Our American Israel

“Our American Israel is masterful and deserves a larger audience.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates

An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays our in our own time.

In 1945, it was not inevitable that a global superpower emerging victorious from World War II would come to identify with a small state for Jewish refugees, refugees who at that time were still being turned away from the United States. How, then, did so many in America come to feel that the bond between it and Israel was historically inevitable, morally right, and a matter of common sense. Our American Israel reveals how Israel’s identity has long been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Beginning at the end of World War II with debates about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and continuing through both the rise of evangelical Christian Zionism and the war on terror, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.

Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations’ histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon; its military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity.

In America today, Israel’s political realities pose profoundly difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that threaten to divide them.