U.S.—Israel Relations

ZEV CHAFETS. A Match Made in Heaven: American Jem, Christian Zionists, and One Man 's Expiration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007. Pp. viii + 231.ZVI GANIN. An Uneasy Relationship: American Jewish Leadership and Israel, 1948-1957. Modern Jewish History. Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2005. Pp. xxi + 255.MICHAEL B. OREN. Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007. Pp. xxii + 778.WILLIAM PENCAK. Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654-1800. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 321.ELIZABETH STEPHENS. U.S. Policy towards Israel: The Role of Political Culture in Defining the "Special Relationship. " Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 338.JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN M. WALT. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Pp xxii + 484.In 1918 members of the U.S. House and Senate expressed support for the British Government's Balfour Declaration of November of the previous year. Numerous pro-Declaration statements by individual congressmen alluded to the recent British victory over the Turks in Palestine, seeing it as confirmation and fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Representative William E. Cox of Indiana stated that "just as Moses had led the Israelites out of bondage, so the Allies are now redeeming Judea." Judea, in the senator's mind, merited redemption: for "Rome taught mankind a government of law . . . but it remained for Judea and her people to give mankind the true Christian religion" (Stephens, pp. 12-13). In Cox's formulation, and in the understanding of many Americans of the period, Christians were in debt to Jews, for it was from Judaism that Christianity sprang. That debt could be fulfilled by supporting the establishment of a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine. It is instructive to recall that these congressional statements were made long before there was a State of Israel or an "Israel Lobby."Though the stated objective of the Balfour Declaration was the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, the centrality and sanctity of Palestine was understood by American Protestant elites as a Christian issue. If Jews as a nation were to be accepted into the postwar family of nations, American Protestants had a role to play in this acceptance - for they could explain to the world that Christianity was in debt to Judaism and that Jews were entitled to a land of their own. As Representative Cox noted in his 1918 statement, "These ideals and teachings of the true Christian religion given to searching mankind, makes Judea and her people the greatest on earth" (Stephens, p. 13).Thus, thirty years before the establishment of the State of Israel, "Judea" had replaced "Palestine" as an American way of referring to Palestine. The preconception that "Judea" belonged to the Jews was so powerful it erased consideration of the majority Arab population in the "Land without a people" that awaited "a people without a land." This American perception of "Judea" as Jewish territory explains some of current American support for Israel. But a biblical understanding of the Palestine issue is an important factor not emphasized sufficiently in the six books discussed in this essay.Explaining U.S. support of and fascination with Israel requires a varied tool kit and highly skilled analysis. No one explanation including a biblical one, is sufficient. Elizabeth Stephens's book focuses on the "political culture" aspects of the question, which she contrasts with the "rational choice" theory of many political scientists. These theorists, according to Stephens, "would deny altogether the importance of culture predispositions." Stephens notes that a political culture approach "does not provide the researcher with a systematic theory of political action that can be subjected to the scrutiny of scientific rigour" (p. …