In 1962, President John Kennedy told Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir that the United States had a “special relationship with Israel.” Ever since, historians, political scientists, and other observers, have debated the meaning of this phrase and the relationship it described. Although Kennedy made the statement to mollify the foreign minister – whose request for firmer political ties he had just turned down – his words did not emerge from a vacuum. They carried a host of associations for Americans, policymaker and ordinary citizen alike, and symbolized pervasive cultural and political attitudes toward Israel and Jews in general.
Following the intense debate unleashed by the publication earlier this year of John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt’s essay The Israel Lobby on the political origins of the American-Israeli relationship, it is worth broadening the discussion to include the cultural as well as the political realm. An examination of the cultural underpinnings of the American-Israeli relationship in no way denies the importance of political, strategic, and economic factors in understanding these ties. Rather, it provides a broader and more nuanced way of understanding “the special relationship.”
By 1962 when President John Kennedy met with then Foreign Minister Golda Meir, many Americans treated Israel as an ally with unique ties to the United States. That consensus represents a remarkable realignment of American attitudes, given the history of anti-Semitism in the early part of the century, as well as the debates in the United States about the founding of Israel after World War II. The transformation of American opinion and policy toward Israel and Jews in the decade and a half after World War II is revealed in multiple changing cultural narratives, both subtle and obvious, as they appeared in popular fiction, the press, and the writings of cultural critics and policymakers. Through these narratives, shaped by the ideology and political realities of the Cold War, Americans saw their own reflection: Israelis became ‘Americanized.”
The transformation of Jews and Israelis from “outsiders” to “insiders” had implications beyond the latest Hollywood movie or Life magazine profile. The shift in cultural narrative both reflected and helped shape the climate of political opinion in which U.S. leaders made policy toward Israel. Policymakers, subject to the same cultural messages as other Americans, were also influenced by such changing views of Jews. Culture was clearly an important factor in constructing the American-Israeli relationship. And the effects were felt at home as well: changing perceptions of Jews and Israel in the American mind helped pave the way for a wide, new acceptance of Jews in American life.
The New Jew
Probably the most familiar American fictional portrait of Israel in the postwar period is that by Leon Uris in Exodus, his 1958 best-selling novel and Hollywood film just two years later. A love story of an Israeli independence fighter and American nurse, Exodus became an enduring cultural touchstone for a generation of Americans and American Jews, because it echoed many of the themes of the previous decade’s cultural discourse and asserted them as unchallenged truths. For instance, it depicted Israel as a nation of pioneers and industrious citizens, ‘making the desert bloom’ amid the squalor of backward Arabs. The story reprised familiar images of independent Jews who resembled other Americans, weaving those images into a narrative about the meaning and creation of Israel, the Jewish character, European anti-Semitism and Zionism, the Holocaust, and the relationship between Israel and the U.S. The cultural narratives embedded in Uris’s story began to take shape after World War II.
After the horrors of the Holocaust, many Americans embraced universalism – the extension of moral concern across national and ethnic boundaries – and rejected prejudices, especially anti-Semitism, in the public culture. No longer shown as merely pitiful victims nor as dehumanized figures completely different from Americans, the Jews who survived the Holocaust had seemingly transcended this fate, and, after 1948, began to embody what came to be called the “New Jew” in the American imagination. Noble Jewish characters in popular fiction, such as Noah in Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions and Rachel in John Hersey’s The Wall demonstrated an inner strength in the face of brutal prejudice. The Jews of early postwar popular culture represented the beginning transformation of Jews from outsiders to insiders; and these images are essential for understanding American attitudes toward the formation of Israel.
Reactions to the Holocaust
Many Americans who supported the creation of Israel argued that Jews, victims of the Nazis and years of anti-Semitism, deserved a state as reparation for their persecution. The debate over the establishment of Israel was shaped by those non-Jewish Americans such as Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt who came to embrace Zionism and weave the story of the Holocaust into a public narrative of why Americans should support the creation of a Jewish state. These two liberals are also representative of mainstream attitudes toward Israel to the extent that their views evolved in the late 1940s and early 1950s, responding to a changing American image of Jews. Both had internalized the social anti-Semitism of their youth, but following the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, had rejected this prejudice and embraced universalism.
