For those inclined to see the workings of divine providence in human history, the special affinity of the American people for Israel provides a happy example. If Israel could have only one consistent ally in the world, it would surely have picked the world's (still) most powerful nation. Without the United States, Israel would be hard pressed to obtain the weapons needed to defend itself.
Bush and Olmert on the US president's May visit to Israel.
Photo: AP
American popular support for Israel has many sources. The first is historical. The Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony self-consciously modeled themselves on the ancient Hebrews and styled themselves as the New Israel. The Hebrew Bible provided their guidance. All the early presidents of Yale were Hebraists, and the college's insignia was patterned on the urim vetumim worn by the high priest.
To this day, Americans remain by far the most religious people in the Western world. Seventy million American Evangelicals constitute Israel's most ardent supporters. Americans have always tended to be jealous of their sovereignty and willing to defend themselves against any threat to their liberty. The state motto of New Hampshire, "Live free or die," captures that spirit. As such, they admire Israel's doughty self-defense against far more numerous enemies.
In Western terms, America is a center-right country. A major aspect of the American exceptionalism discussed by historians is its failure to develop a class-based political movement. That too has strengthened the bonds to Israel. Among American liberals, who tend to see the world in terms of victims and oppressors, 59 percent view the Palestinians more or equally sympathetically (according to a 2002 Gallup poll). Among conservatives, whose focus is on particular values and the determination to defend them, 59% view Israel more favorably.
The presence in America of the world's largest Jewish community - a community that is both wealthy and politically active - has also shored up American support for Israel. (That community, however, is diminishing both in numbers and concern with Israel; many of the most active supporters of Israel in Congress come from states with few Jews.)
BELIEF IN American exceptionalism, its chosenness, has always played a major role in American civic religion. The two dominant conceptions of American foreign policy - isolationism and liberal internationalism - are both predicated upon an assumption of American moral superiority. Isolationists fear contamination from the "foreign entanglements," of which president George Washington warned in his farewell address. Liberal internationalists seek to remake the world in America's image.
Barack Obama speaks in front of the Victory Column in Berlin last July.
Photo: Bloomberg
Sen. Barack Obama represents a third foreign policy approach - what Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington calls the "cosmopolitan." Far from taking American virtue as its starting point, the cosmopolitan seeks to remake America in Europe's image.
Thus Obama presented himself to Europeans last summer as a citizen of the world, one of them. "Mr. Obama," in the words of Fouad Ajami, "proceeds from the notion of American guilt. 'We called up the furies...'" He accepts the Western European critique of America's aggressiveness and seeks to restore American "moral standing" in the eyes of the world.
He shares the Europeans' contempt for the terminology of good and evil: "A lot of evil's been perpetuated based on the claim that we were fighting evil," he says. If his heart thrilled at the sight of Iraqis twice braving suicide bombers to go the polls, he kept it to himself. The war in Iraq, in his view, was nothing more than a "cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors... to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the cost in lives lost and in hardships borne."
And he expresses understanding for the grievances of the perpetrators of evil - Hamas, Hizbullah, even the perpetrators of 9/11, which he characteristically portrayed as part of "an underlying struggle between worlds of plenty and worlds of want" (despite the affluent backgrounds of the attackers). He voted against a Senate bill to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.
Obama's most fervent support has come from the university campuses and cultural elites - where attitudes tend most to resemble those of Western Europeans, and where scorn for those who "cling to guns or religion" runs rampant. These campuses also happen to be the redoubts of the greatest hostility to Israel.
AN AMERICA that more closely resembles Western Europe will not be good for Israel. Western Europeans consistently deem Israel the greatest threat to world peace. And they are remarkably cavalier about Israel's defense of its own existence. Recent memory does not include any Israeli response to attack that the Europeans did not deem disproportionate. The Western European countries have done little to prevent the United Nations from degenerating into an anti-Israel debating society, and a number have supported or abstained on UN Human Rights Council resolutions supportive of anti-Israel "resistance" - i.e. terrorism.
Many commonly held attitudes predispose Europeans against Israel. Western Europe is far along a project of transferring political legitimacy from nation-states to supranational organizations like the European Union, the UN and the International Criminal Court. Having achieved their nation-state rather late in the day, the Jews of Israel remain proud of it. To the Europeans, however, a non-Muslim state based on national/religious identity seems an atavism.
Western Europe's almost religious faith in international institutions of open membership, like the UN, and a declining concern with national sovereignty threaten Israel. International criminal jurisdiction has already rendered Israeli military personnel wary of traveling abroad. Obama frequently demonstrates a similar reverence for the UN, and has a long list of international treaty obligations to which he is eager to submit the US.
