The Arab_Israeli Conflict
Page 1
The Arab-Israeli Conflict in American Political Culture
This book surveys discourse and opinion in the United States toward the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1991. Contrary to popular myth, it demonstrates that U.S. support for Israel is not based on the pro-Israel lobby, but rather is deeply rooted in American political culture. That support has increased since 9/11. However, the bulk of this increase has been among Republicans, conservatives, evangelicals, and Orthodox Jews. Meanwhile, among Democrats, liberals, the Mainline Protestant Church, and non-Orthodox Jews, criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians has become more vociferous. This book explores and explains this paradox.
JONATHAN RYNHOLD is the director of the Argov Center for the Study of Israel and the Jewish People in the political studies department at Bar-Ilan University, where he is also a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Dr. Rynhold’s research focuses on Israeli and American approaches toward the Middle East peace process. His work has been published in numerous academic journals, including Political Science Quarterly, Survival, and the Review of International Studies. He has also coedited two volumes on Israeli elections in the Israel at the Polls series and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Fathom.
For my mother
Denise Rynhold
1940–1993
The Arab-Israeli Conflict in American Political Culture
Jonathan RynholdBar-Ilan University
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA
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© Jonathan Rynhold 2015
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First published 2015
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rynhold, Jonathan.
The Arab-Israeli Conflict in American political culture / Jonathan Rynhold (Bar-Ilan University).
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-107-09442-0 (Hardback) – ISBN 978-1-107-47640-0 (Paperback)
1. Arab-Israeli conflict–1993–Foreign public opinion, American. 2. Arab-Israeli conflict–
Foreign public opinion, American. 3. Political culture–United States. 4. Right and left
(Political science)–United States. 5. Jews–United States–Attitudes toward Israel.
6. Protestants–United States–Attitudes. 7. Israel–Relations–United States.
8. United States–Relations–Israel. 9. United States–Politics and
government–1989– I. Title.
DS119.76.R95 2015
956.04–dc23 2014035121
ISBN 978-1-107-09442-0 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-107-47640-0 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Like U.S.: American Identification with Israel Cultural Foundations and Contemporary Attitudes
Part I Party and Ideology
2 Republicans, Conservatives and the Right: The Surge in Support for Israel
3 Democrats, Liberals, and the Left: Rising Criticism of Israel
Part II Protestants
4 Evangelicals and Christian Zionism: Standing with Israel
5 The Mainline Protestant Church and Anti-Zionism: Divesting from Israel?
Part III Jews
6 American Jewish Attachment to Israel: Mind the Gap
7 American Jews and the Peace Process: Divided We Stand?
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Many people were generous with time, providing invaluable assistance in preparing this book by reading and commenting on parts of the manuscript, or by helping arrange interviews, or simply by being willing to discuss the subject matter of this book with me in depth. In this regard, I would like to thank Carmiel Arbit, Mitchell Bard, Michael Barnett, Ralph Barnett, Peter Beinart, Avi Ben-Zvi, Steve Bickel, Yaeli Bloch Elkon, Daniel Byman, Zoe Clark, Stuart Cohen, Nathan Diament, Alan Dowty, Mike Eisenstadt, Robert O. Freedman, Avi Freeman, Zev Gewurz, Eli Gotlieb, Efraim Inbar, Brian Katulis, Aron Kayak, Michael Kraft, Shimmy Kreditor, Fran and Neil Kritz, Scott Lasensky, Eli Ledledender, Rachel Lerner, David Makovsky, Haim Malka, Henry Nau, Jeremy Newmark, Jeremy Pressman, Natan Sacks, Theodore Sasson, Marcus Sheff, Danny Sherman, David Sloan, Kenneth Stein, Gerald Steinberg, Ken Stern, Elana Sztockman, Kenneth Wald, Michael Weiger, Dov Waxman, Ariella Zeller, and Julie Zuckerman, as well as several interviewees who prefer to remain anonymous. I especially would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as Adrian Daniels and Roy Pinchot, who read and commented on the whole manuscript. Of course, any remaining errors are my sole responsibility.
A significant part of the research for this book was conducted during a sabbatical in Washington, DC, in 2012–2013. In this regard, I would like to thank the Department of Political Science at the George Washington University for hosting me, especially the departmental chair, Paul Wahlbeck, and Professor Emeritus Bernard Reich. I would also like to thank the Kemp Mill synagogue community for being welcoming to myself and my family and for providing a wonderful opportunity for me to immerse myself in American Jewish political culture.
