The Arab_Israeli Conflict

by Jonathan Rynhold

  3 A. F. K. Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

  4 Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6; Peter Feaver, “What Is Grand Strategy and Why Do We Need It?” Shadow Government (blog), Foreign Policy, April 8, 2009, http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/08/what_is_grand_strategy_and_why_do_we_need_it.

  5 One particularly sophisticated work integrates subjective elements into both the domestic politics paradigm and the national interest paradigm, Abraham Ben-Zvi, The United States and Israel: The Limits of the Special Relationship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

  6 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); George Ball and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). For a more sober analysis of the pro-Israel lobby, see David Howard Goldberg, Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups: American and Canadian Jews Lobby for Israel (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990); Dan Fleshler, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2009).

  7 Robert C. Lieberman, “The ‘Israel Lobby’ and American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics, 7, no. 2 (2009): 235–257; Jonathan Rynhold, “Is the Pro-Israel Lobby a Block on Reaching a Comprehensive Peace Settlement in the Middle East?” Israel Studies Forum, 25, no. 1 (2010): 29–49; Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York: Bantam Books, 2009), 75–125.

  8 William Quandt, Peace Process, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005).

  9 Mitchell Geoffrey Bard, The Water’s Edge and Beyond: Defining the Limits to Domestic Influence on United States Middle East Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991).

  10 Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 95.

  11 Fleshler, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby, 36–43.

  12 Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and the Politics in the United States, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 152.

  13 Miller, The Much Too Promised Land, 86.

  14 Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51, no. 1 (1998): 144–172; Colin Dueck, Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders.

  15 John S. Duffield, “Political Culture and State Behavior: Why Germany Confounds Neorealism,” International Organization 53, no. 4 (1999): 770–772; Valerie M. Hudson, ed., Culture and Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997); Juliet Kaarbo, “Foreign Policy Analysis in the Twenty-First Century: Back to Comparison, Forward to Identity and Ideas,” International Studies Review 5, no. 2 (2003): 156–163.

  16 Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security,” in Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 33–75; Emmanuel Adler, “Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics,” European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 3 (1997): 319–363; Jutta Weldes, “Constructing National Interests,” European Journal of International Relations 2, no. 3 (1996): 275–318.

  17 Michael N. Barnett, “Identity and Alliances in the Middle East,” in Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security, 400–447.

  18 Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006); Elizabeth Stephens, US Policy towards Israel: The Role of Political Culture in Defining the “Special Relationship” (Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2008); Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel and U.S. Foreign Policy, trans. James A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New York: Knopf, 1983), 4–5; Moshe Davis, America and the Holy Land (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 13–19, 135–145; Eytan Gilboa, American Public Opinion toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987).

  19 On the importance of cultural change in influencing foreign policy change see Jonathan Rynhold, “Cultural Shift and Foreign Policy Change: Israel and the Making of the Oslo Accords,” Cooperation and Conflict 42, no. 4 (2007); Jonathan Rynhold, “The German Question in Central and Eastern Europe and the Long Peace in Europe after 1945: An Integrated Theoretical Explanation,” Review of International Studies 37, no. 1 (2010): 249–275; Thomas Berger, “Norms, Identity, and National Security in Germany and Japan,” in Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security, 317–356.

  20 A norm “describe[s] collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors with a given identity… Norms thus either define (or constitute) identities or prescribe (or regulate) behavior.” Peter Katzenstein, “Introduction,” in Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security, 5.

  21 David Sills and Robert King Merton, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 218.

  22 “The concept of identity … refers to the image of individuality and distinctiveness (‘selfhood’) held and projected by an actor and form (and modified over time), in part through relations with significant others.” Ronald Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter Katzenstein, “Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security” 59. “Identity … depicts ideologies of collective distinctiveness and purpose, which are enacted domestically and projected internationally.” Katzenstein, “Introduction,” in Katzenstein, ed. The Culture of National Security, 5.

  23 An ideology can be defined as a set of interrelated, coherent, and more or less systematic ideas that provide a basis for political action. Ideologies are both descriptive and prescriptive. They contain normative beliefs and principles that inform end goals. They also contain certain beliefs pertaining to causality – what is possible and not possible – that inform instrumental values (that is, the preferred means for obtaining the end goals). See Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 1–11.

  24 Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).

  25 Brian Girvin, “Change and Continuity in Liberal Democratic Political Culture,” in John Gibbens, ed., Contemporary Political Culture: Politics in a Postmodern Age (London: Sage, 1989).

  26 For a discussion of the different approaches see Stephen Welch, The Concept of Political Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Michael Brint, A Genealogy of Political Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).

