Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance

by Amy Kaplan

Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Now, in the twenty-first century, 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, the revolt against colonialism. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. This paradox persisted long after the Six-Day War, when the United States rallied behind a story of the Israeli David subduing the Arab Goliath. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon and Palestinians rose up against the occupation in the 1980s. Israel’s 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 difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that may well divide them in the future.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Israel, Middle East, United States, American

368 pages, Hardcover

First published September 17, 2018

About the author

Working in the interdisciplinary field of American studies, Amy Kaplan's scholarship and teaching focus on the culture of imperialism, comparative perspectives on the Americas, prison writing, the American novel, and mourning, memory and war.

A past president of the American Studies Association, Kaplan received her Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University, with a specialty in late-nineteenth-century American literature. Her first book was The Social Construction of American Realism (U Chicago P, 1988). She co-edited, with Donald Pease, Cultures of U. S. Imperialism (Duke, 1993). In her book The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Harvard UP 2002) Kaplan shows how imperial expansion abroad--from the US-Mexico War of 1848 to the First World War--profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home. She has received an NEH Fellowship and the Norman Forster prize for the best essay in American Literature in 1998 for "Manifest Domesticity." Last year she was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study.

A wide-ranging critic of contemporary American culture and policy, Kaplan has published essays on the place of Guantanamo Bay in American history, the discourse of “homeland security” in response to 9/11, analogies between the American and Roman Empires, academic life in Palestine in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, as well as articles on Mark Twain and Herman Melville. She is currently writing a cultural history of American representations of Israel.

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Today we see Facebook and Instagram plastered with Jewish posts claiming, “Never Again!” but do you know where that phrase comes from? “It was invented in 1970 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a right-wing Jewish nationalist who made Netanyahu seem like Gandhi. When Kahane went to Israel, the party he created was banned for being too “Nazi-like” and “racist.” Zionism was a win-win for American racists; it kept Jews away. Most Americans disapproved of admitting Jewish refugees after WWII; when Truman tried to ease refugee quotas, “a poll showed that 72% of [US] respondents disapproved”. But when asked if we could ship them to Palestine, “78% of those polled approved.” Yeah, make ONLY the Palestinians pay for the crimes of the Germans. The kibbutz evoked “idealized images of America’s past”; where settlers and their guns forced natives off their land.

I. F. Stone wanted Jews and Arabs to “live together on an equal basis” which he called a “nobler and politically sounder goal than any narrow Jewish nationalism.” Stone pointed out that “a kindred people was made homeless in the task of finding homes for the remnants for Hitler’s Holocaust.” “One pro-Zionist American journalist wrote, Now, we have a situation in which the Jews have done to others what Hitler, in a sense did to them.” Stuart Alsop called Israel “an atavistic garrison state.”

Exodus: The book and film Exodus was a massive propaganda tool for Zionists – “a militant Israel founded by tough Jewish warriors fighting for a righteous cause.” It Americanized the Zionist narrative of Israel’s origins. It removed the history of Jews wielding guns and dynamite while committing terrorism (by the Zionist Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi) to better make its point by avoiding clear regeneration through violence. The historical ship carried mostly adults, but Uris made it a ship of orphans to get more sympathy. It worked because Americans always cry faster over starving children – just as long as they aren’t Palestinian. Uris wrote his father, “I am writing the book for Americans …Gentiles …not for Jews. This is Israel …the fighter who spits in the eye of the Arab hordes and dares them.” I’ll bet Bill Maher would love such brazen Islamophobia. Exodus insulted Jews from concentration camps by making them helpless and victims while instead the New Jew was a fighter. Uris insulted Palestinians for not defending their homes in 1948. Apparently, shamelessly stealing is NOT wrong, but reflexively pausing to use violence is. Who knew? Uris pretended Palestine was “a land that had lain neglected and UNWANTED for a thousand years in fruitless despair until Jews rebuilt it” by ignoring the fact that by 1870, the Jaffa orange trade was exporting 38 million oranges - a dozen years before the first Zionist settlers showed up – and also Uris hated the “negative portrait of war and military authority” in “The Naked and the Dead”, “The Caine Mutiny”, and “From Here to Eternity”. Who can blame him? I hear that dirty Commie Jesus didn’t like war either. The job of Uris’s Exodus twaddle was to insult the Diaspora Jews, while deifying the fighting New Jew [the terror-inducing racial purist borrowing endlessly from Nazism, but never TOO overtly]. The New Jew was virile - like Rock Hudson when he wasn’t at a gay bar.

