beyond the 1949 dividing line, Israel was said to be doubling down on bad behavior. To sympathize with Israel was increasingly seen as a sign of racism, sympathy for imperialism, and support for antihuman systems of domination and oppression. Much of the American right, meanwhile, has embraced a version of the old leftist narrative that justifies Israel and makes support for it a moral imperative.
Both narratives achieve their moral power in part by obscuring important facts. The old pro-Israel narrative of the left did not do justice to the suffering and displacement of the Palestinians, to the role of the Israelis in stimulating the mass flight of Palestinians in 1948–49, or to the origins of the mandate system (which gave the United Nations the legal authority to rule over the future of British Palestine) in European colonialism. The Palestinians never consented to become a British mandate under either the League of Nations or the United Nations; Britain seized Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in a classic act of great power politics with no regard whatever for the views of its inhabitants. From the perspective of the Palestinian Arabs, the Balfour Declaration in which Great Britain committed itself to the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine was the illegitimate act of an imperial power. The moral balance between Israelis and Palestinians was never as one-sided as the old leftist narrative had it.
Yet the new anti-Israel narrative also overlooks crucial events. To take just one example, only a minority of Israeli Jews are European by origin or descent. The plurality have no European roots; they came to Israel from other countries in the Muslim Middle East.[4] Many of these Mizrahi Jews fled or were driven out of their homes by Arab governments and mobs in retaliation, it was claimed by their persecutors, for Israeli behavior against the Palestinians. Others fled brutal mistreatment and unconscionable discrimination. No one speaks of compensation for these refugees; no one commiserates with them; no one seeks to hold anyone to account for the crimes committed against them.
The “European colonizer” narrative about Zionism ignores this reality as studiously and as unjustifiably as the earlier “unspotted Zionist” narrative passed over the suffering of the Palestinians. But the story of the Mizrahi Jews is no small factor in the tangled situation that exists today. Absent Arab persecution of Middle Eastern Jews, Israel today might not even exist; it would certainly be a smaller, weaker, and more left-wing country than is currently the case. The turn to the right in Israeli politics after 1980 and the increasing popularity of hardline nationalist policies in Israel was driven in large part by these refugees from Arab and Muslim persecution. Much of the cynicism in Israel about the moral bona fides of European human rights activists and the U.N. comes from the bitterness of a community whose suffering and losses are a matter of near-universal indifference around the world. Much of the distrust of Arabs and Muslims that plays such a significant role in Israeli politics is grounded in the bitter experiences of this community and its descendants.
The point is not that the old leftist narrative should be preferred to the new one, or vice versa; nor is the point that the suffering of Jews does or should cancel out or obscure the suffering of Palestinians. If we want to think clearly about world politics we can never forget that both on our own part and on the part of those we encounter, it is much easier and more common to feel strongly and speak loudly about the moral imperatives of foreign policy than to reach an accurate, just, and comprehensive understanding of the complex and subtle moral balance that so often exists in our complicated and disorderly world.
Identity Politics
If moralism distorts the American discussion of Israel policy, identity politics inflames it. Israel policy is never just a foreign policy issue in the United States, and many of the ethnic, religious, and racial groups who compose the American people feel a special connection either to the Israelis or to the Palestinians.
Identity politics does not always work in an obvious way. It is precisely because of their strong sense of Jewish identity that many American Jews became strong critics of Israeli policies under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. To persuade the American government to oppose Israeli policies like settlement construction seen as unjust to Palestinians is, for many of the majority of American Jews who fall on the left side of the political spectrum, much more than a foreign policy challenge. It is a test of moral integrity. American Jews in groups like J Street are not just making arguments about foreign policy; their political activism is a way of rising above tribal loyalties and fulfilling what they see as their responsibility to stand up for Jewish values before the world.
