The Arab_Israeli Conflict
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The American Creed, Zionism, and Israel
In 1891, Blackstone organized a petition to President Benjamin Harrison that called for the United States to help restore Palestine to the Jews. The petition was signed by 413 prominent Gentile Americans, in an era prior to the mass immigration of Jews into the United States and the formation of major Zionist lobbying organizations. Those who signed the petition included the Speaker of the House of Representatives; the chairs of the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee; the future president William McKinley; the mayors of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington; the chief justice of the Supreme Court; and the editors of the Boston Globe, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Washington Post. Many university presidents and leading businessmen also signed the petition, including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. Other notable supporters of Zionism, even after they had left politics, were presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.30 Neither of them were prophetic Zionists, nor were many who signed Blackstone’s petition; they supported Zionism for other reasons.
For alongside biblically inspired Zionism there was a non-Jewish liberal Zionism, which viewed the return of the Jews to their homeland as contributing to improving the world in line with the American creed of liberal democratic values. In 1816, Niles’ Weekly Register, the leading American news periodical of the time, welcomed the idea of a Jewish independent state with Jerusalem as its capital, with no reference to Holy Writ. It argued that the return to Zion would further American values. Zion would serve as a haven for Jews from persecution, and agricultural labor would improve the Jewish character. Secular Jewish Zionists reached the same conclusion toward the end of the nineteenth century.
In addition, some Americans supported Zionism as a particular example of the universal right of nations to self-determination – a value proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 as part of his famous Fourteen Points. In this vein, the liberal Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who rejected the literal reading of the Bible and prophetic Zionism, declared: “The Jews have a right to a homeland. They are a nation … They have no place where they are not exposed to the perils of minority status.”31
However, for Americans, Zionism was not just another ordinary case of self-determination; it was much more than that, because they identified Zionism, and later the State of Israel, with the American creed. Americans have generally believed that the creed makes them exceptional; but Israel has often been perceived as an exception to exceptionalism. As Ronald Reagan exclaimed, “There is no nation like us, except Israel.”32 For many years, Americans have admired Israel’s rapid economic and social development. Following a visit to Israel in 1959, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote of her deep admiration for Kibbutzim that were “literally reclaiming the desert and making it bloom.”33
Even before the creation of the State of Israel, Zionist pioneers evoked for Americans their self-image of America as a pioneering enterprise. An example of the political impact this could have came in 1946, when an Anglo-American Commission of Enquiry was established to decide whether or not to let Europe’s Jews immigrate to Palestine. One American committee member, Frank Aydelotte, wrote:
I left Washington pretty strongly anti-Zionist … But when you see at firsthand what these Jews have done in Palestine … [it is] the greatest creative effort in the modern world. The Arabs are not equal to anything like it and would destroy all the Jews have done … This we must not let them do.34
Frank Buxton, another American member of the committee, wrote:
I came away from those [Jewish] farms [in Palestine] … not quite so certain that American pioneers left no successors.35
Buxton also compared the Haganah (the defense arm of the Labor-led Zionist movement in mandatory Palestine) to the American Revolutionary Army. After the state was already established, President Truman wrote, “I believe it [Israel] has a glorious future before it – [as] not just another sovereign nation, but as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.”36
More recently, the pioneering theme has found expression in admiration for Israel’s technological prowess, particularly in the high-tech field. Because of their pioneering problem-solving mentality, Americans are far more admiring of technological innovation than other nations.37 As Vice President Joe Biden put it, “Israel’s history is a tale of remarkable accomplishment. On a perilous patch of desert with sparse natural resources, you have built perhaps the most innovative economy in the world. You have more startups per capita than any nation on the planet, more firms on the NASDAQ exchange than anyone except the United States, and more U.S. patents per capita than any country, including my own.” Biden went on to attribute this “remarkable and yet improbable success” to Israel’s “democratic traditions, to its patriotic and pioneering citizens, and as with my own country, to its willingness to welcome the persecuted and the downtrodden from far-flung corners of the globe.”38
Biden is by no means alone in identifying common values that link the State of Israel with America. Once, after crossing from Jordan into Israel, Eleanor Roosevelt reflected that entering Israel was “like breathing the air of the United States again.”39 The United States was founded by immigrants fleeing religious persecution; so was Israel. The United States was built by pioneers on the frontier; so was Israel. The United States had obtained its independence from the British Empire and created a democracy; so had Israel.
