19
It felt to many americans that the millennium was heating up in the closing months of the George W. Bush administration. A devastating financial crisis had badly shaken a country still reeling from the shock of 9/11, worried about new terror attacks, and fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.[1] Putin’s invasion of Georgia in the summer of 2008 was the first concrete sign that the post–Cold War “holiday from history” might be coming to an end.[2] The economy continued to hemorrhage middle-class jobs. The polarization unleashed by the Iraq War continued to divide the country. Many Americans, mostly but not all liberals, felt that the country had lost its way.
Against this background, Barack Obama’s election struck many Americans as an extraordinary moment of hope. That an America so embattled and challenged could look forward in optimism appeared to many observers at home and abroad as an eloquent testimony to the underlying strengths of American society. It seemed that the election, not only of the first Black president, but of a man who was equally at home in the seminar room or on the basketball court, and gifted with the ability to represent the ideas and aspirations of his political constituency with a dignity and grace given to only a few American presidents, marked a notable return to the promise of the post–Cold War era. The millennium was turning cool again as “No Drama Obama” took the wheel.
No American president had had this kind of charismatic impact since John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and in many ways Obama can be called the “Black Kennedy.” Just as the ascent of Jack Kennedy signaled the triumph of Catholic and Irish (and, by extension, other descendants of the Great Wave immigrants, including American Jews), so Obama’s election was felt by many to represent a decisive turn in the long and sorry story of American race relations.
But Kennedy’s election was not just a triumph of integration. It had been a triumph of assimilation. Kennedy’s message for the New England WASPs who had once viewed the surge of Irish and Catholic immigrants as a threat to American identity and values was blissfully reassuring. America’s first Catholic president might have an Irish surname and attend Roman masses, but his heart was on the Charles, not the Tiber. His aides and associates weren’t disreputable South Boston ward heelers; they were Harvard men like McGeorge Bundy and John Kenneth Galbraith. JFK was a miracle that only America could produce: an Anglophile Irishman ready to take his place among fellow Brahmins in the New England elite.
Barack Obama was called to a similar but even more talismanic role in American life. The racial divide was an even older and deeper chasm than the gap between the “old stock” and Great Wave immigrants had been. From the 1960s on, American liberalism had made racial equality its most important single domestic policy priority. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s, the Great Society’s extension of the welfare state, and a generation of work to desegregate schools and housing and to decrease discrimination in employment and education through a broad range of affirmative action movements had shaped the Democratic agenda for half a century. Obama’s election was a sign that these monumental labors were having an effect. The color line was not what it was.
Moreover, Obama was in his own way as reassuring a figure as JFK. His long attendance at Jeremiah Wright’s church seemed to have had as little impact on Barack Obama as JFK’s membership in the Catholic Church had on the earlier president. Like Kennedy, Obama was a product of elite institutions steeped in the New England ethos. Kennedy attended Choate before Harvard; Obama’s elite high school in Hawaii, Punahou, had been founded in 1841 by Congregationalist missionaries from New England and is sometimes called the Andover of the Pacific. While slightly to the left of his domestic rivals on domestic policy issues in the 2008 primary campaign, Obama was clearly as much a part of the Democratic Party mainstream in his era as JFK had been in his and, like Kennedy, Obama would choose many of his close advisors from the heart of the American establishment.
The meaning of Obama’s victory seemed both intoxicating and clear: America still worked. The liberal ideas and values of the American democratic tradition were strong enough to overcome even the racial divide, and those same ideas were so universal and appealing that, as members of once excluded groups fought their way into national leadership, they would rally to those American ideals.
Sadly, these hopeful expectations would remain unfulfilled. This was to some degree inevitable. No president, no human being could fulfill all the expectations that some Obama supporters hung on their champion. At home, the record was disappointing. As the recovery from the Great Recession—real but for many agonizingly slow and incomplete—continued, inequality grew, good blue-collar jobs continued to disappear, and a devastating epidemic of drug abuse and addiction sent life expectancy for working-class white men into a steep decline.[3] Poor housing policy both before and after the financial crisis destroyed much of the wealth of the Black middle class and put millions of non-Black Americans under great stress as well.
The economic crisis of Black America—laid bare in statistics that showed no diminishment in the “wealth gap” between Black and white families since the end of the civil rights movement—raised the disturbing prospect that half a century of liberal policy had failed to reduce the racial divide.[4] Racial resentment among both Blacks and working-class whites was on the rise during the Obama years.[5]
Internationally, the Obama years were also challenging. When President Obama turned the White House over to Donald Trump in 2017, the United States would be more hated and despised in a Middle East that was more inflamed than in 2009. During those eight years, Russia and China would emerge as bitter and determined opponents of the United States and inflict a series of setbacks on the Obama administration that eroded its authority at home and abroad. President Obama’s most important diplomatic victories, the nuclear weapons agreement with Iran, known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), and the Paris Climate Accords did not have enough backing in American politics to be enshrined in treaties that the Senate would ratify, and so remained vulnerable and weak.
Despite the many differences between them, George W. Bush and Barack Obama both saw their terms in office disrupted by events at home and abroad that did not fulfill the expectations they brought with them. Russia’s and China’s hostility, and their ability to find chinks in America’s armor stunned Obama as much as the ability of Iraqi guerrillas to turn Iraq into a quagmire and consume the political capital of his administration had shocked Bush. In the Middle East, Obama’s hopes of fostering democratic transitions turned out to be as ill-founded as Bush’s had been.
That such very different presidents as Bush and Obama presided over years of increasing American political polarization, declining perceived economic well-being, and foreign policy frustration is a phenomenon that deserves more attention than it receives. Like the American leadership class as a whole, the two presidents were profoundly mistaken about the forces reshaping the world. The well-meaning presidents of the era between the two world wars had similarly launched international initiatives to secure world peace and stabilize the global economy. Those hopeful initiatives foundered against realities leaders did not anticipate and could not understand. Like their Lodge-era predecessors, America’s leaders in the post–Cold War era brought the conventional ideas of their generation to the task of statecraft. Neither Bush’s earnest Sun Belt Republicanism nor Obama’s sleek and stylish neoliberalism proved adequate to the domestic and foreign challenges of the day. The world had become a darker and more dangerous place under their leadership even as growing swaths of the American population felt increasingly alienated from both parties and the political establishment.
No premonitions of future trouble blighted the jubilant dawn of the Obama years, particularly for the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party drawn to him by his early and steadfast opposition to the Iraq War. Most of the Democratic leadership had, with whatever qualms, endorsed George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. For some it was political calculation based on the national mood in the post-9/11 era; for others, it was based on instincts for engagement and a forward-leaning American posture formed during the Cold War and heightened by the post–Cold War successes of President George H. W. Bush in the Gulf War and of President Bill Clinton’s interventions in the Balkans.
