Content area
Full Text
Israel's Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict, by Walter L. Hixson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 324 pages. $99.99.
Reviewed by Chris Toensing
The presidency of Donald Trump has cast an unusual spotlight upon the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel. The attention is not novel: every US president since Harry Truman has faced at least one Middle East crisis that has required him to balance what are assumed to be the competing needs of Washington's Arab and Israeli alliances. The crises are always big news, as the president of the day strives to reconcile his twin claims to be Israel's top international backer and, at the same time, an honest broker in the Arab-Israel conflict. Most presidents have wanted to retain both mantles. What is new about Trump is that he seems to care only about the former, as shown, for instance, by his appointment of a two-state solution opponent as ambassador to Israel and his announcement that the US would move its embassy to Jerusalem.
For most scholars, the salient question is not where US sympathies lie - in the end, and well before Trump, it has usually been with Israel - but why. The literature engendered by this question is sparser than one might think, given the emotions that the subject stirs, though as seen below it has grown richer of late. For decades, it broke down into three broad, sometimes overlapping categories: 1) books stressing that Israel, as "the only democracy in the Middle East," is the natural US ally in the region; 2) books emphasizing Israel's usefulness to US strategic goals; and 3) books arguing that support for Israel has little to do with the US national interest and is rooted instead in American domestic politics, chiefly the pro-Israel lobby's influence in Washington. In 2006, political scientists John Mearsheimer and...