Israel’s democratic character has been especially important in garnering sympathy among Americans. Its success in maintaining democracy served as a model in American eyes, for other allies. Thus, when in the 1970s, the Taiwanese responded to American prompting to democratize by claiming that it was impossible because they were under threat from mainland China, U.S. officials pointed to the Israeli example of maintaining democracy under the constant shadow of conflict.40 In 2008, more than 80 percent of Americans agreed that the two countries “share common values, including a commitment to freedom and democracy.”41 In recent times, there has been growing liberal criticism of Israel. This is an important topic fully addressed in a subsequent chapter. But even allowing for this, American liberal opinion remains consistently more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians,42 in sharp contrast to the Europe Left, as we shall see later.
The Holocaust, the American Creed, and the Commitment to Israel’s Security
While the Bible and the American creed created a basis for American identification with Israel, prior to 1945 this orientation was constrained by anti-Semitism. Consciousness of the Holocaust helped delegitimize anti-Semitism, and by the 1960s anti-Semitism had fallen dramatically.43 Meanwhile, the 1960 Hollywood film Exodus, starring Paul Newman, linked the Holocaust directly to the struggle to found the State of Israel, broadening the appeal of Israel in America. In 1978, Holocaust consciousness grew in the wake of the highly publicized threat by American Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors, and the screening of the NBC miniseries Holocaust.44 The year 1993 was another important one, with the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, which won seven Academy Awards, and the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum is situated in Washington, DC, on the National Mall along with the national museums and monuments. It has more than 2 million visitors per year.
Consciousness of the Holocaust has informed the American commitment to Israel’s security. As we saw earlier, there is a strong strain within American political culture that feels the United States has a special duty to support human rights and democracy worldwide. This is perceived to be an important part of what it means to be American, and it became especially pertinent from the 1940s onward, when America left isolationism behind to become a global superpower. In this context, Americans have felt a special duty to protect Israel for two reasons. First, following decolonization after 1945, only two countries have remained consistently democratic: Israel and India. Israel thus sto
od out as particularly worthy of support, especially as India was closer to the Soviets during the Cold War. The second reason was the Holocaust.
The rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust played a critical role in convincing many Americans, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Reinhold Niebuhr, that the Jewish people needed not only a homeland but also a sovereign state.45 Presidents Truman, Johnson, and Reagan all felt that the Holocaust placed a special responsibility on the United States to support Israel. As Reagan explained, “I've believed many things in my life, but no conviction I've ever held has been stronger than my belief that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel. The Holocaust, I believe, left America with a moral responsibility to ensure that what had happened to the Jews under Hitler never happens again.”46 In this sense, the Holocaust is not just something terrible that happened to others; rather, it is the symbolic representation of absolute evil, and as such it offends the American creed. As Sen. John McCain wrote, “The Holocaust underlined, in the starkest terms, the moral basis for Israel’s founding … In standing by Israel, we are merely being true to ourselves. If we ever turned our backs on Israel, we would be abandoning the principles that built our nation.”47 Thus, while the American public is not generally keen on foreign aid, a majority has consistently supported aid to Israel while opposing aid to the Palestinians and America’s Arab allies.48 When the American public was asked if U.S. troops should be deployed to assist Israel in the event of an Iranian attack on the Jewish state, an absolute majority supported sending troops.49 Indeed, when the public was asked what U.S. goals in the Middle East should be, “helping to protect Israel” was among the top five answers, with more than three-quarters designating it as an important goal.50
Still, the reasons behind support for these commitments to Israeli security have not only been moral and cultural; they are also related to perceptions of U.S. strategic interests.
Israel as a U.S. Ally
Over the years, there has been a vigorous debate among the elites as to whether Israel is a strategic asset or liability. This elite debate is dealt with at length in the following chapters. But for now, what is important is that the American public has come to view Israel as a strategic asset. After Israel’s spectacular victory in 1967 over the Soviet Union’s Arab allies, the idea that Israel could be a strategic asset began to take off. Israel’s performance seemed all the more impressive set against the background of Vietnam and the weakness of America’s Arab allies.51 Subsequently in 1979, following the fall of the Shah of Iran, Ronald Reagan referred to Israel as “the only remaining strategic asset in the region on which the United States can truly rely.”52 In the 1980s about a third of Americans viewed Israel as a close ally (a further 40–50 percent viewed it as a friendly country). In the wake of 9/11, the percentage who viewed Israel as a close ally grew to nearly half, while around two-thirds defined Israel as an ally. Only the UK, Australia, and Canada consistently ranked higher than Israel as American allies in the eyes of the public.53
Israelis and Americans have also shared a perception of the threat posed by terrorism, radical Middle Eastern states, and Islamism. Since the mid-1970s, terrorism has been the most frequently cited foreign policy problem in surveys conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. In the wake of 9/11 the perceived threat from terrorism increased still further.54 As of 2010, international terrorism remained in the public’s view the most significant threat to vital U.S. interests, followed by nuclear proliferation and Iran.55 Already in the 1970s, a spate of hijackings and high-profile terrorist attacks – notably the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics – established a link in the public’s mind between Arabs and terrorism.57 Since 1979 the State Department has maintained a list of states that sponsor terrorism. Most of the countries on this list have come from the Middle East, including Syria, Sudan, Iran, Libya, and Iraq.58 Moreover, since 1991, most of the countries that the American public has been least favorable toward have also been countries that are very hostile to Israel: Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran, Libya, and Syria, and from 2001 to 2004, the Palestinian Authority under Yasir Arafat.59 (See Figure 1.1.) Thus, part of the reason for siding with Israel is the American public’s extremely negative perception of such countries.
