Why Israel Matters to Americans part one
Jews and Israel in the American consciousness and imagination.
Israel is the
victor. It is a pioneer. An innovator. It took land without a people and made
it blossom at the hands of a people without a land. Israel is necessary. Israel
is a haven. It is moral. It is a democracy. Israel is... Israel is... America. Israel
occupies, no pun intended, a unique position in the American news media landscape, in its political landscape,
and, more than anywhere else, in the American consciousness and imagination.
There is an
assumption of virtue, of a greater good, in America's official history that has
been consciously reproduced by Israel's advocates for a large part of the last
century in an attempt to Americanize the Israeli project. And so when the
curtain is pulled away to reveal the violence that upholds Israel's existence, there
is an understanding from the United States of the "necessity" of this
violence. Because Israeli violence is necessary to protect Israel from threats
to its exceptional existence. Just as American violence is necessary to protect
the United States from threats to its exceptional existence.
How Israel is
covered in the U.S. news and popular media serves to obscure the biggest thing that
ties the United States and Israel together. They're both settler colonial
states which have been built on the displacement and ethnic cleansing of other
peoples.
And so to tell the
story of Israel in U.S. news media has required, for over seven decades, the
disappearance of Palestinians, their history, and their right to their homeland.
Because a cultural narrative about Israel where Palestinians and their history are
front and center, would also then require that we are honest about the violence
that belies every part of the myth of American exceptionalism.
Welcome to “Blog,”
where I tell you the whole story.
Making Israel without Palestine.
In the seven decades
since Israel was established as a state in the British mandate of Palestine, American
engagement - ideological, political, cultural - with the Jewish state has seen different
iterations.
But at its core,
these iterations have relied on being a mirror of the American nation. And in
that mirroring, Israel has been assigned a duality, as both the victim and
victor.
Israel is a victor, emerging
from one of the cruelest crimes of the 20th century as a successful, unified
people who have built a formidable nation despite thousands of years in a
persecuted diaspora.
For a cultural
history that extolls shared values, it must build those shared values in
opposition to other ideas, other values, and in the case of state and
nationalist identities, other people. U.S. News and popular media have built a
case for Israel
reliant on the
disappearance of Palestinians and any claim they have to their land. On the disappearance
of their history of ethnic cleansing, the theft of their lands, and their
ever-expanding diaspora.
Making Palestinians the best pitiful victims.
A counter-narrative
to the American story about Israel that would be told from the Palestinian
vantage point would also indict the
sustained American histories and realities of violence against its Indigenous
and Black populations. Thus, Palestinians must be made into, at best, pitiful
victims caught as collateral in Israel's attempt to defend itself, and at
worst, as generation after generation of “terrorist” threats.
In both
representations of Palestinians, the purpose of the state of Israel, the
political status quo, and its carefully curated image remain intact. Even when
Israeli crimes and transgressions beyond the expanding occupation, land theft, and
apartheid are clear, Israel's moral authority isn't questioned.
Questioning that
moral authority is akin to questioning the necessity of Israel. So how did we
get to this point, where deference to Israel's moral power is reflexive and
unquestioned, a privilege not enjoyed by other countries and nations?
It's too reductive
to think that a pro-Israel lobby is alone in building Israel in the American
landscape, that they alone have had this power. It's also not enough to look at
U.S. foreign policy interests in the region as the sole determinant of Israel's
narrative power in U.S. news and popular media.
Both those things
are central, of course, but what brings it all together is the cultural history
of Israel in the United States,
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