Liberal American Jews are not the only Americans whose deepest beliefs and sense of personal identity influence both the intensity and the nature of their convictions about U.S.-Israel relations. There are other American Jews who believe that to call for the U.S. to oppose Israeli policies amounts to a betrayal not only of Jewish values but of the Jewish people. The controversies among American Jews about American policy toward Israel, and the role if any that the Jewish community should take in that debate, are also controversies about the meaning of Jewish experience, Jewish faith, and Jewish identity. They are disputes about which elements of the American Jewish community should be dominant, whether the Democratic or Republican parties should rule in Washington, and about the meaning of Jewish identity in the modern world. Should Jews bear witness to the universal ethical principles embedded in Jewish tradition, or should they think first about the security and power of the Jewish fatherland?
It is not only American Jews for whom arguments about Israel policy are about more than the American national interest in the Middle East. For many American Christians and Muslims, Israel policy involves questions of identity and group standing. Millions of American Christians believe that loyally supporting Israel is part of America’s special world mission. Other American Christians, also numbering in the millions, believe that the pro-Israel bias in American evangelical religion is a gross religious and cultural error that needs to be purged. Many American Muslims believe that correcting what they see as an American pro-Israel bias based on racist, orientalist, and Islamophobic ideas will help improve their standing and acceptance in American society. Are ideas about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that are mainstream in much of the global Islamic community to be ruled out of bounds in American politics? Does this mean that the American political system has no room for Muslims who are loyal to their own core beliefs?
The passions stirred by Israel policy go deeper. Many Americans historically sympathized with the Zionists because the Zionists, like the early American settlers, were pioneers, bringing civilization and progress, as they saw it, to new lands. Both Israeli Zionists and American pioneers drew inspiration from passages in the Hebrew scriptures about the advance of the “Chosen People” into the land of Canaan, where they displaced the original inhabitants in obedience, as they believed, to a divine mandate. But “settler state colonialism” is controversial, and rightly so.
In the United States today, many people identify with the victims of settler colonialism. For some Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans, it can make more sense to identify with the Palestinian victims of Zionist expansion than to hail the heroism of the Zionist pioneers. For other Americans, rejecting the heritage of settler colonialism is seen as an important step on the road to building a more just society. From this perspective, one’s attitude toward Israel is a test case: those who support Israel have aligned themselves with the history of western rapacity and colonialism responsible for so much injustice and misery around the world, while those who oppose Israel have joined the resistance.
Far from seeing support for Israel as a form of dual loyalty, many Americans view sympathy with Israel’s enemies as something close to treason against the United States. Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies, they believe. Islamic triumphalism, postcolonial hostility to western capitalism and Israel, hatred of western civilization and perhaps of Christianity itself are seen as hostility to American values and the American way of life. However we come down on the issues, what is important to observe is that while the object of these policy debates is U.S.-Israel relations, the energy driving this activism comes from Americans’ deepest beliefs about themselves and their identity.
The issues brought forward by these different perceptions are real, and the questions they pose are deep. The passions raised by these issues may be grounded in skewed and one-sided perceptions about the facts on the ground, but they are still, from a political standpoint, facts; in no state can policymakers avoid taking strong public sentiments into account. Inescapably in American politics, Israel policy is a domestic political issue, not just another foreign policy debate.
We can acknowledge this reality, but we must also acknowledge its consequences: the passions of identity politics make us angry and they keep us engaged, but they do not always make us wise.
The Strategic Vacuum
America’s Israel policy, like its China policy, its NATO policy, or its Russia policy, cannot be assessed or debated in a vacuum, yet that is what many people on both sides of the Israel debate would like to do. Perhaps the establishment of the Jewish state on Palestinian land was a ghastly blunder and a horrible crime. Perhaps it was the legitimate exercise of self-determination by the Jewish people. Perhaps it was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Perhaps it was a mix of one, two, or all three of these. Nevertheless, the state—a nuclear state and a regional superpower in a region many think vital for American interests—exists. What should we seek to achieve through our relationship with it?
That question can only be answered on the basis of a considered national strategy, and it is at this level that the problems with our national debate on Israel policy mix with the problems of our larger national conversation on foreign policy. What is America’s global strategy? What role should our Middle East policy play in that strategy? And what role can or should Israel play in both our regional and our global strategies? The election of President Trump, a man determined to break with conventional Washington establishment foreign policy, led to the most intense debate over American global strategy in many years and, at the time of writing, that debate is still in its early phases.