Figure 1.1. Favorable Views of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Iran (From Mendes, “Americans Continue to Tilt Pro-Israel.” Copyright © 2012 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved. The content is used with permission; however, Gallup retains all rights of republication. This graph is an interpretation of data compiled by Gallup, Inc. However, Gallup, Inc. had no part in the creation of this graphic interpretation.)56
American Attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs
Terrorism is not the only reason why Arab countries tend to be unpopular. For while both strands of American identity forged a sense of identification with Israel, they have also forged a sense of “otherness” regarding Islam and Arabs. In the nineteenth century, what most Americans knew about the region came from the Bible, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, or from popular travelogue books that tended to portray Arabs as alien and Islam as cruel and primitive.60 Some of these themes continued to inform American attitudes into the 1970s.61 However, the reach of such negative stereotypes has declined significantly since then. Thus, even in the decade after 9/11 a majority of Americans had a favorable view of Muslim people, double the figure of those who had an unfavorable view.62 Moreover, a majority reject the idea that 9/11 was part of a clash of civilizations with Islam.63 Nonetheless, in November 2001, half of Americans felt that their own religion had little in common with Islam, compared to about a third who felt they had much in common. By 2007, this gap had widened to 70 percent and 19 percent respectively. In parallel, in 2002, 25 percent of Americans felt that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers; by 2007 45 percent agreed with this view, and 39 percent disagreed.64
Also in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a plurality had an unfavorable view of Muslim countries.65 These unfavorable attitudes were probably not only to do with terrorism, but also with related perceptions of Arab and Muslim states in the light of the American creed. For in contrast to Israel, most of the rest of the Middle East has lagged behind in terms of economic and social development. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, despite massive oil revenues, the Middle East’s GDP was the lowest in world outside sub-Saharan Africa.66 Furthermore, while Israel has maintained democracy, in the twenty years following the collapse of Communism, Freedom House ranked the Middle East as the most undemocratic area in the world, with only Israel ranked as “free.”67
American Political Culture and Hostility to Israel
Many of those who are hostile to the main themes of American political culture tend also to be hostile to Israel per se (as opposed to merely critical of certain Israeli policies). This point is elucidated by comparing the approach of Rev. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement to Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam is not only anti-Semitic and anti-Israel,68 but in parallel, rejects both the Protestant foundation of American identity and the American creed. For them America is not an exceptionally good country, but rather an exceptionally bad country. Rather than identifying with America, Malcolm X identified with the Third World, which he viewed as suffering at the hand of white American imperialism, just like the blacks in America. As Malcolm X declared “I don’t even consider myself an American … I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”69 In contrast, Martin Luther King was a Protestant minister who, in his most famous speech, declared: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”70 Dr King also supported Zionism, stating, “We must stand with all our might to protect [Israel’s] right to exist.”71
Similarly, the Far Left, which has never believed in the American creed, has also been deeply hostile to Israel.72 They see America as the prime source of suffering in the Third World
, with Israel cast as “a lackey of American imperialism” and as a “colonialist entity.” In parallel on the Right, many proponents of the Realist school of international relations, such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who believe that foreign policy should be driven purely by material interests and not values like the America creed, have opposed the existence of a special relationship between the United States and Israel. Both these groups are dealt with in depth in forthcoming chapters. But the key point here is that just as the roots of support for Israel stem from identifying Israel with core strands of American political culture, so in parallel, those who reject those strands also tend to be hostile to Israel.
American Public Opinion toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict
In 1948, more than 60 percent of Americans supported the creation of the State of Israel, and only 10 percent opposed it. Since then, the most commonly asked poll question has been whether one sympathizes more with Israel or the Arab states/Palestinians. In the twentieth century, although a plurality of Americans remained neutral, sympathy for Israel remained 2–3 times greater than sympathy for the Arabs. During the Six Day War sympathy for Israel spiked, reaching a ratio of 10:1.73 But in the 1970s and 1980s the ratio returned to about 3:1 in favor of Israel.74 Meanwhile, the image of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was severely damaged by the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.75 Levels of sympathy for Israel and the Palestinians in American public opinion since 1988 are illustrated in Figure 1.2.