Walter Russell Mead
The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People
Walter Russell Mead - The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People
- Good afternoon everybody, and good evening. So it’s a real privilege today to be joined by Walter Russell Mead, who is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, which by the way is the best title I think I’ve ever heard, Walter. And he is the Global view columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the James Clark Chase Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York. He’s also a member of the Aspen Institute, Italy and Board member of Aspenia. Before joining Hudson, Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations as the Henry H. Kissinger Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy. He’s authored numerous books, including the widely recognised “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World.” Mead’s most recent book is entitled “The Arc of a Covenant: The US, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.” So Walter, it’s really a pleasure to be here. As I said, I studied you in college, so it’s a privilege for me that I get to do this today. And we’ve got a jam-packed hour because discussing the US-Israel relationship could go on for several days, but we’re going to see how far we can go and then everybody can read the book as the way to learn more. So before we dig in, I wanted to ask what brought you to write this book? You’re not Jewish. Some may wonder why you’ve chosen to kind of give yourself a bit of a rod for your own back here, but what is it that brought you to actually focus on this?
Well, you know, as somebody who studies American foreign policy and especially the history of American foreign policy, I just, I’m fascinated by the way that this tiny little country is such an obsession in American politics and not just in American politics. Anywhere you go in the world, people feel this intense interest, and sometimes it’s positive and sometimes it’s negative about Israel. And they have extremely strong views on the US-Israel relationship. And over time, I’d come to feel that most of these views were rather wrong, and that the misunderstandings about the US-Israel relationship were part of an even larger misunderstanding about American foreign policy, the way America works. So this seemed like a useful thing to do to try to cast some light on this very, very controversial subject.
So before we focus on the kind of US-Israel side of the relationship, I wanted to go a little bit further back and talk about Zionism, which in and of itself is seen as a controversial topic for today. How do you see Zionism as having evolved to where it is today and as you say, becoming this obsession on the world stage?
You know, the story of Zionism is such an interesting story, and again, it’s not well understood. Most European Jews, when Herzl published “Der Judenstaat,” people either attacked it or more often just ignored it. And there’s this idea that somehow Zionism was this project that the extremely powerful Jewish community imposed on the rest of the world. Actually, Zionism for Jews was a little different. It was, you know, if you’d asked your typical European Jew in 1890, 1900, what do you want? They’d say, we’d want to be left alone, to live our lives, whether religious lives, secular lives, whatever, just let us be. And then if you hate us too much to let us be, and you’re not going to do that, at least let us move to some other country where we’ll be all right. And those two ideas were dominant among the world’s Jews, Herzl understood that neither of those was going to work out. That the Jews of Europe, who seemed to be assimilating so well and encountering so much progress in the 1880s and 90s would ultimately face being driven out or killed en mass in Europe. And the doors of immigration that were open almost everywhere in 1900 would close to them, trapping them in Europe. That was the sort of nightmare vision Herzl had. And Zionism seemed to be, again, not the of a victorious people imposing its vision on the world through power, but the one possibility for Jewish survival that could attract the critical non-Jewish support that would allow it to actually happen. And this I think was always Zionism’s secret weapon in the political contest in the Jewish community, was that unlike the paths of assimilation, toleration, or immigration, Zionism could attract just enough gentile support. So that with a lot of hard work, good bit of luck and extremely focused effort, the Zionists were actually able to bring their programme to realisation in a way that the other programmes for the Jewish future in Europe failed.
So now looking to where we are today with that being the basis, if you meant this book to kind of debunk the theory of the all powerful Israel lobby thesis and perhaps, you know, the power of Jews around the world, do you think you’ve done that through the book and, you know, do you think that it’s something that people will be able to absorb or is there something else driving this obsession?
Well, look, anytime you’re talking about a sort of powerful, irrational belief that has its holds on a lot of people, the idea that it can just be dispelled with a couple of chapters in a book and a dose of common sense is a little bit utopian.
Especially in today’s day and age where we shouldn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.
This is, we are in the golden age of conspiracy theories, and antisemitism is one of the most popular recurring conspiracy theories. So no, I don’t think a book like this or any book can make antisemitism go away, but I do think it’s helpful that this may shake some people in their convictions and make them take another look. In fact, I’ve had some Arab friends and Arab-American friends who’ve really been quite supportive of the book and would like to see it translated into Arabic because they actually think it makes points that a lot of sensible people would like to hear. So I think there’s room to maybe push back against stereotypes, push back against prejudice, but we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought we could make it go away.