  27 Robert M. Entman, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.

  28 B. Dan Wood, The Myth of Presidential Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  29 Author interviews with Peter Beinart, 2011, and with a congressional staffer, 2013.

  1. Like U.S.: American identification with Israel

  1 Quoted in Peter Golden, Quiet Diplomat: A Biography of Max M. Fisher (New York: Cornwell Books, 1992), 424.

  2 Walter Russell Mead, “The New Israel and the Old: Why Gentile Americans Back the Jewish State,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 4 (2008): 29.

  3 Anatol Lieven, America, Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Henry R. Nau, At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

  4 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

  5 Walter Russell Mead, “The Jacksoni
an Tradition,” National Interest 58 (Winter 1999–2000).

  6 U.S. Census Bureau, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html; “Religious Landscape Survey,” Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life, February 2008, http://religions.pewforum.org/reports#.

  7 Mead, “The Jacksonian Tradition.”

  8 Quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 31.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Lieven, America, Right or Wrong, 49; Jeffrey Jones, “Americans See U.S. as Exceptional,” Gallup, December 22, 2010, http://www.gallup.com/poll/145358/Americans-Exceptional-Doubt-Obama.aspx.

  11 Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 22.

  12 Christopher Coker, Reflections on American Foreign Policy since 1945 (London: Pinter, 1989).

  13 Moshe Davis, America and the Holy Land (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 13–19, 135–145; Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  14 Daniel Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism: The Great Frontier and the Matrix of Federal Democracy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998); Kenneth D. Wald and Alison Calhoun-Brown, Religion and Politics in the United States, 5th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 43–45.

  15 Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (New York: Knopf, 1983), 5.

  16 Bruce Feiler, “Moses, the Patron Saint of Washington,” Washington Post, October 18, 2009.

  17 Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), 65.

  18 Cited in Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (London: Continuum, 2009), 156.

  19 Quoted in Ron Kurtus, “Bill Clinton’s Second Inaugural Address in 1997,” Ron Kurtus’ School for Champions, http://www.school-for-champions.com/speeches/clinton_second_inaugural.htm.

  20 Davis, America and the Holy Land, 25–26.

  21 Ibid., 64.

  22 Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 7–8.

  23 Davis, America and the Holy Land, 31.

  24 Paul Merkley, American Presidents, Religion, and Israel: The Heirs of Cyrus (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).

  25 Bill Clinton, My Life (London: Hutchinson, 2004), 353.

  26 Ronald R. Stockton, “Christian Zionism: Prophecy and Public Opinion,” Middle East Journal 41, no. 2 (1987): 253; John Green, “The American Public and Sympathy for Israel: Present and Future,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 44, no. 1 (2009); Jeffrey Jones, “In U.S., 3 in 10 Say They Take the Bible Literally,” Gallup, July 8, 2011; Lydia Saad, “Holy Land, or Just Ancient?” Gallup, July 29, 2003, http://www.gallup.com/poll/8941/Holy-Land-Just-Ancient.aspx.

  27 Paul Charles Merkley, The Politics of Christian Zionism, 1891–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 55; Yaakov Ariel, On Behalf of Israel: American Fundamentalist Attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, 1865–1945 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1991), 77.

  28 Green, “The American Public and Sympathy for Israel”; Stephan Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 186–187; Jones, “In U.S., 3 in 10 Say They Take the Bible Literally.”

  29 James Guth and William Kenan Jr., “Religious Factors and American Public Support for Israel: 1992–2008,” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Seattle, WA, September 1–4, 2011).

  30 Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 278–282; Yaakov Ariel, “An American Initiative for a Jewish State: William Blackstone and the Petition of 1891,” Studies in Zionism 10, no. 2 (1989): 125–137.

  31 D.B. Robertson, ed., Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1957), 133–142.

  32 Golden, Quiet Diplomat, 424.

  33 Michelle Mart, “Eleanor Roosevelt, Liberalism, and Israel,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 3 (2006): 75.

  34 Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (London: John Murray, 2000), 178.

  35 Ibid.

  36 “Harry Truman,” National Cold War Exhibition, Royal Air Force Museum, http://www.nationalcoldwarexhibition.org/the-cold-war/biographies/harry-truman/.

  37 “Survey: Optimism Reigns, Technology Plays Key Role,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, October 24, 1999, http://www.people-press.org/1999/10/24/optimism-reigns-technology-plays-key-role/.

