The Origins Of Today’s Conflict Between American Jews Over Israel

In the early years, American Jewish support for Israel was a fraught issue. The turning point was the six-­day war of 1967, which solidified a strength of feeling that has only recently begun to fracture

Even before it existed, Israel was on American minds. Colonial preachers called their new land Canaan; Herman Melville saw Americans as “the peculiar, chosen people, the Israel of our time”. In the Second Great Awakening of the late 18th and early 19th century, American Protestants became obsessed with the Holy Land, and it was perhaps in response that one Jewish preacher had called in as early as 1818 for Jews to establish themselves in Ottoman Syria. Christian Zionism flourished, remaining a powerful force in American politics to this day. But Zionism in the modern sense was largely a product of the mass migration from the Russian Empire, and even in the interwar years­ pro-­Zionist movements in America were still outranked socially by the officially “non-Zionist” American Jewish Committee (AJC), which represented the leadership of the most assimilated section of the Jewish population whose arrival predated the “Russians”. Their attitudes were reflected in the 1898 resolution of the American Reform movement, which declared itself “unalterably opposed to political Zionism” on the grounds that “the Jews are not a nation, but a religious community”.

Into the 1930s, the AJC opposed the setting up of an international quasi-parliamentary Jewish organisation lest it imply that Jews owed an allegiance to one another that ranked above their allegiance to the political institutions of their own homeland. When the creation of the World Jewish Congress was mooted, the ΑJC objected to the view that “the Jewish people” was, or could ever be regarded as, “a united national organism”. The wartime AJC president, Judge Joseph Proskauer, regarded Zionist propaganda for a homeland in Palestine as “a Jewish catastrophe”, and insisted that “from every point of view of safety for Jews in America there has got to be an open, vocal Jewish dissent from nationalism and political Zionism”.