Why Israel Matters to Americans

Israel & America

Israel is the victor. It is a pioneer. An innovator. It took land without a people and made it blossom at the hands of a people without a land. Israel is necessary. Israel is a haven. It is not moral. It is not democracy. It's a terrorism.

Israel is...

Israel is...

America.

Israel occupies, no pun intended, a unique position in the American news media landscape, in its political landscape, and, more than anywhere else, in the American consciousness and imagination.

So let me be clear about what I believe. I am against Israel because I believe that they occupied Palestine and again & again they do genocide on Palestine.

Its cause is the shared history and common values that draw America and Israel together.

There is an assumption of virtue, of a greater good, in America's official history that has been consciously reproduced by Israel's advocates for a large part of the last century in an attempt to Americanize the Israeli project.

And so when the curtain is pulled away to reveal the violence that upholds Israel's existence, there is an understanding from the United States of the "necessity" of this violence. Because Israeli violence is necessary to protect Israel from threats to its exceptional existence. Just as American violence is necessary to protect the United States from threats to its exceptional existence.

How Israel is covered in the U.S. news and popular media serves to obscure the biggest thing that ties the United States and Israel together. They're both settler-colonial states which have been built on the displacement and ethnic cleansing of other peoples. And so to tell the story of Israel in U.S. news media has required, for over seven decades, the disappearance of Palestinians, their history, and their right to their homeland.

A cultural narrative about Israel where Palestinians and their history are front and center, would also then require that we are honest about the violence that belies every part of the myth of American exceptionalism. Welcome to “Backspace,” where we tell you how the story is told in the headlines, and then we think about how we can tell it a little differently.

We think about how we can tell it a little differently. In the seven decades since Israel was established as a state in the British mandate of Palestine,

American engagement - ideological, political, cultural - with the Jewish state has seen different iterations. But at its core, these iterations have relied on being a mirror of the American nation. And in that mirroring, Israel has been assigned a duality, as both the victim and victor. Israel is a victor, emerging from one of the cruelest crimes of the 20th century as a successful, unified people who have built a formidable nation despite thousands of years in a persecuted diaspora.

Modern Israel was born in the aftermath of the tragedy of the Holocaust. It was created to fulfill the long-standing dream of the Jewish people to return to the home of their biblical origins. Israel is a beacon of democracy in a sea of violence and hostility. Israel is the most important technology force in the world next to the United States.

Israel is a victim surrounded by enemies who want to drive it into the sea. Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel is surrounded by countries and entities that want to drive them into the sea. Tensions are rising after the deadliest wave of Palestinian terror attacks inside Israel in years. It has the right to eliminate the cancer that is threatening its very existence.

There are many reasons why the U.S. has this distinctive relationship with Israel, but I think the one that is most important is actually cultural.

That is, we have a long history of representing Israel as being tied to U.S. interests, but also to U.S. values, religious values, and democratic values. Those representations have shaped most of us in one way or another to think of Israel as more than just a strategic ally or a good military partner.

For a cultural history that extolls shared values, it must build those shared values in opposition to other ideas, other values, and in the case of state and nationalist identities, other people. U.S. news and popular media have built a case for Israel reliant on the disappearance of Palestinians and any claim they have to their land.

On the disappearance of their history of ethnic cleansing, the theft of their lands, and their ever-expanding diaspora. 

- It's a time of border trouble for Israel. Another incident on the Jordanian frontier resulted in a roundup of Arab infiltrators, an action that follows an attempt by these illegal entrants into the country to terrorize the Israeli populace living near this troubled line.

- The militant Arabs claimed a territorial right to Jerusalem and Palestine that was a thousand years old. But the determined leaders of Zionism pleaded a right that was even older.

- Four Israeli settlers were gunned down yesterday in the West Bank by Hamas, the Palestinian faction that opposes peace talks.

- To return to Palestine would be to displace Israel. We want to think about how Palestinians are not just entirely invisible but made visible in a particular way, which is either as terrorists or as victims. If we think about the comparison between the United States as a settler colonial state and Israel as one, we can think about how people in the U.S. presented Native Americans. They were presented as disappearing, as not having political claims.

You know, often people were very sad about what had happened to them, but what to do? Palestinians have not been seen for a long time, but when they are seen, starting in the 1980s, they begin to be seen as people who might have political claims, but the story of them is a story of people who are victims, who have a sad story, but Israel had to be Israel.

A counter-narrative to the American story about Israel that would be told from the Palestinian vantage point would also indict the sustained American histories and realities of violence against its Indigenous and Black populations. Thus, Palestinians must be made into, at best, pitiful victims caught as collateral in Israel's attempt to defend itself, and at worst, as generation after generation of “terrorist” threats.

- It doesn't really matter what the Palestinians do.