In a wider sense, I would like to thank the members of the Department of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University for providing me with invaluable support and encouragement over the years; special mention to Shmuel Sandler, whose sage advice on this project was invaluable, and to the head of department, my good friend Shlomo Shapiro.
Finally, on a personal note, I especially want to thank my wonderful wife, Elise; our boys, Matan and Tomer; my father, Monty; my sister, Joanna; my uncle and aunt, David and Valerie Rynhold; and my cousin, Professor Daniel Rynhold:
.שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה
Introduction
The United States … has a special relationship with Israel … really comparable only to which it has with Britain.
—John F. Kennedy1
The United States has a special relationship with Israel. A defining feature of the special relationship is that support for Israel goes beyond an empirical calculation of U.S. interests. This is because the relationship is grounded on deep cultural foundations that predate the mass immigration of Jews to the United States. While this special relationship continues to endure; beneath the surface those foundations are shifting in conflicting directions. For in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a paradox has emerged in the way America relates to Israel. On the one hand, Americans identify with Israel and sympathy for Israel is widespread, surging to new heights. On the other hand, Americans are increasingly divided about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and this division increasingly aligns with the major political, ideological, and religious divi
des in America.
Thus, Republicans and conservatives have become far more supportive of Israel than liberals and Democrats. At the same time, the most vociferous evangelical supporters of Israel oppose Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, while mainline church activists have been pushing divestment from Israel in order to pressure Israel into making concessions. In the heartland of pro-Israel sentiment, the organized American Jewish community has become increasingly divided over the peace process, as exemplified by the formation of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby J Street, as an alternative to the established pro-Israel lobbying organization the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
What we have here is an “Israel paradox” in American political culture. On the one hand, sympathy for Israel is deep-seated, widespread, and increasingly robust. On other hand, there are increasing divisions among Americans over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Surveying and analyzing this paradox is what this book is all about.
Approaches to U.S.-Israel Relations
American support for Israel is a subject of extensive public debate and academic inquiry. Within the public debate a number of clichés have become pervasive. For example, it is often claimed that Americans’ sympathy for Israel is primarily due to two factors: apocalyptic evangelicals trying to bring about Armageddon, or the power of the “Jewish” lobby. Certainly, evangelicals are very supportive of Israel, and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States does possess influence. However, such explanations are simplistic and misleading. After all, as we shall see later on, even secular liberal Americans are more pro-Israel than Europeans. Moreover, Americans’ support for Zionism was already apparent in the nineteenth century, predating the existence of a Jewish pro-Israel lobby, and at a time when the American Jewish establishment was anti-Zionist.
Others retort that American support for Israel is simply a matter of shared democratic values and that the reason Europeans are more anti-Israel is because of anti-Semitism. Certainly, anti-Semitism is higher in Europe than in the U.S. and is often associated with anti-Israel sentiment, but European countries with democratic values and low levels of anti-Semitism, like the UK, are still more sympathetic to the Palestinians than Israel. So once again, this simplistic explanation does not suffice.
Finally, a common explanation for the growing divide between Republicans and Democrats on Israel is that right-wing Israeli policies are alienating American liberals. Again, there is no doubt that American liberals oppose the policies of the Israeli Right, but the levels of sympathy for Israel among Democrats has actually remained steady, while liberals have been divided among themselves over who is primarily to blame for failure to achieve peace. Clearly then, there is a need to analyze these issues in depth.
In terms of academic studies, broadly speaking, there have been three approaches to U.S.-Israeli relations, one focused on American national interests, another on the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, and yet another on political culture.
The National Interest
The Realist approach to international relations views shifts in the balance of power between states and the national interest defined in terms of power and state security as the key to understanding international relations.2 From this perspective U.S. support for Israel is viewed as stemming primarily from the perception of Israel as a strategic asset for the United States.3 Indeed, international politics and U.S. interests have clearly played a significant role in influencing U.S. policy to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
However, it is not always clear whether supporting Israel has been in the U.S. interest or not. In fact, there has been a long standing debate among American policy makers as to whether Israel is a strategic asset or a liability. This debate has intensified in the twenty-first century. Crucially, it is not simply a debate over the nature of the empirical reality that can be settled by “facts” alone; rather it is a debate informed by different subjective conceptions of what American grand strategy ought to be.