In the twentieth century, there were four distinct moments when the United States had to develop a new approach to foreign policy. One was in the aftermath of World War I, when the United States reexamined old assumptions and methods to develop an approach to the international situation that dominated our politics through the start of World War II. The second came after World War II, when the Soviet challenge forced the Truman administration to develop what would become America’s basic strategy during the Cold War. The third came in the early 1970s when the Vietnam defeat, the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system, the rise of OPEC, and the Soviet achievement of nuclear parity forced a difficult strategic reappraisal on the Richard Nixon administration. The last shift came at the end of the Cold War, when the American foreign policy establishment decided that the promotion of a “new world order” based on liberal market economics and democracy promotion should drive American strategy in the wake of the Soviet collapse.
At each of these decision points, the American position toward the Zionist movement and, later, the State of Israel was one of the questions Americans wrestled with. In every case, the policy we adopted toward Zionism and Israel was of a piece with the larger national strategy, even as the national strategy was influenced by perceptions of a special relationship between American and Jewish destiny.
With the decay of the post–Cold War consensus, American society is now conducting a foreign policy debate as consequential as any of the earlier ones. These debates are likely to continue as the twenty-first century brings new challenges. Will the United States press forward with the global-order-building agenda that characterized our policy during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations? Will we pursue similar goals in different ways, adjusting our responses and priorities to changing conditions? Will we slash our international commitments and responsibility, trusting more to allies and to the balance of power to keep the peace? Will we walk away from the whole global order project? Whatever we decide, the consequences for the United States and for the rest of the world will be immense and, as in the past, the course of our national debate over Israel policy will likely both reflect and help shape the broader debate. In any case, the question of Israel policy must be placed in the strategic context of American foreign policy as a whole.
The Perils of Theory
There is another reason why American discussions about foreign policy in general and, especially, Middle East policy so frequently fall short. Half-digested generalizations resting on weak readings of history or careless assumptions about large groups of people often lead us astray when the national conversation turns to the Middle East.
Dogmatism is one of the great enemies of clarity when it comes to the study of American foreign policy. Political theory is an important subject and from Plato to our own time brilliant intellectuals have illuminated the choices societies face. Without generalizations we could not think at all; the world is too complex, and our minds too limited, to make sense of events without resorting to simplifications and generalizations. It is when theory degenerates into dogma and laws that the trouble begins.
At its best, theory can challenge our assumptions, point us toward interesting questions, and alert us to important facts that we might otherwise miss. But theory can and often does hide as well as uncover; without deep wells of historical knowledge and personal experience, a too confident reliance on abstractions and generalizations frequently creates an illusion of knowledge, concealing our ignorance and blinding us to forces and facts that cannot safely be ignored.
International relations constitute one of the most intricate forms of human interaction, and, thanks to the global range of American engagements and the complicated nature of the American political process, American foreign policy is the most complex phenomenon in the field of international relations. After a lifetime of study, I for one am still learning new and surprising things about it all the time. Yet not many people can immerse themselves in this study, and in any case, we cannot wait until a lifetime of reflection and experience makes us wise in order to deal with the crises of the passing day. For this reason, the production of theory, of generalizations about and simplifications of foreign policy, is necessary for public and democratic debate, and presidents and other policymakers must make decisions about subjects whose depths they will never have the time to plumb.
Academic theories about international relations, however recondite they sometimes become, are one of the ways that scholars try to make the complex realities of foreign policy more comprehensible to more people; myths or narratives are another way in which people try to make sense of large forces that affect their daily lives. The importance of American foreign policy is so great, the amount of knowledge required to really make sense of it is so daunting, and the hunger of people to understand forces that have so much impact on their lives is so unappeasable, that sweeping generalizations can always find a receptive audience. I have made some of these generalizations myself. Some are deeply considered, good-faith efforts by serious observers to find useful patterns; some are simply popular prejudice in crystallized form; some are conspiracy theories formulated by immature minds who’ve spent too much time in the steamier zones of the internet. The good theories can be useful aids to comprehension as long as we don’t rely on them blindly; the bad ones lead the unwary into endless mazes of illusion and error, where far too many people wander in the pathless dark.
