Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and the Wall Street Journal’s Global View columnist. He is the author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2002), perhaps the most important foreign policy book of the past 25 years, and, most recently, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, just published by Knopf. I know from a memorable conversation with him in his office 15 years ago that the book represents both a passion project for Walter. I invited him to write something for us about his interest in the subject that would help us bring the book to the attention of our readers. He has graciously obliged with this column.
About twelve years ago I set out to accomplish what I expected to be a simple and straightforward task: writing a book that would tell readers why so many Americans so persistently support Israel.
Such a book was clearly needed. The conventional wisdom held then as it does now that support for Israel proceeds from American Jews and from pro-Israel evangelicals. Jews are less than two percent of the American population. Evangelicals are harder to count, but the Pew Research Center found that 25 percent of Americans self-identified as evangelicals. However, many American evangelicals are Black and Hispanic. According to the Public Religion Research Institute 2020 Census of American religion, white evangelicals comprise only 14 percent of the American adult population. Add the Jews and the white evangelicals and you get 16 percent of the public.
According to the most recent Gallup survey, however, 71 percent of Americans polled held a positive image of Israel while 55 percent sympathized more with Israel than with the Palestinians. (This was more than double the 26 percent who sympathized more with Palestinians; 18 percent called themselves neutral.)
Frankly, I smelled a rat. Even if every Jew and every evangelical were firmly and loudly pro-Israel, the two groups combined account for less than a quarter of Israel’s support in American public opinion. If something as basic as the sources of American support for Israel was so poorly understood, what else might the conventional wisdom have missed?
It turned out that the conventional wisdom misses a lot. There are many things that “everybody knows” about this relationship that turn out to be plain wrong. Most people, especially but not only younger people, think that America and Israel have always been allies, that support for Israel has always been a conservative political cause, that Israel could not survive without its American alliance, and that American Jews are united behind pushing Israeli interests at every opportunity.
None of this is true. For the first 25 years of Israel’s history, the United States held the Jewish state at arm’s length. The Holy Grail of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy was an alliance with Egypt, not Israeli security. Israel won the 1967 Six Day War with French arms, and it was the French who, against stiff opposition from both Eisenhower and Kennedy, helped Israel develop a nuclear program.
Well into the 1970’s, support for Israel was stronger among American leftists, including the Democratic Socialists of America, than among Republicans and evangelical Christians. In 1948 the Southern Baptist Convention refused to congratulate President Truman on his recognition of the State of Israel. Under John Foster Dulles, the State Department plotted with Britain to detach the Negev from Israel.
Meanwhile support for Israel was a trademark issue of the American left. Black civil rights leaders were among Israel’s strongest and most vocal supporters. Paul Robeson, a gifted and famous Black singer (and Communist Party member), appeared at benefits to raise money for the Irgun, the underground army associated with what, today, in Israel, is the right-wing Likud Party led by Bibi Netanyahu.
As for the role of American Jews in Israel policy, I was astonished to discover that the strongest and most effective American proponents of Zionism have been non-Jewish Americans. In 1891 President Benjamin Harrison received a petition asking him to use American diplomatic influence to support the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The petition was signed by dozens of leading Americans (John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, then-Speaker of the House William McKinley and many of the leading WASP journalists and clergy of the day). Five years before Theodor Herzl launched a Jewish Zionist movement in Vienna, the American establishment was already sold on the idea.
American Jews by contrast were often opposed. Henry Morgenthau, Woodrow Wilson’s Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and perhaps the most politically influential American Jew of the area, did his best to persuade Wilson to reject the Balfour Declaration. The New York Times had been a pro-Zionist newspaper under Christian ownership; under a new Jewish owner the paper became a leading anti-Zionist voice.
Researching and writing this book took me more than a decade, but I don’t regret a minute of it. To get to the heart of this story, I had to go deeper into the history of American politics, culture and ideology than ever before. I had to dive into the complicated politics around immigration that led Americans to ban mass immigration for more than 40 years of the 20th century. I had to look into the intellectual history of both the left and the right, study the role of Israel and the Jews in Protestant theology, and re-examine the history of American foreign policy across the 20th and 21st centuries from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump.
This has been the most difficult and rewarding intellectual endeavor of my adult life. If I had fully understood the challenge, I might not have dared to begin. Once the work was underway, however, every new plot twist, every paradox and every puzzle just drew me in deeper.
My hope at this point is that my readers will get the same sense of discovery and delight from reading the book that I did from writing it. This is a story that is even more important than you think it is, that illuminates more of American life than you think it does, and that holds more surprises and even shocks than you think it can.
Reader, I hope you enjoy.
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