Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance 𝕓𝕪 𝔸𝕞𝕪 𝕂𝕒𝕡𝕝𝕒𝕟.

A Book Summary

Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by Amy Kaplan is a groundbreaking exploration of the deep cultural, emotional, and political bonds that have linked the United States and Israel over the past seventy years. Amy Kaplan (1953–2020) was a distinguished professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading scholar of American literature, imperialism, and culture. In this work, published in 2018, she moves beyond conventional diplomatic or strategic analyses, instead examining how popular culture, religious narratives, and national myths have forged a sense of shared destiny between the two nations. With sharp insight, Kaplan reveals how Israel has come to embody American ideals, anxieties, and contradictions, becoming a mirror for America's own sense of exceptionalism.

In the coming weeks, I will be sharing, In shā’ Allāh, chapter-by-chapter summaries of the book, focusing on its central themes, core arguments, and significant historical moments.

Introduction

This introduction chapter establishes the foundational framework for understanding how Israel has become deeply embedded in American cultural and political consciousness over the past seventy years. The author argues that Israel's significance in American discourse extends far beyond foreign policy concerns of a particular ethnic group, evolving into a central component of American national mythology.

The Evolution of American-Israeli Narratives

The chapter traces the transformation of American perceptions of Israel through several distinct phases, beginning with the romantic idealization following the Six-Day War in 1967. During this period, "many Americans romanticized Israel's way of making war as a humane and muscular alternative to the American approach, which had led to the quagmire in Vietnam." This comparison reveals how Israel served as a mirror for American anxieties about their own military conduct and national identity during a turbulent period.

The author identifies a crucial shift in the 1980s when "apocalyptic narratives started to supplant and reformulate heroic ones, as discourse about Israel took on a heightened moralistic and religious tenor." This transformation marked the end of Israel's image as an "invincible victim" and the beginning of more complex, often contradictory narratives that would persist into the twenty-first century.

The Post-9/11 Paradigm Shift

A pivotal moment in American-Israeli relations occurred after September 11, 2001, when "Israel's experience of terrorism offered Americans a ready-made vocabulary for articulating their own sense of unprecedented trauma." This development fundamentally altered how Americans understood both their own vulnerability and Israel's strategic importance. The author notes that "the paradox of vulnerability and invincibility had already implicitly informed American perceptions of threats to national security" during the Cold War, but this paradox "became even more resonant after 9/11, when the United States looked to Israel as a model for fighting the war on terror."

This recasting proved transformative because it "joined the nations to each other as innocent victims of evil forces and bestowed moral righteousness on their pursuit of indomitability." The shared experience of terrorism created a new foundation for American-Israeli solidarity that transcended previous political and cultural connections.

Cultural Mediators and Universal Narratives

The chapter emphasizes the crucial role of American Jewish cultural figures in shaping broader American perceptions of Israel. These individuals—"novelists, filmmakers, journalists, intellectuals, and museum curators"—were not professional advocates but rather "cultural mediators who interwove their visions of Israel with compelling myths or critiques of America." Their effectiveness lay in their ability to "translate their attachments or disillusionments with particular ethnic meanings into universal idioms."

This cultural work proved more influential than formal lobbying because it embedded Israel within broader American narratives. The author argues that these cultural mediators "have at times been more effective than formal lobbyists in communicating their passions and ambivalences to a broader public and in shaping the way a diverse swath of Americans have made Israel their own."

The Myth of Exceptionalism

The chapter critically examines how narratives about Israel have contributed to American exceptionalism while simultaneously creating what the author calls "the myth of the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel." This myth operates by viewing "Israel in an idealized mirror" while also projecting "idealized visions of American nationhood onto the image of Israel."

The author acknowledges the complexity of this relationship, noting that examining "the exclusive relationship between the United States and Israel risks reproducing the myth of the exceptional relationship." This self-reflexive awareness demonstrates the author's commitment to critical analysis rather than perpetuating existing mythologies.