Elaborate and highly developed theories about international relations are also necessary for bureaucratic policymaking. Before World War II, American foreign policy was, at least in comparison to what it has become, a semi-artisanal activity carried out by small groups of people all mostly sharing a common background and a common set of cultural and social beliefs. Since then, the massive growth of the national security state, and the proliferation of immense and lumbering bureaucratic behemoths from the Pentagon to the State Department to the intelligence community and beyond, have vastly increased the role of academic theory in policy planning. The bureaucratic structures that produce contemporary foreign policy do not favor sensitive, intuitive observers whose delicate senses can detect subtle shifts in the wind of international affairs; they favor administrators and managers who are less interested in the significance of small differences between countries and situations than in broad theoretical principles and generalizations that enable bureaucrats to create, for example, “development policies” intended to operate in countries as different as Guatemala and Guinea-Bissau.
Unfortunately, when it comes to American Middle East policy discussions, glib theories about how the world works, how the peoples of the Middle East think, how liberal societies work, and about the roles that American Jews play in American politics work together to confuse and frustrate both policymakers and the general public. Whether it is orientalist caricatures of Middle Eastern peoples or antisemitic caricatures about Jews, bad theories about how groups of people think and behave—stereotypes—usually lead to bad analysis. When, as has happened more than once in American discussions about the Middle East, stereotypes about ethnic, racial, or religious groups combine with poorly grasped abstract theories about international relations, major confusion results, and the policies that flow out of this muddle rarely lead to success.
This is not a right-wing problem or a left-wing problem; it is a human problem and an American problem. Liberals and conservatives, isolationists and interventionists, realists and idealists all struggle to balance, and sometimes they all fail to balance, the inescapable need for theories and simplifications against the ineradicable truth that reality is more complicated than our sometimes crude mental approximations of it. There is no real way to solve the problem of theory; like so many other difficult and uncomfortable realities in the world of foreign policy, it is something that we have to live with, and it is yet another reason why we must so often resign ourselves to the disappointing and compromised results that flow from the policies we make.
The Problem of Progress
Americans are usually optimists; our history has made us so. The belief that history is ascending toward a future of more freedom, more justice, more abundance, and higher spiritual values is one of the foundations of American thought. It has been a powerful and often benign force in American politics and policy; it helped propel both the antislavery and women’s suffrage movements to success, and its optimism about the American future was a powerful influence on George Kennan’s ideas about containment at the onset of the Cold War.
In many ways this optimism is a positive national trait, but the fit between American expectations and Middle East realities has never been smooth. Optimistic American missionaries in the nineteenth century believed that their work among the Armenians and other Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire would promote harmony between Christians and Muslims and, eventually, lead Muslims to convert to Christianity.[5] In reality, the missionary work contributed to the national and sectarian conflicts that led to genocidal massacres of Middle Eastern Christians and brought some of the world’s oldest Christian communities to the brink of extinction. Optimistic Americans believed that the establishment of a Zionist state would accelerate the economic and social development of the Middle East, and that the Arabs would learn from their Zionist neighbors and build prosperous democratic societies of their own.[6] Optimistic Americans believed that the newly independent Arab states were ripe for democracy after World War II. They believed that the Shah of Iran’s so-called White Revolution would modernize and ultimately democratize Iran.[7] They believed that the Oslo Accords would lead to a permanent, stable peace between Israelis and Palestinians. After 9/11, optimistic neoconservatives believed that a new wave of democracy and prosperity would destroy the political appeal of jihadi ideology. They believed that an American intervention would lead to stable democracy in Iraq. Optimistic Americans believed that the Egyptian “revolution” of 2011 was creating a new Egypt, liberal, democratic, and westward looking.[8] They believed that overthrowing Muammar Qaddafi would bring better governance and safer living conditions for civilians in Libya.[9] They believed that Turkish Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was a democrat who would modernize Turkey and overcome the gap between Islam and western-style democracy.[10] They believed that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was a forward-looking, modernizing reformer who was interested in moving Saudi Arabia toward a democratic future. Many now appear to believe that an American withdrawal from the region would leave it more tranquil without any serious negative impact on American interests worldwide.[11]
The disappearance of American optimism would be a bad thing. Much of the dynamism of American life springs from the habits of risk taking, innovation, and entrepreneurialism that an optimistic mindset creates. A more pessimistic America might be a wiser country that made fewer foreign policy blunders, but it would be weaker, poorer, and less influential than the America we know. Nevertheless, a sober analysis of America’s Middle East track record leads to an inescapable conclusion: when it comes to analyzing events in the Middle East and crafting policies, a naive and deterministic optimism has led Americans to one grave error after another.