So following on from that, and I was talking with Gabby Pearlman, who worked with you to write the book about this, which is, you know, the theory that the late Rabbi Sacks used to raise and that you yourself have raised about antisemitism being a barometer for the health of a society. And that often countries that subscribe to this worldview don’t tend to have, you know, as much success perhaps as some of the others. What do you make of that theory?
It’s certainly true that in American history, the periods where Americans have had the most doubt about where America was going, whether America could work, those have been the times that we’ve seen real surges in antisemitism and both on the left and the right at those times. So in the Depression, you had these, you know, where people were feeling all this economic pain, they didn’t understand the economic system. You found waves of antisemitism, Father Coughlin, the sort of infamous radio preacher was sort of a big element in American pop culture in the 1880s and 90s when an agricultural depression was driving a lot of farmers off the land, a hatred of Jewish, presumably Jewish bankers, finance, inflamed a wave of antisemitism. So yes, and I think today when a lot of people wonder, you know, does America have a future? Is the American dream real? Or is it some kind of a hoax you’re seeing again today on the far left and on the far right connected to this collapse of confidence in the American way, you are seeing the return of these conspiracy theories and prominent among them antisemitism.
So one of the jokes often amongst the Jews is, if we really controlled the world, we’d be better at it. But what do you think are some of the case studies that you refer to in the book as you know, if this Israel lobby was all powerful, then wouldn’t there be more wins? I mean, take Iran as a prime example of the JCPOA agreement or elsewhere where Israel has not had the success that people may report.
Look, I think it, you know, you look at history and you know, you start, let’s start off, let’s try to test this idea that the Jews rule the world. All right, 1930s Hitler is rising. Are the Jews able to assemble a worldwide boycott of Germany? Are the Jews able to bring down the German economy. In the United States, Jewish lobbying couldn’t even get President Roosevelt to increase the quota of immigrants that would allow a few more Jews to escape from Europe. Then World War II begins. In America, the Jewish leaders come to Franklin Roosevelt and they ask him to divert a few aeroplanes doing bombing rates in Europe to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. And they get nowhere. Now, this is not what an all powerful ruling group of people gets, but then in 1948 when Harry Truman recognises that Israel’s declaration of independence, suddenly the Jews control everything. And to hear the anti-Semites talk, this was all about, you know, the all powerful Jewish lobby crushing Harry Truman and forcing him to do their bidding. But again, four years later, Eisenhower becomes president. And for the next eight years, America’s main goal in the Middle East is to build a relationship with Nasser as a way to confront the Soviet Union. And they’re perfectly willing at Suez on other occasions to throw Israel under the bus in order to try to get this alliance with Nasser.
So what all powerful Jewish lobby is there? How does, you know, even if we assumed and I think historically it’s wrong, that it’s the Jews who shape pro-Israel policy in the United States. Why do they rise and fall so tremendously if they are this all powerful lobby? Surely that’s not a very good explanation. Again, when Israel was small and weak and a nation filled with refugees from Europe in the Middle East and the 1950s, huddled together concentration camp survivors, encircled by far greater powers on every side. You know, if America had a strong Jewish lobby and they were devoted to Israel in this way, surely that’s the time America would’ve supported Israel most, when Israel was weak. But you actually look at the history of the relationship, it’s after Israel becomes a regional superpower that it begins to enjoy a closer relationship with the United States. Israel, I say in the book that Israel did not become strong because it had an American alliance, it gained an American alliance after it had become strong.
So, you know, we are talking about sort of US foreign policy and stuff as if it doesn’t change depending on the government of the day. So do you think this is a problem both amongst the left and the right historically, before we look at the politics of today, you know, do you think there’s this assumption whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat president?
