I tend to underplay the real affinity that some Americans have for Israel, because I’m a progressive, and I find the general claim by Zionists, that the 2 countries are joined at the hip, hogwashian. But I know there are some resonances, and the other day Jack Ross sent me two interesting notes on southern support for Zionism.
Ross’s first note said: “From The
Provincials by Eli Evans, written in 1973… some stunning quotes that
reverberate loudly in our time, especially the last one. Evans worked
in the Carter White House and went on to become the great historian of
The Jews of the South. His other books include the definitive
biography of my physical likeness, Judah Benjamin.”
Here are the quotes from the Evans book. If you’re bored, skip down to Ross’s interpretation:
“Senator Hyman Rubin of South Carolina attributes Israel’s popularity
in the South partially to its reputation as a ‘scrapper’. He referred
to a recent Republican poll in South Carolina which showed that the
most admired profession was the military and the most admired trait was
not honesty or religion, but ‘toughness’. So Israeli toughness rubbed
off on Southern Jews, so much so that a legislator in a Southern state
reported that an admitted Klansman saw a newspaper picture of Moshe Dayan on his desk and blurted out ‘I admire that man more than anyone else in the world today except George Wallace.'”
“Flonnie
Maddox, the mother of former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, has built
a reputation in Georgia as a Bible-thumping speaker on the Sunday night
evangelical circuit. Bruce Galphin wrote of her in his biography of
Maddox: ‘In early 1968 she traveled to the Holy Land with a group
called Intercession for Israel,
whose mission is to convert Jews to Christianity. When an Israeli
remarked to her ‘We’ll have Jordan’, she replied ‘You’ll have every
inch of it. God said you could.’ The Dome of the Rock, she is
convinced, is going to be removed. ‘That’s scriptural. Solomon’s Temple is going to be rebuilt for Jesus. They’re building a throne for him to
sit on. I’m going to sit with him on his throne, Jerusalem is going to
be my home for a thousand years.””
“There is also the
sense in which the Israelis represent a white enclave encircled by dark
and heathen peoples, so that a member of a Baptist church which had
integrated in Birmingham could write a letter of protest to the local
paper, pointing out that “the good Jews of Israel have maintained their
purity as a people” by refusing to be overrun by the Arab nations
surrounding them. In the tense period before the 1967 war, a group of
Georgia’s most prominent Jews, as part of a national effort, visited
Governor Maddox to urge him to issue a statement supporting Israel.
Maddox, according to one man who was there, readily agreed to the
statement, and then surprised the group by volunteering that ‘everybody
ought to be for Israel.'”“Southerners also appreciated Israel’s
eye-for-an-eye military style. The conservative Richmond News Leader
complimented Israel when it bombed the Lebanon airport in retaliation
for Lebanese support for Arab guerrillas who were shelling the Israeli
settlements on the usually quiet Lebanon border. It suggested that
this country could well imitate Israel when responding to incidents
like the capture of the Pueblo by North Korea.”
Now here is Ross’s analysis:
My overall interpretation of this is that it illustrates that the bases
of “the American people’s support for Israel” are fundamentally
illiberal, and reflect the most illiberal parts of the American
psyche. Furthermore that it illustrates that the phenomenon is hardly
limited to our own time, and goes back even further than the first
Likud overtures to Falwell et al in the 70s.
This does not necessarily mean the same can or should be said about American public opinion at the time of Israel’s founding. I have no idea, and to my
knowledge it has never been studied, what degree of anticipation there
was among evangelicals before 1948 in the events that led up to it.
Though sources of that period I imagine would be at best sketchy, since
fundamentalism was at that time still reeling from the repeal of prohibition.
This
is significant because anything that could be viewed as the defeat of
Israel, even the successful implementation of a two-state solution,
would have at least as catastrophic an effect on the Christian right as
the repeal of prohibition. We are already seeing it happen in the
Christian right’s decline and the rise of the evangelical left, I would
say because the reality of the Iraq War, which they supported out of
their Christian Zionism, has done much to disabuse them of it.
As
for the racism angle [of segregationist identity with Zionists], remember first that by 1967 the Freedom Rides
were ancient history, and that there was already talk [by the neocons] of the mugging by
reality. But the role of that legacy should not be underestimated in
turning those first Jewish new leftists against Zionism. As for the
Southern Jews themselves, there are a few known cases of some who
openly defended segregation and joined the Citizens Councils, but the
vast majority made the supreme effort to present themselves as
moderates.
But what I find most significant about all of this
is the very deep roots it exposes to American admiration for Israeli
ruthlessness, and the American wish to emulate it, that has finally and
tragically been fulfilled in the Iraq War and in American policy in the
Islamic world generally.