They can blow up whomever they want to blow up, they can elect Hamas when given an opportunity to move forward, they can take one chance after another to recognize the state of Israel and their right to exist, and they will not do it. The last few times that negotiations have taken place, the emphasis has been on asserting that Israel has been victimized by terrorist activities, by Hamas, and by the failure of the Palestinians to govern themselves. In both representations of Palestinians, the purpose of the state of Israel, the political status quo, and its carefully curated image remain intact.

Even when Israeli crimes and transgressions beyond the expanding occupation, land theft, and apartheid are clear, Israel's moral authority isn't questioned. Questioning that moral authority is akin to questioning the necessity of Israel. So how did we get to this point, where deference to Israel's moral power is reflexive and unquestioned, a privilege not enjoyed by other countries and nations?

It's too reductive to think that a pro-Israel lobby is alone in building Israel in the American landscape, that they alone have had this power. It's also not enough to look at U.S. foreign policy interests in the region as the sole determinant of Israel's narrative power in U.S. news and popular media. Both those things are central, of course, but what brings it all together is the cultural history of Israel in the United States, how Israel was understood by Americans in the aftermath of the Second World War, and how much of that has been a mirroring of how the United States sees itself. There's a tendency to believe that the horrors of the Holocaust are what led to American support and sympathy for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

But the late Dr. Amy Kaplan, in her 2018 book, “Our American Israel,” makes the argument that for Israel to be embraced by Americans, the idea of Israel had to be Americanized. She writes Israel's "proponents attributed New World meanings, symbols, and mythologies to a European movement to establish a Jewish polity in the Arab Middle East. They drew parallels between 'Mayflower' Pilgrims and Jewish pioneers in the familiar landscape of the biblical Promised Land, and they presented Zionist settlement as enacting American ideas of modern development."

- In 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the George Washington of Israel, led his people and his country to independence. And this mirroring, according to Kaplan, wasn't hard to do, especially when both shared a belief in their exceptionalism as signified by how they celebrated their anti-colonial origins, struggling against the British Empire, and distancing themselves from the violent conquest at the center of their founding. Just as Indigenous peoples are erased from the founding of an America free from British colonizers, Palestinians mostly disappeared in Israel's founding.

- At the founding of the Israeli state, there was almost no recognition of Palestinians at all. Even the word Palestinian was often used to refer to Palestinian Jews, people who had moved there. Palestinian Arabs were all but invisible. They were talked about only as refugees. The idea that they even represented a national consciousness was nowhere to be seen. So it was the Israelis who had the narrative of decolonization and nationalism behind them. While some major news media like "The New York Times" were vehemently anti-Zionist, the narrative of decolonization and nationalism was embraced by many non-Jewish American liberals and progressives.

They saw a Jewish state as the perfect rebuke to Nazi fascism, paralleling the official narrative of the U.S.’ defeat of Nazi Germany. They also saw Israel as an actualization of socialist ideals, especially with the establishment of kibbutzim and the Soviet Union’s initial support for Israel.

“The Nation,” a left-leaning magazine, was home to some of the biggest and most active support of Israel and helped create the blueprint for how the narrative of Israel would come to be embraced in the United States news media for the coming decades, even if “The Nation” evolved its own position on Israel over time. The Jewish Agency, founded by socialist Zionists who helped organize and fund Jewish immigration to Palestine, gave “The Nation” a grant of $50,000 in 1947, for the purposes of, “conducting research and publishing articles and reports and promoting the Zionist cause among American liberals and foreign delegates to the United Nations.” Emboldened by this, its longtime editor, Freda Kirchwey, dedicated the pages of “The Nation” and its entire publishing institution to lobbying for the Zionist cause.

Between 1947 and 1954, the Nation Associates, which was responsible for publishing the magazine, produced 12 widely distributed reports campaigning for the Zionist cause. Kirchwey even wrote a 133-page memorandum for the UN on behalf of “The Nation,” making the case for Israel and tying the Arab Palestinians to the Nazis, which became a mainstay of liberal arguments against Palestinian self-determination, thanks to her efforts. She ultimately even took credit for pushing the Truman administration into recognizing the state of Israel. The Jews organized a government over there, and it's been a successful one ever since.

Now, Kirchwey is just one of several examples of American media liberals and progressives who worked diligently and successfully alongside Zionist groups and leaders to make Israel into a liberal project and ideal that looked like the United States. And for every sentence dedicated to what a beacon and necessity Israel was as a pioneering nation of the so-called “new Jew,” there were many more dedicated to trumpeting the barbarity, jealousy, and backwardness of Arabs and Muslims. This early period of creating myths around Israel isn't the only critical era in the cultural history of Israel in the United States, but it is the bedrock of how Israel came to be essentially Americanized in the eyes of the public. This is the time when there is buy-in from Americans from all different backgrounds that yeah, maybe Israel is necessary.