The Iraq War dissenters reflected many different points of view. Some remembered the Vietnam War and had consistently opposed American military interventions in subsequent years. Some were aligned with the realist restrainers and wanted a less global, less ideological, and less ambitious foreign policy for the United States. Some saw the Iraq War as part of an overmilitarized and Islamophobic response to unrest in the Middle East and hoped for a more creative, diplomatic, and sympathetic American engagement under President Obama.
At one time, the election of a liberal Democrat would have been good news for Israel. By 2008 the picture had altered. A reflexive sympathy for Zionism was no longer standard equipment for the American left, and doubts about the justice of Israeli policies on the West Bank and Gaza were widespread among Democrats and liberals, including many liberal Jews. A new and more critical perspective on Israel had put down roots among many American liberals and progressives, and this perspective, shared by the incoming president in his characteristically cautious and cerebral way, would influence the deliberations of his incoming team.
Yet those who hoped for a revolution in American policy toward Israel would be disappointed. Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories would continue to expand, there would be no progress toward the establishment of a Palestinian state, and Israel would receive the largest aid package in its history from Obama. For Vulcanists, this was just one more proof that “the Jews” were too powerful for any American politician to oppose. As usual, the truth was more interesting and more enlightening. On the one hand, the evolution of the American left’s views of Zionism was as complicated and, in its way, as unique and exceptional a story as developments on the right. And on the other hand, the course of Obama-era Israel policy, like that of so many of his predecessors, had as much or more to do with the power of Israel on the ground in the Middle East as with the actions of any domestic lobby.
Israel and the Left
When I lecture and teach about Israel policy to student audiences, many are genuinely astonished to learn that during the earlier decades of its existence, Israel was more popular on the left than on the right, and more popular in Europe than in the United States. Young Europeans in particular are often shocked by a forgotten chapter in their own history.
Europeans have not always been prominent among Israel’s critics. At a time when many American Republicans and conservatives wanted little to do with Israel, Britain, West Germany, and France were providing arms and diplomatic help to the impoverished and endangered new state. At the time of the 1967 war, 55 percent of British respondents and 59 percent of those in France backed the Israelis; only 2 percent in either country supported the Arab cause.[6] That spring, a Gallup poll found that 38 percent of Americans viewed Israelis more favorably than they viewed the Palestinians. As usual, this dwarfed the percentage that favored the Palestinians (3 percent), but most respondents weren’t engaged on either side.
British newspapers across the spectrum, including The Guardian, The Times, and The Economist, ran pro-Israel editorials. In France, prominent left-wingers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Pablo Picasso led a chorus of marquee-name intellectuals in support of Israel’s position.[7] Thirty thousand French citizens gathered in front of the Israeli embassy in Paris to offer replacement labor so that more Israelis could fight at the front.[8] In Bonn, West Germany’s Cold War capital, the Israeli embassy was besieged with offers of help, including military volunteers.
Middle East wars can still bring large crowds of students and protesters to Israeli embassies across Europe today, but their view of Israel has dramatically changed. The shift in European opinion from enthusiasm to reserve and then at times hostility toward Israel is sometimes portrayed in the United States as a consequence of immigration from the Islamic world and the return of old-fashioned European antisemitism. While both migration and resurgent antisemitism are part of the story, the shift in European opinion toward Israel cannot be reduced to these causes.
As we’ve seen, the relationship between philo-Semitic politics and the European left has deep roots dating back to the struggle against absolute monarchies and clerical rule. This long-standing alliance emerged strengthened and renewed following the tragedies and horrors of the Third Reich and the world war it launched. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, to be pro-Jewish was to be antifascist. In addition to reflecting a sincere and widely felt horror at Nazi crimes, sympathy for the Jews was a stick with which the postwar European left could happily beat the (traditionally more clerical and antisemitic) right. Also appalled by Nazi crimes, and determined to demonstrate their own repudiation of fascism, members of the postwar Christian Democratic and centrist parties competed with the left to show their affinity for Zionism and their concern for the victims of the Holocaust.[9]
In the United States, pro-Israel sentiment was also strongest on the left. To be pro-Israel was to embrace a foreign policy vision that owed much to the liberals who had pushed Truman to support the Zionists after World War II. The pro-Arab foreign policy supported by State Department mandarins and embraced by the Eisenhower administration for much of its tenure did not just offend American liberals because it was bad for Israel. They hated John Foster Dulles’s approach to the Cold War because the United States ended up backing undemocratic and even antidemocratic forces all over the world. The Middle East was just one example, 1950s liberals felt, of an American foreign policy that had lost its moral bearings.
Toadying to absolute monarchies in the Middle East in order to prevent the nationalization of American oil companies in the region struck many liberals as a grotesque abandonment of important American principles and a symbol of excessive corporate influence over our foreign policy. At the same time, the whole strategy of aligning the United States with “modernizing” military rulers seemed a betrayal of American principles. American liberals did not like American support for repressive military regimes in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and they didn’t like it in the Middle East either. They wanted an anticommunist strategy that relied on alliances with democrats, not on dubious arrangements with fascists like Spain’s Francisco Franco. Israel was exactly the kind of social democracy that many American liberals believed should be our preferred partners in the Cold War.
It is largely forgotten today, but for much of its history Israel was one of the most socialist countries in the democratic world. This was not just a question of the famous kibbutzim or collective farms that were long a leading force in Israeli agriculture. Histadrut, a labor union headed by future prime minister David Ben-Gurion after 1921, owned many of the largest enterprises in Israel, including the country’s largest bank and shipping company. In Israel the workers actually did own the means of production. That a country this socialist could be both dynamic and democratic was an immense source of pride to democratic socialists across the West, and helped the left defend itself against conservative attacks. Democratic socialists across Europe and in the United States looked to Israel as a role model and source of new thinking and policy ideas.
The open antisemitism of the Arab world at the time, expressed not just in rhetoric but including the repression and expulsion of its Jewish citizens, underlined the connection for many liberals between Arab opposition to Israel and the traditional antisemitism of the European right. Support for Israel was seen as a moral duty and a test of character. American liberals responded to the 1967 war with much of the enthusiasm of their European peers. Liberal icon John Kenneth Galbraith said on the television show Meet the Press that he would “absolutely” support direct intervention on Israel’s behalf. One of the only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution used to justify the American war in Vietnam, Senator Wayne Morse, advocated using the U.S. Navy to break Nasser’s blockade.[10]
From the 1940s well into the 1970s support for Israel was a leftist cause in the United States. Liberal icons like Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Adlai Stevenson were the most visible pro-Israel faces to many Americans at that time.[11] Paul Robeson, a prominent Black member of the Communist Party of the United States and a leading musician of the day, performed at a benefit concert for the Irgun, the right-wing, more radical Zionist movement out of which today’s Likud Party ultimately grew.[12] Groups like Peter, Paul and Mary included songs from Israeli kibbutzim in the folk festivals that served as meeting places for iconoclastic young people in the 1950s and 1960s.
