Why Israel Matters to Americans part two
America Israel the story of the entangled alliance.
How Israel was
understood by Americans in the aftermath of the Second World War, and how much
of that has been a mirroring of how the
United States sees itself.
There's a tendency
to believe that the horrors of the Holocaust are what led to American support and
sympathy for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. But the late Dr.
Amy Kaplan, in her 2018 book, “Our American Israel,” makes the argument that
for Israel to be embraced by Americans, the idea of Israel had to be
Americanized.
She writes Israel's
"proponents attributed New World meanings, symbols, and mythologies to a European movement to establish a Jewish polity
in the Arab Middle East. They drew parallels between 'Mayflower' Pilgrims and
Jewish pioneers in the familiar landscape of the biblical Promised Land, and
they presented Zionist settlement as enacting American ideas of modern
development."
And this mirroring,
according to Kaplan, wasn't hard to do, especially when both shared a belief in
their exceptionalism as signified by how they celebrated their anti-colonial
origins,
struggling against
the British Empire, and distancing themselves from the violent conquest at the
center of their founding.
Just as Indigenous
peoples are erased from the founding of an America free from British
colonizers, Palestinians mostly disappeared in Israel's founding. At the
founding of the Israeli state, there was almost no recognition of Palestinians
at all. Even the word Palestinian was often used to refer to Palestinian Jews, people
who had moved there.
Palestinian Arabs
were all but invisible. They were talked about only as refugees. The idea that
they even represented a national consciousness was nowhere to be seen. So it
was the Israelis who had the narrative of decolonization and nationalism behind
them.
While some major
news media like "The New York Times" were vehemently anti-Zionist, the
narrative of decolonization and nationalism was embraced by many non-Jewish
American liberals and progressives. They saw a Jewish state as the perfect
rebuke to Nazi fascism, paralleling the official narrative of the U.S. defeat
of Nazi Germany.
They also saw Israel
as an actualization of socialist ideals, especially with the establishment of kibbutzim
and the Soviet Union’s initial support for Israel.
“The Nation,” a
left-leaning magazine, was home to some of the biggest and most active support
of Israel and helped create the blueprint for how the narrative of Israel would
come to be embraced in the United States news media for the coming decades,
even if “The Nation” evolved its own position on Israel over time. The Jewish
Agency, founded by socialist Zionists who helped organize and fund Jewish
immigration to Palestine, gave “The Nation” a grant of $50,000 in 1947, for the
purposes of, “conducting research and publishing articles and reports and
promoting the Zionist cause among American liberals and foreign delegates to
the United Nations.” Emboldened by this, its longtime editor, Freda Kirchwey,
dedicated the pages of “The Nation” and its entire publishing institution to
lobbying for the Zionist cause.
“The Nation” making the case for Israel
Between 1947 and
1954, Nation Associates, which was responsible for publishing the magazine,
produced 12 widely distributed reports campaigning for the Zionist cause. Kirchwey
even wrote a 133-page memorandum for the UN on behalf of “The Nation,” making
the case for Israel and tying the Arab Palestinians to the Nazis, which became
a mainstay of liberal arguments against Palestinian self-determination,
thanks to her
efforts. She ultimately even took credit for pushing the Truman administration
into recognizing the state of Israel. The Jews organized a government over
there, and it's been a successful one ever since.
Now, Kirchwey is just
one of several examples of American media liberals and progressives who worked
diligently and successfully alongside Zionist groups and leaders to make Israel
into a liberal project and ideal that looked like the United States.
And for every
sentence dedicated to what a beacon and necessity Israel were as a pioneering
nation of the so-called “new Jew,” there were many more dedicated to trumpeting
the barbarity, jealousy, and backwardness of Arabs and Muslims. This early
period of creating myths around Israel isn't the only critical era in the
cultural history of Israel in the United States, but it is the bedrock of how
Israel comes to be essentially Americanized in the eyes of the public.
This is the time
when there is buy-in from Americans from all different backgrounds that yeah,
maybe Israel is necessary. Maybe Israel is good. And following this period, we
see tourism to the "land of the Bible," which had existed well before
Israel's establishment, flourish throughout the '50 and '60, as do epic
biblical films and the relationship between Hollywood and Israel itself.
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