Well, you know, it’s, again, it’s fascinating to see that in the 1940s and 50s, not just in American politics, but in across Europe, it was the left that supported Israel and the right was more distant. So for the Democratic socialists of America who today are called Israel and apartheid state, they in the 1940s and 50s said, look, socialism can work. Israel is the proof. Israel was by far the most left wing of the Democratic countries in the 1940s, 50s, had a much greater state role in the economy, a much more planned economy. And socialism said, look, all you people who say socialism doesn’t work, Israel is socialist, Israel is Democratic, Israel is socialist, Israel has a strong military. And so the left had this kind of triumphalist vision of the Jewish state. It’s only in really after the 1967 war and going on later that the left and the right, especially in the United States, sort of begin to trade places. And as the left gradually distances itself from Israel, the right comes closer. So the politics of this are something that most people don’t ever look at. The left would like to put its old advocacy of Israel down the memory hole where we never talk about or think about these things. And the right’s also a little bit uncomfortable to think there was ever a time when they were not pro Israel. But in fact there was, in 1948 the very evangelical Southern Baptist convention, for some of our readers, our listeners who might not be Americans, that’s the largest Protestant evangelical denomination in the United States, refused to send this telegram to Harry Truman, congratulating him on recognising the state of Israel. So that is so different from what that group would do today, even among evangelical Christians, you see a difference. And in 1948, liberal Protestant Christians were probably more effectively engaged in supporting Israel than the conservatives.
And let’s take the Christian groups as an example. What do you think that accounts for today where, you know, Christian evangelicals have strong support for Israel? What’s led to that change?
I think several things, it begins, well one of the things is Israel today is a more religious, and we could say economically speaking anyway, right wing, conservative, free market country. So Likud as a political party in Israel, puts through a programme that is more say like Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan in the US. And so that Israel, instead of becoming a poster child for socialism, starts to become a poster child for Thatcherism or Reaganism. Well, that makes the right sit up and pay attention, but it makes the left very unhappy. And at the same time, I think the, you know, there’s a lot of times on the left, and I don’t mean to say this in a dismissive way or anything like that, you know, there’s a love of the underdog, the sort of weak darling and let’s all sympathise with the poor people, the underdog, you know, which say you look at how people feel about the Tibetans today or the Palestinians or the Uyghurs or others, very much in the 1940s and 50s, the Jews benefited from that kind of sense on the left. And they’d also been, you know, the chief victims of fascism. So if you were on the left and you wanted a stick to beat the right with, you’d say, look, the right has always been anti-Semitic and Hitler was just the distillation of all the antisemitism, of all the conservative nationalist religious groups going on. So sympathy for the Jews and the Zionist cause was one of the sort of cultural marks that would establish you as a person in good standing on the left.
So let’s dig in a little bit more on that. So, you know, you’ve quoted a couple of other challenging situations around the world, be it the Uyghurs, be it Tibet. Now obviously the level of veracity of the strength of people’s feelings about those situations, if you just take visible demonstrations, protests, comments in the house, et cetera, you know, you could say that the level of commitment people have to those causes is different to the way they engage with the Israel lobby. Do you think that’s based on this theory of the power of the Israel lobby and you know, that actually there is the ability to effect real change by engaging? Or do you think that goes back to anti-Semitic tropes and this kind of, you know, theory of Jews being the stronger, the David and Goliath situation?
Well, I’ll talk mostly about American politics here, obviously, ‘cause that’s what I know the most about. But I visited Northern Ireland a few years ago, and I noticed in Northern Ireland over the unionist neighbourhoods, you’d sometimes see a star of David flag flying. And then over the nationalist neighbourhoods, you’d see the Palestinian flag. And in lots of countries, not just the US or the UK identification with one side or the other in this conflict is, you know, is a factor in local domestic identity politics. There’s something you could say talismanic or charismatic about the conflict so that people whose personal stakes in it might be minuscule are much more engaged in this than they are in others. Now, some of that may rely in individual cases or whatever on antisemitism. And in the book I really try to avoid judging people’s motives. I’m actually not very good at telepathy and I’m not very good at telling you, you know, all the hidden motives and emotions behind things that people say. What I try to do is as best I can clear up, you know, what’s behind the ideas that they’re expressing. So, you know, some of this may be driven by a kind of an anti-Semitic malignancy or fear. More significantly, I think, is that anywhere where you have the Abrahamic religions are strong because of the place of the Jewish people in the Abrahamic tradition. The Jews have a kind of symbolic value that is much greater than their sort of demographic presence would suggest. And so for, you know, say from the anti-Israel side that many Muslims might take, you have sort of a mix of kind of theological feelings deriving from Islamic tradition about, you know, the Jews not being good allies of the prophet Muhammad, rejecting the revelation. But you would then bind that up too with the sense of colonialism, the Christian West oppressing the Muslim East.