The civil rights movement was a hotbed of pro-Zionist sentiment. Black leaders like King were strong, consistent, and engaged supporters of Israel and of U.S. support for it. Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, a Quaker and longtime activist for nonviolence and pacifism, supported placing an ad in The New York Times in 1970 calling for the U.S. to sell Israel “the full number of jet aircraft it has requested.”[13] In 1975, BASIC (Black Americans to Support Israel Committee) published a full-page ad in The New York Times attacking the U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution. The ad cited an article by Rustin and was cosigned by several hundred prominent Black Americans, including Congressman Charles Rangel, union leaders, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, author Ralph Ellison, and civil rights activist Rosa Parks.[14]
Neither in Europe nor in the United States did the problems of the Palestinian refugees engage the conscience of the left in the ways they did in later years. There were a number of reasons for this, some better than others. For many years after World War II, the world was filled with refugees. Israel itself was a majority-refugee nation in the early years, including both European refugees from Nazism and Middle Eastern refugees from Arab persecution. German politicians had to deal with the millions of Germans expelled from Poland and the Sudetenland after the war; for decades German politics would be troubled by the “refugee lobby” with its demands for a right of return and the inheritability of refugee status.[15]
In the early postwar decades the epidemic of violence, ethnic cleansing, and murder continued. Up to two million Hindus and Muslims were killed and more than 10 million refugees were displaced during the communal violence that accompanied the partition of British India.[16] After Burma achieved independence, some 300,000 South Asians, many of whose families had lived in Burma for generations, were forced from their homes and businesses.[17] Hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled or fled from Arab and Muslim countries following Israel’s war of independence. Egypt also expelled tens of thousands of Greeks and other foreigners who had made cities like Alexandria and Cairo cosmopolitan centers while Egypt was effectively under British control. Wave after wave of desperate refugees fled advancing communist control, from Iron Curtain countries in the 1940s and 1950s, from Cuba in the 1960s, and from Indochina following the fall of Saigon in 1975. Over ten thousand Greeks were forced out of Istanbul in 1964.[18] The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 sent 150,000 panicky Greeks fleeing south to lands still under Greek Cypriot control; about fifty thousand Turkish Cypriots had to flee to the north.
In the midst of this chaos and carnage, the plight of the Palestinians did not command as much attention as would later be the case. Many in the West and on the left did not initially think of the Palestinians as a separate people. They were seen as part of the Arab people, a people with large territories and many states to which refugees could turn for new homes. The Germans expelled from Poland went to Germany; the Greeks expelled from Istanbul went to Greece. The Jews the Arabs expelled were resettled in Israel. Why could the Arabs expelled by the Israelis not go to other Arab lands for a fresh start? One can blame orientalism, racism, imperialism, or simply the sheer complexity of the issues and the history involved, but the idea that this was a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians rather than between Israelis and Arabs took many years to impress itself on western minds.
After the 1967 war, the Palestinians became more visible on both sides of the Atlantic, and the occupation of Palestinian territory by Israeli forces would gradually change the way the left in both Europe and the United States saw the conflict. As other refugee problems in the world gradually faded, and as Israel integrated the Jewish refugees from the Arab world, the problems of the Palestinians, both the refugees in the Arab world and those under occupation, began to look both more unique and more shocking. Jews, meanwhile, were looking less like hapless victims of persecution and more like oppressors.
The rise of the political right in Israel also had its effect on the way the Euro-American left saw Israel. Beginning in 1977 when Menachem Begin led the Likud Party to its first election victory, the balance of power in Israeli politics gradually shifted to the right. In subsequent decades Likud and its allies moved toward a combination of free market deregulation in the Israeli economy and a more nationalistic and expansionist agenda when it came to relations with the Palestinians. The western left generally saw this shift through the prism of the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, and this made the shift to sympathy with the Palestinians, seen as victims of Israel’s rightward turn, a natural development. In some cases, many on the left, with real heartache and pain, began to turn away from their former support for Israel.
Another force pulling the European left away from its early support of Israel was the influence of what can be called the hard left. As the ideological and military front lines of the Cold War shifted from the heart of Europe into what was then called the Third World, there were many European leftists who actively sympathized with communist and anticapitalist movements in countries like Cuba, Angola, and Vietnam.[19] As the American alliance with Israel began to develop in the 1970s and the U.S.-Soviet rivalry came to play a larger role in Middle East politics, Arab leaders like Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and even Libya’s deeply eccentric Muammar Qaddafi became more popular on the more radical fringes of the European left. Israel began to look more and more like an avatar of American capitalism in the Middle East, and an increasingly strident anti-Zionism began to emerge as a hallmark of hardcore left-wing movements across the democratic West. To reject their predecessors’ Zionism became a way for student radicals in what Europeans called the “68 generation”—after the protests and upheavals of 1968—to demonstrate their rejection of what they saw as the colonial mindset of the older generation. A strong anti-Zionism that did not always stop short of sympathy for groups engaging in terrorism became a hallmark of the more radical groupings on the far fringes of the European left.
Driving the shift in European attitudes toward Israel was a revolution in European attitudes toward colonialism, nationalism, and national power. Historically, nationalism and social democracy had been joined at the hip. Nationalism created a bond between people speaking the same language and sharing a cultural heritage, and this sense of common identity and mutual obligation created the political basis for the welfare states of the twentieth century. The relatively small and homogeneous Scandinavian countries offered an example of how successfully social democracy could create stable mass prosperity under favorable conditions, but the idea that the ethnic nation-state could serve as the incubator for democratic and progressive governance emerged in the nineteenth century and remained central to European politics during much of the twentieth century. This was the political culture and worldview out of which Herzlian Zionism grew, and the socialist ideals that shaped the Yishuv and the early decades of Israeli independence continued to reflect what one might call the progressive nationalism of European social democracy.
The split in the socialist movement between pro-Soviet communists and anti-Soviet social democrats was, among other things, driven by nationalism. The pro-Soviet parties committed themselves to an internationalist standpoint, often refusing to support their national governments in World War I and supporting revolutions during and after the war. More moderate socialists remained committed both to the nation-state and to democratic and parliamentary politics.