Once the existence of Israel was a fait accompli, support for the state grew in American popular and political culture. Images of Israel’s pioneering economic and military abilities, and democratic credentials built upon a foundation of good will that had been in place since 1947. This support was clear to both press and political observers. For example, a week after the formation of Israel, the Washington Star noted that, “the dramatic action of the Palestine Jews…fired the imagination of many an American.” In popular fiction written after the war, there was an even stronger identification with Israelis. Meanwhile, most politicians agreed that there was at least some public support for Israel. As Democratic Party chairman Howard McGrath told the Herald Tribune Forum: “Israel is supported by the great mass of people in the United States.”
Such benevolent American attitudes toward Israel became more widespread after 1948 through a cultural “Americanization” of the state. Celebratory articles highlighting Israeli pragmatism and the resemblance between Americans and Israelis appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, among other places. Meanwhile, in films such as The Sword in the Desert and The Juggler and in novels such as The Last Temptation, heroic Israelis demonstrated their pioneering, military prowess, and western outlook. Such images strengthened the foundation of support for Israel and for the American quest to erase discrimination against its own Jews. This increasingly cohesive image of Israel continued to evolve through the 1950s, finally contributing to greater policy changes in the 1960s.
Christian Zionism in the 1950s
The evolving image of Israel and Jews must also be understood in the context of the 1950s religious revival in the United States, with its assertions of Judeo-Christian unity. Israelis of the popular and political imagination resembled the prophets and simple folk who filled the pages of Bible stories. Popular biblical films and novels from the 1950s – such as The Song of Ruth, Samson and Delilah, The Prodigal, and The Ten Commandments – brought these images to life. Americans treated the political problems of the Middle East differently from those in other parts of the world because of the religious significance of the “Holy Land.” For instance, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who combined views of hard-nosed realpolitik with religious piety, acknowledged the special status of the Middle East. While Dulles and others paid lip service to the region being the home of three great religions, most of the indications in American public culture stressed that Christianity was the culmination of this religious heritage. Nevertheless, Judaism, part of the “Judeo-Christian civilization” benefited from this association.
Thus, the Cold War cultural narrative of religious revival and Judeo-Christian unity influenced attitudes toward Israel. Dulles and President Dwight Eisenhower were contributors to this narrative, championing the importance of spiritual values in the Cold War in which the “free world” was confronted by “Godless” communists. Numerous policymakers, critics, and popular writers and artists increasingly saw Israelis as religious brothers, sharing an understanding of moral values and, subsequently, political values in a Cold War world.
The Decline of Anti-Semitism
As the images of Israel were being remade in the 1950s, so too were those of American Jews, who not only gained acceptance in the halls of political power, but throughout public culture in the United States. Surveys demonstrated a clear decline in anti-Semitism from its wartime high and expressions of prejudice disappeared from popular culture. As the editors of Look magazine observed in 1955, “Hitler made anti-Semitism disreputable.” At the same time, American Jews also found themselves the beneficiaries of the increased emphasis on the multinational and multiethnic Western alliance in the Cold War, standing strong against international communism. In this struggle, Jews could be accepted for who they were; they did not have to assimilate to the point of shedding their particular identity. In press articles and in popular fiction, such as A Passage in the Night, The Enemy Camp, and Marjorie Morningstar, Jews were iconographic immigrants living out the Horatio Alger story of assimilation and success – central myths in American identity. Thus, identity as immigrant “outsiders” helped to cement Jewish credentials as “insiders” living out the American dream.
This image, of course, had a profound effect on perceptions of Israel and Israelis through their association with American Jews in cultural discourse. For example, in 1951, the popular television show The Toast of the Town, ran a special entitled “The Israel Anniversary Show” to celebrate what host Ed Sullivan called “the very glorious third anniversary of the founding of the young but powerful state of Israel.” The show featured a mixture of American and Israeli songs, a variety of well-known performers, testimonials about Israel from politicians and American Jewish leaders, and vaudeville comedy skits playing on Yiddish expressions and accents. The message throughout was that a celebration of Israel was really like a celebration of American Jews, and that all Americans, Jew and non-Jew alike, could identify with Israel.
