Walter Russell Mead’s latest book, Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, examines the fascinating question of why Americans have so much “sympathy for the Zionist movement and the Jewish state.” Perhaps better than any other book yet written, it reveals the sources of American Zionism, back to America’s own founding.
The framers were steeped in classical antiquity, Greek, Roman, and biblical, and saw themselves as part of that epic story. They saw America’s mission as not just providential but the source of a worldwide democratic transformation.
The myth of an all-powerful Jewish lobby persists, though it has, at long last, been pushed to the fringes. Mead offers many facts that show why the picture of America’s Israel policy being beholden to powerful Jewish groups is simply not historically accurate. Few are as compelling as the observation that Israel has often had better friends in America than such lobbies. In 1891, the Blackstone Memorial, a document delivered to President Benjamin Harrison bearing the signatures of leading American gentiles including J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, proposed to “give Palestine back to the Jews.” That year, Mead writes, “the New York Times had been under non-Jewish ownership when it endorsed the Blackstone Memorial; by 1922 it had been sold to a Jewish owner, and it subsequently opposed Zionism.”
The roots of America’s support for Zionism go deeper still. The Enlightenment had two major consequences for the Jewish people, one good, the other calamitous. With the rise of a powerful commercial bourgeoisie in the late Renaissance came the impetus for liberalizing democratic reforms, starting with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England and culminating a century later in the American Revolution. “Out of the fires of Religious persecution came a belief among increasing numbers of Protestants that religious toleration, as well as the separation of church and state, was God’s will.” America became a haven for those fleeing religious persecution.
Unfortunately, that same economic and political transformation also unleashed a more savage force, nationalism, which led to increased antagonism against Jews in 19th century Europe and eventually to the pogroms in Russia, the reason for the Blackstone Memorial. In the countryside of Eastern Europe, Jews found themselves increasingly persecuted, and even in the cities, where they had been faring better, they faced growing suspicion.
In Europe, the Enlightenment failed to live up to its promise for the Jews. Assimilation had failed. The increasing ostracism of European Jews led a young Austrian Jew, Theodor Herzl, to write an explosive pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, in which he argued for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, faut de mieux. Zionism was born.
Yet after introducing us to Herzl, Mead has virtually nothing more to say about Jewish Zionism or the birth of Israel. Incredibly for a 600-page book about Israel, David Ben-Gurion is mentioned hardly a dozen times, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky only once. But then again, Mead’s main purpose is to focus our attention on gentile Zionism in America. Showing how incidental lettered Jewish Zionism was to the American variety only proves his point.
Through the period of persecution and Holocaust in Europe and settlement in Palestine, Mead’s focus remains in Washington, where Zionism shifts progressively from steadfast aspiration to core policy commitment. In the midst of World War I, former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote that “there can be no peace worth having” until “the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.” A generation later, an “American Cyrus,” President Harry Truman, gets most of the attention and most of the praise. It was Truman who reconciled competing constituencies and priorities to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine after World War II, recognizing the state of Israel just minutes after its independence.
Still, given the socialist leanings of Israel’s early governments and the competing aim of placating the oil-rich Arabs, the U.S. government’s support for Israel remained more a matter of word than deed in material policy terms until 1973, the year that changed the Middle East and the U.S. forever.
Fresh off a landslide reelection, President Richard Nixon started 1973 with one of the highest approval ratings ever measured. By October of that year, when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel during Yom Kippur, the Nixon administration was imploding due to the Watergate scandal. With the help of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, however, Nixon was able to steer to a strategic victory against the Soviet Union, ending the era of state-on-state Arab-Israeli wars and making the U.S. the preeminent power in the Middle East.
“The events on the battlefields of the October War were dramatic enough, but politics and diplomacy had as much to do with the war’s outcome as events on the ground, and the consequences of the war for American foreign policy were much more important than the relatively modest, limited, and ultimately ephemeral territorial changes brought about in the fighting,” Mead recounts. “Soviet influence and prestige suffered blows from which they never recovered. Egypt moved decisively from Nasser’s pan-Arabism to Sadat’s Egypt First policy. The United States came out of the fighting more deeply and publicly aligned with both Israel and Egypt than ever before and established as the arbiter of the Middle East.” Alas, in the course of a whole chapter devoted to those events, Mead goes into virtually no detail about them, military, political, or diplomatic, sticking instead to more general observations.
The latter part of the book details the increasing centrality of Israel in U.S. foreign policy, particularly the emergence of the Republican Party as a bastion of pro-Israel sentiment. As Mead recounts, the American Left had long lionized the persecuted, stateless Holocaust survivors searching for a corner of the desert where they could establish their humble socialist collectives. But by the 1970s, “instead of creating a trade unionist’s paradise on the Mediterranean, the Jewish state had become a military juggernaut.” It took just a few years for the Left to turn against Israel, becoming for many leftists an object of single-minded hatred.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Left was heading in the opposite direction as Marxian dreams turned to dust among listless kibbutzim and hopes for peace pinned on unreformed Palestinian terrorists like Yasser Arafat turned to ashes in wave after wave of senseless suicide bombings. Mead tries mightily to be evenhanded in his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At one point, he seems to attribute the failure of the peace process to the weakness of Israel’s left-leaning political parties, but it is precisely the other way round: The failure of the peace process has destroyed the Israeli Labor Party and pushed the entire Israeli electorate to the right.
Mead notes the contradiction between the free market orientation of the Republican Party and the deeply progressive values of both American and Israeli Jews. “The anti-welfare state, anti-socialist ideas that inspired Ronald Reagan struck a large majority of American Jews as both mean-spirited and wrongheaded.” And in Israel, even right-wing parties are to the left of the Democratic Party in many areas of social policy. That is one of the tragedies of Zionism, though: Too many Israelis and Israel supporters viscerally reject what is the only realistic hope for peace in the region, namely the embrace of political and economic liberalization by both Israel and its neighbors.
America won the Cold War because a substantial part of the world adopted the American model of political and economic liberalization to fantastic result. The alliance with Arab states that is now emerging from the Abraham Accords is a heartening development. But the Arab states are brittle dictatorships. Any one of them could implode and be taken over by radicals, as happened in 1979, when America’s crucial ally, the Shah of Iran, was toppled and replaced by one of the most virulent and dangerous regimes on Earth.
The Arc of a Covenant is history on a grand scale — intellectual, social, cultural, political. It vaguely recalls To the Finland Station, in which the great American essayist Edmund Wilson meticulously traces the various European intellectual currents that converged in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries toward a single cataclysmic point in time, namely Vladimir Lenin’s arrival at the Finland railway station in St. Petersburg in 1917, the spark that lit the Russian Revolution.
The book’s title, Arc of a Covenant, is a not-so-oblique reference to the biblical ark that enshrined God’s covenant with the Jewish people. But here the “covenant” is that between America and Israel, and “arc” is implicitly used in the dramatic sense. The title is apt, for the book has an epic arc.
Mario Loyola, a professor at Florida International University and a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, served as associate director for regulatory reform of the White House Council on Environmental Quality from 2017 to 2019.