The relationship between nationalism and progressive ideology was, however, more complicated than it looked, and over time the European understanding of the relationship between the two forces would change. By the end of the twentieth century, nationalism would look to many Europeans like a dangerous relic of a toxic past. Many factors supported this evolution in European thought and the result was a growing moral gap between Zionism and progressive European sensibilities. History did not operate in quite the same way in the United States, with the result that the revised and more critical liberal approach to Zionism that gradually gained ground among American Democrats was both superficially similar to and profoundly different from the dominant approach in Europe.
Before 1939, Europe had been a continent of assertive nation-states and world powers. That began to change after World War II. As Europeans gradually began to adjust to a world in which no European state other than the Soviet Union could claim to be a major world power, and as they contemplated the disasters that conflicts between European nations had brought about, nationalism was increasingly rejected as a backward, destructive, and atavistic force.
For most of the last sixty years, the construction of what would become the European Union was the most important project of European politics, and as the process gained momentum it created a new kind of European political sensibility. Nationalism, from this new European perspective, was a backward and dangerous force (in Europe at least; nationalism in the postcolonial world was still highly regarded). Nineteenth-century nationalism had not only led European countries into the imperial ventures that in retrospect shamed them; it led Europe into one hideous war after the next. For the future, cooperation, respect for international institutions, reconciliation with neighboring nations, and the pooling of sovereignty were the values on which civilization had to be built.
To the new European sensibility, Israel, as a nationalist state edging toward the annexation of “unredeemed” national territory, gradually came to look less like the state of fellow traveling cosmopolites than like a practitioner—indeed, an embodiment—of exactly the kind of nationalism and realpolitik that right-thinking Europeans believed had poisoned their past and would be a threat to their common future. Transcending national rivalries to build a cosmopolitan order became the ethical foundation of European politics; for Israel to use its superior military power to create settlements on occupied territory struck European sensibilities as exactly the kind of irresponsible and unjust national self-assertion that led Europe into calamity. Every European country had to give up irredentist claims on its neighbors; why could not the Israelis leave the West Bank alone?
Attitudes toward hard power also divided Israel from its old allies on the European left. Europeans who came of age during or before World War II had the habit of command. They had reached maturity in countries that were world powers. Winston Churchill was born when Britain was the greatest power in the world. Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi, and the whole older generation had come to maturity in the age of European empire when Britain, France, Germany, and Italy ranked among the great powers. They had played the game of thrones on a world scale and understood realpolitik as well as any Caesar. They had not given up their power easily or willingly. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the British and the French had fought a series of colonial wars—often with the support of the democratic left parties. The British Labour Party tried to preserve the British Empire in the Middle East, and French socialists supported their country’s efforts to keep its colonies in Indochina and, especially, North Africa.
Then came the generational shift. Robert Schuman, revered as a founding father of a united Europe, died in 1963. He was followed two years later by Churchill. In 1967 it was the turn of Adenauer, one of the greatest statesmen in the long history of Germany. De Gaulle retired from public life in 1969 and died in 1970. The successor generation had grown up in a very different world. Their life experiences reflected Europe’s reduced, post–World War I circumstances, the Depression, and the horrors of the Second World War.
As the end of empire came to look both inevitable and, in economic terms, unimportant, the moral calculus changed. As the British, the French, the Italians, the Belgians, and the Dutch retreated from empire, and the Germans reflected on the horror and misery that came from their own ventures in Weltpolitik, Europeans increasingly recoiled from the moral and military costs of power seeking. Among other things, this meant that they tended both to see Israel’s experiences wielding power through the unhappy lens of their own recent colonial history and to embrace idealistic views of world politics that put Israeli behavior in a particularly harsh light.
This shift also led many Europeans, and especially those on the political left, to look with anguish and horror on the left’s often enthusiastic support for imperialist policies in the past. That so many of Europe’s center-left parties embraced vicious colonial wars in the Middle East and elsewhere led to a generational and ideological rift. The postwar generation that erupted on the European scene in the student revolts of 1968 looked back on their parents’ complicity in the Algerian, Indonesian, and Indochinese wars of the 1940s and 1950s with contempt. As the Israelis began to plant settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, apparent similarities between Israeli behavior and the discredited policies of European imperialism were impossible to ignore. Even for more moderate figures who accepted the existence of Israel within the cease-fire lines of 1949, any effort to expand those frontiers looked like the kind of settler colonialism that the French, for example, had practiced in Algeria. That the French policy of supporting Israel in the 1950s was largely driven by a common opposition to Arab nationalism further stained Israel’s reputation in the eyes of the new generation of the postcolonial European left. Israelis gradually morphed in the mind of the European left from victims of fascism desperately seeking refuge to avatars of European colonialism, sharing the guilt of Europe’s long and often cruel domination of the global south.
After the end of the Cold War, much of the European left signed up enthusiastically to build a post-nationalist and even post-historical union. By leaving nationalism and realpolitik behind, the European Union could be a new kind of power in a new kind of world. The attraction of its values, the wealth of its consumer market, and the power of its example would transform Europe’s neighborhood. Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, and Egypt might never join the EU, but they would increasingly share its values and outlook, and their foreign policy would become increasingly peaceful.
From this standpoint, Israel was a problem. Its constant resort to “disproportionate” force in retaliation against attacks, the nonstop provocations of its settlement policy, and its insistence on the Jewish nature of the state were not just affronts to Europe’s values. They were threats to Europe’s peace. Israeli policies were encouraging Islamism and jihadi terror across the Middle East, creating obstacles in the path of both the economic and the social development of the region, and ultimately endangering Europe itself.
For Europeans coming to terms with large populations of immigrant Muslims, this was not just a foreign policy problem. Europe’s new inhabitants were alienated from western culture and western values at least in part because of the West’s long record of support for Zionism, a cause that many Middle Eastern migrants viscerally loathed and regarded as perverse and unjust. As the number of migrants from predominantly Muslim countries in Europe grew, the danger that Israeli policies seen as provocative would inflame tensions and promote terrorism in Europe itself grew with it.
Many Israeli Jews dissented from Europe’s post-historical project as vehemently as their ancestors had done from the order-building efforts of Holy Roman emperors and popes. From a Zionist point of view, the EU dream of a post-nationalist, post-historical world of tolerant and enlightened societies dwelling peacefully together looked like a beautiful fantasy, not a solid foundation on which to build the future of the Jewish people. Not only did European dreams of a universal, values-based peace look naive to a nation in arms and educated in the school of Herzl; it also did not appear as if this beautiful new Europe could protect its surviving Jewish minority.