Uris Part Two: Otto Preminger and Dalton Trumbo found Uris far too unsympathetic to both the British and the Arabs. “Both the film and the novel effaced the violent dispossession of Palestinians.” “Exodus presents the establishment of Israel as a universal good.” Uris wrote “of the Arab failure to advance culturally, economically, and socially from the Dark Ages.” Who knew Uris was clueless about Arabs giving us mathematics, astronomy, medicine and architecture, while conveniently forgetting the Spanish Inquisition, and the conscious destruction of most pagan knowledge by the Catholic Church which set off those same Dark Ages. Uris framed Deir Yassin Massacre as an exception that comically had nothing at all to do with Palestinians in fear fleeing the Nakba. Even David Ben-Gurion wasn’t fooled by Exodus, and he said of it “As a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing written about Israel.” Yep. Philip Roth criticized Exodus for relinquishing “the moral authority of the Jew” by painting a violent New Jew obsessed with “retribution” in response to Nazism’s crimes.

Moshe Dayan wrote “without the steel helmet and the cannon’s mouth, we cannot plant a tree nor build a house.” Ah, the beauty of settler-colonial poetry by Moshe himself! Perfect for embroidering on a Zionist’s pillow.

In 1967, equal opportunity thief Israel steals the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Or as Noam has said, Israel intentionally chose expansion over security. This brought 1,000,000 Palestinians under Israeli military rule; and what could go wrong? Who consciously desires to have an “army of occupation” up against one million occupied who have a legal right [under international law] to resistance and armed struggle?

In 1982, The Los Angeles Times ran this headline: “War has Cost Israel its Underdog Image.” In 1982 Israel loots the PLO Research Center of all of its Palestinian memorabilia. If you want to push the narrative that Palestinians don’t exist, first remove the evidence. Zionists remove the Palestinian towns during the Nakba, and in 1982, Israel at the Research Center removed the land deeds, photos, and especially all the maps. David Shipler called this theft an effort to “steal the Palestinians past and identity.” If a bully stole all your family photos and documents, would you be unhappy or fight back? In a textbook case of projection, Menachem Begin said, that the goal of the Palestinians was “to destroy a people. The method: genocide – to kill, woman, and child.” [I know you are but what am I?] In 1979, after Israel attacks an Iraqi nuclear reactor [a war crime] Begin said that if Israel hadn’t bombed the plant, nothing less than “another Holocaust would have happened to Israel and her people.” What? An Iraqi nuclear plant was somehow going to kill six million Jews? Standup comedian Begin then doubled down and actually said “Israelis ALWAYS mourned the killing of children.” Anyone spending ten minutes of Instagram today watching IDF soldiers laughing about killing children, and Zionist rabbis saying killing Palestinian infants is both moral and just – would find Begin’s comments crazy.

Elie Wiesel learned from the Holocaust to not be silent about those who are suffering [unless of course the suffering were Palestinians]. Note that Russians liberated Auschwitz and Madjanek “months” before the US reached Buchenwald and Dachau. “The US Army command initially had no plans to free camp inmates, and soldiers who stumbled across the death camps reported feeling overcome, dazed, and even repulsed by the survivors they saw there. [p.201]” Isn’t learning real history fun?

The biblical names for the West Bank are Judea and Samaria [remember The People’s Front of Judea in the Life of Brian, and the good Samaritan]. In 2002, US military observers in the West Bank watched “the Israeli army bulldoze a 40,000-square-meter area in the center of the Jenin refugee camp, an operation that killed an estimated fifty-two Palestinians. Marines showed a special interest in learning about urban warfare.” Who doesn’t want to calmly watch 52 humans crushed to death – a war crime – while you stand like a coward with your thumb in your ass? The most “moral” army in the world, folks! When fascism comes to the US, such knowledge gleaned by Marines will be invaluable, because resisting Americans in the future aren’t probably going to commit collective suicide.