Grand strategy involves a self-conscious identification and prioritization of foreign policy goals and a selection of a plan and the appropriate instruments such as military power or diplomacy to achieve those goals. It begins with theories about how the world works and what ought to be the role of one’s state in that world. Even Realists, such as Walter Lippmann and George Kennan, thought that cultural factors can profoundly affect grand strategy.4 Thus, in order to explain the influence of strategic factors on U.S. policy, one must first understand the place of Israel in these ideational constructs, which are an integral part of America’s political culture.5
The Pro-Israel Lobby
While Realists generally view domestic politics as at most a secondary factor driving foreign policy, two prominent Realist scholars have argued that U.S. policy toward Israel is an exception to that rule. In the wake of President George W. Bush’s strong support for Israel, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argued that U.S.-Israeli relations are primarily a function of a powerful pro-Israel lobby. While the strident polemical tone of their work made a big splash, their argument was not in itself original, but rather echoed earlier works that essentially made the same case.6 There is no doubt that pro-Israel groups constrain U.S. policy, raising the political costs of pressuring Israel. But Mearsheimer and Walt’s claims are exaggerated.7 Pro-Israel groups do not control U.S. policy, nor are they its main determinant.
Middle East policy is made primarily by the administration, especially the president.8 Between 1945 and 1984, when the pro-Israel lobby clashed with the executive it won about a quarter of the time, and then primarily on the details of economic issues rather than on the bigger issues of diplomatic or military policy.9 More recently, Aaron Miller, a former State Department official who dealt with the Middle East peace process in the 1990s, concluded: “I cannot remember a single major decision on Arab-Israeli peace in which AIPAC, either directly or indirectly, prevented us from moving in the direction we [the Administration] wanted.”10 Even allowing for the growth of AIPAC in the twenty-first century, the Center for Responsive Politics ranked the pro-Israel lobby’s effectiveness twenty-sixth out of forty industries lobbying Congress.11
In any case, whatever the precise level of influence exerted by pro-Israel organizations, that influence cannot be properly understood in isolation from wider public opinion. As Kenneth Wald concluded, foreign policies advocated by ethnic groups succeeded “only to the extent that they had allies outside their own communities; could frame their policy in terms that resonated with American values; and, perhaps most important, offered plans consistent with American national interest as perceived by the president and public opinion.”12 Andrew Kohut, the president of the highly respected Pew Research Center that surveys American public opinion, concurred, stating, “If you didn’t have a broad base of public support … you couldn’t create the level of support for Israel that exists on the basis of lobbying.”13 In other words, in order to explain the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, one must first of all understand the resonance of Israel in American political culture.
Political Culture
In terms of International Relations theory, rationalist-materialist paradigms such as Neorealism, Neoliberalism, and Marxist dependency theory view ideas as merely an epiphenomenon, dismissing the role of political culture. However, neoclassical Realism14 and foreign policy analysis15 do recognize a significant role for ideational factors, while Constructivism gives culture and ideas pride of place.16 Indeed, a short Constructivist analysis of U.S.-Israel relations has been published.17 More generally, there have been a number of works about American political culture and attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East.18 But these are almost exclusively concerned with the Cold War period or earlier. They also tend to emphasize the “stickiness” of attitudes. This is an important part of the story. However, culture and attitudes are, at least in part, dynamic.19
Given changes in American attitudes to Israel and the Middle East since the end of the Cold War, there is an acute need for a new
and comprehensive analysis of this subject. This is the purpose of the current work. Below, the concept of political culture is defined and the way in which it is deployed in this book is outlined.
Definitions and Approaches
In the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Lucien Pye defines political culture as “the set of attitudes, beliefs, and sentiments which give order and meaning to a political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behavior in the political system … encompassing both the political ideals and the operating norms20 of a polity.”21 As such, political culture incorporates conceptions of collective identity,22 conceptions as to the nature of politics (ontology), assessments of what is desirable (values), legitimate (norms) and plausible in the political realm, all of which inform the ideological23 orientations and political objectives of both leaders and citizens, as well as the strategies they deploy to advance these objectives. Moreover, political culture is not only cognitive and evaluative, but also affective. According to Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba,24 the cognitive element decodes experience giving it meaning; the evaluative element informs expectations and provide goals towards actions are directed, while the affective element refers to emotions that “move” actors. While some elements of a political culture are consensual, others are contested, often vigorously, by various subcultures.25
Some have approached the study of political culture by analyzing the aggregation of individual attitudes through surveys; while others have adopted an interpretative approach that has focused on understanding intersubjective meaning as portrayed in the discourse, in narratives.26 This involves analysis of how issues are framed, wherein framing is defined as “selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution.”27