Comparative Context and Broader Implications

While focusing on the American-Israeli relationship, the author situates this within a broader context of ethnic group lobbying in American politics. The chapter notes that "other minorities and ethnic groups, such as African Americans, Irish Americans, and Cuban Americans, have also lobbied around foreign policy issues in South Africa, Ireland, and Cuba." However, Israel's case is unique because "what might have been the foreign policy concerns of a particular ethnic group came to have long-term symbolic associations with American national mythology."

This transformation meant that "Israel became as much a domestic as a foreign issue," fundamentally altering how Americans understood both their own national identity and their international relationships.

Historical Continuity and "Common Consent"

The chapter concludes by connecting contemporary American discourse about Israel to deeper historical patterns. Referencing Abbot's 1799 sermon about "our American Israel," the author notes that this was already considered an "apt and proper" term by "common consent." This historical continuity suggests that American identification with Israel draws on longstanding patterns of American self-understanding.

The author's stated goal is to explore "the creation of 'common consent' over the last seventy years about the 'apt and proper' ways of speaking about Israel in the United States." This framing positions the book as an investigation into how particular narratives achieve cultural dominance and become accepted as natural or inevitable.

Through this introduction, the author establishes Israel's unique position in American consciousness as both a foreign policy concern and a domestic cultural phenomenon, shaped by evolving narratives of heroism, vulnerability, and shared destiny that continue to influence American political and cultural discourse today.

Next: Chapter One (Lands of Refuge)-July 16, 2025

Chapter 1 Summary: Lands of Refuge -How America Fell in Love with Israel: The 1940s Story You Haven't Heard

It's 1947, and Gregory Peck is playing a journalist in the Oscar-winning film Gentleman's Agreement. At a cocktail party, he awkwardly approaches a Jewish physicist — a thinly veiled Albert Einstein — to talk about Palestine and Zionism.

"What sort of ideas?" the physicist asks.

"Palestine, for instance. Zionism."

"Which? Palestine as a refuge . . . or Zionism as a movement for a Jewish State?"

"The confusion between the two, more than anything."

That Hollywood exchange captures something crucial that Amy Kaplan wants us to understand about how Americans came to see Israel. It wasn't inevitable. It wasn't automatic. And it certainly wasn't simple.

The Myth We Tell Ourselves

Most Americans today assume that after the Holocaust, supporting a Jewish state was obvious — a moral imperative that any decent person would embrace. But Kaplan's research tells a different story.

"A Jewish state, however, was by no means a universally applauded or uncontested idea in the aftermath of the war," she writes. In fact, many Americans found the whole concept troubling. A state based on religious identity? In a land with an Arab majority? To many, it seemed to contradict everything America stood for.

So how did we get from skepticism to the "unbreakable bond" we hear about today? Kaplan argues that "the idea had to be Americanized" — transformed from a European nationalist movement into something that felt familiar, even inevitable, to American audiences.

The Committee That Changed Everything

The story really begins with a devastating report from the displaced persons camps in Germany. Earl Harrison, investigating conditions for Jewish survivors, delivered a crushing verdict: "We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them."

President Truman was horrified. He demanded that Britain allow 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine immediately. The British, trying to hold onto their crumbling empire, countered with a proposal: Let's form a joint committee to study the whole mess.

Enter the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry — twelve men (no women, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, or actual experts allowed) tasked with solving one of the world's most intractable problems.

The American delegation included some fascinating characters, but Kaplan focuses on Bartley Crum, a progressive lawyer from San Francisco. His critics called him "Comrade Crum" because of his left-wing politics. He'd fought against racial discrimination, helped found the UN, and was about to defend anti-Franco fighters in Spain.

A journalist described Crum as "serious, courageous, and prepared like a trained prizefighter to battle for his convictions." He was also, Kaplan notes, exactly the kind of American progressive who would become enchanted with Zionism — and help sell it to the rest of the country.

The Washington Hearings: A House Divided

When the committee opened hearings in Washington in January 1946, they discovered that American Jews were deeply split on the whole question.

The Zionists, led by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, saw "the establishment of a Jewish state not as a question to investigate, but as an international commitment to fulfill with all due haste." Rabbi Stephen Wise, the 72-year-old veteran leader, moved audiences to tears as he recounted the history of Jewish persecution and called on Christians to guarantee that "Palestine shall be yours."