And so the, you know, the opening of Palestine to Jewish colonisation by the British being an aspect would sort of get you where you live emotionally as a Muslim and then as an Arab nationalist and anti-colonial. But also people in other parts of the world, say in Malaysia, where one of the fundamental elements in Malaysian politics today is that under British rule, a lot of Chinese immigrants were settled in Malaysia as labourers and other things. The British leave, there’s independence, and now you have this large Chinese Malaysian community. And so in Malaysia, the Israeli Palestinian issue is much more emotional than in some other countries that don’t have similar issues. Or in Algeria where there were people can kind of, when they look at the West Bank, they sort of see what French colonisation of Algeria was like. So people relate to this conflict in a lot of ways that stir up profound emotions. And in the same way people in let’s say the United States who see Israel as an example of American values, working, democracy, free markets, creating a rich society and a strong society in a place with few natural resources and so on. You see, but also in American Christianity, going back hundreds of years before there was such a thing as liberal or conservative Christianity or evangelical or modern, people interpreted the Bible as predicting a return of the Jews to the holy land. And so when this starts to happen and then when the US and Israel become allies, it just feels good to a lot of people. I should maybe add another element to this, and if I’m talking too long, stop me.
I will, don’t worry.
Okay. If you think about the way people felt in the 1940s, what was going on around them? Think about the year 1944, Soviet troops began to liberate the extermination camps in Poland and the horror and the shock. There’d been reports of the Holocaust before, but suddenly you’re getting the photographs, you’re getting news reels with the survivors. The horror is overwhelming. And what does this say? You know, central hope of western civilization since the Enlightenment was that progress in science and technology and rationality was going to make a better humanity. We weren’t going to be vicious and brutal and prejudiced and all these terrible things. We’d be improved by the civilising qualities of modern civilization. Well, Germany was the centre of modern civilization, the philosophy, the music, the culture. And so in the middle of the enlightenment, in the middle of Germany, a horror breaks out as dark and unspeakable as anything in the annals of human history. What this tells you is the enlightenment is a fraud. It’s not going to save us. We are the monsters we’ve always been. There is no safety or security in progress against these terrible evils in the human heart. That’s number one. Number 2, 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this unreformed and unreformable human race recently revealed to be irredeemable in the sense that there’s an evil inside it, that science and reason cannot conquer, has now gotten its hands on weapons that can end all life on Earth.
The shock of those two realisations continues to echo and re-echo through, I think the psychology of just about everyone alive, even today, it’s a profound, profound revelation of the human condition. But then 1948, the state of Israel appears, the survivors of the Holocaust don’t disappear. And there’s a renewal. And again, for American Christians and others, other Christians in particular who had been raised on these ideas that when times are darkest, toward the climax of history, God will bring the Jews back to the lands of the Bible. It feels as if the appearance of Israel demonstrates that even in the middle of the chaos, the horror, the fear of the modern world, there is hope, the God of history, the God of Israel, the God of the Bible is real and is powerful and is acting today. I think again, you cannot understand the psychology of Americans today about Israel without having this picture in your head.
And how much of this do you think is a kind of Catch-22 around language? If you think about the way US leadership often describes the US-Israel relationship and vice versa, you know, they use words like unbreakable bond, unique, special, I mean, even Jimmy Carter would describe it as unique, which a lot of the Israelis would say is not someone they necessarily thought of as having a close supportive relationship with Israel. You know, I come from the UK and it’s not unusual to hear the UK US relationship described as the special friendship, but it is unusual, generally speaking, to hear that level of kind of, you know, moral connectivity between countries other than the way this unbreakable bond is described between the US and Israel. How much do you think language plays a role in this?
Well, I think the real question there is why do the politicians want to use this language? Because if a politician started running around saying, the United States has an unbreakable bond with China or unbreakable bond with Russia, right? You would get, it wouldn’t necessarily help you win the next election, right? So the politicians who keep coming down on this special relationship know that this is what voters want to hear. And you know, when a politician in America says, I’m pro-Israel, I think what the audience hears is not so much, oh, that’s great, he’s going to increase our aid to Israel by 10% or something like that. They think, oh great, he believes in American values just like I do. That this is support for Israel is seen somehow as part of an American way. And therefore it’s, you know, it’s why do politicians say they’re in favour of motherhood and why do they kiss babies, right? It’s because people want them to, or they feel that this will elevate themselves. So I’d say it’s not so much the language creating a reality as a reality promoting the language here.
