The History of American Debate Over Israel
In the spring, I sent out an interview with Professor Eric Alterman about the history of debate over Israel. Now seems a good time to share his testimony again.
Professor Alterman is a historian and CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism. He was the "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation for 25 years and is a contributing writer both to The Nation and The American Prospect. Professor Alterman is also the author of twelve books, including most recently We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel.
In his book, and in conversation, Professor Alterman explores American Jews’ evolving perceptions of Zionism, the centrality of the Six-Day War (1967) in changing American Jewish sentiment toward Israel, and generational differences in views of Israel and Palestine today. A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. Paying subscribers can also listen to the audio of the conversation, which includes further discussion of the history of Zionism, how the idea of “Never Again” became fused with support for Israel, and more:
Ben: Professor Alterman, thank you so much for being here.
EA: Happy to be here.
Ben: Let’s begin in 1948. Why were there competing views within the U.S. government over supporting the early Israeli state?
EA: Outside of politics, American Jews were grappling with the meaning of the Holocaust. It was such an enormous event that they just couldn’t wrap their heads around it. The people who were trying to alert the world to the atrocities couldn't understand why other people weren't rising up to stop them. It's still hard to explain. So, many American Jews dedicated their efforts instead to supporting the Zionist movement.
Interestingly, American Jews were originally anti-Zionists. In the mid-19th century, about a quarter of a million German Jews came to the U.S. They were Reform Jews who believed that Judaism was a religion but not a people. But between 1880 and 1924, about two million Eastern European Jews came to the U.S., and there were many more Zionists in this widely persecuted cohort.
In the 1940s, a fight broke out inside American Jewry between the Zionists and the non-Zionists. The Zionists won. By 1948, the big question was if the U.S. government would support Israel and the UN’s plan to divide Israel and Palestine into two countries—which gave 55% of the land, along with warm water ports like Jaffa to Jews, who according to UN estimates at the time made up slightly less than a third of the country.
Ben: You write that the dependence of the plan on mutual goodwill and a spirit of compromise meant “the plan might have just as well depended on a herd of unicorns.”
EA: I should also mention that Israel was successful in portraying the displacement of Palestinians as a voluntary departure, launching a propaganda campaign with the help of American Jewish organizations. As a consequence, the Nakba was never understood or known by many people in this country. (The word “Nakba” didn’t even appear in The New York Times until 1998.)
Still, the U.S. national security establishment initially opposed supporting Israel. They worried, among other things, that support would imperil U.S. access to Middle Eastern oil. To sway the Truman administration, American Jews launched one of the largest lobbying campaigns in all of history. The sheer amount of letters written to the president and Congress, and the amount of money that was raised for Israelis, the weapons that people helped smuggle — there's never been anything like it.
Ben: — with one obvious caveat: we still don’t know the precise statistics behind the lobbying campaign in 1995 to create International Speak Like a Pirate Day.
EA: …right.
Back in the 1940s, American Jews’ efforts worked, and Truman ended up supporting the founding of Israel in 1948.
Notably, afterward, American Jews largely went back to their own business of caring about separation of church and state, civil rights, building synagogues, etc. It wasn't really until the Six-Day War in 1967 that we entered the modern era of Israel being at the center of American Jewish identity.
Ben: In many ways at the center of the war, from an American perspective, was the book and the movie Exodus, published in 1958 and 1960, respectively.
EA: Exactly. The story that Exodus told was the story that many people had in their heads during the war.
The film stars Paul Newman as a beautiful, strong Jewish man in a sort of cowboys and Indians tale, with the Arabs cast as Indians. It’s very Americanized. The Jews overcome long odds to defeat their Arab enemies.
For many American Jews, the fiction became a reality during the Six-Day War. Israel defeated armies primarily from Syria, Egypt, and Jordan in just six days, which happens to be just how long the Book of Genesis said it took God to create the universe. Many American Jews felt like God had actually stepped in. It was transformative for them to see Israelis win in a way that seemed to sync with the image of Paul Newman glistening in the sun.
