Why Does America Support Israel?

Walter Russell Mead is not Jewish, but he knows more about Jews than most Jews. The son of an Episcopal priest from South Carolina, Mead is the Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, and previously taught foreign policy at Yale, a subject about which he has written several books. But when we first met, some 10 years ago, he wanted to tell me about the Blackstone Memorial.

The Blackstone Memorial was a petition presented to President Benjamin Harrison in 1891. It was signed by 431 prominent Americans, including J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, future President William McKinley, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and numerous congresspeople, as well as several notable organizations, including the Washington Post and New York Times. What urgent message did this star-studded manifesto convey to the American president? It was a plea to return the Jewish people to their historic homeland in the Middle East. Far removed from the work of Jewish activists, it was compiled years before the Jewish writer Theodor Herzl would kick off the modern Zionist movement. Mead had come across the remarkable document in the course of researching what would eventually become his next book.

A decade later, he has finally published the results of his inquiry into the historical roots of American support for Israel. The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People tells the story of the non-Jewish relationship to the Jewish state from before its founding to the present day. Part original scholarship, part counterintuitive history, part meditation on American identity, part debunking of anti-Jewish conspiracies, there is nothing quite like it. If I could force people to read one book about America and Israel, it would be this one.

It’s also quite topical. Yesterday, President Joe Biden arrived in Israel, kicking off the latest visit by an American president to the tiny country. If history is any guide, the trip will occasion the same rehashed talking points about the U.S.-Israel relationship, its origins, and its merits. Mead’s book is the antidote to this stale sermonizing. You will learn more from it than from most of the contemporary coverage.

In advance of Biden’s trip, I sat down with Mead to talk about why Zionism succeeded in spite of the preferences of many Jews, how Israel won its independence with repurposed Nazi weapons, and how an imaginary planet explains why so many people believe that Jews control America.

Yair Rosenberg: Let’s start with the Vulcans. Like most people, I know of them as aliens from Star Trek, like Spock. But it turns out that the name “Vulcan” derives from something far more interesting, which you use as the organizing metaphor for your book. What does “Vulcan” have to do with the idea that Jews or Israelis control American foreign policy?

In the 19th century, this very famous French astronomer, Le Verrier, did some calculations and discovered that there was something wrong with the orbit of Uranus. It wasn’t where it