So let’s follow up on that. Perhaps traditionally that’s been the case as there’s been more polarisation in the US as there’s this increasing volume on the kind of far left or progressive side around can you be pro-Israel? In fact, just last week, you know, Rashida Tlaib basically said, I want you all to know that among progressives, it’s become clear that you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government. And we will continue to push back and not accept that you are progressive except for Palestine. So is now that language that is, you know, small but a audible minority in the Democratic party starting to happen because the progressives believe that’s a way to also win votes? Or what do you think it is that’s leading to that change?
Well, you know, there are certainly districts in the United States, we have, what, 435 I think members of the House of Representatives. And they’re, you know, in our country, there are a handful of districts where those ideas, you know, resonate with the people. A certain number of times they’re heavily immigrant districts where the immigration is coming often from the Middle East, and we have actually a lot of Palestinian Americans in the US now, and they want to express their views of the conflict in, you know, the ones that are natural in their community and they want them represented on the American scene. But it is interestingly the case that when it comes to votes in Congress, you really don’t have a noticeable increase in support for “anti-Israel resolutions. And that even as say President Obama or President Biden is supporting something that Israel really doesn’t like, like the JCPOA, they feel the need not to say we’re supporting this even though a lot of Israelis don’t like it because it’s good for the United States, and it’s not really my business to worry all that much about Israel. I’m worried about America. They don’t say that, which would be one answer. What they say is, you don’t understand, I’m the most pro-Israel president. I’ve provided Israel with more aid than any other president or something like that, that tells you where a lot of public sentiment is among Democrats. They’re certainly not, president Obama’s not campaigning for Republican votes when he boasts about the size of his aid packages for Israel. So it’s a complicated situation. It’s an evolving situation. Politics doesn’t just take one shape and then freeze forever. But I would say we’re still a ways off from in American politics. Your attitude toward Israel being a clear partisan line with one big party anti-Israel, one big party pro-Israel.
So over the recent US and Israel elections, there’s been many headlines, you know, claiming that they kind of mutually involve each other in their elections, be it, you know, Netanyahu visiting Congress to talk about the Iran deal or meeting with Ron Dermer, being headlines from last week, the key Democrats are urging Netanyahu not to include far right parties in his coalition. Do you think the kind of special relationship transcends into this kind of, you know, mutual involvement in each other’s elections?
Well, look, I think, you know, it was no secret that say President Bill Clinton would’ve been happier if he had not been dealing with Netanyahu as Prime Minister at various points. And it’s also not a big secret that a lot of Israeli politicians might prefer a Republican president to a Democratic one under certain circumstances, so this is true. It’s also true that, you know, many Europeans were doing what they could to prevent the election of Donald Trump or the reelection of Donald Trump. There are inevitably, when you feel connected to another country, the politics tend to bleed over in various ways. So, you know, yes, there is something there. One of the interesting things that makes it complicated, I think, is that if American Jews voted in Israeli elections, okay, you would never see a Likud government in Israel.
There’s a reason you can only vote in the Israeli elections if you are there. Israelis abroad can’t even vote in Israeli elections.
Right, exactly, exactly. But if the American Jewish community could all mass vote in Israeli elections, there would never be a Likud. If American Gentiles could vote in Israeli elections, there’d probably be a Likud government maybe half the time, maybe more, so, you know, so that, again, this shows how the relationship of American policy toward Israel does not tally exactly what the views of the American Jewish community, many of whom are profoundly and deeply anti-Likud but not anti-Israel.
So I wanted to touch on the Trump presidency, and I know this book’s been a long time in the making, so I don’t want to focus too much on kind of one specific era, but do you think the role of Jared Kushner kind of, you know, right there in the middle of the White House, the theory that, you know, that feeds right into this kind of Israel lobby, you know, president Trump moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Do you think any of that had a meaningful long-term effect on people’s views of the Israel lobby? Or does each presidency have examples of it?
I think, look, there will be certainly people out there who point to Jared Kushner’s role and say, aha, Trump was just trying to help the Jews. Again, if you look at, you know, look at the voting and you look at campaign contributions, American Jewish community, not unanimously, but by a very large margin, totally utterly rejected Donald Trump. Not only in terms of voting, but also in terms of donations. If Donald Trump’s goal in life, single goal in life was to get more Jewish votes and more Jewish money, right, he would’ve had a foreign policy much more like Barack Obama’s than like the one he followed, right? Donald Trump was actually much more interested in Christians and conservatives and he, I read about how for years it had been an American law that we were going to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. You know, this law I think was passed when Jimmy Carter, sorry, when Bill Clinton was president after he’d criticised George H. W. Bush for leaving the embassy in Tel Aviv. All right, so we passed the law, but every six months Clinton would then sign a waiver and not move the embassy, right, law’s on the books. Then in 2000, George W. Bush attacks Al Gore, the Clinton administration hasn’t moved the embassy, right? Then Bush W. becomes president, and every six months he signs the waiver and doesn’t move the embassy. President Obama talking to APAC as he’s running for president in 2008, says, Israel, you know, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. He gets in and amazingly, every six months he signs the waiver, Trump comes to be president, right? And he says, you know, I’m not signing the waiver, I’m moving the capitol, I intend to do this. And all the experts, you know, the whole group of Middle East experts sign a letter to Trump. If you do this, the Middle East will blow up. It’ll be the most terrible catastrophe anybody’s ever seen. The embassy moves.