Come to Israel R Us – we’ve got the fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems developed over decades of brutal occupation to make your next dictatorship go off without a hitch! Take it from someone who just doesn’t care, trust our systems for urban pacifications and management. Don’t delay, turn endless war into a brand asset! Call 1-800-GEN-OCIDE today!

This book was good; I’ve read dozens on Israel Palestine and by far the best of those so far was “Palestine Hijacked” by Thomas Suarez. The best book focusing just on the US & Israel though, is “The Israel Lobby” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely stunning. Kaplan, one of the fixtures of American studies' turn towards the international context of US Empire, turns her eye on the history of US pop culture and media interpretations of Israel. if you are as confused as me as to how so many in the general public here ended up in clear and unconditional support of the Israeli project, here is your book. the chapters discuss settler analogies in the establishment of Israel, the shifting image of Israel as "invincible victim" or renewed masculine hero, or the apocalyptic visions of the evangelical right. these themes are examined through texts like Exodus (both book and film), PBS documentaries, the establishment of the US holocaust museum, the Left Behind book series, and a variety of news media reporting (and controversies and contexts, such as the establishment of ADL and AIPAC). the text itself is completely lucid writing...yeah, the book is really essential and eye-opening stuff.

[David Curry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kudos to Harvard University Press for making available to us Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, an important contribution to rational discourse with regard to Israel. I read it recalling that a few years ago a professor at a major university three blocks from our home was denied tenure ostensibly because he published articles critical of Israel.

Kaplan presents the bond between the U.S. and Israel as gestating in and frequently returning to a shared sense of exceptionalism and entitlement, with both nations seeing themselves as rescuing territory from backward savages. She discusses Leon Uris’s popular mid-century novel Exodus and compares the film adaptation, which at the time fueled support for Zionism, to American westerns or “cowboys and Indians” films. (I still haven’t managed to erase the memory of Robert Frost during John Kennedy’s presidential inauguration reciting his embarrassing poem “The Gift Outright,” which is a pretty bald celebration of Manifest Destiny. Opening line: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”)

Kaplan is particularly keen in delineating Israel’s Soviet-like proclivity to censor and defame detractors. This proclivity increased after international reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and brutal massacre of civilian refugees there.

The chapter tracing Christian evangelical support for Israel is mind-boggling.

U.N. resolutions condemning Israel’s policies and actions have routinely been blocked by the two nations in the “entangled alliance” this book explores. How likely is it that the rest of the world is wrong and the U. S. and Israel are right? Au fond, a U.N. resolution condemning Israel is no more likely to survive than a U.N. resolution condemning Russia.

In her conclusion, Kaplan refers to “the darker shadows of shared exceptionalism: the fusion of moral value with military force, the defiance of international law, the rejection of refugees and immigrants in countries that were once known as havens.”

She ends with this: “ ‘No daylight between the United States and Israel’ is a phrase that has recently joined ‘special relationship’ and ‘unbreakable bond’ in the lexicon of U.S.-Israel relations. The metaphor of ‘no daylight’ implies that the two nations’ interests are so closely knit together that nothing and no one can come between them. To see daylight between the two countries would suggest separation and betrayal. But ‘no daylight’ also means darkness, a fitting metaphor for the blindness that has characterized the special relationship between the United States and Israel. We must let in daylight if Americans are to understand why and how this bond has come to be unbreakable.”

I appreciated this note in Kaplan”s acknowledgments after the text and notes: “My father, Solomon Kaplan, passed away while I was writing this book. He would have disagreed with much of it, but he would have fiercely defended my right to have my say.”

[sorrowmancer · Rating 4 out of 5]

really good at what it does

[Eli Kaufman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amy Kaplan's Our American Israel is a crucial read for anyone who asks themselves why the US has an "unbreakable bond" with Israel. By charting the history of this relationship, from Mandate Palestine to the War on Terror, Amy Kaplan finds the cracks, and fissures of this bond, unsettling the notion that that "there is no daylight" between the US and Israel. But this book is about more than just the relationship between the US and Israel in any strict international relations sense. It also shows how the US relates to itself and the way it projects an idealized version of itself onto an imagined Israel, a projection that adapts to the changing domestic and global conditions through time. In light of this, she shows how this relationship is not purely strategic or rational, focusing primarily on literature and media to show the many ways that Americans, across the political spectrum of Liberal and Conservative both see themselves, and therefore see Israel and what it represents.

