America in Israel, Israel in America

2,948 words

Amy Kaplan
Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018

It is well known that Zionist Jews used their incredible influence upon American society and the Truman administration to achieve American recognition and support for the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. It is likewise known that Christian Zionists continue to support Israel to the furthest degree which the highly limited white Christian influence upon America goes.

It is not well known, however, that liberal, old–stock American whites played an influential role in generating American support for the creation of Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Liberal support for Israel from came about through metapolitical effort in media outlets such as The Nation and through the work of an American “civil rights”-supporting lawyer named Bartley Crum.[1] Crum was a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which was chartered to determine the future status of Palestine, then part of the British Empire under a mandate which originated with the League of Nations.

The reason for the Committee was that during the First World War, the British had promised that Palestine would become a homeland for the Jews. This promise turned out to be easy to make, but hard to enact. Jews settled in British-ruled Palestine, but immediately came into conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. The British responded by shutting down Jewish immigration and vacillating on what to do.

The British Empire was falling apart by the end of the Second World War. In Mandatory Palestine, aggressive Jewish settlers had begun waging a campaign of terror against the British in an effort to get them to leave. In Europe, Jews were being housed in camps for displaced persons, and their plight was a humanitarian crisis. In America, Jewish ethnonationalists were urging the Truman administration to “do something.”

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry’s majority opinion was to implement a series of vague half-measures which would be implemented by a new trusteeship created by the United Nations. Crum and a British member of the Committee, Richard Crossman, were the only two members to endorse separating Mandatory Palestine into independent Jewish and Arab nations.

The Americans on the Committee of Inquiry saw a parallel vision of America in Jewish Palestine. Crum thought the region looked like California, while others saw Texas. The British members rather felt that the region was simply alien territory. Both Crossman and Crum were bedazzled by visions of technocratic progress, while Crum envisioned New Deal-style projects for Palestine similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority, which would create large-scale agricultural production. Crossman, for his part, a Labour Party socialist, was smitten by Israel’s communal kibitzes.

In the mid-1940s, the American public was hostile to Jewish immigration into America from Europe. Moving Jews to Palestine was supported by many Americans, however. Editorials and features endorsing it appeared in the mainstream press, including The Nation, a liberal magazine which was edited by Freda Kirchwey, an old-stock American. Kirchwey framed the Zionist project in American terms according to which ships bringing Jewish immigrants to Palestine were like the Mayflower. The Zionist struggle for independence against the British was analogized to that of the American struggle for independence, with the Arabs standing in for the Iroquois.

The contradictions in the Zionist project were not noticed by any of the American liberals who supported Israel, however. Arabs were not small bands of Amerindians living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They were in fact a civilized people being dispossessed through naked aggression. These liberals likewise failed to see the long-term trouble that support for Israel would cause Americans.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, American liberals covering the conflict, including Kirchwey, reported on the war through a highly slanted viewpoint. They reported on fleeing Palestinians and Jewish militia activity, but failed to connect the dots that it was armed Jewish settlers who were driving Palestinians out of their homes and towns. They also exaggerated Arab, and especially Palestinian, military capabilities. In 1948 the Palestinians had few, if any, modern weapons, and little to no ammunition. The Arab countries were similarly underequipped, poorly trained, and badly divided.

The warped view that Americans had of the situation was partially due to the flaws in the thinking of American liberals. These liberals were internationalists who supported the United Nations and wanted it to intervene, such as by supporting the partitioning of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Crum was also a supporter of liberal Republican Windel Wilkie. Wilkie had written a bestseller called One World in 1943. Liberals such as Crum and Kirchwey were similarly biased when it came to Communism, and didn’t see the Soviets as the threat they were. Kirchwey was a proud anti-anti-Communist who saw fascism behind every bush in America.

These liberals failed to see the problems that Israel would cause the US in the future because those who believe in “civil rights” always fail to properly interpret facts. In the same way that liberals fail to see biological differences between whites and sub-Saharans as the cause of so much trouble in America, they failed to see that the Jews in Palestine were carrying out ethnic cleansing.

Exodus

A major metapolitical effort which Americanized the Zionist story was the 1958 novel Exodus by Leon Uris, a Jew. Uris was already an established writer, and he included fictional accounts of the Holocaust in the book. These are semi-pornographic and filled with preposterous atrocities. For example, the character of Dov, played by Sal Mineo in the film, was “used as a woman” by camp guards in the book. (In the film, Dov is a collaborator.) The American public lapped up Uris’ writings.

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Uris was encouraged to write Exodus by Zionist Jews in Hollywood. The film, which came out in 1960, was directed by Otto Preminger and is essentially a Western. Uris and Dalton Trumbo, a Communist, served as the screenwriters. The film stars Paul Newman as Ari Ben Cannan, a Palestine-born Hagenah fighter, and Eva Maria Saint as the American Protestant Kitty Fremont.

