In his quest to discover the sources of the growing rift between American Jewry and Israel, Daniel Gordis convincingly arguesthat, rather than being traceable to the character of Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, or to changing patterns in American Jewish life, the rift is over issues of “moral and political essence and ideology”—issues of, in a word, identity. He proceeds to diagnose four divergent “political and cultural assumptions” that, taken together, expose the ways in which Israel and America represent “two fundamentally different if not antithetical political projects.” Although the resultant tensions between Israeli and American Jews are “as old as Israel itself,” rarely if ever have they generated the fissures currently dividing the two communities. The question, then, is: why now?
In what follows, I mean to expand on the reasons advanced by Gordis with some background reminders from American political history. This history shows that inter-communal tensions are not the only or even the most important factors in the rift. Although, as Gordis notes, suspicion and misunderstanding plagued relations between American Jews and the Jewish state from Israel’s inception, they were also tied in great part to a tension that pervaded U.S.-Israel ties more broadly, and that has its locus in the shifting priorities of American foreign policy.
In May 1948,President Harry Truman swiftly extended diplomatic recognition to the newly born state of Israel. Nevertheless, during its War of Independence, he also imposed an arms embargo that imperiled Israel’s ability to repel invading Arab armies. For his part, Truman’s successor Dwight Eisenhower at firstdistanced America from Israel as he sought to win over Gamal Abdel Nasser and convert the Egyptian dictator’s influence into coin on the Arab street more generally. His administration even established a CIA front group to counteract popular American sympathy for Zionism.
Although the relationship improved somewhat under the Kennedy administration, it remained tepid until the Six-Day War. Just as Jerusalem’s stunning success in that conflict “did much,” as Gordis writes, “to soften feelings” toward Israel among American Jews, more significantly it did the same in Washington. Israel’s victory demonstrated the logic of a U.S.-Israel alliance. Morally, the Jewish state represented at once a fellow democracy in a region otherwise devoid of free societies and a plucky underdog pursuing its national self-determination in the mold of America’s founding fathers. Strategically, Israel could serve as America’s battleship in the Middle East; armed with U.S. weapons, it could help balance and beat back Soviet power.
The new partnership quickly took hold. President Lyndon Johnson began to speak of the Jewish state with the moral conviction that would become common among later presidents. Soon after the war, when the Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin asked why the U.S. would back a country with only three million citizens against 80 million Arabs, Johnson responded: “because it is right.” Many Americans appeared to agree. In June 1967, a Gallup poll had found 38 percent sympathizing more with Israel than with the Arab nations; by January 1969, that number had jumped to 50 percent.
Throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s—despite Arab oil embargoes, despite the humiliation of the American defeat in Vietnam and the ensuing years of foreign-policy confusion and disillusionment—Israel successfully reinforced its moral alignment with the United States. It did so through its performance as the forward arsenal of American might in the Middle East. As I’verecounted elsewhere, Israel saved the U.S.-backed Hashemite kingdom in Jordan from a Syrian invasion, humiliated the Soviet Union by downing its planes over the Suez Canal, and opened the port of Haifa to the U.S. Sixth Fleet to counter the Soviet presence in Syria. Most spectacularly, in the summer of 1982, Israeli pilots flying U.S. planes downed 86 Syrian-manned Soviet MiGs without suffering a single loss.
Israel’s achievements generated American goodwill. When asked in the 1970s whether a so-called Jewish lobby was taking over Congress, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Democratic Senator from Washington, responded that Americans of all kinds, far from being in the thrall of lobbyists, “respect competence. They like that we are on the side which seems to know what it’s doing.” In 1988, 63 percent of Americans averred to pollsters that an “extremely important” or “very important” reason for U.S. support of Israel was that the country was “the most outspoken foe of Communism in the Middle East and its strength prevents the Soviets from gaining even further influence in the region.”
American Jews, for their part, largely adhered to the same views. Not only did they remain strongly pro-Israel, but, as Gordis points out, they “saw no friction between those feelings and their feelings as proud Americans.” And this seamless support would persist, at least on the surface, throughout the Reagan presidency and until the collapse of the Soviet empire—after which the tectonic plates undergirding the U.S.-Israel alliance and, correspondingly, the American Jewish relationship with Israel began to shift.