  38 U.S. Department of State, “Vice President Biden’s Speech at Tel Aviv University,” IIP Digital, March 11, 2010,http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/texttrans/2010/03/20100311123835eaifas0.9307062.html#axzz39BpiUsXk. (Emphasis added.)

  39 Mart, “Eleanor Roosevelt, Liberalism, and Israel,” 75.

  40 Author interview with a high-ranking Taiwanese official on visit to Taiwan, 2002.

  41 Melissa Radler, “Poll Shows Americans Back Israel in Intifada,” Jerusalem Post, March 14, 2001; The Israel Project Election Day Survey, November 4, 2008, http://www.theisraelproject.org/atf/cf/%7B84DC5887–741E-4056–8D91-A389164BC94E%7D/081620%20TIP%20ELECTION%20NIGHT%20FOR%20RELEASE.PPT#1.

  42 Green, “The American Public and Sympathy for Israel”; “Modest Backing for Israel in Gaza Crisis,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, January 13, 2009, http://people-press.org:80/report/482/israel-hamas-conflict.

  43 Jerome A. Chanes, “Antisemitism and Jewish Security in AmericaToday,” in Jerome A. Chanes, ed., Antisemitism in America Today: Outspoken Experts Explode the Myths (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1995), 14.

  44 Edward Linenthal, American Sacred Space (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 222–224.

  45 Eyal Naveh, “Unconventional ‘Christian Zionist’: The Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and His Attitude toward the Jewish National Movement,” Studies in Zionism 11, no. 2 (1990) Mart, “Eleanor Roosevelt, Liberalism, and Israel,” 66.

  46 Ronald Reagan, An American Life (London: Hutchison, 1990), 410. On Truman and Johnson see Elizabeth Stephens, U.S. Policy towards Israel: The Role of Political Culture in Defining the “Special Relationship” (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), 89; Lenny Ben-David, ‘Lyndon Johnson – A Friend in Deed,’ Jerusalem Post, September 10, 2008.

  47 John McCain, “Why Israel,” Reader’s Digest, December 2003, 126–127. (Emphasis added.)

  48 “Public Opinion toward Foreign Aid,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/poaid.html; see also CNN Poll, August 2–3, 2006; CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, September 14–15, 2001; “Most Americans Favor End to U.S. Foreign Aid to Middle East, Except Israel,’ Rasmussen Reports, February 25, 2011, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/israel_the_middle_east/most_americans_favor_end_to_u_s_foreign_aid_to_middle_east_except_israel.

  49 “Global Views 2006,” Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Public Topline Report, October 2006, http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/UserFiles/File/POS_Topline%20Reports/POS%202006/2006%20US%20Topline.pdf.

  50 “Goal of Libyan Operation Less Clear to Public: Top Middle East Priority: Preventing Terrorism,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, April 5, 2011, http://www.people-press.org/2011/04/05/goal-of-libyan-operation-less-clear-to-public.

  51 A. F. K. Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 40–42.

  52 Ronald Reagan, “Recognizing the Israeli Asset,” Washington Post, August 15, 1979.

  53 For the Harris, USA Today, and Rasmussen polls, see “Reliable Ally Polls,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/poally.html; s
ee also “Americans Have Very Different Attitudes to Different Countries in, or near the Middle East,” The Harris Poll, November 20, 2009, http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/Harris-Interactive-Poll-Research-Middle-East-Allies-2009–11.pdf; “Egypt, Kuwait Top the List of Countries in the Middle East That Americans Think of as Friendly,” The Harris Poll, November 10, 2010, http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/mid/1508/ArticleId/619/Default.aspx.

  54 “Worldviews 2002: American Public Opinion and Foreign Policy,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/UserFiles/File/POS_Topline%20Reports/POS%202002/2002_US_Report.pdf.

  55 Constrained Internationalism: Adapting to New Realities: Results of a 2010 National Survey of Public Opinion, (Chicago: The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2010), http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/UserFiles/File/POS_Topline%20Reports/POS%202010/Global%20Views%202010.pdf; Jeffrey Jones, “In U.S., 6 in 10 View Iran as Critical Threat to U.S. Interests,” Gallup, February 16, 2010, http://www.gallup.com/poll/125996/View-Iran-Critical-Threat-Interests.aspx?CSTS=alert. On perceptions of the threat from Islamist extremist groups, see “More See America’s Loss of Global Respect as Major Problem,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, June 16, 2008, http://people-press.org/2008/06/16/more-see-americas-loss-of-global-respect-as-major-problem/; “U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, December 3, 2009, http://people-press.org/2009/12/03/us-seen-as-less-important-china-as-more-powerful/.