There really isn’t that much of a catastrophe. The Abraham Accords continue going forward. For Donald Trump, this is not primarily a way of getting money from American Jews or votes from American Jews. It’s part of his general thing to say, look, I do what I promise, the other politicians are all liars, they will tell you anything if you will vote for them. But when they get in, they will do nothing, all right? I am not like that, I say what I mean, I know what you want, I know what you care about. I’m going to deliver it, that was his message to his voters. And using your Israel policy to communicate with your electoral base, that’s kind of the key, that explains a lot of the policy of a lot of American presidents. Their Israel policy, whether it’s pro or con, hot or cold, whatever it may be, is because the average American pays more attention to Israel than almost anything else in foreign policy. And yet, Israel is not the most important military partner of the US, not the most important trading partner of the US and so on. It’s a place where presidents can make adjustments in their policy in a way to speak to their base. And that’s what they do.
So why do you think that is? Why does your average American pay more attention to this issue?
I think it’s for these reasons we were talking about earlier that, Israel’s a symbol of hope for the average American. You know, if you go back into the 1800s, and actually in Britain you had some of this too. There were these people, you know, a lot of people read the books of classical antiquity. They saw the Greeks were these wonderful people. Greece was a beautiful country. There was freedom, there was democracy. The Roman Republic in Italy was beautiful. Just read all those odes of ours. I mean, the countryside was great, the people were strong. And the Bible, read the Bible, the land was beautiful. The people were strong and virtuous. And look now modern Greeks under the Turks, Greece is poor. They are poor, Italy, it’s terrible. Under the Popes, under the Austrians, all of these despots and the Jews scattered throughout the world, if they would embrace the principles of freedom, Americans thought, you know, and live like Americans, be farmers, move out of the cities, be farmers, have democracy, then these poor ancient peoples would begin to recover their glory. And the world would see this, and the world would know America is right. All those snooty aristocrats in Europe who look down on the American republic, they’ll be astounded when American principles can renew the Greeks, the Italians, and the Jews. So in the 19th century, you have Americans fighting in the war for independence for Greece. You have a lot of American engagement in the Italian unification, but you even have Americans going to Palestine and trying to persuade Jews in Palestine to start farming and to start living like Americans in the belief that this will kind of, you know, change their, you know, redeem the land and redeem the people.
If you go to Jerusalem, you can stay in the American Colony Hotel, which was actually what is left of one of these unsuccessful colonisation things. So when the Jewish Zionists appear and start saying, okay, we’re going to go live on farms, we’re going to be farmers and we’re going to renew the land, and we’re going to become strong as a people. Americans weren’t saying, oh my goodness, what crazy Jewish idea, they come up now and they’re going to force Zionism down our throats, no Americans say, finally the Jews have figured it out. We’ve been trying to tell you this, and when you do this, it will work, and then when it works, when the land begins to transform, and then the Jewish people having been victims and helpless and all of these things for so long emerge as a strong and self-confident nation, astound the world with their military prowess, their technological developments, all right? Again, the message to a lot of people in America is that we are right, that Israel’s success shows that America is right and that, you know, people like success stories. And so Israel has a lot of fans in the United States who may not know a lot about it, but their ears are very keen to hear about it, and they want an American president to stand with it. And they sort of, if the American president doesn’t like Israel, they sort of think, well, what’s wrong? Do you not like America? Do you not like all of these values, what’s wrong with you? And presidents don’t want to face that.
So one of the, obviously the big challenges for US presidents has been the need to try and engage in the Israeli Palestinian conflict and to, you know, each one of them has their own theory of the case. Even if it’s, you know, Donald Trump’s version of kind of, I’m going to leave it and I’m going to go at it from a different angle. Why do you think US presidents feel, you know, the need to try and broker an agreement? And what do you think it is that they don’t understand about the region that’s meant limited progress?