Maybe Israel is good. Following this period, we see tourism to the "land of the Bible," which had existed well before Israel's establishment, flourish throughout the '50s and '60s, as do epic biblical films and the relationship between Hollywood and Israel itself. The '60s, in particular, are bookended by two critical moments that guaranteed Israel's positioning in both an American consensus about its necessity and goodness, and in the U.S.' foreign policy future: the release of the 1960 film "Exodus," which was supported by the Israeli government and based on the novel by Leon Uris, and Israel’s quick victory over its neighbors in the war of June 1967. I think the book "Exodus" resonated differently for different audiences.

I think for non-Jewish people, the book, but especially the movie, tells the story of Israel in an American register. It tells the story of Israel as the settling of a frontier. 1967 was an incredible turning point in Americans’ views of Israel.

Almost every newspaper or magazine has some joke or comment about how maybe we need to bring Moshe Dayan over to end the Vietnam War. Israel takes on this new vision or new version of a myth in the U.S. as an invincible and admired military power. So that image that emerged after 1967, that the U.S. should be both with Israel and like Israel in terms of foreign policy, I think is one of the structuring realities to this day in how many people think about Israel. Palestinians during these years more or less disappeared from having any claim, only significantly reappearing as so-called “terrorists,” with high-profile acts of violence like the 1972 Munich massacre of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes, and then as victims in 1982, with the Israeli-backed massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps of Lebanon. In "Our American Israel,” Dr. Amy Kaplan also and most emphatically notes that while we saw decades of Israel being Americanized for an American audience, following 9/11, we see an Israelization of the United States.

We see a shift from the long-held, “admiration of Israel as a mirror of America's idealized self-image, to emulation of Israel as a model for fighting America's worst nightmares.” It may take a century, two centuries, three centuries, but we will exterminate you. Now, while there have been moments of sympathetic visibility of Palestinians in U.S. news media, there hasn't been a staking of the legitimacy of Palestinian claims. Israel, as it exists, always requires that its legitimacy, existence, and moral authority be upheld.

So a Palestinian narrative about the Nakba, about apartheid, about the refugees and land theft, hasn't even been allowed to be written in American cultural history. And that's been for many reasons, like Israel as an arm of the American empire, anti-Muslim and Arab sentiments as fundamental to Israel's case for legitimacy, evangelical eschatology that's anti-Semitic, and, of course, the fact that the majority of American Jews fall into the category of whiteness.

So how can journalists in U.S. news media engage with Israel and its role in U.S. history in a way that is honest and adheres to the basic principles of journalism, like punching up and never down? like punching up and never down? Well, it involves a lot of reimagining of how we've embraced Israel and disappeared Palestinians for seven decades based on whose humanity we've determined is worth more because of how it looks like ours.

I think there is a question of why it has been so hard for Americans to imagine that Palestinians have an absolute right to self-determination.

That Palestinians, as much as anybody else, have the right to represent themselves, and to have some kind of sovereign control over their lives. It is a bit shocking to me that it's been so hard for Americans to understand that. But I think it's a combination of Islamophobia - even though many Palestinians are Christian, many are Muslim, and that Islamophobia gets in the way. In the pilot episode of “Backspace,” back in May 2021, we broke down the sort of language that contemporary news media uses in coverage of Israeli occupation and apartheid, language that obfuscates not only the daily crimes committed by the Israeli state but also the realities that Palestinians have experienced since 1948.

But language is easier to revisit and rectify than an entire moral framework built on not only shared values but ideations about a shared so-called Judeo-Christian heritage, about shared myths of revolution, about shared pioneering and shared exceptionalism. Good journalism about Israel that does what it's supposed to do doesn't separate Israel from its position as an occupying state and from its origins as a European settler colonial project born out of a European movement led by European Jews. Good journalism about Israel doesn't ignore what sustains Israel's existence as it is:

the apartheid, Gaza as an open-air prison, the ever-expanding settlements, the checkpoints, the land theft, the incarcerations and killings of Palestinian youth, in addition to so much else that is meant to ensure that Palestinians never can have self-determination. Good journalism doesn't ignore Palestinians and doesn't question or belittle their claims to nationhood, resistance, and return when it does offer them some semblance of humanity and coverage. But for that kind of good journalism to happen, it needs to untangle and deconstruct the myths that tie together Israeli and American exceptionalism. Otherwise, our journalism guarantees that those myths, which are used to justify the cruelties that sustain both Israel and the United States, are strengthened. both Israel and the United States, are strengthened. And thus concludes another episode of “Backspace.” You guys are really the real ones for watching. So, listen, we could really use your input. We're getting ready for another season of “Backspace.” Yay, I know. But, we need your help. We want to know, what are some other topics that are covered in U.S. news media that need that "Backspace" treatment? 

Let us know in the comments your opinion.