This was not only a matter of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions by migrants. The rise of nationalist and populist parties, including the Golden Dawn in Greece and the AfD in Germany, provided evidence that antisemitism among other Europeans had not disappeared after 1945. The willingness of so many European governments to engage with Iran, despite the frequent bloodcurdling threats from its leaders to annihilate Israel, reinforced a suspicion among many Israelis that Herzl’s warnings about reliance on “enlightened” Europeans were correct. The post-historical utopia Europeans hoped to build would not be a safe or a welcoming place for Jews.
America’s Exceptional Left
The shift in attitudes toward Israel was not uniform in Europe. In Germany, political criticism of Israel always had to be balanced with a sense of historical responsibility. In the Netherlands and Denmark, historically philo-Semitic influences continued to make themselves felt. And there were differences between more moderate voices and more radical ones everywhere. Attitudes toward Israel became a kind of marker: the more radical one’s politics in general, the more radical one’s position against Zionism—and, for that matter, the more critical one was of the United States and capitalism generally.
While the American left generally moved in the same direction as the European left, it tended to move later, more slowly, and not as far. There were groups on the left who shared the full-throated anti-Zionist convictions of some in Europe, but they long remained smaller and less influential in the American Democratic Party than similar groups across the EU.
Americans who shared the visceral anti-Israel bias of politicians like Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn existed, but they were marginal political figures. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden were all significantly more pro-Israel than any European major party leaders on the left, and although their pro-Israel stands were often controversial, they paid no significant political price either in their party or with voters at large for advocating a close and supportive relationship with the Jewish state, in spite of occasional disagreements.
This difference existed even though many Americans on the center-left shared some of the perceptions, values, and ideas that gradually turned the European left against Israel. Whether it was the suffering of the Palestinians, increasingly conspicuous as other refugee populations were resettled and absorbed, the injustices of military occupation, the perception that a more forthcoming approach by Israeli negotiators would lead to a peace settlement, or the belief that old-fashioned nationalism needed to be left behind in order to build a better world, American liberals saw and were troubled by the same Middle Eastern events as their Europeans peers. But the American left stands on cultural and political foundations that are significantly different from those of Europe, and the relationship between the American left and the Jewish state has, so far at least, not broken down in quite the same way that the European-Israeli relationship has.
For Vulcanists, the reason was the obvious and traditional one: the American left was less anti-Zionist than the left in other countries because of the financial and media power of the usual suspects. Clearly, the only possible explanation for the inability of anti-Israel activists to dominate the mainstream Democratic Party had to be that American Jews were deploying their massive financial resources to frustrate what would otherwise be the natural and inevitable course of American politics.
There were, of course, Jews in the Democratic Party and Jews on the left. The shift away from Israel was not universally or immediately popular among the large percentage of the American Jewish population whose natural political affiliations are on the left. Some pro-Israel Jews abandoned the left over what they saw as a dangerous anti-Zionist turn. Ronald Reagan’s pro-Israel stance, and the popularity of Israel among Sun Belt Republicans more widely, attracted some formerly Democratic Jews to the GOP. Other pro-Israel Jewish Democrats like former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman felt increasingly marginalized by the party’s shift.
Meanwhile, Black Democrats were sometimes among the progressive voices pushing for a faster shift to a more critical and pro-Palestinian stance on Israel policy. The split over Israel policy was part of a split between Blacks and Jews rooted in mutual grievances dating back to the civil rights era when emerging Black student leaders rose up against what they saw as the overly cautious and moderate stances of an older generation of activists and leaders—many of whom happened to be Jewish. At the same time, American Jews whose financial contributions supported the civil rights movement in its early years and who took real risks to support Black rights felt cast aside and disrespected by the new and more militant leaders.
Beginning with Malcolm X, the fiery speaker and charismatic leader who emerged from the Nation of Islam to help define and popularize a vision of Black empowerment more radical and confrontational than King’s approach, a new generation of Black leaders began to see closer similarities between the Palestinian and Black causes. In the 1940s, at a time when antisemitic attitudes in the United States were near their all-time peak, American Jews and American Blacks both faced conspicuous hostility and overt discrimination. By the end of the 1960s, American Jews had had much more success working their way into the mainstream, while for the majority of American Blacks, economic marginalization and social exclusion remained. As the U.S.-Israeli alliance deepened, and as large numbers of American Jews continued a highly visible ascent into the upper reaches of American life, both philo-Semitism and Zionism gradually lost standing on the left.
Although Israel policy was neither the root cause of nor the most burning issue in the tensions that arose between some Black and some Jewish leaders and communities in the 1960s and later, the impression that more centrist Jewish Democrats were opposing efforts by more progressive Black Democrats to change America’s Middle East policy contributed to the wave of Vulcanist political analysis on the left. The narrative that big-money Jewish donors placed limits on the political direction of Democratic Middle East policy was widely accepted in some circles, but while pro-Israel Jewish Democrats were never shy about making their sentiments clear, and while Barack Obama, like Harry Truman, grew weary at times of the indefatigable ardor with which pro-Zionist Democrats made their case, in the Obama administration as well as in the Truman years, Israel policy reflected a sophisticated and complex response to a wide range of political and strategic considerations.
In his memoir of his first term, President Obama described both the deep roots of his personal engagement with Israel and his concerns about Israeli policies. He learned about the Holocaust, an “unconscionable catastrophe,” from his mother, and about the biblical Exodus in grade school. American Jewish authors like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth helped shape his literary imagination with their stories of outsiders trying to find a place in America. The predominantly liberal politics of American Jews, the influence of Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber on Martin Luther King Jr., and the friendship and support that Obama found among Jewish neighbors and friends in Chicago all created a sense of attachment and fellowship that is not easily broken.
As Obama writes, “I believed there was an essential bond between the Black and the Jewish experiences” and all this “made me fiercely protective of the right of the Jewish people to have a state of their own.”
