Creating the Israeli Myth

Abstract

A March 2018 Gallup poll found that nearly 75% of Americans view the State of Israel in a positive light.1 In a nation that is increasingly divided politically and culturally, support for the Jewish state has remained one of the few bipartisan issues left with a majority of Republicans and Independents, and a near majority of Democrats (49%) firmly in Israel’s corner. As President John F. Kennedy stated, “Friendship with Israel is not a partisan matter, but a national commitment.” But why? Why did U.S. citizens come to see Israel as country worth supporting? And why does the United States often support Israel in the United Nations and other international forums when it is not in its national security interests to do so? Shaul Mitelpunkt, a lecturer in U.S. History at the University of York, attempts to answer these important questions in his impressive first book, Israel in the American Mind. Focusing on the critical three decades between 1958 and 1988, the period when U.S. military, diplomatic, and financial assistance helped make Israel one of the strongest countries in the world, Mitelpunkt successfully demonstrates how the U.S. commitment to Israel is deeply embedded in the intellectual, cultural, and ideological fabric of U.S. society. Elite American commentators—diplomats, journalists, artists, academics, businessmen, scientists, and policymakers—have propagated “imaginary constructions” of Israel as a liberal, democratic society united by a “citizen-soldier” ethos (2–3). Americans, especially in the midst of the political and cultural divisions of the Vietnam era, saw in Israel’s citizen-soldier “utopia” a society that seemed immune to the trends that tore the United States apart during the 1960s and 1970s. “Such perceptions mattered,” Mitelpunkt claims, “because they provided the cultural backdrop that made Americans consider their support for Israel reasonable” (2).