Well, I think, you know, there are a lot of reasons why they want to do it, and there are a lot of reasons why they’ve failed. But, you know, if you’re an American president, for one thing, the Americans and the Israelis have a common interest in the idea that there’s a peace process going that helps to calm down the politics of the situation. But also the Israelis make clear that the only people who can get us to make concessions are the Americans. And so you have to, you can’t go to the Europeans, you can’t go to the Russians, you have to go to the Americans. Well, the Americans like that 'cause that puts us at the centre and everybody who wants to get involved in this has to come to Washington. American presidents like that, Israeli prime ministers tend to like that because the Americans of all of the possible intermediaries are the most favourable, but at the same time, then an American president now, again, remember I say that what presidents like to do is to communicate with their supporters in the public through their Israel policy. Now, if I’m feeling some pressure, maybe from the left of my party, I can take some tiny little change in the wording of a statement about Israel and get all of this publicity. The President is really pushing for the Palestinians for this or that, and it become, you know, because everybody follows it. It’s a big story, even if it’s a very tiny and inconsequential change, that will not actually happen, right? Or if I feel the need, oh, everybody’s attacking me from the right and I need to shore it up, I can do something, something, again, quite small and technical that everybody will report as really getting in there with Israel.
So it’s a way, in a sense, the peace process, regardless of whether or not you get any peace out of it for an American president, the peace process is a way to control the international politics of the situation. If the Arabs are mad at you and you want to be, you want to sort of warm up relations with the Arabs, you can give something to the Palestinians, right? Or the Europeans or whatever, you can, you know, you can manipulate, it’s a tool you can use for a lot of things at home and abroad. So I can absolutely see why Americans want it. Now, you know, I think the wisest of American presidents would say, the peace process is good, peace is impossible, therefore, what I need to do is pay attention to the health of the process. There’s problems because of the process isn’t going anywhere after a while, it stops being so healthy. But still the idea that you can solve it though, I think that’s hubris. People want their Nobel prize, they want to go down in the history books. And again, it’s so odd, you know, this problem that in the numbers of people, in the economic stakes involved is tiny compared to, can you hear me okay? I’m getting a thing saying, Walter Mead is connecting to audio on my computer screen.
No, we can still hear you.
Okay. So what you’re seeing is that the world pays so much attention to this, that American press, you don’t think, okay, I’m going to solve the Cashmere problem and get my Nobel prize, I’m going to get my Nobel Prize by solving the Kurdish problem or even the like Ethiopian problem or whatever. These are all problems that involve more people, have killed more people than the Israeli Palestinian dispute. But as you said, this is a talismanic dispute. It attracts and holds the interests of people all over the world. And so American presidents are drawn like moths to a flame, to solving the Israeli Palestinian debate. If I were either an Israeli or a Palestinian official, I have to tell you, I would be so tired of having Americans come clumping through the region, each one convinced that they, you know, they can pull the sword out of the stone. They can solve the issue that no one else has solved. And you just have to go through the whole dreary process with them. It can’t be the most attractive part of those jobs.
Now, I can tell you, having had discussions with some of those Israeli Palestinian negotiators, that is the exact sentiment. But as you say, it’s the process that they have to go to. It’s part of that special relationship. So, you know, growing up in the UK, when I moved to the US you know, and I asked about security outside synagogues, you know, everybody gave me this answer of, no, no, you’re an American now, you know, where American Jews have a very different experience to European Jews. The last four or five years in America has shown unfortunately that that is no longer the case. And you know, if you look at the FBI statistics or the global statistics about where violent anti-Semitism has taken place, you know, unfortunately the US is now leading the charts. Now, how much do you think antisemitism today is starting to feed into this Israel lobby dynamic? And how much is vice versa? You know, is there this connective tissue between the two, especially given some of these opinions we’ve touched on around, you know, what’s a vote winner and what politicians use for what groups?