To me, the most crucial and interesting conclusion of this book is the idea of the invincible victim, constantly under existential threat, yet somehow strong beyond imagination. This exceptionalism and paradoxical belief is what allows Israel, and later the US, to have their cake and eat it too. It allows them to do heinous, inexcusable acts, because the cause is seemingly just and the end justifies the means. They literally can do no wrong as the ultimate victims, a view that Israel has of itself as a nation founded by Holocaust survivors and under constant threat by Arabs, and a view the US has of itself as a freedom loving country "destined" to spread democracy across the world.

While not necessary, a general knowledge of the history of modern Palestine is useful when reading this book, especially because she mostly uses literature and media to trace this history. That being said, she does a good job of explaining enough history to understand the sources she uses. If this is your first encounter with the history of modern Palestine, this book will surely lead you to more research and knowledge with its extensive notes and works cited.

I would highly recommend this book!

[Kyle Neff · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to begin to understand our government's complicity in the atrocity currently unfolding in Gaza, this book is a good place to start.

[Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.2

[Matthew Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent survey of the relationship between the United States and Israel. It definitely makes one question how justifiable such a relationship is, considering the United States usually attempts to portray itself as a moral force in the world. (Then again, who could be surprised that US foreign policy is hypocritical?) Kaplan delves into the political and cultural forces that drove the United States to this point, and while she does not give any advice for extricating the country from this toxic relationship, its clear that she is firmly against the actions of the Israeli government when it hurts innocent people. Israel is an apartheid state. This cannot possibly be argued. This book does a good job of examining exactly how the Unted States helped that state to develop, and how it assists it today. Shame on this country for what it has done. FREE PALESTINE.

[Jeffrey Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kaplan’s Our American Israel critically examines the relationship between Israel and the United States, and how it has shaped history and policy. The topics discussed and examined within these pages are controversial and very delicate, especially when dealing with anti-semitism and the tragic events of the holocaust. First, I have very little perspective on the ancient history of the Israelites or Palestinians and their ties to the currently contested State of Israel. While Kaplan’s book provides plenty of content regarding post World War II occupation of the territory in question, it fails at providing adequate information regarding the ancient history that led to the establishment of the currently unrecognized State of Palestine. Second, this review is based on the argument provided within this book and how it’s written. There is definitely a bias in this material as it is critical of the U.S. and Israel relationship (not inherently a bad thing). And finally, I haven’t studied or read anything regarding the contents of the Torah, the Bible, or the Qur’an, so I can’t make the link regarding its importance to this material. The book briefly touches upon this in the form of Zionism and evangelical Christian or Judeo-Christian ideals.

Kaplan provides a compelling argument regarding the militarization of Israel with the help of the media and United States’ aid. I hadn't realized that May 15 marked the Nakba, the day for the displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes back in 1948 by Zionist military forces. The events of that day are contested on both sides, making it challenging to grasp the true details that led to this mass displacement. Implementation of a Jewish State was the ultimate goal. It was fascinating to see the politics leading up to this decision as there were opportunities for America and other countries to provide a safe haven for the oppressed Jews post-WWII. Instead, established Palestinians either fled or were driven out of their homes, leaving an Arab Diaspora in its wake.

Kaplan examined the many pieces of media, both written and visual, that played an influential role in shaping the minds of Americans regarding the State of Israel. For example, works like Exodus by Leon Uris and From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters helped wrongly identify Arabs as “savages and uncivilized peoples,” rhetoric shockingly similar to that of the American colonizers when describing Indigenous communities. Ultimately, these popular works villainized a group of people and justified their military occupation. It was also interesting to see that critics of Israel’s military might and occupation of surrounding territories throughout history were met with great resistance and labeled as anti-semitic for simply addressing concerns over actions that resembled imperialism. An open discussion and acceptance of criticism for actions on both sides is essential, otherwise this challenging conflict will never have a resolution.

Kaplan’s goal was to humanize Palestinians and their struggle for survival in the face of difficult odds. According to one argument, Israel is disproportionately advantaged in the conflict against Palestinians. With this advantage, in the form of territory, weapons, technology, and support and aid from other countries, Israel has expanded its foothold in the region by occupying neighboring territories along the Gaza Strip even against international criticism. Israel has argued that its expansion is based on defending its homeland from terrorism, avoiding the possibility of another holocaust. Unfortunately, in the process of bombing and occupying neighboring towns and cities to quell terrorism, Israel has killed civilians - the devastating outcome of conflict and war. Kaplan does an excellent job peeling back the layers to expose the core issues with this conflict and Israel’s claims.

