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Middle East Books Review All books featured in this section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1101
The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the U.S.-Israel Relationship By David Tal, Cambridge University Press, 2022, paperback, 416 pp. MEB $29.99
Reviewed by Walter L. Hixson Diplomatic and military historian David Tal has produced a comprehensive international history of the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States. Organized chronologically by presidential administrations, the book is well researched in primary sources derived from American, British and Israeli archives. Tal makes a convincing argument that idealistic and cultural perceptions rather than geostrategic realism established and solidified the special relationship between Israel and the U.S. “Religion, values and history,” he argues, “set the course of the relations as well as their development and structure.” Emphasizing continuity and a “longue durée approach,” Tal effectively demonstrates “the sources, the development and the prevalence of the constants” that have long animated the special relationship. Broadly based cultural ties, including empathy in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, Christian Zionist fundamentalism and perceptions of Israel as a besieged David versus the Arab Goliath (though the reverse
Contributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor. 58
has been more nearly true) propelled the special relationship, which evolved into a strategic alliance. Americans, as Tal demonstrates throughout the book, “identified with the Jewish experience, and later Israel, making it part of their own story and sense of identity.” The emphasis on cultural ties, though not the full story of the Israeli-American relationship by any means, is important and Tal is not wrong to focus on it. The late cultural historian Amy Kaplan wrote a tour de force book on the subject (Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, 2018), which remains the best study on the role of culture within the special relationship. Tal makes some effort to be evenhanded, but sometimes subtly and other times more directly, the book reflects a proIsraeli bias. As he recounts events, Tal pays scant attention to Arab and Palestinian perspectives on the bitter history of the socalled Middle East “conflict.” In Tal’s discussion of the June 1967 war, to cite one example, he argues that “Israel had no choice but to act.” Israel in fact had a choice and, as in the previous war in 1956, it chose to launch an all-out attack. Israel’s Arab neighbors were hostile to the
Zionist state, to be sure, but none were on the brink of attacking it in 1967. Tal, like most scholars on this subject, downplays the significance of the Israel lobby. He fails to grasp the deep roots of the lobby and ignores the highly influential lobby newsletter, the Near East Report, which for decades advised every member of Congress on the position they should adopt on Middle East affairs. Tal ignores my work on the Israel lobby, which leaves little doubt that it has long been deeply ensconced and highly effectual, especially with Congress. Tal also ignores Kenneth Kolander’s tightly focused study of the lobby’s impact in Congress and pays scant attention to the classic work by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who were egregiously attacked for having the temerity to take up the subject. The decades-long work of the Washington Report in this area, as well as Stealth PACs: Lobbying Congress for Control of U.S. Middle East Policy, first published by the American Educational Trust in 1990, are also overlooked. Tal argues that members of Congress are pro-Israel with or without the lobby, which is true to some degree. Yet, on crucial issues such as the mythical “peace process,” the illegal occupation, proliferating Jewish-only settlements and endless U.S. military assistance, the lobby has played a profoundly influential role. The Israel lobby has advocated for every dollar of the $146 billion and counting—far more than any other nation has received since World War II—that has enabled a small nation of some nine million people to become the colossus of the Middle East. Tal also misses an opportunity to solidify his argument on the centrality of culture by not analyzing the relationship in the context of settler colonialism. Israel and the United States were both settler states that forged their national identities through the violent and persistent displacement of indigenous people. Tal could have explored the cultural parallels between the long and tumultuous history of race relations in the United States and Israel’s status as an apartheid state, as designated by numerous human rights groups. Tal’s exhaustive study contributes to understanding the evolution and persistence of American pro-Israeli sentiment, but culAUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2022