But then came the bombshell. Albert Einstein took the stand, and with flash bulbs popping and "adoring women gazing up at him like Gandhi," he delivered a stunning rejection of the whole enterprise.

"The State idea is not according to my heart," Einstein testified. "It is connected with narrow-mindedness and economic obstacles. I believe it is bad. I have always been against it." He called the idea of a Jewish commonwealth "an imitation of Europe" and warned that recent history proved "the end of Europe was brought about by nationalism."

The anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism went even further. Their president, Lessing Rosenwald, rejected what he called the "Hitlerian concept of a Jewish state" and warned against "Jewish nationalism." The hostility in the room was so intense that Rabbi Wise interrupted from the floor, and committee member Richard Crossman felt the "mental daggers in the audience behind him."

The Arab Case: An "Unanswerable" Challenge

Then came the Arab testimony, and it shook the committee to its core.

Philip Hitti from Princeton University laid out the Arab position with devastating simplicity. The Arab claim to Palestine, he said, rested on the "very simple fact" of "continued and uninterrupted physical and cultural association between land and people." He rejected the humanitarian argument for Jewish immigration as "an attenuated form of conquest," adding that "in the mind of the Arab, every Zionist coming in is a potential warrior."

This testimony deeply troubled Crum. "Were the committee instructed to determine the composition and wishes of Palestine's present population," he admitted, "the Arab case might have been unanswerable."

But here's where the American mindset kicked in. Richard Crossman, the British member of the committee, observed something telling about his American colleagues. He attributed their enthusiasm for Zionism to what he called the "frontier mentality."

"Zionism after all," Crossman wrote, "is merely the attempt by the European Jew to rebuild his national life on the soil of Palestine in much the same way as the American settler developed the West. So the American will give the Jewish settler in Palestine the benefit of the doubt, and regard the Arab as the aboriginal who must go down before the march of progress."

Frank Buxton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor from Boston, made this explicit. He likened Jewish settlement to the American "conquest of Indians" and claimed there was "such a thing as an international law of eminent domain" whereby "ultimately the worthy, the enterprising, the improvers, were bound to displace the backward folks."

The Camps: Where Hearts Changed Minds

But it was the visit to the displaced persons camps in Europe that really transformed the committee members.

They witnessed what Crossman described as the "unique and unforgettable smell of huddled homeless humanity." They met "the isolated survivor of a family deported to a German concentration camp or slave labor." Unlike other refugees, these Jews couldn't go home — their communities had been destroyed, their property stolen, and anti-Semitism had actually intensified after the war.

In every camp, the committee was greeted by DPs holding photographs of Theodor Herzl and signs reading "Open the Gates of Palestine!" The refugees were clear about what they wanted. They believed "their one escape from Hell was Palestine," and said they'd rather die fighting Arabs as "members of a Hebrew nation" than "rot away" in camps run by "British and Americans who talked of humanity but shut their doors to human suffering."

When asked for their second choice if Palestine wasn't available, hundreds wrote "Crematorium."

The American Contradiction

Here's where Kaplan reveals something uncomfortable about American attitudes. While Americans were demanding that Palestine open its doors to Jewish refugees, they were slamming shut their own.

When a 1945 Gallup Poll asked whether more Europeans should be allowed into America than before the war, only 5 percent said yes. Citizens bombarded Congress with demands to keep out what they called the "riffraff" and "scum of Southern and Eastern Europe."

The contrast was stark: 72 percent of Americans opposed making it easier for refugees to enter the United States. But 78 percent supported sending 100,000 Jews to Palestine.

As one Republican congressman put it after touring the DP camps: "If the Jewish facet of the problem could be cleared up, the solution of the remainder of the problem would be greatly facilitated. The opening of Palestine to the resettlement of Jewish displaced persons would break the log jam."

Kaplan argues this allowed Americans to "have it both ways: they could support rescuing the suffering victims of the Nazis while keeping their distance from the same people."

Palestine Through American Eyes

When the committee finally reached Palestine, something remarkable happened. The Americans felt immediately at home.

As their train rolled through Gaza, Crum recalled the story of Samson while thinking the landscape looked like "country between San Francisco and Los Angeles." Judge Hutcheson was relieved to find: "This is Texas."