The values that led him to feel connected to American Jews and to the right of the Jewish people to live peacefully in a Jewish state also led him to care about the rights and needs of Palestinians, including the right to self-determination in a state of their own. Obama, whose friends included prominent American Palestinians as well as American Jews, saw the evils and injustice of occupation as keenly as his contemporaries on the European left, but this sense was always related to an instinctive sense that the Zionist case was at bottom legitimate.[20]
Obama’s approach to the question reflected mainstream Democratic priorities and concerns and, as in President Truman’s case, he consistently sought to make Middle East policy on the basis of his convictions about the national interest. And unlike Truman, Obama was and remained popular among American Jews. In 2008, no ethnic or racial group in the United States except Blacks voted for Obama in higher percentages than American Jews, and four years later he still held 69 percent of the Jewish vote.[21]
For many liberal Jews, the young senator from Illinois was a figure of extraordinary promise and hope. They shared the hope that he would reverse the post-Reagan direction of American politics, which veered away from the more liberal ideas that dominated American politics from FDR to Jimmy Carter. It was partly that his commitment to the idea of an America that needed deep and continuing reform to live up to its values matched their own vision of the United States. And it was partly that his vision of Israel policy and his idea about the future of U.S.-Israel relations resonated deeply with their own cherished views. Indeed, during the Obama administration, many of the voices in the White House and the political community urging the president to take a tougher stand against Israeli settlement policies, to defy Israeli pressure on negotiations with Iran, and to press Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians for the sake of peace, were Jewish.
For such Jews among Obama’s supporters, as well as many other Democrats, the issue wasn’t whether American policy should be pro-Israel or anti-Israel. The question was whether Israel and the United States would benefit more from a policy of “tough love” than from a policy which they saw as abetting shortsighted views of Israeli interests. They wanted to press Israel on Palestinian issues to clear the path for a Palestinian state in the belief that this would allow Israel to remain both a Jewish and a democratic state, and because they believed that the establishment of a Palestinian state would improve Israel’s security and enhance Israel’s standing worldwide.
A more useful way to think about the differences between American Democrats and their international counterparts on Israel policy focuses on more powerful political and cultural forces than the alleged power and allegedly fanatical Zionism of American Jews. Israel policy, after all, is not the only political issue on which American Democrats have chosen a unique path compared to other center left parties in the western world. American Democrats were historically more sympathetic to organized religion and, in particular, the Catholic Church than most European social democratic parties—a difference that would be difficult to attribute to the influence of American Jews. It is a commonplace observation that by European standards the American Democratic Party has been something of a center-right party. Just as Israeli socialists were to the left of European socialists during the 1950s and 1960s, American Democrats were well to their right during the same era. If, as views on the left globally have generally turned against Israel, American Democrats take a more moderate view than Europeans do, we should not be surprised—nor should we attribute the difference to Jewish string-pullers behind the curtains. It is more profitable if we look at how their very different historical experiences led American liberals to a unique view of Israel than if we join the Vulcanists in searching for the hidden Jewish hand.
While twentieth-century history made European social democrats and liberals sensitive to the limits of national power and skeptical of its potential for good, American liberals took very different lessons from the history of their times. The lesson most Americans drew from the most destructive war in world history was that the way to avoid a repetition was to extend the protection and projection of American power globally to lay the foundation of world order. Despite episodes of protest against national policy since—the Vietnam and Iraq wars, for example—the left in America has remained broadly pro-government and even pro–national defense.
The twentieth century felt very different depending on which side of the Atlantic you were on. Neither world war scarred the United States as deeply as both scarred Europe. American casualties in World War I were relatively light. Casualties were greater in World War II, but in both conflicts the United States escaped invasion and occupation and the two wars combined killed fewer Americans and left a lighter impress on the American memory than our own Civil War. The American generation that came of age in World War II and afterward had the experience of achieving progressive, liberal goals through the exercise of national power. These were the years of Marshall Plan aid, ambitious development plans and foreign aid programs around the world, and, of course, of deep engagement in the Cold War against a foe that noncommunist American leftists saw as both dangerous and evil.
The Cold War liberals of the era, led by figures like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr, had made a decisive break with what they later felt was the hothouse naïveté of their youthful ideals. The horrors of World War II taught them the fallacy of trusting paper schemes like the Kellogg-Briand Pact to bring world peace, and the harsh necessities of the Cold War taught them the need to break eggs in order to make omelets. Fighting the evil of the Soviet Union often meant compromising with evils elsewhere, just as fighting Hitler had required the support of Stalin. The United States needed allies in the Middle East, and none of the available candidates was morally perfect. Israel, warts and all, was less problematic as an ally than the pet dictators and bigoted monarchs favored by State Department Arabists and the Eisenhower administration.
American liberals were more comfortable than their European counterparts with a tough, strong Israel that sometimes needed to behave ruthlessly to defend itself. Even in the post-Vietnam era, American liberals remained engaged with power, and perceived Israel pragmatically as well as moralistically. Its moral credentials might become questionable, but its growing regional power made it an increasingly valuable and indeed indispensable ally in the volatile Middle East.
The American left is intellectually, politically, and culturally complex. It is a river with many tributaries. There is a social democratic left that is culturally and politically close to the mainstream of European social democracy. There is a hard left grounded in Marxist thought, and often influenced by the experiences of the Latin American left. There are various forms of identity and gender politics, in some cases reflecting the demographic weight and cultural experiences of a fifty-year period of mass migration to the United States from all over the world. There is a religious left bent on making the United States a more just society in accordance with its religious convictions. There is a technocratic, modernizing left grounded in the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. There is an environmental left focused above all on climate change. These currents interact with one another, sometimes cooperatively and sometimes competitively, and they rise and fall in strength and salience depending on events.
But the largest tributary in the river and the most important current in the American left is an inheritance from the nineteenth century: the providential nationalism that sees the United States as an avatar of a new kind of political and social existence with a world mission to spread democratic and egalitarian values. American democracy, America as a country where ordinary people could live in reasonable affluence and full equality before the law, America as a country that welcomed immigrants from around the world—these have always been important values for the American left. Whether it is to defend those values against internal or external threats, or to build a better society on these foundations, generations of American political activism on the left have looked to that vision, however imperfectly realized, of a shining city on the hill—and tried to build it.
These perceptions strengthened and confirmed American liberals in their traditional belief in the value and importance of a strong federal government. From the time of Lincoln onward, Black Americans have looked to the central government to protect their rights. From the Progressive Era onward, backers of a strong welfare state and economic regulation have usually considered Washington a better place to get a hearing than state capitals. In the U.S., progressive ideas are most frequently identified with the power of the nation-state, and American liberals have often appealed to national sentiment to promote goals like civil rights and help for the poor. More than that, the ideal of a common national citizenship has been a cornerstone for efforts aimed at including minority groups and immigrant groups into full economic and political rights.
In Europe, the concept of nationalism was almost universally linked to a specific ethnic, cultural, and, often, confessional identity. In the United States, nationalism has been a more dynamic and wide-ranging concept. As we’ve seen, the “denominational nation” idea that emerged from the seventeenth century, in which many confessional groups could be part of a single Protestant nation, set the American approach to nationalism on a different path. In the eighteenth century, American national identity was erected not only on the basis of religious pluralism, but also out of the preexisting colonial identities. An “American” was a Methodist, a Congregationalist, or a freethinker; she was also a New Yorker, a Virginian, or a Pennsylvanian. In the nineteenth century, the increasing ethnic diversity of the American nation was addressed by extending the denominational model to “national origin.” Irish-Americans, Swedish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans could all find a place under the American flag.