With respect to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, American optimism leads to three very damaging mistakes. First, we continually overestimate the chances that negotiations for a lasting peace will actually succeed. These negotiations may someday succeed, and, speaking personally, I very much hope that they do. But every American president who has tried to reach this goal has fallen short, and these repeated failures have made the region less stable, further inflamed the dispute, and reduced American prestige while diverting American resources from other, more achievable goals.
Second, when negotiations fail, Americans, still overestimating the prospects for success, blame the intransigence of the two parties rather than acknowledging the difficulties of the task. Americans demonized Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after he failed to respond to President Clinton’s last-minute peace appeals in the closing weeks of his power; a more sober reading of Palestinian politics would have revealed that a final accord was exactly what Arafat could not endorse. Similarly, Israeli leaders are sometimes blamed when ambitious but impractical American initiatives fall to the ground. Much more than Americans see or are willing to admit, the obstacles to peace lie less in the intransigence of individual leaders than in the politics of both sides and the situation in the region at large.
Third, American optimism leads both elite and popular observers to mistake the nature of American power. The United States is a very powerful country, but Washington’s ability to force smaller and weaker countries to take steps against the wishes of their leaders is much less extensive than most Americans appreciate. One American president after another has tried and failed to persuade Saudi leaders to provide equal rights for women, to introduce more democratic reform into the kingdom, and to soften the harsh nature of the dominant form of Islam preached in its mosques. While Saudi officials know that the United States has been the kingdom’s protector of last resort for seventy years and its most reliable source of weaponry, American pressure is only one of the forces the Saudis must negotiate, and they will continue to resist American pressure that, in their view, threatens their hold on power at home.
There are similar limits on Washington’s ability to wring concessions on human rights from Egypt, on settlements from Israel, on financial support for terrorists’ families from Palestinians, on final status negotiations from both Israelis and Palestinians, and on much else besides.
This overestimation of American power creates political difficulties for American presidents whatever their party or whatever their approach to the Middle East. If Washington is as powerful as many Americans think it is, then any problem in the Middle East must ultimately be the responsibility of bad political decisions taken in Washington. If Israel is not being forthcoming enough in peace negotiations, if the Palestinians aren’t doing enough to suppress terrorist incitement in their schools, or if democracy isn’t on the march across the Arab world, this is because the American president is doing something wrong.
America-centrism is another form of this tendency to overestimate American power. Alice Longworth once said that her father, Theodore Roosevelt, wanted to be the “bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, the child at every christening.” That is not a bad description of what many Americans, even relatively well-educated and experienced Americans, think the American role in world history has been. As we shall see, America’s role in Middle East politics has often been much less significant than both pro-Zionist and anti-Israel observers assume. Harry Truman was, for example, less significant than Joseph Stalin in the diplomacy surrounding the emergence of an independent Israel, and France, not the United States, was Israel’s most important ally right up through the 1967 war. Americans not only overestimate what their country can do to shape the future in the Middle East; we often overestimate what we have accomplished in the past.