Ben: You cite literary scholar Amy Kaplan, who wrote that after the war, “Israel came to appear both vulnerable and invincible at the same time—at risk of destruction yet militarily indomitable.”
EA: I quote other rabbis and scholars who have similar analyses of how, after the war, American Jewish identity became enmeshed with Zionism. After 1967, if you stepped over the line on Israel, you were functionally excommunicated from the Jewish community. You could go to a synagogue and say, I don't believe in God, I don't keep kosher, I don’t mind if my kids marry outside of Judaism, and it’d be okay. But if you said, I don't like Israel, they’d show you the door.
There’s a whole other, complicated, related topic here, too: lingering shame in the Jewish community after the Holocaust. Israel’s sweeping victory — which should come as no surprise, seeing as they were and remain far better militarily equipped than their enemies — deepened a belief that Jews needed Israel to prevent another Holocaust.
Of course, saying there will be another Holocaust unless Israel is strong and suggesting that if you deny this idea you're disrespecting the memory of the Holocaust, as American and Israeli leaders began to do, also limited critical dialogue of Israel’s actions. The New Left and Black Power groups criticized Israel, but only in 1982 did prominent Jews start to do the same.
Ben: — when Israel invaded Lebanon.
EA: Yes, and abetted the massacres at two heavily populated Palestinian refugee camps near Beirut (Sabra and Shatila). The world began to see on television that there was more than one side to this debate.
Ben: You point out that, around this time, a rising constellation of pro-Israel forces came together: a coterie of neoconservative, war-hawky writers, editors, and political operatives; a newly politicized Christian conservative movement; and an expanded and emboldened American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
EA: Simply put, the neocons and AIPAC were bullies. Their coterie of writers made life difficult for anyone who stepped outside the lines of what they felt was appropriate criticism of Israel. They thought arming Israel would expand U.S. military might and influence in the Middle East (the security establishment had reversed course from the 1940s). I compare AIPAC’s organizational structure and continued influence to the National Rifle Association.
As for the Christian conservatives, their support for Zionism goes back hundreds of years. It’s based on the Book of Revelations, which predicts the second coming of Jesus and Armageddon happening simultaneously. Prominent evangelicals close to the Reagan administration, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, believed that the founding of the state of Israel and the ‘67 war were clear evidence that God was preparing us for Armageddon, a view they spread to their millions of followers.
Today, the neocons are less powerful but still influential, while AIPAC recently started its own super PAC. And a conservative Christian Zionist named John Hagee runs the largest pro-Israel organization in the world. The upshot is that many American Jews would like to see human rights considerations placed on aid to Israel but it's impossible to do, both thanks to the influence of the above groups and continuing support for Israel in the Democratic Party.
Ben: And yet, in public discourse at least, there’s been a leftist turn in the debate about Israel over the last 15 years, driven by younger generations.
How do you reflect on changes in the conversation about Israel and Palestine in the U.S. vis-a-vis the actual reality on the ground?
EA: You ask a lot of big questions.
Ben: Ha, they were inspired by your book!
EA: I think a central issue is that American Jews, who are mostly liberal, see an Israel that is mostly right-wing. Israel's the only putatively democratic country in the world that liked Trump better than Obama or Biden, and polls show that Israeli Jews are more right-wing than their parents, while American Jews are more left-wing than their parents. So there's a split going on, which is why my book is called We Are Not One.
In my view, you can say, I'm laying aside my liberalism because Israel's more important to me, but you can’t say, here’s a liberal case for supporting Israel. To me, this speaks to a necessity for diaspora Jews to figure out what being Jewish means outside of Zionism in a way that we haven’t fully reckoned with for decades.
I hope my book helps spark some of that conversation.
Ben: Well, it certainly did for me. Professor Alterman, thank you so much for your time.
EA: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.