Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance
AMY KAPLAN
(HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 368 PP, £21.95)
Tablet Bookshop price £19.75 • tel 020 7799 4064

The friendship between Israel and the United States has offered both sides distinct advantages for more than 70 years

The special relationship between the United States and Israel is a given of the geopolitical order. It has been a constant since the UN voted, in November 1947, to partition Palestine. The State of Israel was created six months later, in May 1948. Mutual benefits are seen for the most part in terms of political and strategic advantage: the US needs a reliable partner if it is to maintain influence in the Middle East, while Israel, potentially threatened on all sides, needs a powerful protector.

Amy Kaplan, whose new book, Our American Israel, explores this relationship, is a cultural historian and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She ­accordingly offers not a work of political ­science but a description of the cultural ­narratives that have provided a foundation for this ­special relationship.

Her story begins effectively not in 1948, nor even in 1945 when the newly discovered and previously unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust provided an argument for a Jewish homeland that – understandably, given the continuing curse of anti-Semitism in the world – proved irresistible.

Kaplan takes her title “Our American Israel” from a Puritan expression of colonial American exceptionalism. A Massachusetts minister named Abiel Abbot preached a Thanksgiving sermon in 1799 with the title “Traits of Resemblance in the People of the United States of America to Ancient Israel”. He noted that “the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel than any other nation upon the globe … Hence [the term] ‘Our American Israel’ … is apt and proper.”