There was one particular chapter that examined the rise of evangelical Christianity and their ties to Israel. Much of the material in that chapter is relevant to their influence in politics today. Although it was nauseating and anxiety inducing, that chapter alone was worth a read. There’s also a piece that examines the future militarization of the United States’ police force through the adoption of Israeli tactics (post-9/11). The weapons and technology being adopted today is paving the way for a police state = some scary shit! My exploration of this topic won’t stop here!

[Diane Jeske · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why is America so committed to Israel? Kaplan does an excellent job of showing how Americans have seen themselves and their mythical past (and future) in the Israeli story: the Israeli claim to their land mirrors 19th century American conceptions of manifest destiny, Israeli farming in the desert is likened to the 'taming' of the Western frontier, and, of course, American evangelicals require the return of the Jews to Israel for the second coming of Christ. Kaplan's chapter on EXODUS, both the book and the movie, is especially insightful in showing how the colonial project of Zionism was transformed into a story of fighting British colonialism, just as Americans did in our own revolution. Palestinian presence is ignored just as Americans paper over the presence of Native Americans in our own triumphal saga of extending out to the Pacific. This is an essential read for understanding the American perception of Israel and the American perception of Palestinians. Highly recommended.

[Marcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book for anyone wanting to understand the historical, cultural, and political intermingling of the United States and Israel. Kaplan does a wonderful job weaving these three strains together across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The problem is once you read all that you're left with what to do next. Her discussion of collaboration between Israeli and American technology and military research excludes an analysis of the role that universities like Cornell or MIT play let alone the fact that ALL Israeli universities are implicated in that. Likewise when she discusses BDS, it's a bit perplexing why she didn't discuss the lawfare used to attack activists across the US. Readers would do well to follow this up with Maya Wind and Antony Loewenstein's work to enhance the political angle and move into action.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book goes over a lot of history so if you're familiar with that it will help. The main idea though is how the United States sees Israel, progressive, reactionary, or a mixture of both, and the author's background as an English professor is quite helpful. Super gung-ho Israel boosters - Christian Zionists, right-wing Jews, secular "Retvrn" types of a white supremacist but also Islamophobic bent - will bristle. The author doesn't have any great ideas for how to settle the Israel/Palestine conundrum. Israel is here to stay, and not the first problematic international partner the United States has had, but this book provides valuable critical context and perspective.

[Justin Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kaplan’s book is a fascinating mix of popular culture and diplomatic history. Although she may downplay certain pro-Israeli elements when discussing the 1948, 1967, and 1973 wars, her work brilliantly displays the nuances of America’s complicated relationship with Israel. If you’re looking for a concrete history of the conflict in Israel, avoid this book. If you’re looking for something to better understand the specific relationship between the US and Israel, I could not recommend this more.

[Paul Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting more history of Israel, but it's actually an overview of the American media, public discourse and public opinion of Israel. Dense and well researched as far as I can tell, the author has a particular opinion (which I don't necessarily disagree with) about Palestine and Israel that I wish was more a part of her discussion rather than feeling like a foregone conclusion from the beginning.

[Hatice · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most fundamental books to understand the historical context of US-Israel relationship and what cultural and political factors influenced its evolution. It should be mandatory reading to understand why despite all the opposing evidence, the American political and financial class keep supporting Israel’s wrongdoings most of the time against its own benefit.

[Andrew Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book cleared up so many of my questions about the strange bond between the USA and Israel. I only wish it had provided a little more info on the economic ties, rather than focusing almost exclusively on the social and religious ties. But still, fascinating and very effectively written, with a kind of moral & historical clarity that demands respect.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really excellent book, appreciated that it went past the usual explanations of geopolitics as that's always struck me as an incomplete explanation for the way America behaves towards Israel. That perhaps could have been brought into the fold a little more, and at times the book felt a little ponderous, but these are minor criticisms of what is on balance a brilliant work

[Jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong and unbiased. Both academic and accessible. Kaplan explores how American attitudes towards Israel -- both pro and con -- have been manipulated and mediated by American and Israeli media and cultural shifts. This book is a fantastic starting point for earnest readers looking to understand the relationship between Israel and the American public.