The plot centers upon the passengers of a ship, the Exodus, which is filled with Jewish refugees seeking to leave Cyprus and settle in Israel. In the film, the settlers arrive in Palestine in time to participate in the 1948 Arab-Israel War and the creation of the Israeli state. (The actual Exodus was turned back to Europe and was crewed by Americans. The project was a deliberate publicity stunt whose spokesman was a Yankee Protestant minister with a New England accent.)

Exodus makes the British the antagonists, continuing the American liberal view of Zionism as being akin that of the American struggle for independence. The casting of Paul Newman is also significant. While Paul Newman did have a Jewish father, he married two old-stock American women and didn’t look or act in a Jewish manner. Newman was an example of masculine American whiteness, furthering the Americanization of Zionism.

Exodus’ dialogue directly compares the Zionist project to America’s War of Independence. For example:

Kitty Fremont: You can’t fight the whole British Empire with 600 people! It isn’t possible.

Ari Ben Canaan: How many Minutemen did you have at Concord that fired the shot heard ‘round the world? 77.

The Exodus film’s power goes beyond the Americanization of Zionism. It also ties into the idea of an American “Judeo-Christian Heritage” which was just beginning to emerge in America as a result of the Cold War. Kitty Fremont, for example, sees Israel through the lens of her Christian upbringing.

The Arabs are kept in the background in Exodus, and depicted similarly to the Indians who the British armed and organized against the colonial Americans. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem is merely referred to as a Nazi, and his genuine concerns for the fate of his people are completely dismissed. The musical score was penned and sung by Pat Boone, an old-stock American born-again Christian, thus furthering Christian Zionist ideology and the idea of an American Judeo-Christian heritage.

1967

The United States had a splendid little war in 1898. Upper-class Americans with educations and high IQs joined the US Army in enormous numbers and the colonies of the Spanish Empire became American possessions after a series of lightning victories. But in 1967, the United States was mired in Vietnam. Americans with educations dodged military service. Those who joined the National Guard or the Reserves did so knowing they would never be deployed. Apart from a small number of volunteers who became aircrews, the military was filled out with draftees who mostly didn’t have the education, money, or connections to get out of service. The US military was also integrated and endorsed a “civil rights” ideology, so racial problems sucked away its initiative and discipline.

Israel in 1967 was in a different situation. Its ranks were filled out with willing citizens who were highly motivated. The Israelis were also well-equipped with American and French weapons. On June 5, 1967, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground, and a few days later, Israeli troops had seized the Siani Peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights. The Israelis also attempted to sink the USS Liberty with all hands. The war was over in six days.

The American response to the Israeli victory was admiration. The Americans found colorful individual heroes in the Israeli military. The Israeli victory was in sharp contrast to the American effort in Vietnam, where no progress was being made whatsoever.

The Six-Day War created a narrative of Israel as the invincible victim. Kagan argues that the concept of the invincible victim applies to the United States as well. In the 1960s, Americans feared nuclear annihilation despite the fact that the US was bristling with atomic weapons and had successfully used two against Japan.

Lebanon 1982

Israel’s image took an enormous hit when they invaded Lebanon in 1982. The war was effectively an imperialist venture in which Israeli problems at home were expected to be resolved through violence abroad. The war shocked American liberals. In earlier conflicts with Israel the Arabs deported the international press, but in Lebanon the press was allowed to remain in Beirut. They published stories about families killed by Israeli bombs. The Lebanon War took place within the larger context of Lebanon’s vicious civil war, and the Israelis supported a local militia that massacred Palestinian refugees.

The Lebanon War also took place when critics of Israel were starting to organize and get their message out. In the 1980s, Republican Congressman Paul Findley started to speak out against Israeli actions. Kaplan doesn’t mention critics such as Wilmot Robertson, instead pointing to non-white radicals who saw Israel as a colonial project, countering the narrative of Zionism being an anti-colonial movement. These non-white critics of Israel caused Jewish Leftists to become neoconservatives. The neoconservatives then became an important pillar in the Reagan administration.

Incidentally, the word “colonialism” has become a liberal devil word. Zionism was and is both an anti-colonial movement against the British Empire and a colonial project of global Jewry, respectively. If the Jews hadn’t returned to Palestine in the early twentieth century, and instead been there all along, decolonized Palestine would be no different from India or Pakistan, Cyprus or North Cyprus, or Sri Lanka.

The Holocaust narrative

Although Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) discuss Nazi killings of Jews as only a backdrop to their respective plots, the Holocaust was not part of the American conversation in the first three decades after the Second World War. Richard Nixon, for example, only saw arming Israel during the Yom Kippur War in strategic anti-Soviet terms rather than in terms of saving the Israelis from genocide. However, by the late 1970s Holocaust propaganda started to appear on television, books, and movies.

