‘A Piece of Something Bigger’: Why Has the US-Israel Friendship Survived?

Understanding the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel requires knowledge of both America’s global vision and the long-held beliefs of its people, Hudson Institute fellow and foreign policy observer Walter Russell Mead told The Algemeiner.

In an interview last week, the Wall Street Journal columnist and author of works including “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World,” discussed his latest release, “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People,” a comprehensive analysis on the origins of US support for the Jewish State.

“Israel policy is a piece of something much bigger,” Mead said. “You actually do have to understand America and American history: Why do Americans think the way they do about Israel? How did America develop a culture that was able to accommodate large numbers of Jews without degenerating into some of the worst antisemitism that we see? Once you start getting to the story of the ‘special relationship,’ you have to talk about American foreign policy as a whole.”

Mead explained that common misconceptions about American support for Israel are often based on antisemitic conspiracies holding that American Jews exert inordinate influence on the media and foreign policy officials.

A deeper dive into the subject, however, reveals a very different story going back to the Protestant Reformation, which in the English speaking world led to newfound interest in the Old Testament. It also brought declining belief in “supersessionism,” the idea that the advent of Christianity marked the end of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, and a rising conviction, shared mostly among evangelical dispensationalists, that the Biblical prophecies of Christianity could not be fulfilled until Jews returned to the Holy Land.

Years before Theodore Herzl wrote “The Jewish State,” Mead continued, America’s “Zionism of the Gentiles” attracted evangelicals but also non-evangelical Christians and secularists, who hoped that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would be an American-style democracy that vindicated their belief in the goodness of the American project. Many early supporters of Zionism saw the ideology as part of a larger international project and also supported national self-determination movements in Greek and Italy.

“What people often overlook, for example, is the Blackstone Memorial, which was a petition presented to President Benjamin Harrison in 1891 by evangelical minister William Blackstone with signatures from 400 prominent Americans, urging the establishment of a Jewish state in what was then Ottoman Palestine,” Mead said. “It was signed by non-Jews like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, neither of whom likely shared Blackstone’s theology, but who, looking at the situation of Jews in Europe and especially in Alexander III’s Russia, believed a Jewish homeland was the best possible solution for ending centuries of state-sponsored cruelty.”

The Blackstone Memorial set the parameters of mainstream American thinking about Zionism and was later enshrined in US law, when in 1922 the Congress passed a resolution endorsing “the establishment in Palestine of the National Home for the Jewish People.” But during debates on the partition of Palestine in the United Nations after World War II, its principal aim was largely opposed by State Department officials who either didn’t take it seriously or feared that establishing a Jewish state would incite radical political movements in the region and threaten American and British access to Arab oil.

When, in 1948, US President Harry Truman made the US the first country to recognize Israel’s independence, he did so against the counsel of his Secretary of State, George Marshall.

But neither non-Jewish Zionists nor a supposed “Jewish Lobby” forced Truman’s hand, Mead argued. He was moved by currents in American domestic politics: recognizing Israel’s independence, a measure perceived by Democratic liberals as endorsing the United Nations’s ability to solve complex world problems, helped hold the party together as he pivoted toward the Cold War.

During subsequent administrations, however, America kept Israel at “arms length” as it focused on creating anti-Soviet alliances with Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, and Egypt.

It wasn’t until the 1970s — by which time Israel had won several wars that threatened its survival, acquired nuclear weapons, and emerged as a regional power — that the US found itself truly aligned with Israel geopolitically. Only in 1987 did President Ronald Reagan declare Israel a “major non-NATO ally.”

“The 70s and 80s were years when American foreign policy strategists aligned America’s relationship with Israel with its goals for regional order in the Middle East,” Mead said.

Mead said that he hopes his book will show that, while US support for Israel is deeply embedded in American culture, the relationship is also a result of aligned strategic goals.

Those who hold on to the canard that Jews wield undue influence in America, “fundamentally misunderstand the forces that move and shape American policy,” he said.

Today, strategic considerations continue to sustain the relationship, with Israel being a “much more important state and valuable ally than ever before.”

“If the United States decided to end [the alliance], it’s not that Israel would be suddenly friendless and driven into the sea, but rather that other countries like China, India, and Russia would line up to get access to Israeli technology and access to all things that Israel contributes to the world today,” Mead said. “Israel is not a helpless client, it’s a regional superpower.”

But Mead said such a scenario is unlikely.

“My best guess is that both the US and Israel will continue to see significant value in their alliance.”