In American history, nationalism became the rallying cry of those who believed in widening the circle of participation in political and cultural life. It was, Frederick Douglass argued, un-American to deny Americans of African descent their right to the flag and the citizenship that it represented. It was, new immigrants argued, un-American to deny them their equal rights. It was un-American to intern American citizens of Japanese origin during World War II.
Nationalism was not the problem that American liberals attempted to solve. It was one of the tools they needed to address the religious, ethnic, and racial bigotry that disfigured American society. Solving these problems required more America, not less. The more Americans believed in their common identity and citizenship, the more acceptance minority groups would find. “America the beautiful” remains an ideal for many American liberals, who grow misty-eyed on the Fourth of July, feel a lump in their throats when they visit the Lincoln Memorial, and who see the suffragist, labor, and civil rights movements as embodiments of an American spirit that should be honored and emulated today.
Given the deep appeal of these views among American Democrats, the view on the European left that “nationalism” must inevitably lead to irredentism, aggression, chauvinism, and war resonates weakly if at all with many ordinary American left-leaning voters. This is not because—or only because—some Americans are naive and idealistic about international affairs. Nor is it because the American people are essentially satisfied with their current boundaries and lack any sense that American nationalism must pick fights with the neighbors. It is because for most Americans, their concept of nationalism has been harnessed into a moral framework by the belief that America has a unique role in world history and its success as a nation is connected to whether it fulfills the responsibilities of its world historical mission.
We saw early on that Americans’ awareness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that their country was destined, if it held together, to play a pivotal part in world history was an important ingredient in the emerging American identity. To some observers, the idea that one’s country has an important part to play in world history sounds like the height of arrogance and chauvinism. In the American case that has sometimes been true, but the concept of a special American destiny has often served to set moral limits on American behavior. It has also served to deepen the bond of unity among Americans at home, and to give what might have been a somewhat nebulous sense of common identity and citizenship a much more practical focus. When Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address that the American Civil War was a war to save democracy worldwide (“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure”) he was drawing on this sense of America’s global importance to strengthen the nation’s commitment. He was not saying that America had a right to rule the world or to expand its frontiers at will; his idea of America’s providential role acted as a check on chauvinistic ideas and pointed toward an American destiny that involved the peaceful coexistence with many other states.
For much of the American left and the electoral base of the Democratic Party, the idea that America had a providential role to fulfill in the dissemination of political enlightenment was as useful at home as abroad. How could the United States fulfill its global role if it did not abolish slavery, give women the vote, repeal bans against Asian immigration, end discrimination against minority groups, attack poverty, and offer a decent social safety net? A long line of American reformers used these arguments—at the same time that they used the idea of a common national identity and citizenship—to unite disparate and sometimes suspicious voters from many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds into the Democratic coalition that brought the New Deal and the Great Society into being. These arguments would be deployed once again as American liberals attacked the Trump administration for abandoning, as they saw it, the values that were an essential part of America’s world role.
Many Americans on the left do not think “America” is all about conquest, domination, or racism, and they do not feel a tension between wishing America well and wishing other countries prosperity and success. They certainly feel that America sometimes behaves foolishly or even selfishly, and they know that not all Americans share their view of the world. They do not think America is perfect, and many of them have had searing firsthand experiences with racist, sexist, or otherwise oppressive teachers, bosses, or institutions. They know that life in America is often unfair to the little guy, and they look for political leaders who can do something about it. Whether it is a single-payer health care system or a wealth tax, they are willing to consider political and economic changes that horrify many conservatives—in the name of further perfecting the American union. If America falls short it is not because our ideals are flawed but because we have failed to live up to them. Liberals aren’t less American than conservatives or others in this view; from their perspective they are more American than their opponents, and that is a good thing.
Events in the twentieth century deepened the liberal faith in a unique American destiny. Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy to the Democratic Party in both peace and war reflected his deep immersion in the culture and values of providential American nationalism. For FDR, the belief that the United States had a great role and a great responsibility in world affairs was too obvious to need to be defended. That its global role rested on the traditions of political and economic freedom that undergirded the American system was self-evident, and this faith animates his wartime speeches and statements from the fireside chats to the Atlantic Charter. Care for the poor and for the integration of immigrants and minorities was also fundamental to his vision of the nation and of the responsibilities of the federal government. And if his leadership on issues like civil rights, and his acquiescence in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, failed to live up to his lofty rhetoric, Roosevelt never seems to have lost the faith that he was leading the nation toward a place from which, in the future, it could reach the goal of liberty and justice for all its citizens. He did not think that America had reached the end of the road of human progress, but rather that America was on that road and that American leadership was necessary to help the whole world reach that road, and that it was his job to lead America further down that road.
Internationally, the United States played a critical role in the defeat of fascism. It then went on to press for the establishment of the United Nations and, thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt, it succeeded in introducing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Faced with the danger of a totalitarian Soviet Union armed with nuclear weapons, the United States responded by building a democratic alliance of western nations. The Marshall Plan, widely hailed as one of the most visionary and effective exercises in foreign policy in the history of the world, not only consolidated democracy in Europe, it set former enemy nations on the road toward what would become the European Union.
Further afield, the United States did its best to accelerate the process of decolonization, and American economists, health specialists, and aid workers spread around the world to help the new nations achieve prosperity, democracy, and stability. That these efforts did not always succeed, and that when retrograde Republicans like the despised John Foster Dulles were in charge, American foreign policy did not always live up to liberal ideals, did not, liberals felt, diminish America’s historical role. Failures and limitations were a sign that liberals needed to try harder.
Comparing the second half of the twentieth century when the United States exercised a leading world role with the earlier decades when it limited its role, American liberals felt sure that American leadership was good for the world. When the Cold War between two nuclear superpowers ended peacefully with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Americans along with their allies moved to expand the world of prosperous democracy from the West into the Warsaw Pact world and beyond, the sense of a special American vocation only deepened. Facing unprecedented evils and navigating an era of nuclear terror the likes of which had never been seen before, the providential nation brought the world through to a safe harbor.
The gap between American liberals who embraced this perspective and Israel was real, but it was not nearly as wide as the gap between Israel and the European left. Israel’s behavior, especially with respect to the Palestinians, might be problematic for the American center-left, but its Zionist ideology was not. For many on the American left, the cause of Zionism was viewed through the same lens as any other national struggle. The plight of the Jews was treated in the same way any other human rights or refugee crisis would be.