The most influential Holocaust film to date is Schindler’s List (1993). Its final scene is set to the song “Jerusalem is Gold,” which is an anachronism. The song didn’t become popular until the Six-Day War in 1967. But it’s a subtle example of how the Holocaust narrative now serves as a shield for Israeli military actions, however illegal or egregious. Every attack upon Palestinians or other Muslim nations are justified by the Israeli government in terms of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust narrative has now become entwined in America’s story as well. The US’ only role in the Holocaust was to liberate the camps. But a new idea has sprung up in recent decades which suggests that the Roosevelt administration could have stopped the killings if had he sent his bombers to attack the gas chambers at the concentration camps. Of this Kaplan writes:

The conviction that bombing Auschwitz would have rescued Jews draws on the moral clarity of hindsight and a magical belief in the efficacy of airpower. The assumption that the United States bears responsibility for not bombing Auschwitz gives added significance to the phrase “Never Again,” and it has been mobilized for different political purposes. In the opening ceremonies for the [Holocaust] museum, [Eli] Wiesel raised this failure in order to exhort Clinton to “do something” in Kosovo. And when NATO carried out its controversial air strikes in 1999, Wiesel praised the United States for taking the kind of action in Kosovo that it had failed to take during World War II. (p. 205)

The end times

America is a nation with a deeply Anglo–Protestant core. From the very beginning, Americans saw themselves as a chosen people bound for the promised land. When Israel was established, many Christian believers interpreted the event as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Kaplan writes:

Pat Boone’s lifelong involvement with Israel exemplifies the potent mix of popular culture, masculine militarism, and belief in biblical prophecy that bonds conservative American evangelicals to the modern nation of Israel. In the right-wing turn in both countries, evangelicals equated support for Israel’s expansionist polices with the revival of military power in the United States. Israel, they believed, had a special role to play both at the end of times and in the present, by combatting America’s decline and renewing belief in American exceptionalism. Boone contributed to the emergence of the Christian Right as a political force on the national scene. His was a well-known public face on cable television’s evangelical circuit, where he appeared with celebrity preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart. Boone also worked behind the scenes in California with a coterie of businessmen, politicians, and evangelical leaders to help elect his good friend Ronald Reagan as governor of California in 1967 and president of the United States in 1980. In the presidential election, the influence of Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority helped a group of neoconservatives make Israel central to Reagan’s foreign policy. (p. 213)

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Other metapolitical works served to bind American Christians to Israel. In 1970, a Korean War veteran named Hal Lindsey wrote The Late Great Planet Earth in which he argued that the legions of problems in the 1970s, including crime, social decay, drugs, and Third World revolutionary movements were part of a divine plan to bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ and that Israel would play an important role in it.

Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins started publishing the Left Behind series in 1995, which took the theological concept of premillennial dispensationalism, or the idea that Christians will be raptured and leave the Antichrist free to rule this world, and turned it into a series of techno-thriller novels where a remnant of Christian Americans and Israeli converts outwit the new evil order following the Rapture. The Left Behind universe was turned into movies, video games, and a specialized series for teens and military personnel. Both Left Behind and The Late Great Planet Earth enjoyed enormous sales and reached an audience which went far beyond Christian Zionists. On a personal note, when I was in the military, I met a Jewish soldier who was a superfan of the Left Behind series.

The invincible victim narrative entered the mainstream after 9/11, where Americans were told that they had been attacked for their “freedoms” rather than due to America’s support for Israel. After 9/11, methods used by the Israelis began to be taught to the US military and American law enforcement. In 2002, for example, after action reports from Israeli operations in the West Bank were sent to American infantrymen for study. On a personal note, I read these after action reports myself and conducted military drills based on the lessons learned by the Israelis.

A break between liberal Jews and Israel?

Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel doesn’t say anything that Wilmot Robertson, David Duke, or Kevin MacDonald haven’t already said before. Israel is not a particularly good American ally, and Christian Zionists are misguided. In Kaplan’s book we see a possible developing trend in which liberal Jews are breaking with Israel. Liberals in Israel are also entering into bitter opposition with Right-wing Jews in America. One such Jew is Moshe Koppel, who is attempting to shape Israeli society along conservative-libertarian lines. Koppel is starting to be seen in Israel the way George Soros is seen in Europe and America: as the shadowy actor behind every bad event.

There is no way to foresee how this trend will play out. Liberal Jews in America remain hostile to old-stock Americans in general and Evangelical Protestants in particular. With so much polarization and so many metapolitical linkages, the final break could wind up in a nasty divorce, indeed. One thing that white advocates and old-stock Americans can do, however, is to fall back on the old, time-tested American principle of isolationism.

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Note

[1] There is also something of a death wish among those liberals who became Communists or flirted with the ideology. Bartley Crum died by suicide in 1959. Additionally, the ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers’ brother died by suicide, and he attempted it himself. The Communist Alger Hiss’ father likewise died by suicide.