Look, I think one of the interesting things about the anti-Israel sentiment on the left is not just in the United States, but all over the world. You signal to people how far left you are by what you think about Israel. So if you’re a moderate social Democratic politician, you say, I really don’t like the settlements. I think the Israelis have, you know, gone too far and we need to do more for the Palestinians. But you don’t necessarily call for a lot of action about it, you deplore. But that’s kind of it. And the more you’re on the left wing of a social Democratic or socialist party, or the more sort of radical you are, it’s very, very likely that you also see this issue much more strongly, feel more strongly about it. And you start seeing this as a critical issue for campaigning. So there’s a kind of a, again, there are elements of people’s anti-Israel activism that are driven by sort of symbolism, identity politics and signalling in ways that are not always directly connected to what Israelis and Palestinians are doing on the ground. You’ve also got, but now in America you do have, as we said earlier, this is a time when a lot of people in America really wonder, you know, is the idea of America real? This idea of a place where people from all over the world, all different religions and races can work out their own destiny in their own way in a free country. You’ll hear people on the left saying, no, that’s all just a mask for white supremacy. And that ideology of a free America, it’s a total fraud.
And they will often start as anti-Semites, what was it, they said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. And, you know, start saying, well, look at the banks, you know, they’ll come up with all of these sorts of theories pretty much linked to the protocols of the elders of Zion one way or another, and start hammering home on that stuff. Less, I think because, it’s not that these are people who start out hating the Jews and then find in a left wing political analysis a way to hate the Jews. It’s more people who have been disillusioned by America. And as that happens, they start to question things. And on the far right too, you have people who think that whole idea of America is a melting pot open to different ideas and different people. That’s wrong. There’s good Americans and there’s bad Americans. The good Americans look like me. The bad Americans look like other people, and the bad Americans are threatening the good Americans, right? And we talk about the great replacement and people chanting in the streets, you will not replace us including the Jews in that, you just look at the demographics. American Jews are not going to be replacing anybody. We’re not talking about a baby boom among American Jews. So, but this fear and somehow the association of the Jews with the forces out there that threaten our way of life is real. So in a time when people’s faith in America has weakened both on the far left and the far right, you find fertile ground for anti-Semitism.
So with our last couple of minutes, you know, you touched on the fact that reassuringly, you don’t think Israel is yet a kind of fully bipartisan issue, and it’s one that’s still, you know, US presidents in general want to align themselves with, where do you think the US-Israel relationship is headed?
The answer will depend on where Americans go in our own thinking about American foreign policy. We have isolationists now who think that America, you know, globalism just gets America into trouble. We should stop caring about Russia, even China, certainly the Middle East, if those people win the political argument, the US and Israel won’t have much relationship necessarily. Well, you know, if we’re not interested in the Middle East, we’re not going to have that much thought about Israel. So, you know, what’ll happen is that as is always the case, ultimately I think America’s policy toward Israel reflects what Americans understand as their country’s interests around the world. I think actually from an Israeli standpoint, the recent energy crisis probably has increased a sense in America that, boy we really do need to stay mixed up in the Middle East, that, you know, we still care.
Yesterday and today if nothing else.
Yeah, we still need to pay attention to what’s happening over there. And you know, as long as America’s focused on the Middle East, I think Israel is a kind of a natural ally of the United States, and why do I say that? Because the one thing America does not want is to have one country, whether it’s in the Middle East like Iran or out in the Middle East, like Russia or China dominate all that oil because, you know, anybody who can interrupt the flow of oil from the Middle East to Europe and to Japan and so on, you know, has their foot on the throat of the world economy. And that’s a power the United States really doesn’t want to see in the hands of a hostile regime. But here’s the thing, the one thing that Israel doesn’t want is for any single power to dominate the Middle East, whether it’s a local one like Iran or a foreign one like Russia or China, because Israel’s independence needs some kind of a balance of power in the region. So there’s a way in which Israel and the United States, whatever one American president thinks of one Israeli Prime minister or what have you, there is a mutual relationship that runs very deep. And as far as I, I do not see any threat to that confluence of interests happening unless the American people just decide they no longer care what happens in the Middle East, in which case they will be much less interested in Israel.
Walter, this was a really special hour for me. As I said, citing you in in my university essays and then getting to interview you is something I wouldn’t have expected. So thank you. I really recommend everyone read the "Ark of a Covenant.” I note that a few of our audience members have said it’s not yet available in the UK so I hope that it will be soon. If not, you can probably order it on Amazon US and redirect it.
I think Amazon US is probably willing to ship. It’s also available on kindle if you want the ebook.
There you go, so Walter, thank you again. We wish you a lot of success with this book that I think couldn’t have come at a more important time for Israel and the world as the US thinks about its position. So thank you very much for joining us on lockdown and we wish everybody a good afternoon slash evening. And thank you to Gabby for bringing us together today.