For decades, the Soviet Jewry Movement enjoyed widespread support from the left in the United States, among Jews and gentiles alike. The Jackson-Vanik amendment that threatened to frustrate Kissinger’s efforts at détente is named for two Democrats. Human rights advocates as well as pro-Israel groups like AIPAC supported emigration for Jews in the Soviet bloc throughout much of the Cold War. The refusenik issue kept the American Jewish community united in its support for Zionism and Israel through the twentieth century, even as denunciations of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians became more and more frequent on the left. Even into the twenty-first century, when it came to the right of persecuted Jews to emigrate to Israel—or to the right of Israel to defend itself against attack—many Democrats remained instinctively supportive of the Jewish state. Israeli providential nationalism made a certain intuitive sense to American providential nationalists, and the belief that the revival of the Jewish people was part of the globally liberating mission of the American nation had deep roots among American progressives.
The uniquely American answer to the Jewish Question continued to influence the way American liberals understood the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The European idea that Jewish identity was religious or racial rather than “national” made Zionism look like either a theocratic or a racial program. To Americans, liberal or conservative, the idea that Jews were a national group and that American Jews could be proud of a Jewish national identity while being fully integrated into the American nation made Zionism look like a natural and normal exercise of the right of self-determination. From this perspective, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was not a conflict between racist or theocratic colonizers and a non-European people struggling against imperialism. It was a tragic conflict between two rights: the right of the Jewish people to a national home and the right of the Palestinian people to the same.
One should also note the role of liberal Protestant religious groups from so-called mainline denominations in the gradual shift of liberal and leftist Americans away from a pro-Israel stance. Providential nationalism has played a particularly significant role in American liberal Protestantism. That tradition, whose adherents dominated the American establishment for most of the century following the Civil War, acknowledges the inherent tension between the natural affection people have for their homeland and Christianity’s more universal mission. Providential nationalism largely resolves that tension: if the larger purpose of the United States is to advance universal values that are drawn from the Christian tradition, then love of country is a natural complement to religion, not a competitor. Most though not all saw support for Zionism as consistent with their support for other liberal international causes ranging from the liberation of the classical nations of antiquity to national self-determination for Poles, Czechs, and other nations of the imperial zone to the breakup of the European colonial empires. Liberal Protestants were often at the forefront of these movements.
Other crosscurrents within liberal Protestantism have complicated its relationship with Zionism. Some, like Reinhold Niebuhr, were strong advocates of the Jewish state for secular and humanitarian reasons while rejecting the literal interpretations of biblical prophecy widely embraced by Christian Zionists like William Blackstone. Many, however, had opposed the Zionist movement from its beginnings. Connected to Arab Christians, and sympathetic to the cause of Arab nationalism, Protestant leaders like Oberlin president Henry Churchill King and businessman and philanthropist Charles Richard Crane saw the Zionist dream as a nightmare for Middle East Christians and Muslims alike. At Woodrow Wilson’s request, King and Crane traveled across former Ottoman territories to discern what the inhabitants sought from the Versailles Peace Conference. Their report was strongly anti-Zionist, and described the strong opposition of the majority of residents in the region to the Balfour Declaration.[22] These sentiments never disappeared, influencing men like John Foster Dulles and contributing to a tradition of pro-Arab engagement in denominations as varied as the Quakers, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the natural home for liberal Protestants was in the Republican Party, but during the 1960s the mainline churches tended to move toward the Democratic Party and, at a somewhat slower pace, the views of their members moved toward the left. Closer culturally and even theologically to Reform Judaism than to some evangelical and Pentecostal movements, mainline churches have grown increasingly critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
Yet consistent and fervent as their criticism of Israel sometimes becomes, precisely because of their liberal theological roots, mainline Christians remember the long history of Christian antisemitism. They are generally careful to put their criticisms of Israeli conduct in the context of continuing goodwill toward the Jewish people and, especially, to American Jews. The effect is both to increase the amount and to limit the content of anti-Israel sentiment among liberals and Democrats.
Beyond that, American liberals were still responsible for conducting the foreign policy of a global superpower. They understood the sometimes ugly compromises that power necessarily involves in international affairs, and even as they struggled to elevate the moral tone of world politics they knew that American foreign policy could not be reduced to a set of simple moral rules. That perspective made it easier for them to understand, if not always to accept, the realism and hard-power calculations informing Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. It also put perceived Israeli misbehavior in context. Even at its worst, Israel was not the most difficult or hardheaded foreign power with which the United States needed to engage.
For all these reasons, the Democratic Party remained a much more pro-Israel party than many center-left parties in Europe. That orientation would be tested in the next twenty years as America grew more polarized, the prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians faded, and as doubts about providential nationalism grew among some Democrats. Yet the relationship endured. After a year that saw bitter battles between the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress over the Iran nuclear deal and over a GOP-organized speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Congress that angered many of President Obama’s allies, 53 percent of Democrats in a Gallup poll at the end of February 2016 reported that they sympathized more with Israel than with the Palestinians.[23] When Senator Joe Biden handily defeated Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination four years later, the wing of the party most closely associated with confidence in American values, appreciation for the difficult realities of power politics, and continuing if sometimes critical sympathy for Zionism seemed poised to control American foreign policy in a new Democratic administration.
Even so, the ground continued to shift. As the economic, political, and military shocks of the twenty-first century reverberated across American politics, Democrats increasingly questioned the assumptions behind the Rooseveltian liberalism that still broadly informed the party. Was America becoming a more equal and a more just society? Was America really a beacon of freedom to the world, an example that others should imitate—or was it time for Americans to start learning from others? And if America was not leading the world toward a better future, in what sense could American nationalism be justified? Was American nationalism even justifiable from a moral point of view?
These were normal and natural, even unavoidable questions given the economic and social pressures of the day, but the effect was to drive a wedge between Rooseveltian Democrats and an active if not always united or organized post-Rooseveltian left. Some were motivated primarily by a sense of identity politics, believing that, for example, racism was so foundational to American identity that any form of American nationalism was essentially a form of “white nationalism.” For others, the resistance of flag-waving populists on the right on global governance issues ranging from climate change to the International Criminal Court demonstrated the incompatibility of any form of nationalism, American nationalism included, with the deep global cooperation increasingly required to address critical twenty-first-century issues.
It was out of this complex of ideas and associations that Democratic views of Israel policy developed, and the Obama administration would retain widespread popularity with American Jews, among others, as it sought to build an Israel policy on this basis—even when those policies led to direct conflicts with the government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.