Orientalism
In 1978, Columbia University professor Edward W. Said published the groundbreaking book Orientalism, and the discussion of Middle East policy will never be the same. Said noted, quite rightly, that the peoples of the Middle East were perceived through a thick fog of preexisting prejudices, cultural incomprehension, and a political context shaped by colonialism and western domination. Said’s book was not without problems, and his assessment of earlier scholarship was sometimes both inaccurate and unfair, but overall, it cannot be denied that the portrayal of Arabs, including Palestinians, and Islam in the western world was and to some degree still is distorted. Islam was reduced to an intellectual and spiritual caricature; Middle Easterners were seen as simple people who needed redemption through westernization and modernization.
There is no doubt that prejudice and orientalism played a significant role in the development of American attitudes toward the Zionist movement and its enemies. American travelers in nineteenth-century Palestine portrayed the country as a thinly populated desert whose inhabitants were, at best, indolent and backward.[12] They were, perhaps, picturesque, but few Americans considered the townspeople, farmers, and herders of Palestine as their equals.
Orientalism is still a factor in American perceptions of the Middle East, and the tendency to substitute caricatures and stereotypes for real knowledge and understanding continues to darken our counsel. These orientalist stereotypes become a civil rights issue when immigrants, refugees, visiting students, and others face hostility, discrimination, and in some cases violence because of fears and hatreds rooted in a distorted vision of the world. The effect of these ideas on American debates about Israel and about Middle East policy is still felt; popular prejudices about the peoples of the Middle East make sensible policy discussions about Israel and its neighbors more difficult to have.
Orientalism is often seen as a problem of the right and as a carrier of anti-Arab and even Islamophobic images and ideas, but western liberals struggle with an orientalism of their own. Sympathetic caricature is still caricature, and it remains an obstacle to full understanding of a rich and complicated political culture. In terms of the Arab-Israeli conflict the most common form of what could be called the orientalism of the left involves a romanticization and simplification of Arab reactions to the Jewish state. In recent years, the wide variety in Arab approaches to Israel has become more visible as the Gulf states turn to Israel as a valuable if not beloved ally against both Iranian and Turkish ambitions. If anything, Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank have usually pursued a harder line against the radical Islamist Hamas government in Gaza than Israel has done. But the Arab relationship with the Zionist movement and Israel has never been as monolithic as many believe. Most of the land that Zionists settled before 1947 was freely sold to them by Arabs. In the 1948–49 war, no Arab state really wanted to see an independent Arab Palestine emerge from the conflict. The Jordanians, at the time the most militarily formidable of the Arab states, negotiated with both the British and the Israelis to conquer the part of Palestine designated as an Arab state by the 1947 U.N. partition resolution. The Egyptians, once it was clear that they could not conquer it for themselves, preferred an Israeli presence in the Negev Desert to Jordanian control. Jordan at the time was an ally of the U.K., and the British hoped to use the Negev as a base to defend the Suez Canal against a possible Egyptian takeover. Iraq and Jordan, both ruled at the time by Hashemite kings, hoped to unite the fertile crescent into the state that, they believed, the British had promised them during World War I. The Syrians were more interested in keeping the Iraqis and the Jordanians at bay than in helping the Palestinians establish a state. After the Israeli War of Independence, Jordan controlled the West Bank, including the Old City of Jerusalem, and Egypt controlled Gaza. Either country could have set up an independent Palestinian state in the territory they held; neither country encouraged Palestinian independence in those territories until the Israelis conquered them in the 1967 war.
The mix of public hostility and quiet cooperation between Arab states and Israel that we see today is nothing new. Security cooperation between Jordan and Israel was a reality long before the two countries signed a peace treaty. As early as the 1960s, Israel helped Saudi Arabia thwart Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s ambitions in Yemen.[13] Neither Arabs as a whole nor Palestinians are nor ever have been a monolithic people unanimously opposed to Israel. The picture of an Arab world united in an unrelenting hatred of the “Zionist entity” contributes to a sense of Arabs as in some way less human, less enlightened than westerners. It is as orientalist to claim that all Arabs are fanatical members of the anti-Zionist resistance as it is to say that all Arabs or Muslims are religious fanatics.