[Pat Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Critical analysis of the American-Israeli history from post WWII to about 2017. It casts a harsh light on the history of Israel through the lens of the American experience and, in so doing, sheds further light on many of our shortcomings

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eye-opening retelling of the history with which this oldie Gen X'er grew up, this text places Israel and Palestine alongside the U.S.'s own narratives and mythmaking. It should create space for discussion and opportunities to move forward from our current polarized deadlock.

[Shannon Bultinck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t sure if I would learn a lot of new information from this book, but I was definitely proven wrong. It was so interesting seeing everything that has happened over the past 75+ years from an American perspective and how the United States has played a part.

[Alex Helm · Rating 1 out of 5]

israel is a genocidal apartheid state that is only propped up as a us colonial outpost that needs to shut down. PALESTINE WILL BE FREE FROM THE RIVRR TO THE SEA!

[teri martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was very informative, but not for a light hearted reader!

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. Kaplan was a scholar of literature, and this offers a close reading of the affective relationship between Israel and the US over the past 70 years, including everything from a 50s TV special to Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem to, no kidding, Ziva on NCIS. And of course Exodus, the sine qua non of American Jewish romanticization of Israel as mirror of an idealized America, peopled by hardy pioneers saving the land, and those salvageable within, from their inherent barbarism.

It's an incredibly smart book, for one. Kaplan's readings astutely reveal how concerted the production of Palestinian invisibility has been, or was until challenged more recently. But it was less a conspiracy of blindness than, at first, a desire to see what you wanted--Alfred Kazin went there in 1967 and was comforted that Israeli soldiers looked like bohemians from Greenwich Village; Life covered them as idiosyncratic democrats, like the Americans at Valley Forge, a ragtag army of equals. She also shows that there were debates, or at least the possibility thereof, all the way along, from generally sober viewers like I.F. Stone, who went through his own period of romanticism and came out the other side, to observers noting a troubling imperial tendency after 1967. I'd had a sense of 1948/67 as central narrative turning points, but clearly 1982 is a third, with a good many journalists who had stayed in Beirut being horrified to see it bombed into rubble, which of course occasioned hysterics from Begin and Norman Podhoretz, who never met a situation he couldn't simplify to the point of pugnacious absurdity. As she shows in her reading of the two big journalistic tomes from that period, Friedman's career-making book (given all the slams people give him now, curious to what extent going back to that would reveal the same thing, or would it show that, in places where he actually knew what he was talking about and didn't churn out three columns of generalized pablum a week, he was good at his job?) and David Shipler's Arab and Jew, both interview and consider the point of view of real, living Palestinians at length, but also make sure to recuperate this within the context of an Israeli POV, framing the story only one way.

Oh, and the Holocaust Museum point! Wow. She notes that, at the exact time that the Holocaust Museum opened, with its at-best debatable premise that bombing the tracks would have saved lives (I've read a bit of the historiography here, and the premise seems highly debatable, and certainly not something you can just assert as unquestionable), so therefore America screwed up and owes a debt, the Smithsonian and National Museum of American Art ran into trouble for arguing that maybe we didn't need to bomb Hiroshima, and also that classic Western pictures were maybe sometimes a bit racist and imperialist, like when they depicted Indians as forces of darkness fleeing before the forces of capitalism and railroads and farms. Because it is un-American and unpatriotic to say that America ever does anything wrong, except not always.

The war-on-terror chapter is worth the price of admission by itself, a masterpiece of social, political and economic analysis that looks at the Palestine-laboratory notion and contrasts it with the start-up nation story, which is Exodus 2.0, in essence, with high-tech startups replacing kibbutzim to tell the same old story. Big point? Whatever the long romantic attachment to Israel (which has REALLY switched sides of the political aisle these days--she offers the fullest exegesis of the Left Behind series in these terms, wherein America gets to start over, but guess where?), it's long since become variously misguided, cynical, mystification...a screen that prevents honest conversation and honest evaluation of what its leaders are doing and to what degree that ever comported with that vision of a robust and egalitarian state. Definitely grabbing some bits to teach with next fall.