This article is taken from the February 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

When Britain announced its support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine by issuing the Balfour Declaration, many high-profile American Jews opposed the move. “I do not believe that it is to the interest of the Jews or the world to isolate them or to separate them with an effort to form a distinct and separate nation,” the Italian-Jewish New York congressman, Fiorello La Guardia declared. “Whilst of course they are racially one, the Jews of America, England, France and Italy are no different than their fellow countrymen.” La Guardia and the other opponents were ignored. The United States government endorsed the Balfour Declaration. Today, a century later, it is the state of Israel’s main ally.

Fifteen years ago, after the United States had become bogged down in Iraq, and Israel had just fought an unsuccessful war in Lebanon (to which the Bush administration had given a green light), John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published an important book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. In it they argued that the pro-Israel lobby enjoys an undue influence on American politics. By convincing many Americans that American and Israeli interests were “essentially identical”, the lobby had encouraged successive administrations to pursue policies that had jeopardised national security and even, by making criticism of Israel difficult, Israel’s long-term prospects.

In The Arc of a Covenant, Walter Russell Mead offers a counterblast. “The idea that an Israel lobby composed of Jews and fundamentalist Christians dictates America’s Israel policy in ways that deliberately elevate Israeli interests over those of the United States is wrong about the history of US-Israel relations, wrong about the way foreign policy works, wrong about the American political process, wrong about American Christians, and, last, but by no means least, it is wrong not only about American Jews but about the political context of Zionism,” he declares.

Early settlers saddled their children with names such as Ezekiel

He compares the belief in the power of the Israel lobby to the mid-19th century theory that the erratic orbits of Uranus and Mercury were due to an invisible planet, which was given the name Vulcan — when in fact they were the consequence of the effects of the sun’s gravity, as Einstein was later able to explain. Vulcan did not exist.

Mead is a highly regarded expert on American foreign policy and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His book expands on an excellent article he wrote exploring the historic reasons for American support for Israel, published in Foreign Affairs a year after The Israel Lobby appeared. “Like it or not,” he argues, “most of the Israel lobby’s influence comes from the popularity of its cause among the American people.” To explain this he turns not to Fox News but to the Reformation and the first English translations of the Bible.

Whereas the mediaeval Catholic church focused on the New Testament story, Protestants, through the vernacular Bible, were able to read the Old Testament. There the Jews of course were heroes — hence the fashion among early settlers for saddling their children with names such as Ezekiel. This led them to reappraise the Jews as a people and believe that God’s covenant with them persisted, despite their failure to recognise Christ as the Messiah and the execution of him.

Thus, the future president of Harvard, Increase Mather, could declare in Boston in 1666, that despite the Jews’ ongoing involvement in stealing and crucifying Christian children, the time would “surely come when the body of the twelve tribes of Israel shall be brought out of the present condition of bondage and misery, into a glorious and wonderful state of salvation, not only spiritual but temporal”. The Jews would “recover the Possession of their Promised Land”, he predicted.

As a result of a wave of pogroms in eastern Europe in the late 19th century, the Jewish population in the U.S. grew a thousand-fold — from just 4,000 in 1830 to 4 million a century later. In 1924, however, the United States largely shut its doors to immigrants in a dramatic clampdown that remained popular beyond 1945 despite the revelation of the extent of the Holocaust.

The unimpressive Vice President Harry Truman was left to deal with the question of what to do about Jewish survivors of the Nazis after Franklin D Roosevelt died. He tried to force Britain, which then controlled Palestine, to take 100,000 Jewish refugees (because, as the-then foreign secretary Ernest Bevin indelicately claimed, “They do not want too many Jews in New York”). “Not since the martyred Lincoln was followed by Andrew Johnson had a man of great stature been succeeded by such an undistinguished person,” says Mead.

He nonetheless tackles Truman’s predicament with empathy, describing how public opposition to immigration, the popularity of the idea of a Jewish state, his tumbling approval ratings, the splitting Democratic party, Stalin and the British all mattered more than relentless Jewish lobbying. Thus he explains the twists of Truman’s policy on Palestine yet ultimately quick recognition of the state of Israel. As Mead concludes trenchantly, “if ‘the Jews’ ran America, immigration would not have been restricted and Israel would likely not exist.”

Spiralling petrol prices led to a jump in support for Israel

Mead skips over the awkward postwar era when the Americans flirted with Nasser and sucked up to the Saudis. Nor does he dwell on the way that the Israelis used the nuclear reactor they built at Dimona to oblige the Kennedy administration to start selling them conventional weapons.

Whilst the Six Day War of 1967 is often seen as the turning point in US-Israel relations, Mead thinks the Yom Kippur War six years later mattered more. The spiralling petrol prices caused by the Arab embargo led to a jump in support for Israel among ordinary Americans: the trigger here was not ideological but economic. As Mead says, “Israel’s enemies have always, despite their best efforts, been Israel’s most helpful friends.”

As the United States became dependent on oil imports to meet its needs, whilst standards of living risked slipping further, successive administrations sold advanced weaponry to the Arabs. By doing so they came under pressure to support Israel as well. The Black civil rights activist and Quaker Bayard Rustin supported placing an advert in the New York Times in 1970 calling on the US government to sell Israel “the full number of jet aircraft it has requested”. Black empathy for Israel has always been notable.

The survival of the state of Israel has in turn had a powerful effect on American society and its politics, which Mead finally explores. “It is less that Israel is strong in American politics because of evangelical support than that the existence of Israel helped evangelical religion become a major force in American life.” That evangelicalism, which fed off fears of nuclear war and was then channelled so successfully by Ronald Reagan, has dissipated. Since the Iraq War, the American appetite for foreign adventures has gone. For Donald Trump, giving a blank cheque to Israel served as a way to distance himself even further from and discredit his establishment rivals, to the delight of his base.

Mead makes a good case for seeing US policy towards Israel primarily through religion, culture and domestic politics, although his many brilliant insights risk getting lost in a book that is too long. Perhaps the greatest irony — and threat to his thesis — comes with his own observation that “Israel the victim never drew much American support; Israel the victor found America eager to cooperate”.