This form of orientalism doesn’t just lead to mistaken ideas about Arabs. It also distorts the American discussion over Israel policy. One reason some observers have exaggerated the power of the “Israel lobby” is their belief that policy battles over issues like military aid for Israel involve a bitter zero-sum contest between pro-Israel forces and a united and determined “Arab lobby.” Arab alienation from the United States over the Israel issue, many have believed over the years, puts U.S. access to Arab oil at risk and imperils the fortunes of American oil companies.
If that is all true, the Israel lobby must be awesome indeed. But it hasn’t been true. It has always been the case that their own security—the security of their countries, the security of their dynasties, their own personal security—has been the major priority of the oil sheikhs. Some have been more anti-Zionist than others in their private feelings, but in their foreign policy these states are too weak and too surrounded by envious rivals and enemies to privilege visionary projects like throwing the “Zionist entity” back into the sea over the quiet pursuit of more important, more attainable, and more immediate goals.
The Jewish Question and the Jewish State
Left and right orientalism muddles American thinking about the Arab world; the widespread belief, especially abroad, but frequently found in the United States, that a sinister “Israel lobby” somehow controls America’s Middle East policy is also a source of distortion and error.
Antisemitism is a tricky subject to discuss. Many of modern Israel’s most bitter critics in the United States are proud and passionately committed Jews whose critique of Israel is grounded in their understanding of Jewish ethics; clearly, one can be a critic, even a bitter and persistent critic, of Israel without harboring feelings of hatred toward the Jewish people as a whole.
There is nothing inherently antisemitic about criticizing a given Israel policy on moral or pragmatic grounds, and still less is there anything inherently antisemitic about arguing that the interests of the United States might lie in opposing Israel on a particular issue rather than supporting it.
There is nothing inherently antisemitic about believing that the Balfour Declaration was unjust to Palestinians or that American interests would be better served by withdrawing from the Middle East rather than remaining engaged with it. Arguments about ideas and about policies generally deserve and indeed demand to be addressed on the merits, rather than with a flurry of ad hominem attacks about the imputed motives of those making them.
Yet it would be obtuse to deny that reactions to Israeli actions are often fueled by passions and perceptions grounded in antisemitic memes and ideas, and that antisemitism is deeply entrenched in the culture and thought processes, not only of that misguided and unfortunate portion of humanity that consciously espouses antisemitic ideas, but of many others who do not always perceive the antisemitic origins or implications of false but plausible-seeming ideas that have long been a part of the mental furniture of our civilization.
Antisemitism itself is related to a broader phenomenon, something my brilliant former colleague Adam Garfinkle has written a book about. Many people—Jews, antisemites, and others—share a tendency to think that Jews play a larger role in human society than they actually do. Garfinkle’s term for this phenomenon is “Jewcentricity.”[14] Both the pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist narratives about the birth of the Jewish state exaggerate the Jewish role in the events that created Israel and overlook the critical importance of gentile support in making the Zionist movement powerful among Jews. As I studied the degree to which the Zionist movement’s unique ability to get critical gentile support gave Zionism a prominence and power among Jews that it otherwise could never have had, I was frequently tempted to subtitle this book “Don’t Blame Israel on the Jews.”
I resisted that temptation, but the mistaken impression that Zionism is an agenda that powerful Jews imposed either on the United States or on the gentile world at large remains a major reason why so much of our national conversation about Middle East policy consumes so much energy but produces so little good policy. Antisemitism is not just an invidious prejudice, and therefore a moral error; it is an intellectual error, and an example of a bad political theory. Antisemitism commits its adherents to a set of damaging errors about how power works in the modern world. Those who think that “the Jews” control finance don’t understand how economic power works. Those who think that “the Jews” control American politics understand neither the United States nor its political system. Those who think that “the Jews” control the American media and abuse that power to create an American consensus behind support for Israel don’t know much about American Jews, the American media, or the many millions of non-Jewish Americans who have their own reasons for supporting an American alliance with the Jewish state.
If we are to have a serious and effective national conversation about Israel policy, we will have to clear away the mistaken ideas and perceptions that any conversation about the Jewish people naturally and inevitably attracts. We need a less Jewcentric narrative of both Zionist history and of America’s engagement with the Zionist project.