Israel as a Cold War Ally
Through the 1950s, there are many examples of how policymakers such as Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dulles, Eisenhower, and members of congress, like television personalities, journalists, novelists, and Hollywood producers – albeit in a less effusive way – accepted and contributed to a cultural narrative that embraced Israel and Jews as similar to Americans. For example, former President Harry Truman highlighted American and Israeli similarity before the Zionist Organization of America in 1957:
Here was a country founded on the love of human freedom, just as our own country was based on the ideal of freedom./Here was a country designed to be a haven for the oppressed and persecuted of the earth, just as our own country had been./Here in the land of Moses and the prophets was a rebirth of a nation dedicated, as of old, to the moral law and to belief in God./..I believe it has a glorious future before it…as an embodiment of the great ideals of our civilization.
Politically, this narrative painted Israel as a Western country surrounded by anti-Western Arabs. Hostility toward Arabs, overall, only grew after the 1956 Suez crisis (when Egyptian leader Gamel Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company and Israel, Britain, and France invaded Egypt), especially since Nasser had invited the Soviet Union into the region and seemed determined to thwart American strategic plans. Moreover, many Americans continued to agree with the sentiments voiced by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles three years earlier: “The basic fact of the matter is that the Arabs do not want peace [in the Arab-Israeli conflict] and will not negotiate in any way for any sort of settlement.”
By contrast, as a result of a decade of cultural embrace that highlighted the similarity between Americans and Israelis, the Jewish state was easily seen by the late 1950s as a Western ally in the Cold War. Israeli foreign policies were interpreted – in the press and by policymakers – in light of these cultural images. Israel’s alliance with Britain and France, and her actions against the pro-Soviet Nasser also helped to rewrite American attitudes toward the nation, even though U.S. policymakers sharply condemned Israel’s actions over Suez. Other policy disagreements between the U.S. and Israel continued long after the Suez crisis was over, but they became routine and secondary. For example, although Israel wanted to obtain an offensive weapons capability greater than all of the Arab states combined, U.S. policymakers turned down the requests, pointing out that the U.S. was already generous with Israel, while encouraging Europeans to supply Israel with enough weapons for its self-defense. Meanwhile, Americans continued its close diplomatic relations with and provide extensive economic aid to the Jewish state.
The Suez crisis and its aftermath tested – and affirmed – the status of Israelis as insiders. Back in 1955, Dulles had warned Prime Minister Moshe Sharett not to make any military moves against Egypt in reaction to a sale of Czech arms to the country. He reasoned that aggression on Israel’s part would force the U.S. to take sides against the Jewish state, and erode political and popular support for Israel. “Israel has a tremendous asset of good will of all American people. What a people will do in assisting another country depends more on such things than on treaties.” Dulles was right on this point, more so than he realized. Israel did enjoy tremendous good will from Americans on the eve of Suez, good will that was strong enough to blunt American policymakers’ criticism of the Israeli attack on Egypt and its defiance of both the U.S. and U.N.
Israelis and Jews as “Insiders” in American Culture
By the end of the 1950s, a set of mutually reinforcing political and cultural narratives about American Jews and Israel had solidified. If the decline of anti-Semitism helped to encourage the political acceptance of Israel, deepning U.S.-Israeli ties helped to hasten the end of prejudice against Jews. Similarly, the images of Israel permeated popular as well as political culture, constructing a story of Israeli similarity to Americans. As Jews in the United States became more accepted, Israelis, too, became “Americanized,” – culturally, politically and religiously – within an American cultural narrative. It’s important to remember that assertions of Israeli and American similarity were found in the political as well as popular culture, with policymakers often invoking the same language and assumptions about ethnic characteristics as did best-selling pot boilers or journalists.
The assumptions of American and Israeli similarity were further encouraged by the policy decisions coming out of Washington and the rhetoric used to describe those policies. Continuing U.S. aid, the decision to de-emphasize many disagreements between the two nations (for example, the dispute over the sovereignty of Jerusalem), and a budding strategic reliance with Israel in the late 1950s signalled to most Americans that the U.S. and Israel were at least “friends,” if not “partners” in a Cold War world.
The early Cold War was a time of tremendous change in Israeli-American relations. It is a period of the Israeli-American relationship that has often been neglected by historians, except for the story of Israel’s formation and the Suez War. But this period is essential for understanding the multifaceted U.S.-Israeli relationship in the 1970s and after. Although few U.S. weapons went to Israel and the economic aid of these years was but a fraction of what would follow, it was in the late 1940s and 1950s that Israelis were redrawn in popular culture to resemble Americans, and became “insiders” in American political culture.
Michelle Mart is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University, Berks campus and the author of Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally and other articles on American-Israeli relations.