In Tel Aviv, Crum marveled at the "tree-shaded boulevards, with opera and theaters, with playgrounds and modern schools." Everywhere in the city, he wrote, "you could stand on the street corner and say: 'this might be any American town.'"

The kibbutz reminded them of their own pioneer past. Frank Buxton welled up with tears after visiting one, exclaiming: "I felt like getting down on my knees before these people. I've always been proud of my own ancestors who made farms out of the virgin forest. But these people are raising crops out of rocks!"

But there was something else that caught American attention — something that sounds shocking today. Crum noticed what he called a "strange phenomenon." The Jewish children in Palestine were "blond and blue-eyed, a mass mutation that, I was told, is yet to be adequately explained." He saw them as "more a throwback to the farmers and fishermen of Jesus' day than products of the sons and daughters of the cities of eastern and central Europe."

Other Americans made similar observations. James McDonald visited a Jerusalem synagogue in 1948 and was "struck once more by the variety of the faces of the boys. Had I not know where I was, or heard the Hebrew words, I would have sworn that most of them were of Irish, Scandinavian or Scotch stock."

Kaplan notes that "as European Jews in Palestine became whiter—and more civilized—the Arabs among whom they settled appeared darker and more primitive."

The Liberal Consensus

Back in America, a powerful coalition was forming around Zionism. Progressive journalists like I.F. Stone and Freda Kirchwey of The Nation, politicians like Henry Wallace, intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr — they all embraced the Zionist cause.

For these liberals, supporting Israel wasn't just about helping Jewish refugees. It was about fighting fascism, promoting democracy, and advancing social justice. Kirchwey saw Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities as a "flaming symbol to all the world of humanity and freedom."

The Nation received a $50,000 grant from the Jewish Agency for "conducting research and publishing articles and reports, and promoting the Zionist cause among American liberals and foreign delegates to the United Nations."

They embraced grand technocratic schemes like the Jordan Valley Authority, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority. This would use American engineering to create new farmland for millions of Jewish immigrants while supposedly benefiting Arab neighbors too. It promised, as Kaplan puts it, "development without domination."

The Ghosts in the Machine

But when I.F. Stone and Freda Kirchwey visited the new State of Israel in 1948, they encountered something that didn't quite fit their progressive vision.

Stone was surprised to discover that "from a military point of view, the Jewish State was fully in existence the day it was declared." By May 14, 1948, "of some 350,000 Arabs in the Jewish area, 300,000 had fled."

Driving to Tel Aviv, Kirchwey saw "the little Arab villages by the roadside. Many had been shattered by gunfight. All were deserted." But she didn't dwell on this emptiness.

In Jaffa, she asked "Why did the Arabs run?" Despite noting the military attacks, she concluded the mass flight "seemed to have little to do with the fighting itself." She characterized it as an "epidemic of fear" — as if fear were a disease rather than a response to violence.

Stone's account was similar. He described Jewish forces attacking Arab neighborhoods but presented Arab flight as somehow disconnected from these attacks. "The Jews held and the Arabs failed," he concluded, "because one people cared enough to die and the other didn't."

The Americanization Project

What Kaplan shows us is how a European nationalist movement was successfully repackaged for American consumption. Zionism became frontier pioneering. Jewish settlement became the march of progress. Arab resistance became backward opposition to modernization.

The Anglo-American Committee officially rejected the idea of a Jewish state, but the minority position advocated by Crum and others would triumph in the UN partition vote. More importantly, their way of thinking about Israel — as a progressive cause, a democratic experiment, a refuge for the oppressed — would shape American discourse for decades.

"The success of this project," Kaplan writes, "lay not in eliminating contradictions but in making them invisible through powerful narratives that aligned Zionism with American values and mythology."

By 1948, Israel had been transformed from a controversial idea into an American progressive cause. The "special relationship" wasn't inevitable — it was constructed, carefully and deliberately, by cultural mediators who made Israel's story America's story.

And that, Kaplan suggests, is how we got from confusion to consensus, from skepticism to the "unbreakable bond" — not through the force of moral clarity, but through the power of familiar stories that made a foreign cause feel like home.

Next: Chapter Two (Founding Israel in America)